‘Not what it looked like from down here,’ Toshiko said. ‘He screamed. Threw his arms about like he was trying to grab the air and hold on.’
‘Flailing,’ offered Owen. ‘Thrashing about he was. Desperate.’
‘It was only a few seconds, I suppose, but it sounded like…’ Toshiko’s eyes looked haunted as she recalled it. ‘Well, like despair, I suppose.’
‘Not straight away. He didn’t start screaming until about halfway down.’ Owen tucked the digital camera back in his jacket pocket. He stared at the corpse. ‘Maybe you changed your mind, eh? No going back on that decision, mate. What got into you?’
Gwen didn’t understand. ‘How could you have noticed that? It must have been over in seconds.’
Toshiko pointed to their car. ‘We’d located you with the heat sensor array in the SUV. So we knew that he was on the edge.’ She indicated the protective shroud of material that protected the middle section of the Levall-Mellon site. ‘Just as well. With all that green stuff covering the outside, we couldn’t see into the building. And there’s no CCTV in operation up there, either.’
‘Nice explanation,’ Owen told her. ‘Refreshingly free from the technobollocks you usually give us.’
Toshiko scowled. ‘Don’t parade your ignorance, Owen, just because you don’t understand the language.’
‘I thought you preferred to speak C-minus.’
‘That’s C++,’ she chided. ‘I also know that Java is more than coffee. And that Assembler has nothing to do with IKEA furniture.’
‘All those languages, Tosh, and you still don’t include English.’ Owen put his arm around Gwen’s shoulders and steered her so that they were looking up at the point from which Wildman had fallen. ‘He was just there. We noticed you were further away. Jack was obviously the tall bloke in the middle, and you were the one with boobs on the far side of the area. But never fear, freckles. If it had been you on the edge, I’d have been there to catch you. Falling for me, eh?’
She disengaged his arm from her shoulder. ‘As if.’
‘All the pretty girls do, y’know. Before they know it, I’ve swept ‘em off their feet and they’re lying next to me…’
Gwen rolled her eyes. ‘The only way you’ll end up lying next to a “pretty girl”, Owen Harper, is if you’re both knocked down by the same bus.’
Far from being disappointed, Owen leered at her. A moment later, it was like he’d already forgotten. He drew back the smeared raincoat to reach into the corpse’s jacket pockets. This brief search produced a crushed wallet and an ID badge for the Blaidd Drwg nuclear research facility. ‘We got the right bloke then.’
‘I think “got” is putting a positive spin on it,’ Jack called out from above them.
Gwen had left Jack back on the eighth floor when she’d hurried down to see what had happened to Wildman. Who knew what Jack had been doing up there since then. She remembered he liked to look out across the city at night from high vantage points, so maybe he’d been taking in the view up there while he had the chance. He must have decided to descend in style, because he was using the builders’ lift down the side of the building. As it started to vanish slowly behind the chipboard barrier that surrounded the lower floor, he jumped onto the top of the wooden partition and then leaped the remaining seven feet to street level, agile as a cat.
‘As interrogations go,’ Jack concluded, ‘it wasn’t one of my best. Hey, who parked that bus there?’ He cast a glance past it at the gathering crowd of rubberneckers. Further would-be eye witnesses were leaning out of upper-storey windows in adjacent buildings. ‘I guess we could try and continue this here, but clearing this bunch of ghouls 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?’