Slow Decay t-3

by Andy Lane

  ‘You’ve got a nerve, showing your face around here!’

  She turned, startled.

  ‘Mitch?’

  ‘Surprised you remember us, now you’re running with that Torchwood mob.’

  She grinned. ‘I couldn’t forget you. We shared chips at three in the morning too many times for that. You’ve shaved your moustache off. You looked better when you had it.’

  Jimmy Mitchell didn’t return the grin, or the banter. His face was set in a scowl that brought his heavy eyebrows together in a dark line and put a crease in the centre of his forehead. ‘Don’t try and sweet-talk me, Gwen. We know you removed evidence from the crime scene, and all we get told by the bosses is that we should proceed with the case with whatever evidence we have left.’

  ‘I promise you this, Mitch — whatever we took was incidental to your case, but vital to ours.’

  ‘Can I have that in writing?’

  ‘Bugger off.’ She smiled, to show there were no hard feelings. ‘What’s the story on the nightclub deaths, then?’

  Mitch shrugged. ‘Looking like a self-contained thing. Five lads got into a fight and inflicted fatal wounds on each other. We’ve got all the weapons, including the broken bottles. Only thing is, we don’t know what they were fighting about. There were video cameras all over the club, relaying pictures to screens inside so the clubbers — narcissistic shits that they are — can see one another, and the management record everything just in case of trouble, but there’s nothing there to give us any clue. One moment they’re talking; the next minute they’re fighting; then they’re dead.’

  ‘Can you run me off a DVD copy of the video footage?’

  He thrust his chin out pugnaciously. ‘Only if I can see whatever your people removed from the club.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.’

  Gwen thought for a moment. ‘See, but not touch or take.’

  He nodded. ‘I just need to make sure it’s not something we need to worry about — drugs, guns or stuff.’

  ‘It’s not. But I’ll bring it anyway. That café round the corner — the one that does the espresso strong enough to stand your spoon up in? Three o’clock?’

  Mitch’s face relaxed slightly. ‘Look, kid — I know you’ve done good for yourself. Whatever Torchwood is, it’s got high-level cover. You people must be doing a phenomenal job. Whatever you hear, whatever we say, it’s not personal, OK? It’s just…’ He paused, groping for the right word. ‘It’s just jealousy, I guess. You turn up in your fancy car, with your fancy clothes, and you waltz into our crime scenes like you’re better than us.’

  ‘But isn’t that the same way you treat the Police Support Officers?’ Gwen asked.

  ‘Yeah, but we are better than them. What’s your point?’

  ‘No point. Can I have that DVD now?’

  ‘I thought we agreed on three o’clock!’

  ‘That was for the thing we took out of the club. I may as well take the DVD now, as I’m here.’

  ‘You don’t change, do you? You’re still a chancer. Wait here.’

  He was gone for ten minutes, and while she waited Gwen read through the various Health and Safety bulletins that were pinned to the dividing boards. When Mitch returned, he was empty-handed.

  ‘I’ve set it up in the audio-visual suite. You can watch through it once, then take a copy with you. And you’ll have to sign for it.’

  ‘OK.’ The AV suite in the police station was high-quality: she would be able to zoom in on images, enhance details, and do most of the tricks that she could do back at Torchwood, with the added benefits that she’d get a little privacy — which was sorely lacking in the Hub — and foster a little more trust between her and her former colleagues in the police.

  The AV suite was just a darkened office with a widescreen LCD TV and a rack containing various bits of video equipment: a region-free DVD player, VHS, Betamax and U-matic recorders, a tape recorder and a CD deck, and even a laserdisc player for some bizarre reason. The lads probably thought it took LPs. The idea was that it should be able to replay any recordable media the police took in as evidence, although Gwen remembered them once being foxed by an archive of illegal phone intercepts made, for reasons known only to the suspect, on 8-track tape.

  The DVD was sitting on top of the rack, a silver disc in an unlabelled black box. She slipped it into the machine and called up thumbnails of the eight chapters it contained. The disc had been pre-edited by Mitch or his boys: one chapter for the pictures from each camera that had caught the incident as it swung back or forth. It took her forty minutes to go through every chapter twice, at the end of which she knew three things.

  It was Craig Sutherland who had brought the device along to the club.

  He was demonstrating it to his friend Rick by pointing it at something or someone out of the camera’s field of view.

  And, seconds after Craig had demonstrated it, Rick had smashed a beer bottle on the nearest table and lashed out at a passing youth, slicing his face from eye to chin, leaving a gaping, bloody gash, horrifying even on the grainy video footage.

  The rest was tragic and inevitable. The youth’s friends weighed in, arms rose and fell, blood spattered the nearby tables and walls. Gwen timed the action: from beginning to end, it took twenty-three seconds. It was a Grand Guignol of unimaginable savagery from kids, just kids, who had been talking and drinking peacefully just a few moments before.

  It wasn’t her job. Not technically. It was up to the police to investigate the deaths, ascribe guilt and innocence and close the case. She didn’t live in that world any more.

  But it was clear from the video footage that nobody else was involved. It was the closest thing to an open and shut case she’d seen for a long time, except for motive. And motive would get lost along the way. The deaths would be blamed on drugs, or cults, or gangs, or something. Once the police knew they weren’t looking for anyone else, they would wind the investigation down. Only Torchwood would know that the entire event, all five deaths, were due to kids using, or misusing, a piece of alien technology.

  Toshiko was down on the firing range.

  It was a darkened room, about fifty feet long and thirty wide, starkly illuminated by striplights suspended from an arched ceiling of old red bricks. A flat counter ran across the room at waist height, ten feet from the nearest wall. Partitions divided the bench into sections at which the Torchwood team would stand when they were conducting their regular firearms training, or when one of them was testing some suspected alien weapon they had found. On the other side the room was empty. The far wall contained a set of Weevil-shaped targets, some singed by laser fire and proton blasts, one still soggy from the time Owen had fired an alien fire extinguisher at it by mistake.

  Toshiko was alone in the firing range. Alone, apart from two white mice.

  One of the mice was in a small perspex cage on the bench, just in front of Toshiko. It was cleaning its whiskers with almost obsessive care. The other one was in another small perspex cage on a table in front of one of the distant targets. It was running up and down, sniffing at the corners and seams of its cage, stretching up to check the holes in the top.

  Also on the bench, clamped in place so its longitudinal axis pointed towards each of the mice, was the lavender-coloured alien device.

  Toshiko had two video cameras, one on each side of the room, recording her every move. One was set for long shot, the other for zoom. Jack wouldn’t miss anything… in case her experiment went wrong.

  Somewhere in the Archive, there was a section devoted to the records left behind by other Torchwood members; ones who had been carrying out experiments, just as Toshiko was. Ianto had showed her where it was, once upon a time. Videos. Photographs. An ancient daguerreotype. And one scratchy old wax cylinder that, Ianto told her, contained a man’s voice talking very calmly up to the point when he suddenly let out the most God-awful scream that Ianto had ever heard.

  Toshiko had n
o intention of only being remembered for the record of an experiment gone wrong. And even if she was, she wouldn’t be remembered for a scream. She would be remembered for the longest, loudest, most unexpected stream of profanities ever recorded by Torchwood.

  Using a laser pointer, she lined the alien device up carefully with the two mice: one just a few inches away, the other across the room. She was pretty sure that she had the thing aimed the right way: the overlaid images she had taken of the inside were ambiguous, but she had enough experience of analysing alien technology to know the difference between a transmitter and a receiver, no matter how many light years away they had been fabricated.

  The mouse in the far cage was starving. Toshiko hadn’t fed it for several hours, and she could tell by the way it was climbing the sides of the cage that it was desperate for food.

  ‘I’m probably going to regret asking this,’ a voice said from the doorway, ‘because when I ask similar questions of Owen I get some rather disturbing answers, but what are you doing in here with two white mice and an alien device?’

  Toshiko looked around. Ianto was standing in the doorway.

  ‘I’m trying to confirm a theory,’ she said. ‘I think this is an emotional amplifier. I think it can actually transmit emotions over long distances.’

  ‘And you’re trying this out with mice, which are not, as far as I know, renowned for their emotions.’

  Toshiko smiled. ‘Hunger is an emotion,’ she said.

  Ianto entered the room and glanced at her experimental set-up. ‘So one of these mice is hungry, and the other one isn’t? And you want to see if you can project the hunger from one to the other?’ He raised his eyebrows, looking at the small plate Toshiko had put to one side. ‘Left to myself, I would have picked cheese. I notice you’ve gone for the rather more unusual chocolate-smeared-with-peanut-butter option.’

  ‘I’ve worked with mice long enough to know that cheese is a cliché born of old Tom and Jerry cartoons,’ she replied.’ ‘If you really want to tickle a rodent’s taste buds, you want peanut butter and chocolate.’

  The mouse on the bench beside her wasn’t paying much attention. It had spent the past hour gorging itself on food. Now it just wanted to clean itself up and sleep it off.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Everything is set up.’ She took a last look at the video cameras, to check the right lights were on, and then moved across to the device.

  ‘Based on the interior structure,’ she said to Ianto, ‘the button that activates the device is here.’ She indicated a wider section in one of the raised ribbons that criss-crossed the device. ‘In fact, there are two buttons: one to activate the power and a separate one to operate the receiver and transmitter combination, placed far enough apart that a careless finger can’t accidentally touch them both together. It has to be deliberate — first one button, then the other, and probably within a set period of time.’

  Toshiko picked up the piece of peanut butter-smeared chocolate and slipped it through a hole in the top of the nearest perspex cage. It turned as it fell, landing sticky side down. The mouse in the cage glanced at it incuriously, and went back to cleaning its whiskers.

  Toshiko pressed the first button on the device, and then the second one.

  The ribbons along the side of the device glowed with a subtle apricot colour. Toshiko stepped backwards so that the video cameras could get a better view.

  The mouse in the container on the far side of the firing range didn’t react. It kept on climbing the sides of its cage, desperate to get at the food and satisfy its hunger. The nearest mouse, however, sat bolt upright, ears pricked, whiskers pointing forward eagerly. A sudden blur of motion and it was on the chocolate, tearing at it with tiny teeth, turning it over and over with its paws, wolfing down big chunks of the peanut butter. It was acting as if it was starving, as if it hadn’t eaten for hours.

  Toshiko reached out to touch the power buttons again. The apricot glow faded away.

  The mouse rocked back from the chocolate. It brought its paws up in front of its tiny nose in an almost comical double-take, seemingly surprised at the peanut butter that was smeared across them. Convulsively it began cleaning its whiskers all over again. The chocolate lay, ignored, where it had fallen.

  ‘Point definitively proven’, Ianto said, impressed.

  The area was mostly office blocks with wide glass frontages and lobbies that were all rose marble and lush tropical plants. Few cars passed by, and those that did were either chauffeur-driven, high-end hire cars or lost. No bus routes came that way: there was too much risk of hoi polloi getting in. Any old Cardiff pubs that had survived the blitzing and rebuilding of the area had been gentrified into wine bars or gastropubs catering for the office workers of a lunchtime. No chance of an eighty-year-old bloke with his dog nursing a pint of mild and bitter all night while watching a game of darts, Rhys guessed. The entire place was probably like a ghost town come nine o’clock.

  A board in the lobby of the block that Rhys had entered contained a list of all the companies that occupied the offices. Half of the block appeared to be empty: an indication of the way businesses were being priced out of Cardiff by increasing rents.

  A uniformed man, sitting at a rose marble desk that seemed to have been extruded from the ground rather than carried in and placed there, was giving him a curious stare. Rhys scanned the list, looking for one name in particular.

  Each floor seemed to be devoted to a different company: Tolladay Holdings, Sutherland amp; Rhodes International, McGilvray Research and Development… collisions of surnames and generic phrases that didn’t tell you much about what the companies did. There were probably people working for them who weren’t entirely sure either.

  And there it was. The Scotus Clinic. Twelfth floor.

  Rhys took a deep breath. This was it. Once he booked in at the security desk, there was no going back.

  He wanted Gwen to notice him again and, if Lucy’s story of extraordinary weight loss was anything to go by, then this was the way to do it.

  Nodding to the guard, he walked into the elevator and pressed the button for the twelfth floor.

  He could do this.

  He knew he had it in him.

  FIVE

  ‘So what have we got so far?’ Jack asked.

  They were back in the Hub. It was late on Thursday afternoon, and he’d called a council of war, pulling everyone back from whatever they were doing. In Gwen’s case that had been interviewing the friends and relatives of the dead boy, Craig Sutherland: a depressing process, combining one part grief with four parts suspicion, to which she had become depressingly familiar during her time with the police and thought she had managed to escape when she joined Torchwood. No such luck.

  Jack was standing at the head of the Boardroom table, the LCD screen behind him showing a rotating Torchwood logo, providing a dramatic backdrop to his muscular frame: constantly changing and yet constantly the same, moving and seemingly at rest.

  ‘Well,’ Toshiko said, and looked around at the others, ‘I could go first.’ She was sitting there, legs crossed, arms folded carefully in front of her. ‘I have been working on the alien device, and I have discovered what it is. Or at least, I believe I have determined a part of its function.’

  ‘I’ll bite,’ said Jack. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I haven’t completed my tests yet, but I believe that it is an emotional amplifier. It can detect emotions some distance away and amplify them locally, or detect them nearby and amplify them at a point some distance away.’ Seeing their blank faces, she continued: ‘It works in much the same way as a loudhailer, for instance. That picks up quiet sounds and amplifies them so people can hear them a long way away.’

  ‘Or a directional microphone,’ Owen added. ‘That picks up quiet sounds a long way away and amplifies them so you can listen to them.’ He looked around the room. ‘Not that I would ever try that outside Torchwood, of course. That kind of thing is wrong. Especially at three o’clock in the morning,
when you think the girl across the street is having it off with her boyfriend. Completely wrong.’

  ‘Moving rapidly on from Owen’s dodgy moral sense,’ Jack said, ‘can anyone suggest what such a device might be for?’

  Fidgeting, Owen said, ‘I can think of one straight away. There might be alien races that communicate via some kind of short-range empathic sense. As they developed technologically, they might invent things that enabled them to communicate at longer ranges; let their friends know what they were feeling across the other side of the valley, or whatever. It’s like an emotional mobile phone.’

  ‘It’s a theory,’ Jack said. ‘Tosh, what do we know about the construction of the device?’

  ‘It’s small, and built with a lot of artistry and care. More a piece of craftsmanship than a mass-produced item. I would deduce from this that the civilisation that built it puts great store by art and artisans. The internal circuitry serves two purposes: not only does it produce the emotional amplification effect, but it also contains a picture within its structure. An image. I believe it might be a portrait of the device’s owner, or its designer.’

  ‘What’s the purpose of that?’ Gwen asked. ‘Bill Gates doesn’t put his picture inside every computer he sells.’