She shook her head violently. ‘No. I’m fine. Really, I am.’
‘OK, then let’s get you home. Get some lunch inside you.’
‘That sounds — Rhys!’
‘What?’
For a moment he couldn’t work out why he was having difficulty talking, and then he realised that he’d just taken a bite out of the bagel. ‘Sorry. Come on — let’s get out of here.’
Still masticating the chewy dough, he wheeled the trolley toward the checkout fast enough that Lucy only managed to throw one or two extra items in it. Getting it scanned and paid for was relatively painless, despite the look that the bloke on the checkout gave him when he came to the opened pack of bagels. Fortunately, Gwen had left him with the car, so they were back at the flat within ten minutes.
‘Coffee?’ he asked as the door closed behind them, ‘or shall we unpack the stuff and get some food on?’
‘Actually,’ Lucy said, ‘I want something else.’
He glanced back at her. There was a confident, dangerous look in her eyes. ‘Look, Lucy, we need to-’
‘No talking,’ she said, and strode toward him, hips swinging.
His gaze kept flickering between her face, her incredible breasts as they swung from side to side and her crotch, a smooth Y-shape outlined in tight denim. How could something so close to a wet dream be just a step away from a nightmare? He put his hands up, unsure whether he wanted to push her away or pull her closer, crushing her to his chest. She kept walking, breasts pressing against the palms of his hands, nipples hard beneath the fabric of her blouse and that black, lacy bra that he remembered seeing beside the sofa that morning.
‘I need you,’ she moaned. ‘I need you inside me, Rhys.’
And, turning her face up toward him, she leaned forward and sunk her teeth into his cheek, worrying the flesh before tearing a chunk away.
The last thing Rhys remembered was seeing his own blood, splattering across her cheeks like scarlet freckles.
ELEVEN
Owen could hear sobbing even before he reached the cells.
He stopped before he rounded the corner, and she saw him. It wasn’t that he liked listening to women cry — although he’d experienced more than his fair share since he lost his virginity in a stationery cupboard at school when he was fifteen — it was more that he didn’t want to see what any girl looked like when she was crying that hard. The sobs were racking, heaving things, and sobs like that in his experience were accompanied by snot and dishevelled hair and a general loss of self-respect. He liked women who were neat and tidy; at least, outside the bedroom.
When she showed no sign of stopping crying, Owen scuffed his foot against the floor. She didn’t hear or, if she did hear, she didn’t respond, so he did it another couple of times.
Eventually the crying stopped and, after a few moments when Owen imagined her hurriedly wiping her face, a small, scared voice said, ‘Is there someone there? Hello?’
He walked nonchalantly around the corner as if nothing had happened. She was in the third cell along: a girl with blonde hair, matted now, and a face blotchy from crying and streaked with mascara. Still, at least she’d made an effort to clean herself up. She was still holding a tissue. Cardboard fragments lay scattered around her feet. Owen had a feeling that they were all that was left of the pizza boxes that had been stacked up in her cell earlier.
‘Hallo, Marianne,’ he said.
‘Everyone seems to know my name,’ she replied, ‘but I don’t know who anyone else is.’
‘I’m Owen. I’m a doctor.’
She moved closer to the transparent barrier that separated the cell from the corridor. ‘Am I ill? Is that why I’m here? I can’t remember.’
‘This is an isolation ward. We think you might have caught an infectious disease.’
She wasn’t convinced. ‘It looks more like a cell. A really old cell.’
‘Ah. This part of the hospital had been closed down. We reopened it because of the epidemic.’
‘But I thought I’d been drugged. The man who was here earlier told me someone had drugged my drink.’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Owen said, thinking quickly. ‘But we think whoever drugged your drink was infected with a tropical disease.’ He racked his brain for the name of some remote illness, the kind of thing that GQ published ghastly colour photographs of under the heading ‘10 Diseases You Really Don’t Want To Catch’. ‘It’s called Tapanuli Fever. Never been seen in the UK before. We’re isolating anyone this guy came into contact with until we can get them checked over.’
‘Is that why I’m so hungry all the time? Is that one of the symptoms?’
‘Look,’ he said reassuringly, ‘the chances are you’re clean, but we need to be sure. If we’re wrong, it’ll make avian flu look like a joke.’
‘Avian flu was a joke. It never happened.’
‘Yeah, but if it had, it would have been really serious.’
He took a deep breath. She wasn’t your normal Cardiff city centre good-time girl, this one. Sparky. If he’d met her in a bar, he’d have been tempted to chat her up and take her back home. Well, back to her home. ‘Look, do you know how many people died of flu in the great pandemic of the fourteenth century?’
‘Sorry, I was crap at history,’ she said. ‘But I was really good at biology.’
‘I bet. It was twenty-five million. About a third of Europe’s population at the time. These things can spread faster than Crazy Frog ringtones if they’re not checked.’
‘And that’s what you do?’ She looked him up and down. ‘Aren’t you a bit young to be a doctor?’
‘Aren’t you a bit young to be hanging around in bars accepting drinks from strangers?’
‘Point taken.’ She sniffed. ‘So what can I do to help? Apart from just hanging around in the cold and the damp?’
‘I need to conduct an examination, but I can’t come in the… unit… with you.’
‘OK.’ She started unbuttoning her blouse. ‘You want me to take everything off?’
‘Yes. No!’ Owen took a deep breath. Tempted though he was, if Jack caught him getting a girl to strip off in the cells, he’d be out on his ear. It had been bad enough last time it happened; he’d never talk his way out of it again. ‘No, I’ve got a kind of scanner thing. If I pass it through the food slot, you can wave it all over your body. It’ll take readings which I can analyse later.’
‘And it’ll work through clothing? I don’t mind taking everything off. You’re a doctor, after all.’
God help him. ‘Yes, it’ll work through clothing. You don’t have to take anything off.’ Although, he almost said, if it’ll make you feel more comfortable…
Owen reached into his pocket and took out his Bekaran deep-tissue scanner: slim and rectangular, with a lens arrangement set along one edge. It was essentially an ultrasound generator and detector, but Toshiko had modified it, reconfiguring the device to send its readings via wireless LAN directly to Owen’s terminal. But he didn’t really care how it actually worked. As far as he, or any doctor, was concerned, it fell under the general banner heading of ‘shuftiscope’ — a device that allowed him to take a shufti into someone else’s body. Whatever a ‘shufti’ was. Something his dad used to say, as in: ‘I’ll just take a shufti at that washing machine.’ Maybe Jack would know where ‘shufti’ came from. He was good with old words.
Owen knelt, and slid the device through the slot at the bottom of the door where pizzas had obviously been passed through to her. ‘Here. It’s switched on already. Just move it carefully along the outside of your clothes, as close to the skin as you can get. Try and make sure you cover everything.’