SEVEN

'So, how did you get out?' Jack asked, pushing Alexander across Roald Dahl Plass. He caught a whiff of the burned woman from the lapels of his coat and was tempted to step out of the cover of the large umbrella and let the rain soak it off him. The SUV had needed fumigating by the time he'd got back to the Hub, the smell of Gloria Banks clinging to the upholstery like a takeaway. Today was not working out so well, and he wasn't sure that spending time with Alexander was likely to improve matters.

'I've been working on a homemade batch of perception-adjustment drugs for the last few weeks,' the old man replied, looking up at Jack with something approaching embarrassment. 'The nights are long and boring. After a while, you'll do anything to fill them.'

Jack steered the wheelchair towards the water tower.

'Should I be worried?'

'It's nothing major, just a basic distortion agent.' Alexander shifted in his seat. 'I dosed Pip Jarret's cocoa. He's currently waging war against the TV room furniture in the mistaken belief that it's a giant species of ant hell-bent on colonising South Wales. He provided quite the distraction.'

Jack centred the chair on the paving slab that marked the entrance to the Hub. 'Where did you get the chemicals to knock something like that up?'

'I brought some supplies with me.' Alexander held his hand up before Jack could interrupt. 'Nothing you need worry about. Besides, you can find most things naturally if you know what you're doing.'

'If I hear of colostomy bag explosives being sold on the open market, I'll know whose door to knock on.'

Jack tapped a button on his wrist-strap, and there was a jolt from beneath them. 'Wheelchair access,' he smiled as they vanished from Roald Dahl Plass and descended into the Hub.

Alexander was determined not to appear impressed as he tried to get his head around the layout of the place. He noted the presence of a hydroponics room and a large office, and several other rooms that he couldn't place at that distance. There was an ear-splitting screech from his left.

'Oh,' he sighed. 'You have a pterodactyl. How quaint.'

Jack laughed and the lift came to a jerky halt at the base of the tower. He shifted the wheelchair onto the metal gantry and pushed Alexander towards the Autopsy Room.

Ianto got up from his desk and headed towards them. 'Pteranodon, actually,' he said, frowning. 'Ianto Jones. You must be Alexander.'

'Yes, I must, mustn't I?' Alexander shook Ianto's hand and rolled his eyes as he spotted the look that passed between the young man and Jack. 'Tell him if he's going to roger you, the least he could do is get you an office of your own.' He waved at Ianto's workstation. 'Look at him, sat there in the middle of the entrance hall.' He looked up at Jack. 'Bet you've got your own office.'

'Well…'

'Thought as much. Bet you don't use it for much more than looking at porn and listening to Glenn Miller, either.'

Jack gave Ianto a look that begged for help and wheeled Alexander towards the Autopsy Room. They came to a halt at the top of the curved flight of metal steps, and Alexander sighed, looking at the route down.

'Didn't think that through, did you?'

Gwen stepped through the main Hub gate with a stack of pizzas in her hands. She watched as Ianto and Jack carried the old, swearing man and his wheelchair into the Autopsy Room.

'Hello,' she said once they had reached the bottom of the steps. 'Would this be the temporary medical help, by any chance?'

'Very temporary!' Alexander shouted. 'I've resigned twice since these Neanderthals started manhandling me. A man of my qualifications gets used to being treated with a certain amount of respect!'

'Oh, shut up, you miserable old git,' Jack said with a chuckle. 'If I'd known I was employing Old Man Steptoe, I'd have thought twice.'

Ianto wheeled Alexander over to the examination table which Jack was lowering to a more practical working height.

'Thank you, young man.' Alexander gave Ianto a smile and a half-wave towards Gwen. 'Nice to meet you, probably.'

'Gwen Cooper,' she replied, 'and I'm afraid there's nothing nice about what you're going to see under there.' She pointed at the table.

'I've seen things you wouldn't believe, my dear,' Alexander replied. 'Walked knee-deep in the meat of alien battlefields. Worked the front line of a war fought by species advanced enough to liquidise an enemy at the flick of a switch.' He looked up at Gwen. 'Have you any idea how disconcerting it is when your patients arrive in the form of broth?' He tugged the sheet free, leaving it to fall to the ground, where Ianto was quick to tidy it away. 'Though I must admit,' Alexander continued, looking at Danny Wilkinson's body, 'this is certainly bizarre.'

He began to wheel himself around the table. 'All external signs of violence — the shattered mouth, the chafing where the skin has torn against the tarmac in his efforts to free himself — would seem to make it clear that death was due to either shock or suffocation.'

'Suffocation?' Ianto asked.

'You try breathing a pavement and see how far your lungs get.' He checked the boy's mouth. 'Given the angle of his neck and throat and the fact that he obviously took some time to die, I'm assuming the pavement somehow infiltrated his mouth but not the rest of him.' He looked at Jack. 'If the pavement had appeared inside the rest of his body, he would have died instantly. This leads us to the conclusion that it must have been the pavement that lost physical cohesion and not the boy.'

'Oh yeah,' muttered Ianto, placing the carefully folded sheet away in a drawer. 'It'll be that old liquid pavement problem again. The council were looking into it, I believe…'

Alexander chuckled and nodded his head towards Ianto. 'I like him. He definitely deserves his own office.'

'Is there a list?' Gwen said. 'Somewhere I can put my name down? I'd like a pot plant, too, if the budget will stretch.'

'Ooh…' Ianto smiled. 'There's a Venus Flytrap in the containment chamber you can have. Saves me having to feed it.'

Jack looked at Gwen. 'Careful, it eats thirty kilos of fresh meat a day. We found it in the Brecons after following up reports on missing hikers.'

'It just loves Kendall Mint Cake.' said Ianto.

'God save me from your world,' Alexander muttered, running his fingers along the surface of the tarmac. 'I'm going to need access to your chemical stores and maybe that greenhouse upstairs.'

'Sure,' Jack replied. 'What are you after?'

'I want to mix something up that will dissolve all this tarmac and leave the body intact. You might want to take a sample first. Run some broad-range scans.'

Ianto held up a finger, walked to a drawer, pulled a lump hammer out and struck the edge of the tarmac with enough force to chip a piece off.

Gwen stared at the mallet. 'Don't you ever ask to tap my knee with that.'

Ianto smiled. 'Good for tenderising plant food.'

'And in box number two…' Jack said, yanking open one of the large drawers to reveal the body of Gloria Banks.

'Burn victim?' Alexander shrugged. 'What's the connection?'

'The location. They were found only metres and hours apart,' Jack replied. 'Also a large chronon surge at the time and location of death in both cases.'

'I'm a physician and chemist, not a physicist,' Alexander noted, 'so it's not really my field. However,' he smiled, 'I'm also excruciatingly clever and in love with the sound of my own voice, so I'll comment anyway. Chronon particles aren't proactive enough to do damage themselves, even in extraordinarily high doses. They are a symptom not a cause.'

'Agreed,' Jack replied, 'but they're also our only lead to what's going on.'

Ianto dashed up the stairs and over to his desk, reappearing next to Gwen on the railings. He held up what appeared to be a mobile phone. 'This can be used to trace chronon particles.' He looked at all three of them in turn and shrugged as they didn't say anything. 'I'll get my coat then, shall I?'

Later, Ianto sat down in the dry of a bus stop, eating fish and chips in the company of a couple of empty crisp packets, a carrier bag, several crushed beer cans and a stray cat that eyed him — or rather his fish — from the other side of the shelter.

'There's no end to the glamour of life in Torchwood,' he told the cat. 'It's just like James Bond except more… really, really crap.'

Perhaps the cat didn't believe him. Certainly it was happy to risk the rain until he threw it a few flakes of cod. 'Thank you,' he said, as it decided to hang around. 'I hate eating alone. The menu isn't what it could be either.' He held up the fish. 'You should try Brenda's on St Mary Street. Much tastier.' He smiled. 'The service isn't bad either. Ask for Patrick.'

He'd spent the last couple of hours wandering up and down the streets, trying to pick up a trace of chronon particles. He'd hung around the road where Danny Wilkinson's body had been found but, noticing a few curtains beginning to twitch, had decided to head up to the high street and keep his head down for an hour. Last thing he wanted was a slanging match with nosy suburbanites.

He flung the cat as much of his fish as he could dig free of the batter and ketchup mush he had created and dumped the rest in a wastepaper bin. Digging a wedge of serviettes from his jacket pocket, he began to scrub his hands clean with rainwater and dedication.

He decided it was probably safe to head back towards the Land of Twitching Curtains. He should give the place another thorough sweep for an hour and then call it quits. Opening his umbrella, he stepped back out into the rain.

A group of kids were sheltering under the awning of a convenience store. Cigarettes and a two-litre bottle of strong cider passed between their lips, the usual night-time sports whatever part of town you were in. A smart-looking woman gave them a wide berth as she aimed for the store entrance. A couple of wolf whistles followed her inside, but she ignored them.

'Look at that poof,' one of them said as Ianto walked past. He tried to think of something scathing to shout back, but he could come up with nothing that didn't sound desperate rather than witty, and he didn't want to give them more ammunition.

He crossed the road and tried to walk as nonchalantly as possible. Ridiculous… He'd faced off alien invasions with a quip and a spring in his step, but put him up against a bunch of chavs and his nerve went. Pathetic.

He heard them wolf whistle again and turned to see the smart-looking woman leaving the shop with a bottle of wine in her hand. She marched straight into the road, taking as wide an angle away from the kids as she could while still heading home. 'Fancy joining the party?' one of the boys shouted, much to the hilarity of the others. 'Swap you some of your booze for a bit of tongue!' He waggled it for her, but she kept her attention fixed firmly on the road.

Little bastards. Ianto was walking back towards them when the scanner in his pocket began squealing. The woman stared at him, a hint of panic in her eyes. Ianto clawed the scanner out, trying to look both reassuring and apologetic.

'The poof's got a rape alarm!' one of the kids shouted. 'He should be so lucky!'

The scanner was going haywire, and Ianto could make neither head nor tail of what it was trying to tell him. He looked up, hoping to at least reassure the panicking woman. He smiled at her and there was obviously enough sincerity there as she was beginning to smile back when something collided with her from behind. Her body spasmed into a star shape that would have been almost funny were it not for the look on her face and the distinct cracking of bone that carried between the electronic bleeps of the scanner. Her umbrella — a small affair decorated with autumn leaves — popped into the shape of a cocktail glass and fell from her hand. She appeared to hover for a few seconds, then she fell forwards and began to roll, over and over, coming straight at him.

The kids outside the shop were running away in the opposite direction, they could see that the night had taken a bad turn and they'd be best placed anywhere but here.

As the woman drew close, tumbling over herself, arms and legs spinning at angles that proved them free of their sockets, Ianto became aware of another noise between the bleeping of his scanner: the grinding of metal wheels on tracks. There was a taste of ozone on the air, as faint as a memory of childhood fairs.

Just before the ghost of a tram hit him, Ianto had the good fortune to disappear, leaving behind the woman, who came slowly to a halt as the present day reasserted itself.

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