They started to run.
TWELVE
Old warehouses lacking roofs. The bones of the city’s vanished industry. High-walled stone sheds with bare socket windows and roof-tile avalanches on the floors. Pigeons, weeds, puddles of rainwater.
No Jack. No Tosh.
‘Spread out,’ James said. They wandered around the derelict spaces, keeping each other in sight. There were scraps of metal tracks inlaid into parts of the concourse hardpan where freight trucks had once shunted. Broken lead raingoods spilt green stains down scabby brick work. In places, there were little caches of junk — wrappers and cartons, doorless fridges and defunct cookers. The residents of Butetown evidently used this place to dump their junk. Oddly, there was no evidence that the homeless lingered here, in what Gwen thought would be a typical location. What kept them out? Old attempts at fencing and boarding had long since perished and given up the ghost.
Ghost. An unfortunate word to bring to mind. It was broad daylight, closing on noon, but the place felt clammy and haunted.
Gwen paused below a massive brick archway that demarcated the plots between two warehouses. Part of a bas-relief inscription decorated the curve of the arch:
MILL ER amp; PEA ODY MBER FOUR POT 1 53
Lower down, newer signs had been fixed to the brickwork with wire and rivets. Red lettering on white fields:
KEEP OUT DANGEROUS STRUCTURE DANGER OF DEATH
She tried her phone again. She’d lost count of the number of attempts she’d made to reach Jack in the previous forty minutes. Since the ‘boiled egg’ message to James, nothing had been heard from their illustrious leader.
Dialling tone, connecting.
‘Please wait,’ said a voice. ‘We are diverting you to the voice mail box.’
‘James! I’ve got voice mail!’ Gwen called, keeping the phone pressed to her ear. That was an improvement. Until then, they hadn’t even got a connecting tone.
James hurried over to join her from the far side of the place.
‘Hi,’ said a recording of Jack’s voice. ‘This is Jack. Message me up good.’
‘Jack, it’s me. Where are you? We’re here. Where are you, for God’s sake? We’re looking everywhere. Call me back. OK? It’s Gwen. OK?’
She hung up.
She glanced at James.
‘I left a message.
He nodded. ‘If it’s…’
‘What?’
‘I was just thinking. If it’s boiled egg, well, it’ll be hard boiled by now. We’ve been here half an hour.’
‘Forty minutes, actually. This can’t be the right place.’
‘Ianto’s directions were specific. Besides, the SUV is here. They’re here too, somewhere.’
‘Somewhere.’
‘Maybe they went for a beer.’
She frowned. ‘What?’
James pointed up at the arch inscription. ‘Well, it’s MILL ER time.’
Gwen glared.
‘Not the moment for a bad joke? No?’
‘No.’
‘You’d think I would have sensed that.’
Gwen turned in a full circle on the spot, slowly scanning the abandoned site around them. ‘Nobody’s here. Nobody comes here. Nobody would come here.’
He nodded. ‘Not unless they wanted to make an Ultravox video. And it was 1981.’
‘Except for that, maybe. Let’s go back to the SUV and sweep out from there again.’
They started walking. Gwen’s phone started ringing.
She hoped it wasn’t Rhys.
There was no caller ID on the screen.
‘Hello?’
‘Gwen?’
‘It’s Jack!’ she hissed at James. ‘Jack? Where are you?’
Something unintelligible gurgled back, something with the vague semblance of Jack’s accent. It sounded as if he was on a train, in rush hour, and going through a tunnel.
‘Jack? Jack? Say that again! Where are you? You sound like you’re on a train!’
‘Gwen we-did- can’t really Mary-seriously…’
‘Jack? Jack?’
The line went dead.
‘Bugger!’ Gwen cried. She tried redial.
‘Bugger!’ she cried again.
Her phone rang again immediately. It made her jump so much, she almost dropped it.
‘Yes? Jack?’
‘On a train?’ his voice said, clear as a bell. ‘On a train? People on mobiles always say that. “I’m on the train,” they say, like that. It’s a cliché. Was that humour, Gwen Cooper?’
‘Shut it! Stop babbling! I said the train thing because you sounded like you were on one. Quickly, before the line goes dead again, where are you?’
‘We’re in the chapel.’
‘The what?’
‘St Mary’s.’
‘Where the bloody hell is that? We’re in the… Where are we, James?’
‘The derelict warehouses Ianto sent us to. Off Livermore.’
‘You get that, Jack?’
A fuzz of static.
‘Jack?’
‘I said I heard,’ Jack replied. ‘You’re in the right place. St Mary’s is smack in the middle of it. Little old chapel, used to be sweet and quaint, boarded up now. Can’t miss it.’
‘We missed it.’
‘It’s right there.’
‘We’ve been here three-quarters of an hour and we can’t find you.’
Silence.
‘Jack?’
More silence.
‘Jack!’
‘I was thinking,’ Jack answered.
‘We’ll don’t.’
‘Pardon me. Look, you parked where we did, right?’
‘Right next to the SUV.’
‘You just walk from there, straight through the doorway dead ahead. You-’
White noise, like surf across shingle, washed his words away.
‘Jack? I’m losing you.’
‘Gwen? I lost you there for a sec. Did you hear what I said? Start at the SUV, in Number Three Coal Depot, and head through the north door. We’re standing beside-’
Scrambled, alien voices, static, gone.
‘Jack? Jack, you bugger?’
The message on her mobile’s screen read ‘CALL ENDED’.
Her phone rang again, two trills, then rang off. Another feeble trill, and dead again.
‘What did he say?’ James asked.
Gwen looked up at the arch.
MILL ER amp; PEA ODY MBER FOUR POT 1 53
‘Number four depot,’ she whispered. She looked at James. ‘We’re in the wrong place.’
‘We are?’
‘We’ve overshot,’ Gwen said, and started to run back across the echoing space.
As she ran, her phone tried to ring again, and gave up mid trill.
James caught up with her. They crossed back through an empty, dank vault of loveless Victorian stone, until they could see the SUV and the Saab through a crumbling doorway.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Here is where he means…’
They wove around each other, staring out at the brick shell enclosing them.
Her phone rang, sharp and echoing in the cold space.
‘Jack?’
‘I keep losing you. The signal’s bad.’
‘Jack, we’re right there. I can see the cars and the north door. Where are you?’
‘Where are you? We’re right here, outside the chapel.’
‘What bloody chapel?’
‘The funny little chapel with the graffiti and the boarded-up windows.’
‘There is no bloody chapel, Jack.’
A pause. She thought she’d lost him again.
‘Gwen?’
‘Yeah?’
‘How many windows in the west wall?’
She turned and counted. ‘Thirty-six. Three rows of twelve.’
‘Middle row, third window along from the right. Big chunk of masonry missing from the lower left-hand corner?’
‘Yes.’