away is gonna be like trying to keep flies away from shit. Get him back to the Hub and do the autopsy there.’
‘Oh great,’ moaned Owen. ‘We’ve got one corpse in the SUV already, and now we have to fit us and this carcass in there too.’
‘Quit griping. That car’s deceptively spacious,’ Jack told him. ‘Gwen and I will take the other vehicle.’
‘Let me think,’ Owen said, as though talking to himself out loud. ‘Whose conversation will I enjoy more on the journey — a dead guy’s or Jack’s?’
‘See you back home,’ Jack told him.
Gwen watched Owen’s face darken as he twisted to watch Jack walk away. Maybe it was just a trick of the light.
She started after Jack Owen was still complaining to Toshiko. ‘Let’s get this stiff shifted. What I need is a really big spatula. And gloves. I hate it when I get bits of brain under my fingernails.’
FIVE
Toshiko’s attention flitted from monitor to monitor. The display frame on her desk in the Hub held six of them, each illustrating some aspect of her analysis or showing the results of a search she’d initiated.
Gwen stood behind her, quietly watching. Toshiko didn’t like to be studied, Gwen had discovered early on. She said it reminded her too much of her father supervising her homework. All that study didn’t seem to have been wasted, Gwen wanted to tell her. This was Toshiko absolutely in her element, despite Owen’s occasional disparaging remark about her ‘geek chic’. Toshiko was a composer, with data as her music. She coordinated all the elements of her orchestral score, pulling them together until they made sense, so that everyone else heard the symphony and not a cacophony of unrecognisable noise. And, as with an orchestral performance, it was usually only when Toshiko presented the completed piece to them that they were able to recognise it. A masterpiece from the disorderly mass of information.
Toshiko’s work station in the Hub appeared the same, a mass of random junk that seemed to make sense to her alone. ‘Creative chaos’ was how Jack had once described Toshiko’s methodology, in an admiring tone that suggested the others could take a leaf out of her book. Not that he was any different — on the desk in his office, amid the paperwork and old TV sets and bowls of fruit, she’d seen a dish containing fragments of coral, as though he was trying to grow it.
Toshiko’s was the first station you saw when you entered the Hub — a jumble of display screens, scribbled piles of paperwork, and assorted electronic parts. There was even a Rubik’s cube that she could complete within a minute. Owen kept messing it up and dropping it back on her desk when she wasn’t looking. She would infuriate him by somehow completing it each time, even when he’d peeled off and replaced several of the stickers. ‘Teenage bedroom’ was Owen’s alternative description of Toshiko’s desk.
Gwen cast a look over at Owen now, and saw him locating his keyboard amid the piled mess of his own desk, which was the next station along. He had the keyboard on his lap and was thumping at the keys. So unlike Toshiko’s elegant touch typing.
Toshiko used a data pen now to annotate a couple of her displays. On the two screens to her left, a long list of names and dates scrolled past, almost too quickly to read, and certainly too fast to remember. On the right, the displays revealed Wildman’s journey through the centre of the city, in the jerky stop-frame animation format of stolen CCTV images. The two smaller screens in the centre showed a combined satellite image of the area around the Blaidd Drwg office complex. Toshiko overlaid the local roads as a grid of white lines, and picked out the scene- of-crime locations as red dots. Gwen remembered the spreading pool of red in the roadway earlier, with Wildman’s smashed head at its centre. These blood splashes on Toshiko’s displays revealed the locations of his victims over the past week.
Gwen eased forward to get a closer look. Toshiko let out a little sigh of exasperation. ‘You’re dripping on me. Do you mind?’
‘Sorry.’ Gwen stepped back again. ‘The rain started before we got back to the car. Took us a bit by surprise. It had looked so nice earlier in the day. Wasn’t in the forecast.’
Toshiko spun around on her stool. ‘Look, why don’t you get settled in the Boardroom? I’ll pipe the results up there in a few minutes.’
Gwen nodded. ‘OK.’ Better leave Toshiko to it, she thought. She made her way down the short flight of steps that led to the walkway across the shallow basin. She was still amazed by the way the Hub was aligned with the surrounding area above ground. A clue was the tall stainless-steel pillar that reached from the basin up to the distant ceiling, where it continued up another seventy feet beyond the pavement of Roald Dahl Plass opposite the Millennium Centre. Constantly flowing water cascaded like a shimmering curtain on all sides of the pillar. The base had started to turn green with algae, yet the Hub neither felt nor smelled damp. The basin itself seemed to rise and fall with the tide. Once they had found a bream flapping about in there, lost and forlorn until Owen had caught it, analysed it, pronounced it fit to eat, and cooked it in the Hub’s kitchen on the upper level. This had briefly earned him the nickname ‘Harry Ramsden’.
Gwen met Jack at the top of the spiral staircase that led up to the Boardroom. He was still wearing his greatcoat. Rainbow spots of rain stood out on the collar and shoulders, strangely illuminated in the irregular light of the Hub. He stared out over the main area, evidently enjoying the sight of his team busy at work.
‘Saw you talking back there with the policeman…’
‘Andy?’
‘Yeah. He giving you a hard time?’
‘No, not at all.’ Gwen considered how she’d felt talking to Andy in the alleyway. Or not talking to him, more like. ‘Sometimes I just hate keeping secrets. Sometimes I wish people wouldn’t tell me them, then there’s no pressure. Know what I mean?’
‘Part of the job,’ he told her.
‘My mum used to say you shouldn’t keep secrets from your friends. If you can’t trust your friends, who can you trust?’
‘No point wrapping your birthday presents then!’
Gwen laughed. ‘Ah, that wouldn’t be a secret. She’d say that counted as a “surprise”.’
‘And the difference would be…?’
‘A surprise is something you tell everyone about. In the end. You can’t have a surprise party if no one turns up.’
Jack laughed too. ‘And a secret is something that you tell people about one friend at a time?’ He watched her thoughtfully. He scratched his forehead with his forefinger, and his pale eyes never left hers. ‘Do you share your secrets?’
Gwen knew what he meant. She’d seen him shot through the head and survive it. Heard him talk about some unexplained incident that meant that he
Jack was still studying her reaction. ‘And what about Rhys?’
What about him, she thought. Every day she was keeping things from her boyfriend. She couldn’t tell him the truth about Torchwood. He didn’t understand why she was always on call, day and night. And he never asked her about it. Another unspoken understanding. Or was it? By not talking, how could she be sure?
‘Don’t lose track of your own life,’ Jack told her. ‘You mustn’t let it drift away. Torchwood can consume everything. Everyone…’
His voice trailed off. He’d seen Ianto, their receptionist, walking up the spiral staircase. Ianto was about her age, maybe a few years younger, and not bad-looking, she decided. She hadn’t worked him out yet. He seemed happy to do the more mundane work in Torchwood — the fetch-and-carry stuff, whether that was a Tesco bag full of shopping or body bag full of Weevil.
