The workmen staggered back to their feet and cursed him with the fluency of long practice. The younger man, a crew-cut teenager with a cauliflower ear, had taken the blow from the briefcase. He was attempting to seize Wildman by grabbing onto his beige raincoat when Jack approached at full pelt and yelled at him to step aside.
Wildman struggled at the door, fumbling with the latch and open padlock. He glared at Jack, and seemed to convulse. From her perspective, still halfway down the alleyway from him, it looked to Gwen as though Wildman was going to be violently sick. She heard a plopping sound, and Wildman regurgitated a green-grey bolus at Jack. Jack stepped aside with a surprised yell, bumping into the two construction workers. Wildman took his chance in the confusion. He almost wrenched the door off its rusty hinges, and dived into the building site.
The construction workers were staring at whatever Wildman had sicked up. It hadn’t splattered as it hit the ground. It just lay there, pulsing slightly. Jack reached out one foot, trod the thing into the dusty pavement. Then he kicked it through the door. He was briefly prevented from following it, as the two workmen grasped him by the arms. Jack shucked them off with a swift, violent shake of his shoulders. That’s when they saw his pistol, and they backed off, raising their hands.
‘Good choice,’ said Jack, and disappeared into the building site, still in pursuit of Wildman.
Gwen pounded up the street to the door, and brandished her ID card.
The older of the two workers stared at her. His wide round eyes were pale in the dirty brown leather of his face. Now he’d seen the ID, his manner was wary, less confrontational. ‘What’s going on here? That bloke’s not well. He was throwing up… what was that thing?’ The door was slightly ajar, and he was about to open it for a look, but Gwen pushed it shut again.
‘Well, this site isn’t safe to go wandering around in,’ persisted the workman. ‘I’ll have to let the gaffer know about-’
Gwen dismissed his objections. ‘I don’t need your gaffer’s permission. I just need you to get out of the way. Anyone else in there? Anyone else arriving for another shift?’
‘We’re the last. All done for the day. Just locking up,’ said the younger man, eager to sound helpful.
‘But the floors aren’t all in yet,’ protested his older mate. ‘Not beyond the fifth, at any rate. And the external sheeting doesn’t go beyond that, either.’
Gwen leaned right back, and stared up into the early evening sky. The building construction loomed over her, a vertiginous cliff of scaffolding and grey concrete. Far above, a dirty orange crane poked out above the top floor. Green fabric netting flapped in the breeze around the unfinished office block, a rippling sign announcing that it was a Levall-Mellon development.
‘The site manager’ll have my guts. I can’t be blamed if you lot get yourselves killed.’ The construction worker’s tone had changed completely now. Gwen recognised it from a dozen similar encounters with her new team. The people you encountered started out superior, arrogant. And when faced down by anonymous authority, they were cowed into submission. Or, like now, they started looking to offload the responsibility they’d made such a fuss about to start with. That’s when you knew they weren’t going to be a problem, because they no longer wanted that authority.
She pointed to the yellow hard hat clipped to his waist. ‘I’ll need that,’ she said. He hesitated. ‘Come on, we haven’t got all day.’ She pulled the door open again. ‘Lock this behind me.’
Beyond the chipboard barrier, it was gloomier than in the street outside. Gwen paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. She tried the hard hat and found that the guy’s head was much bigger than hers. She gave up trying to adjust it, and placed the hat on the edge of a rusting yellow skip. The skip was half-full of rubble, grey chunks of broken wall and spiral scraps of concrete reinforcement steel.
The thing Jack had kicked through the door had fetched up against the angled side of the skip. How had Wildman been able to spit that out, Gwen wondered. It had unfurled now, like a snot-coloured starfish with four legs. The thing quivered for a moment before it went stiff, leaking yellow bile into the grey dust.
Gwen flipped open her palmtop computer, thumbed a fastkey, and dialled Toshiko at the Hub. ‘We’ve pursued Wildman down Blackfriar Way. Into the construction site. Wildman’s covered some distance since we spotted him.’
‘Interesting,’ Toshiko replied. ‘He must have made a miracle recovery. The reason we couldn’t get his secretary earlier was that she drove him home, because he wasn’t feeling well.’
‘Just an excuse, d’you think?’ asked Gwen. ‘A reason for them to sneak off for an afternoon shag?’
‘Unlikely,’ said Toshiko. ‘From what I can make out, Wildman is a bit of a sad bachelor. No suggestion that he’s got a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Or a close relationship with an animal.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’ Gwen eyed the dead starfish thing that Wildman had spat out at Jack. ‘There’s certainly something that’s not quite right with him,’ she said. ‘I’m going in to support Jack. Can you get police back-up to close off this whole area, and then get here yourselves?’
‘OK,’ confirmed Toshiko.
‘Was Mitch all right?’
‘Mitch?’ asked Toshiko.
‘The policeman at the pick-up.’
‘When did you start worrying about the police?’
‘I never stopped,’ Gwen told her. ‘So, was he OK?’
‘Didn’t notice,’ admitted Toshiko. ‘We were too busy scraping up bits of victim. Talk to you later.’ And she ended the call.
Gwen could hear running on the floor above her. Shoes pounding and scraping on dusty concrete. She scanned this floor, and saw where they must have gone. She stepped through a gap in the wall where emergency doors would later be fitted, and looked up into the stairwell. Concrete stairs made a four-sided spiral up into the building. There were no rails in place, so she hugged the wall, staying well away from the edge where, flight by flight, the drop became sheerer and more disorienting.
Her lungs were starting to burn as she approached the eighth floor. Beyond the next landing was the scuffling sound of shoes on concrete. Gwen she slowed her progress and peered out carefully.
The early evening sun fell in a brilliant shaft of light, angled through the whole area. Concrete reinforcement wire poked out of blocks in the centre. Gwen blinked in astonishment. She could see through the unfinished floor, and again through the next three floors below that. On a cross-beam in the centre stood Jack. He was balanced, apparently unconcerned by the dizzying gap below him, with his pistol trained on the far side of this shell of a room.
Wildman had picked his own way carefully over the fretwork of connecting girders, and now scrambled over the partly constructed exterior wall and onto the raised wooden and metal framework that surrounded the building. He had to use both hands to balance, and then to grasp the weathered steel of the scaffolding and hoist himself out onto the ledge. His beige coat no longer clung tightly to him. It rippled in the breeze that whistled through the carcass of the building. Gwen could see that the raincoat was actually too small for Wildman, and the arms had ridden up above his wrists to reveal the soiled cuffs of his grey suit.
Wildman stood on the pale brown scaffolding platform. He turned to face Jack. The race up the building and the subsequent scramble across this floor had exhausted him. He took deep, desperate breaths of air. Several metres to his left a stretch of the zigzag laddering straddled the side of the building, an even more precarious route down than the unfinished emergency stairs. To Wildman’s right, the battered plastic opening of a long debris chute yawned ominously, ready to devour whatever was dropped in and to regurgitate it many floors below into another, unseen yellow skip. Wildman couldn’t seriously be considering either of those exits, thought Gwen.
Jack must have been thinking exactly the same thing. ‘C’mon, Wildman,’ he called across to him. ‘Where are you gonna go from here?’
Wildman peered behind himself, out across the city. While he did this, Gwen shuffled carefully into the room. She could now see through the skeleton of the building at this height, and a momentary nausea washed over her. She clutched at the wall to steady herself.
When she looked up, she could see that Wildman was still staring out. The green fabric netting outlined this part of the building beyond the frame of scaffold poles, but through a gap in one section it was possible to see right out over Cardiff. They were high enough now to have a clear view, uninterrupted by nearby buildings. Streets criss- crossed their way towards the waterfront. There was the bronzed hump of the Millennium Centre. The glittering Bay reflected light between the moorings, and stretched out towards the barrage. Clouds were starting to roll in across
