The House That Jack Built

by Guy Adams

  Julia stared after them for a while before moving back across the road and into her drive.

  'The Wilkinson boy,' said a woman's voice from beyond the privet hedge that lined Jackson Leaves.

  Julia peered through the foliage. The speaker was wreathed in cheap gold and cigarette smoke, mouthfuls of which she puffed onto the breeze as she worked her way through the length of a Dunhill.

  'Dead as you like, buried in the pavement.'

  'I'm sorry?' Julia felt as if she were still making dream shapes from the silhouettes of rain. Nothing was making sense.

  'Kid from up the way. Buried in the ground, he was, arms and legs sticking out all over.'

  'That's horrible.'

  'It is, and you can bet there'll be drugs behind it. They're all on drugs these days.'

  Later, Rob and Steve were putting flat-pack furniture together as if everything was all right.

  Maybe it was. Julia found she still couldn't tell. She watched from the dirty (and now broken) front window as the police tape, tent and investigators vanished and rain appeared. There was a big trench by the side of the road where a chunk of the pavement had been removed – she could see it filling with water. She tried to imagine what the body might have looked like.

  'Don't suppose you could make us a cup of tea, could you?' Rob asked from behind her. 'That bed frame's turning out to be a right bastard, and Steve's moaning about the lack of service.' He shifted awkwardly in the doorway. 'You know what he's like... gobby.'

  Julia nodded and made her way through to the kitchen. She should get on anyway, staring out of the window wasn't going to make her feel any better. She needed to crack on, knock the unfamiliar away and start making this home. As she worked her way through the last of the kitchen things, she almost felt normal, even convinced herself that there wasn't the faint outline of a fat man watching her from the back garden, that it was nothing but the rain.

  THREE

  Gwen pulled up alongside the cordoned-off police tent that was keeping Danny Wilkinson's body out of sight. She stepped out of the car, smiling despite herself as she watched a couple of men struggle to drag a mattress from the back of a transit van. Beyond them, a woman was staring back at her from the open doorway of a house that looked to have seen better days. Certainly the weeds on the drive and the cracked front window spoke of neglect. The two men stumbled at the kerb, mattress wilting between them as they turned in opposite directions. There were a number of people hovering on pavements and in front gardens. Most of them had probably already seen the body but still wanted to see more.

  Gwen, realising that she was staring at the woman in the doorway, gave an embarrassed smile and turned away. She ducked under the police tape and did her best not to appear hurt by how hostile the uniformed officers were on her arrival. The ranking officer on site simply waved at the small team of officers loitering around the body and walked out of the tent. Not a word was spoken as she was left on her own.

  While the existence of Torchwood was still deemed 'secret', most of the police force knew of them, albeit only as 'that weird Special Ops lot'. Things had been too public of late, what with zombies marching the streets and people dropping like flies during the Welsh Amateur Operatic Contest. There was only a certain number of times the regular force could be kicked off an unusual crime scene by a handful of plainclothes operatives before two and two would be put together and a degree of resentment fostered. Nobody liked to be deemed unskilled for an investigation – whether they might want to pursue it or not – and there was no more effective phrase in the policing handbook for pissing off an officer than 'need to know only'.

  Gwen squatted down next to Danny's body. The only overt physical damage was the shattered teeth and bloody gums where the boy's face had hit the ground, but that somehow made it worse. The surreal presentation and the palpable look of fear in his eyes was far more disturbing than anything so obvious as an open wound. How long had he been trapped like that? How long had he struggled? It made her itch just to think about it.

  'Weird, huh?'

  Jack's voice startled her and she wondered how long she'd been staring. 'You were quick.'

  'Knew the way.'

  He hissed air between his teeth as he took in the details of the body. 'That's just... wrong.'

  It looked like he'd be using Alexander's pager sooner than he'd hoped.

  Ianto parked the unmarked white van as close to the police tent as possible, grabbed a toolbox off the passenger seat and a white cotton face-mask from the glovebox. He hopped out of the van, only too aware that every net curtain within spitting distance was twitching as the locals ignored their usual afternoon telly for a slice of voyeurism closer to home. It must be like having Jeremy Kyle on all day. 'My boy in pavement scandal – lie detector special.' God, but he hated the suburbs...

  He ducked down and entered the police tent.

  'Hello, campers,' he said, putting down his toolbox. He cracked it open and pulled out a medium-sized chrome flask. 'Who's for coffee, then?'

  'You read my mind,' Jack smiled and gave Ianto a wink.

  'If the first thing that pops into your head when you see me is "hope that sexy devil put the kettle on before he left", then I can honestly say I don't know you half as well as I thought.'

  'OK, it was the second thing that popped into my head.'

  Ianto walked around Danny's body, sipping at his own drink. 'Poor sod,' he muttered before turning to Jack. 'When I got Gwen's message, I was already heading over here.'

  'How come?'

  'We picked up a huge chronon surge in the area. I cross-checked it with police reports and picked up news of Danny Wilkinson here.'

  'The Rift?'

  Ianto shook his head. 'Don't think so, the decay signature was different.'

  Gwen began to make a sarcastic 'chat' gesture with her hands. 'Chronons... blah, blah... decay signatures... Try to remember we didn't all grow up playing with chemistry sets. Some of us had a life.'

  Ianto smiled. 'Actually, I loved Action Men when I was growing up.'

  'Plus ça change,' Jack said with a wink. 'Chronon particles are the fallout from temporal disruption,' he told Gwen. 'Like radiation. You can look at the way the particles degenerate to trace where they came from in the first place. The Rift has a very specific particle-decay signature. This didn't match it.'

  'Thank you for the geekless subtitles.' She smiled. 'But how does weird time poo do that to a pavement?'

  'Normally, I'd say it doesn't,' Jack replied. 'But I guess that's what we have to find out, isn't it?'

  Ianto walked over to his toolbox and pulled out a small pen-shaped object.

  'You might want to step back,' he warned Jack and Gwen. 'This thing's lethal.'

  He placed his coffee at the far end of the tent before walking back over to the body. He twisted the object in his hand, and there was a high-pitched whine. He pointed it at the ground and began to trace a line around the body, a wedge of road surface – about four or five centimetres wide – vaporising as he passed. Finally, back where he started, he turned the machine off and placed it back in his toolbox.

  'Pocket pneumatic drill?' asked Gwen. 'Handy.'

  'I just bet it's sonic.' Jack smiled.

  'Tosh's notes say "molecular", actually,' Ianto replied. 'It isolates the construction of the physical object you're pointing it at and removes that object completely within specified parameters. Bit like erasing stuff in Photoshop, only more dangerous... I sincerely doubt you can make your foot vanish at the ankle using Photoshop.'

  Ianto walked out of the tent, went to the back of the van and unloaded a chunky-looking trolley, like a hospital gurney but more capable of off-roading. Wheeling it into the tent and alongside Danny's body, he squatted down and sighed.

  'Unfortunately, nobody's thought of a cool way of doing the next bit.' He looked up at Jack. 'Cop your end, then,' he said. 'I'm not getting a hernia on my own.'

  Jack came over and forced his fingers around the ed
ge of pavement Ianto had left intact. The pair of them gave a roar as they hoisted it onto the trolley.

  'Such manliness,' Gwen sighed. 'I'm almost overcome. Now hunt me bison.'

  Neither of them graced her with a reply as they covered the body with a sheet and wheeled the trolley back out to the van.

  Jack brushed fragments of grit from his palms as he watched Ianto pull away from the kerb and set off back to the Hub.

  'I'll pay a visit to the kid's parents,' he said to Gwen.

  'Sure?' she asked. It wasn't a part of the job any of them relished.

  'Sure. Just set the boring paper trail running for me, would you? Traffic accident, no witnesses.'

  'You sure we can contain this that simply? Loads of people are bound to have seen something.'

  'Nobody'll believe it. The family are the only ones who'll cause a fuss. The neighbours will just make gossip, and nobody believes that.' He grinned. 'If I'm wrong we'll just add a little something to the water supply. Again. You want to ring PC Plod and tell them they can have their tent back or shall I?'

  'I'll be politer,' she replied, pulling out her mobile.

  'Yes you will.' He looked up at the sky where grim and weighty clouds clambered over one another, eager to give Cardiff a soaking. 'Tell 'em to make it quick if they want to be back indoors and curled up with their sweet tea and chocolate digestives before the rain comes.'

  'Try and remember I used to be on the force, Jack,' Gwen sighed, selecting Andy's phone number on her mobile speed dial.

  'Yeah, but then you got a proper job. No more chasing scallywags and rescuing cats from trees for you.'

  Gwen rolled her eyes, turning her back on him and getting into her car as Andy answered the phone.

  Jack walked along the road, stopping in front of Jackson Leaves. It looked so tatty compared to the other houses in the street.

  'Rotten tooth in an expensive smile,' he said. 'Scrub up, lick of paint – nobody would know how old you are.' He smiled at the idea. 'You and me both.'

  He spotted movement at the front window, a momentary flash of red beyond the dirty, cracked glass. He turned away, not wanting to draw any more attention than they already had, and strolled back to the SUV.

  Getting behind the wheel, he brought up the Wilkinson family's information on the built-in palmtop and was about to set the GPS when the street name clicked into place. He knew it; it was only just around the corner.

  The first fat drops of rain exploded against the tinted glass of the windscreen, blurring the view outside to a dripping watercolour. He stared at the old houses as they appeared to melt. It was so easy to superimpose the city he once knew over the top of the one around him now. To look at these Edwardian stacks and remember them as new, as modern. But he fought against the temptation. He had always been a man – despite the affectation of his clothing – who tried to look forward. With the amount of history he held in his head, he could ill afford to do anything else. If he didn't box it up and lock it away, he would soon lose himself in it. Despite his best efforts, he still sometimes found himself panicking in a crowd, throwing second glances everywhere as the curve of a nose or twitch of a smile reminded him of someone he had once known. Ianto had once asked him how many lovers he had had. Jack had refused to answer, not to spare either of their feelings, more out of the fear that he might be unable to list them all. That would have hurt too much.

  He put the wipers on their fastest setting, bringing the outside world back into sharp clarity, and drove to Danny Wilkinson's house.

  Ianto pulled into the underground car park beneath the Millennium Centre, wincing as he always did when in the van. (He knew he had a spare few centimetres to clear the overhead barrier, but it didn't look like it, and he always expected the sound of tearing metal to accompany him into the gloom.) He hated having to sneak things into the Hub by this, the 'tradesmen's entrance'. He felt too exposed.

  In the early days of Torchwood Cardiff, there had been access to the lower storage areas via submarine. Submarine... How cool was that? Who said things always improved over time?

  He parked the van in its registered bay, stepped out and checked around to make sure he was alone. He had made it his business to know all the users of the car park, their details filed away in his head. He used the Loci – or Memory Palace – technique, allocating visual triggers to the information so as to be able to store and recall everything quickly. He pictured the owners of each of the cars around him and then – using an expanded mental layout of the house he had grown up in – he checked each one of them off, placing them in a line of cupboards that he visualised in his old kitchen. For example, if he opened the cupboard just above the sink – the one with a Fiat 500 key-fob hanging from the handle – he would see David Thompson, the jolly young man who dealt with the intranet at the Welsh Assembly, sat on a tin of baked beans. In his hands he held the jack of clubs (Blackjack: giving his age as twenty-one in Ianto's system), and a photograph of Kelly Rowland (Thompson's flat-mate was called Kelly). If Ianto were to lean in and look at the time on Thompson's watch – a scratched souvenir from Disneyworld, Mickey waving his gloved hands cheerily as the seconds ticked away – he would see the hands pointing to five past nine: Thompson started work at nine and finished at five. It sounded complex, but Ianto found he could store huge quantities of information using the system, and storing information was a big part of what his life was about.

  He finished his quick sweep around the bays on the lower level – everyone in their right place and nobody to see what he was up to – before opening the back doors of the van. The trolley's legs dropped down onto the concrete floor, taking the weight of Danny Wilkinson and the chunks of tarmac still attached to him. Ianto wheeled it over towards the door marked 'Private' that led to the Hub. He raised his face so the retinal-scanning software in the security camera could check him against access protocols. After a couple of seconds, the lock clicked to open and the doors parted slightly. Moving as quickly as possible – the doors were on a timer system of nine seconds – he wheeled the trolley into the short tunnel on the other side and pushed the doors firmly closed behind him.

  The tunnel badly needed sorting out, the damp having encouraged moss to cluster around the light fittings like bushy green beards. It smelt bad too, though he was unsure whether there was much he'd be able to do about that. He hated getting behind in his housework. The Hub had gone to pot over recent months.

  He walked through the weapons store – trying not to think about the amount of dusting that represented – then into the Hub itself.

  Gwen had beaten him back.

  'Took your time,' she said as he wheeled the trolley past her desk.

  'I mind the speed limits when I have dead bodies in the back of the van,' he replied. 'Has Jack called that old friend of his yet?'

  'Alexander Martin?' Gwen shook her head. 'Don't know. He was dealing with the boy's parents.'

  'Oh.' Ianto nodded, lining the trolley alongside the upper railing of the Autopsy Room. 'The fun bit of the job.'

  'Yeah.'

  'Makes a change from you having to do it, I suppose.'

  Ianto attached the slab of tarmac to a chain winch bolted into the ceiling, lifted it up and then lowered it into the Autopsy Room so that it was sat on the examination table. He ran down the stairs, lined the slab up and made sure the supports were tightened so the table could take the weight. He jogged back up the steps and over to his desk to check whether anything significant had occurred in his absence.

  There had, and his face fell as he scanned his monitor screen. 'There's been another chronon surge...'

  'Where?' Gwen asked, scooting over on her wheeled chair.

  'Right on top of the last one.'

  FOUR

  'That's horrible,' said the new woman.

  'It is,' Gloria replied, sucking the pale blue smoke of her cigarette deep into her long-suffering chest. It wheezed under the assault, huddling behind the cotton of a knock-off designer blouse her husba
nd had brought back from a 'business trip' to Thailand. As long as that was all he brought back, Gloria had long decided not to ask questions. 'And you can bet there'll be drugs behind it. They're all on drugs these days.'

  Gloria peered through the privet hedge, trying to get a look at the woman who'd moved into Jackson Leaves. She looked young – though Gloria thought that about most people these days.

  'I knew Joan,' she said. 'The lady that used to own the house.'

  'My aunt.'

  'Really?' Gloria relished the surprise she conveyed in her voice. 'She never mentioned you.'

  There was little polite one could say to that of course.

  'We weren't all that close.'

  'So sad.' Gloria's casual spite had some bite left to it. 'It's terrible a woman of that age being so alone. Especially at the end.'

  There was a slight pause from the other side of the hedge, and Gloria wondered if the young woman was going to argue. She hoped so; there was nothing she liked more than a good argument.

  'At least she had her friends,' the young woman said. 'And neighbours of course. If you'll excuse me, I really must get on with the unpacking.'

  Gloria let the woman go, too angry at having been outdone to think of a suitable reply. She ground her cigarette into the blue-granite gravel of her driveway, which was a considerable improvement on the cheap, weed-strewn grit of Jackson Leaves she assured herself, and turned her Ferragamo shoes – or at least a market-stall approximation of them – back toward the house. She couldn't loiter in the garden all day, after all.

  Inside, she glanced at the clock in the kitchen and sighed. It was only four o'clock, and that limited her choices as far as slaking her thirst was concerned. Sometimes she just couldn't understand how time went past so slowly. It felt nearly time for bed, it really did.

  She flipped the switch on the kettle and shuffled through the box of exotic teas she kept mainly for show. She was sure there was an Earl Grey left in there, which was as much of a concession towards the exotic as she was willing to make if not in company. No, no Earl Grey... There was a 'Lady Grey' though... How different could it be? A little more long-suffering and capable of multitasking than the Earl, she imagined, pulling the cardboard tab from the top of the bag and dangling it from its clean white thread.