Torchwood_Long Time Dead

by Sarah Pinborough

  He almost jumped when the phone on the desk rang again, and he answered it gruffly. If it was the policeman with any more snappy demands, he had a good mind to tell him to go and shove his cockiness where the sun didn’t shine. It wasn’t Cutler, however, but the Department records administrator.

  ‘You put in a request about a deleted file, sir?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Have you got the information for me?’

  ‘Yes.’ The woman paused at the other end. ‘You wanted to know who deleted it and when?’

  ‘That’s right.’ His patience, thin as it was that morning, was disappearing. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘It’s just that…’ She hesitated. ‘It’s just that, according to the system, you deleted it. Yesterday morning.’

  ‘What?’ Jackson froze. ‘What do you mean, I deleted it?’

  ‘It was deleted with your clearance. All back-up files. I can’t even tell you whose file it was – not without going down and searching through the paper files for a match and that will take days.’

  ‘Do it,’ he grunted.

  ‘But sir, I…’

  Commander Elwood Jackson hung up. His heart raced and, as it thumped, the start of a headache beat out a rhythm in time with it in his skull. If he wasn’t careful he’d be heading for a stroke or an aneurism or something equally unpleasant. He didn’t understand this situation at all. He hadn’t deleted the file, so the only other possibility was that someone else had compromised his computer. But who? Who was this person who had managed to delete all trace of themselves in the system? Most soldiers and Department men had their DNA logged in several databases. If they hadn’t found their man in their own files they’d normally come up somewhere else.

  He was starting to actually look forward to Cutler’s arrival. Maybe if he and the policeman shared their information they might both come up with some answers instead of both drowning in questions. He needed some coffee and stared at the empty machine. Where the hell was Sue Costa? Surely she should be here by now? How late had she stayed at the party? She didn’t strike him as the kind of girl to get too drunk and sleep in late. She was too efficient for that. He’d give it ten minutes and then call her – it looked like he was going to have to make the coffee himself.

  He’d set the machine gurgling and was waiting impatiently for the jug to fill when Lt Howe knocked on the door and came in. Jackson expected to see the policeman behind him, but he was alone. He almost asked him to find out who’d been in the Portakabin when he’d been out the previous day, but then decided against it. He’d wait and hear what Cutler had to say first. The last thing he needed was gossip amongst the men. The Department would no doubt be firing him for incompetence soon enough without him making it worse.

  ‘Lieutenant?’ he said.

  ‘It’s one of the pieces of equipment we’ve retrieved, sir. Not alien, but human. The handheld monitor?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The tech team have got it working again. The specifications for it were stored in the back-up drive.’

  ‘Get to the point, soldier.’ The machine finished bubbling and Jackson poured himself a mug, glad that his hand was steady. He had a feeling that in a moment he was going to need something stronger, but coffee was going to have to do for now.

  ‘We’re picking up some very unusual readings from it. Massive spikes in activity. We’re trying to pinpoint the focus and locations, but we’re learning as we go.’

  ‘Could it just be faulty or damaged?’ Jackson asked.

  ‘No, sir. As far as we can tell, the machine is working perfectly. We just need to understand what it’s trying to tell us.’

  ‘Then get back to it, and I want to know the minute you have anything further.’ The Rift Monitor. That’s what Howe was talking about. If the handheld one was showing lots of activity then there was something alien at work in Cardiff.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Howe disappeared and, as the door closed behind him, Commander Jackson sipped his coffee. God, it was awful. He never quite got the quantities right. Where the hell was Sue Costa?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Suzie sat in the train station and listened once again to Tom Cutler’s message on her phone. Around her, people scurried on their way to this train or that, eyes fixed on departure boards or looking for waiting friends rather than the dark shadows that crept too far from her body to be quite natural. No one sat in the seats around her, though, and despite her hunched shoulders and the tears streaming down her face, not a single stranger stopped to check on the beautiful crying woman in the middle of the station. Their sixth sense was working quietly for them by ignoring her. Those that walked by might not think they’d noticed her sitting so still in the midst of the hubbub, but their dreams that night would be plagued by darkness and demons and pain.

  Suzie felt alone. She was also terrified. She should have killed Tom Cutler. She really should have. Why hadn’t she? It couldn’t be love, that would just be ridiculous. It had to be the bond she felt with him over Torchwood. Something about that shared experience made her vulnerable to him. He’d weakened her. Her eyes blurred with fresh tears and she clenched her fists with frustration at herself. It was all going wrong – she could feel it. The darkness was too greedy, and although she’d killed another two since leaving the policeman’s flat it wanted more. It was always going to want so much more. She was coming to realise that it wanted it all. It wanted to take the whole world into its black embrace and drag it through her to the place between dimensions and she had no idea at all how to stop it, and even if she could.

  Her best chance was to spend her life feeding it and hope that it would die with her when the nothing eventually came for her again. Somewhere in the last twenty-four hours, that future had started to feel a little like hell. That moment had come at precisely the point when she’d realised that she couldn’t kill stupid DI Tom Cutler, because the old Suzie, the one that she’d thought was dead but it seemed was very much alive, had gone and felt sorry for Cutler. He’d been messed up enough. She felt connected to him in a way she hadn’t with anyone else. Bloody Torchwood had made wrecks of them both. God, she’d been pathetic standing over the bed with the knife. She’d even shoved a sleeping pill into his glass of water so he might feel it less. It hadn’t helped. She still couldn’t kill him. He looked so calm and handsome lying there asleep, and she couldn’t imagine him cold and blue and lost into nothing. It made her cry. And here she was, hours later. Still crying.

  She looked up at the board again. Any one of those trains would do for now. She needed to get to London, get to her secondary safety deposit box in the basement of Selfridges, and then catch a flight to somewhere warm. They’d never catch her, not if she kept new Suzie in charge. She was too clever for them. Cutler might, though. He’d want answers. Especially when he knew about her. What scared her most was that she almost liked the idea of him catching her. It would mean she could get to see him again. For the first time in what seemed like forever, she wished Jack Harkness was here. Perhaps he could make things right. Maybe he could get rid of the screaming that was starting to fill her head.

  She looked back up at the board but, as the creeping shadows lengthened a little on either side of her, she still couldn’t bring herself to move.

  ‘Play it again.’ Tom Cutler couldn’t believe what he was seeing. A cool slick nausea had crept outwards from his stomach and his face tingled. How could that be? Of all the things that he might have expected to see on the CCTV footage, it wasn’t Sue Costa. But there she was. The first film started again and there she was, about to turn down Rebecca Devlin’s street, striding confidently in the early morning light, her gaze straight ahead.

  ‘This would be pretty much the time Rebecca Devlin was putting the rubbish out,’ Andy Davidson said. ‘It’s likely they would have seen each other.’

  ‘Play the next clips again.’ Cutler’s mouth felt like sandpaper. Sue. Sue Costa, if that even was her name, which he now very much doubt
ed. She wasn’t answering her phone and had left him sleeping and now this. He thought about the awful vagueness and headache he’d woken up with. Had she drugged him? On screen, she walked out of Andrew Murray’s block of flats, and then a second clip played, recorded a few seconds earlier, inside the building. Andrew Murray came in and then pressed the lift button. He yawned but didn’t look in any way anxious or unsettled. He didn’t twitch or move from foot to foot, but simply stood there, bored, and waited for the lift. Not what anyone would expect from a man half an hour or so away from hanging himself from the balcony.

  On the small screen, the lift doors silently opened, and there she was again, Sue Costa, stepping out. They nearly bumped into each other and smiled politely as they passed to counter the awkward moment.

  ‘It’s strange,’ Andy was leaning so far forward his face almost touched the screen. ‘She doesn’t speak to him, and neither of them is acting like they know each other. She doesn’t even glance back. Surely if she thought she recognised him, she’d turn around?’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t,’ he muttered. ‘And maybe he didn’t remember her until he got upstairs.’

  Maybe it wasn’t her that Andrew Murray and Rebecca Devlin remembered. He thought about what had happened to him the previous night. He’d slept with Sue and then all his memories had come back. What was it about her that did that? She wasn’t part of Torchwood. He’d never met her before, he was pretty sure about that. But it was Torchwood he remembered, and now she was working at the Hub site, and people were dying and others were killing themselves.

  He looked down at his shirt and scanned it closely until he found what he wanted. One long curly hair was stuck to the cotton from where she’d rested her head on his shoulder last night. He pulled it free and handed it to his sergeant. ‘Get this over to the lab straight away. I want to know if it matches the samples found on the victims.’

  ‘What? What are you on about?’ Andy frowned as he took the hair carefully and held it between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘Just do it.’ Cutler headed for the door. ‘And get on to Andrew Murray’s block of flats. Get a list of all the residents. What was she doing there? Does she live there or was she visiting someone? A boyfriend, maybe.’ Even after everything he’d just learned, that thought made his stomach twist. Was that why she’d wanted to come to his the previous night? Because she lived with someone? It didn’t feel true in his heart. Whatever else was going on here, what had happened between them was real. Either that or he was the world’s biggest fool.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Andy called after him, his confusion clear.

  ‘To get some answers.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  He’d tried Sue’s number four times on the way over to the site, but there was still no answer. Each time it went to her message service, his heart sank. Why wouldn’t she talk to him? If she could trust anyone it was him. Whatever mess this was, surely there was a way out of it for them – he couldn’t believe that she was a cold-hearted killer. Could he have been that fooled by her? Or could she have felt the same way as he did, regardless of anything else she might have done?

  It came as no surprise that she wasn’t at the site, and he didn’t even glance over at her desk as he strode into the Portakabin.

  ‘It’s all linked,’ he said. ‘The murders. Torchwood. And the suicides.’

  ‘Suicides?’ Commander Jackson was on his feet, the desk between them. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s on the news. Along with all kinds of other madness. People missing. People killing themselves. And it’s all down to this place.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Explain.’ Jackson looked dog-tired, and Cutler took a deep breath before he started. The old man had a lot to take in. Military campaigning and taking orders was one thing, this was a whole heap of other shit.

  ‘Eryn Bunting, the woman whose ID was stolen to open the safety deposit box back in 2007, killed herself last night. She wrote “I remember” on the bathroom wall. There’s been a few of those over the past few days. We weren’t sure how they were connected, but now I think that all these people killing themselves are remembering their encounters with the Torchwood team. They were given something to make them forget. Some kind of drug. But now their memories are back.’ He felt the terror that had been sitting in the pit of his stomach since the previous night. ‘And something is scaring them so badly they’d rather die than face it.

  ‘I think whoever took her ID was a member of the Torchwood team and they used the safety deposit box to store something in case of emergencies.’

  ‘How the hell do you know all this about Torchwood? That’s confidential. On the phone, you said that this site was the Hub. You can’t have known that.’

  ‘I’ve been here before.’ Cutler smiled softly. ‘I’d just forgotten about it.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Commander Jackson sat down.

  ‘The thing that confused me was that I didn’t remember her. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t part of Torchwood. She just wasn’t when I met them.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense. Who?’

  Cutler’s phone rang, and he looked down to see Andy Davidson’s name glowing on the display. The lab would have been quick – they didn’t need to ID the hair, just see whether it matched the ones they already had from the victims. His heart pounded even as his gut told him that he already knew the answer. He’d remembered what it was she said that had been bugging him.

  ‘It’s a match,’ Andy said. ‘Now are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘Call the station and get me the info on that block of flats.’

  ‘But—’

  Cutler hung up and stared at the Commander as his heart and stomach raced to his mouth. ‘I think you’d better call the Department about Sue Costa.’

  ‘Sue? What about her?’ As he spoke, the Commander’s eyes widened with the realisation of what Cutler was saying. ‘You think she… Dear God.’ He sat back heavily in his chair.

  ‘Her hair’s a match with those found on the victims. Also she told me something last night. About the first victim. The man that died in the vault. The one you neglected to mention?’

  Jackson opened his mouth to speak, but Cutler held a hand up to stop him. ‘Don’t worry about it. That’s how you lot operate. The thing is, she told me that he had lovely eyes. She couldn’t have known. She arrived here after that murder and the eyes are hardly lovely when they’ve exploded.’

  ‘There’s more,’ Jackson said. ‘Someone deleted that file from here. From my computer. It must have been her.’

  ‘She’s been busy.’ Cutler tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice. His heart ached. He’d liked her. He’d really liked her. He still did. ‘But whatever she’s doing to these people, it isn’t natural. It must be something alien she’s using. Some piece of technology stolen from here. Maybe that’s how she killed your first man. She got in somehow, and he came across her and the device killed him.’

  ‘She killed him,’ Jackson said.

  ‘Sir?’ A young man appeared in the doorway. ‘These were just emailed over for you. I’ve printed them out.’ He passed an envelope to the Commander and then vanished, not even acknowledging Cutler’s presence. Maybe civilians didn’t exist to the Army or the Department. They lived in a world of knowledge and secrets, while the rest of the population just bumbled along, just like he’d been doing since Jack Harkness had wiped his memory. Why would anyone take an interest in a world that was oblivious? Why care about the sheep? Thinking of the suicides and the missing people and those unlucky enough to have been caught in Sue Costa’s wake, Tom Cutler found that he, unlike the soldiers, cared very much about the ordinary people going about their normal lives. Protecting them was his job, and he intended to do it – even if it meant going after a woman he’d half fallen in some kind of love with.

  Jackson was staring down at the contents of the envelope, his mouth half-open. ‘You’
re not going to believe this,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Oh, I think I’ve seen everything.’

  ‘Not this.’ Jackson handed over the papers and Cutler stared down at them. He frowned, stuck in disbelief for a moment. ‘But this has to be a mistake. This can’t…’ His voice trailed off as he stared at the picture of Sue Costa – Suzie Costello, according to the file – with the word ‘DECEASED’ stamped across it. ‘How can she be dead? This must be a mistake. She must have faked it.’

  ‘Look at the second page. It’s Jack Harkness’s report on her. Not only is she dead, she’s been dead twice.’

  Cutler did as the Commander told him. He had to read it twice to take it all in. With the details laid out in black and white as they were, it was hard to see any trace of the woman he’d held in his arms the previous night with her sparkling eyes, soft skin and gentle smile. According to the file, Suzie was a murderer several times over, had tried to kill Gwen Cooper in order to steal her life force. He stared at the last detail. While escaping from Torchwood last time, Suzie had gone to hospital to kill her dying father. Maybe if she hadn’t done that, he thought, she might have got away. What had her father done to her that she wanted such a terrible revenge? He stared at the paper and its tale of blood, murder and suicide. He should have felt shocked and appalled – and on a lot of levels he did – but he also pitied her. He knew how Torchwood could affect your life. What had it done to Suzie Costello?

  ‘She’s clearly brilliant,’ Jackson said. ‘Everything must have been so carefully planned. The first set of back-ups after she shot herself. And now all of this.’ He sighed. ‘Brilliant and a touch of paranoia.’

  ‘It’s only paranoia if it’s not true.’ Cutler stared down at the picture. Her hair was longer and darker in it. He liked it. ‘She’d have known they would come after her.’ He looked up. ‘But I don’t understand. If she’s dead, then how can she be back? You haven’t found this glove-thing have you?’