Jack shook his head. ‘Best we got was two inches on page eighteen.’
‘So, that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. It’s good. Everybody caught up in The Amok Incident was too damaged to remember anything coherent.’
‘Well, that’s kind of good.’
‘Best we could hope for.’
Gwen waited. Then she said, ‘I think I’d better apologise.’
‘Really?’
‘I was harsh, on Thursday. Really very harsh. I’m sorry.’
Jack sat back and sighed. ‘No, you’re all right. I should apologise. I was out of line. I didn’t realise how … how insidious the Amok was. I think it affected me more than I knew. Made me act-’
‘It’s OK.’
‘It’s not OK. It deserves an apology,’ Jack said.
‘Accepted.’
Jack nodded. ‘We friends again, Gwen Cooper?’
‘Always were.’
He nodded again. ‘You have a good weekend?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Hang out with the others?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. There was no point lying.
Jack stood up. ‘Andy Pinkus, Rhamphorhynchus. The lost season. As good as James claimed?’
‘Yeah, it was.’ How did he know?
‘I know everything, Gwen,’ Jack said. ‘Maybe I could borrow the disks sometime. I do like Andy. Smart-funny, like Ren and Stimpy, you know what I mean.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, let’s get to work,’ Jack said.
‘The Amok,’ Gwen said. ‘Do you know what it was?’
‘That? Oh, yeah,’ Jack replied.
He flipped over one of the newspapers on his desk and tapped a finger on the back-page word search.
‘A puzzle?’ James said.
‘Yeah.’
‘We were nearly killed by a word search?’
Jack nodded. ‘Kinda.’
‘People died because of a word search?’ Toshiko asked.
‘OK,’ Jack said, ‘hurry up and get over that part. I was making an analogy. A Jamesian analogy. The Amok is a puzzle, a mental exercise. Like a crossword or — yes — a word search. Trouble is, it was built by and for a species who exist in more dimensions than we do. Their idea of a simple puzzle invaded our minds in ways we couldn’t cope with. We weren’t made for logic challenges on that scale. We are simple, sturdy, four-dimensional beings. An eleven-dimensional sudoku is going to be a bit of a head-melt to the likes of us. Addictive, inviting, perplexing, infuriating, involving… but beyond our feeble means to solve.’
‘You’re saying I was mullahed by a sudoku?’ Owen asked, joining them.
‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘What news?’
‘This just in. The Peeters are hatching,’ Owen said.
‘Damn! Fighter Command!’ said James.
‘Exactly. Let’s roll,’ said Jack.
SEVEN
The alley beside the Mughal Dynasty smelled of exhaust fumes and cooked garlic on a Monday morning. The sky was spitting gobs of rain and, from outside the restaurant, Shiznay could hear the shouts of the delivery driver from the meat packers.
She was wearing a jogging suit, her hair tied back, and was lugging four tied-up sacks full of kitchen waste from the Sunday buffet (‘two for the price of one!’).
Shiznay opened the lid of the galvanised dumpster. She heard a scurrying, a settling, and braced herself for the rats that often popped up out of the slurry. Kamil ought to have been doing this drudge work, but Kamil had been out with his mates the previous night, and had greeted their mother’s calls with groans and rebukes. ‘Shiz, Shizzy, be my good daughter and take out the rubbish.’
And she was, always, a good daughter.
She threw the bags of rubbish into the dumpster, swinging from the waist. She heard a stirring, and looked for something to flip the lid shut without having to get too close.
The noise wasn’t a rat. It was coming from behind the dumpster.
Mr Dine unfolded himself and stood up in the light. He blinked at Shiznay.
She stared at him. ‘You,’ she said, ‘should go away.’
‘Shiznay,’ he said, focusing on her. ‘I… I’m sorry, I-’
‘You should go away, right now! You’re not welcome here!’
Mr Dine breathed in and exhaled slowly.
‘Were you… sleeping behind there?’ she asked. ‘Did you sleep there last night?’
He shrugged. ‘I crashed.’
She said nothing, just stared at him.
He looked back. ‘I wanted to come back, Shiznay. To apologise. Is your father all right? I have a horrible feeling I might have hurt him the other day.’
‘He’s fine. But he doesn’t want to see you around here any more.’
Dine nodded, understanding. ‘Of course. I can appreciate why he feels that way.’ He took something out of his jacket and held it out to her. ‘I left without payment transaction. I wanted to repair that error. I trust this will be adequate.’
‘I don’t want any trouble. Just go. Go.’
‘Please take this, Shiznay, and give it to your father, with my solemn apologies.’
He stank. He’d been sleeping in the dumpster, by the smell of it. Reluctantly, she put out her hands, expecting a few crumpled notes.
He put rocks in her hands instead. Grit, more like. She looked down. ‘What is…?’
Diamonds. Eighteen rough-cut diamonds. Or specks of broken glass, but she was somehow sure they were actual diamonds.
‘Who the hell are you?’ she asked.
‘A customer.’
‘I can’t take these.’
‘Why not? Surely they sufficiently reimburse your restaurant for the meal I ran out on?’
‘I don’t know where you got them from. Are they dodgy?’
‘Dodgy?’
‘You know, shonky?’
‘You have used two words I don’t know.’
‘Dodgy? Shonky? How the hell do you not know words like that?’
‘I’m not from around here.’
‘That much is certain. Where the hell did you get a handful of diamonds? You pick them up off the street, did you?’
He looked blank for a moment. ‘I found them in the waste unit.’
‘Right.’
‘A pencil. A broken pencil. Just a stub. One of yours I think. The kind you write down orders with, certainly. It was simply a matter of graphite compression.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing illegal was done. I performed the compression manually.’
‘You what?’
‘It was a simple action.’
Shiznay stared at him. ‘Were you sleeping there all night?’
Mr Dine smiled. ‘From time to time, I am suddenly alerted to action. I usually have little warning, and the priority takes over. I am invested. I can’t argue with it. The calorific cost of alert is huge. I expend at a high level, and then crash rapidly. It usually turns out to be a false alarm.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘I know. Please accept the payment. And please pass on my abject apologies to your father. My intention was not to hurt him. Alert protocols had taken over. The Principal appeared to be in danger. I have no choice but to act when that happens.’
‘Mr Dine, I-’
‘One last thing, Shiznay. Close your eyes.’
She closed her eyes, and heard a slight, whooshing sound. When she opened her eyes again, he had vanished. Which was, of course, impossible, given the geography of the alley.
Unless he had gone…
Shiznay Uhma looked up at the sky, into the sporadic rain.
‘Come back when you want,’ she said.
A fine Edwardian house on a quiet residential street in Pontcanna. A black SUV, the automotive equivalent of mirror shades, sitting outside under the council-tended elms.
This was not amateur. Gwen was quietly delighted at that part. Not so overjoyed about the mucus.
The Droon were migratory, and sometimes came to Cardiff the way that these things did. According to conversations, operational post-mortems, Torchwood had dealt with the Droon eleven times since Jack had taken charge. Three of those occasions had been since Gwen had joined the team. They’d had practice.