His mind was easing a little. Tough night. Rough night. One of the worst, and it still wasn’t over. Today, or the next day, or the next, the night was going to last forever. Even so, he began to relax a little. He felt safe and powerful up there, confident that he was the only being in Cardiff who could ascend so high and regard so much without being seen.
In both particulars, Jack Harkness was entirely wrong.
Mr Dine waited, crouching down below a parapet. He could feel the pull. He resisted. He had to check first. Be sure. It might just have been a false alarm.
He stood up and stepped into space.
Twenty metres below, he landed effortlessly, and began to run across the slanted roofs.
Owen Harper poured himself another measure of Scotch, and toyed with the glass. By his own standards, he was falling down drunk. Luckily, he was in his own apartment overlooking the Bay.
He gazed out at the lights.
‘I used your soap, is that all right?’ the girl said, coming out of the en suite.
Owen looked around. ‘Yeah, sure.’
What the hell was her name again? Lindy? Linda? The only thing he was sure of was that she had the most tremendous rack in the history of tremendous racks.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
He stared at her. She wasn’t wearing anything, and that helped to remind him why he’d brought her home with him in the first place. He took a sip of Scotch.
‘Looking at you,’ he said.
The bath was neck-deep and warm, and suffused with fragrant oils. Toshiko Sato turned the lights down until only the candles made a glow, and slipped off her bath robe.
She sank into the bath. The warm water enveloped and embraced her, soothing her bruises and her tired, weary body.
She lay back, and reached for her glass of wine.
James Mayer paused the television remote and cocked his head. Someone was definitely tapping on his door.
He got up, gingerly, feeling the pain in his body, and padded barefoot to the door.
‘Hello,’ said Gwen.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘Is me being here a problem?’ she asked him.
‘Hell, no, I was just surprised. I didn’t expect-’ He looked at her. ‘You know today is Friday, just, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you know the Andy Pinkus Marathon doesn’t start until Saturday?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Gwen?’
‘Are you telling me I can’t stay here until Saturday?’ she asked.
‘No,’ James replied. ‘Have I ever?’
Her mouth met his. He pulled her into the flat.
Later, during a brief intermission, she got up, naked, closed the door, and turned the deadbolts.
SIX
Monday morning, with a sky like a dirty fleece above Cardiff.
As the kettle boiled, Davey Morgan fed the cat, and then made up his flask.
‘So, anyway, I left it in the shed,’ he said, bringing his story up to date. ‘It didn’t seem to want to be disturbed, so I thought, it’s doing no harm here, I thought, and left it there.’
He took his digging jacket down off the door-peg in the little back kitchen. It was the top half of an old suit. He reckoned he’d been married in it, in ’48, but Glynis had always insisted he’d been wearing it when they’d first met, at the social in Porthcawl, which would have been ’46. Glynis had always had a keen memory for such details, either that, or she had always been better at asserting her version of the truth. He missed her.
The jacket had been pretty done in by the mid 1950s, but she’d refused to let him throw it out, for ‘sentimental reasons’. So it had become his digging jacket, her name for it, reserved for the allotment in cold weather. Pretty good run it had had since then, for a demob suit with feeble stitching.
‘I suppose I’d better check on it,’ he said. The cat was as indifferent to this remark as it had been to the rest of his story. Bowl cleared, it sat down like a Degas ballerina, toes en point, and began to lick its arse.
‘You be all right here for an hour or two?’ Davey asked. The cat looked up briefly, the tip of its tongue slightly protruding, then went back to its ablutions. He wasn’t talking to the cat anyway. He was talking to the picture on the hall table. But he always pretended he was talking to the cat, because if you talked to pictures, you had to be bonkers, didn’t you?
He put on his cap and patted the pockets of his digging jacket. Glynis had died in 1978. Complications, the doctor had said, which had seemed a reasonable diagnosis. As complications went, dying was a considerable one.
Every Friday night, she’d slipped a packet of mints into the pocket of the digging jacket for him to find every Saturday morning out on the allotment. He still checked, even though there hadn’t been a packet of mints to discover in twenty-nine years. There was a wrapper, though. A twenty-nine-year-old scrap of foil and paper. He’d never had the heart to throw it away.
He went out into the yard, and locked his backdoor. Leaning against the wall, he put on his wellies, then walked off down the backyard to the lane behind the houses that joined with the allotment path.
A pneumatic drill stammered like a frantic blacksmith. They were building new homes on Connault Way. The land buy-out had included a large swathe of the allotment space that had once surrounded the streets of Cathays. Madness. Jim French, who grew winter veg on the plot three over from Davey’s, had told him on the nod that the council were considering selling off their patches to the developers too. How could that be right, in any man’s world? What would he do for lettuce and spuds and marrows then?
He could smell brick dust and rain on the air. The new houses looked like box skeletons over the hedge. Prefab rubbish, like Airfix kits, thrown up in a month, the speed of weeds. Not like the front-and-backs on his street. Decent brick, wooden doors. Course, his could use a lick of paint, but still.
There was no one on the allotments, not on a Monday morning. The iron gate squealed as he let himself through. More than half the plots had gone back to the wild. Nobody wanted the toil of an allotment any more, not when there were Kwik-Saves full of guavas and broccoli and pre-washed beans.
That was why he’d been digging in the plot next to his. He hadn’t paid the annual fee for it, but it had been abandoned more than ten years ago, and he hadn’t seen the harm of it. And that’s when he’d found it. Just that last Saturday, forking the cleared earth while the stripped weeds crackled lazily in his brazier. He’d just had the clearest taste of a mint in his mouth, just for a second, the memory of a mint, when the tines of his fork struck it.
The boys had been there again, Sunday night. Empty beer cans on the path, a cloche kicked over. Davey still had the tub of black paint ready, in case they ever took it upon themselves to decorate his shed again, the way they had in the spring. Foulmouth buggers couldn’t even spell. Taff Morgan iz a old purv.
Davey went up to the shed and undid the padlock. It was still there, where he had left it, propped up in his wheelbarrow, angled slightly as if it was looking out of the grimy window.
‘All right, then?’ he asked.
It made no more response than his cat had done.
‘I was wondering if you had a name,’ Davey said. ‘Just to put us on civil terms. I’m Davey, but they all call me Taff. The wife even called me Taff.’
A little hum: no more response than that.
‘Daft name, I agree. What do you call it now? A stereotype, is that it? Had it since ’42. Royal Fusiliers, boys from all over, no older than me. Boys from Liverpool and Birmingham and Luton. Jock, see, he came from Aberdeen, so naturally, he was Jock. And I was Taff. Taff Morgan. The Welsh lad. Oh, it was a simple thing. You didn’t argue. You were glad to be noticed.’