Gwen was sure that when she’d first arrived, parking her car around the corner and walking into the road she wanted, hands in pockets and looking casual, the first person she saw reached for a mobile phone. Maybe she was imagining things, but she could almost feel the invisible web of warnings fanning out from that one person: watch out, there’s a stranger in the street. Might be the police.
The flat that Lucy shared with her junkie boyfriend was about halfway along the street. Gwen paused by the gate and looked at the outside. The curtains were drawn. One window was cracked. The house had been converted into flats: the hall appeared to have been divided, and there were two doors, one that presumably led to the ground floor and the other giving access to the stairs up to the first floor. Paint was peeling off both doors, and weeds formed a border along the junction between the concrete of the front garden and the walls and the front step.
She rang the bell for the right-hand door. Judging by the fact that the house to the left had its door next to this one, the stairs were on the left of the hall, meaning that the right-hand door gave access to the ground floor, where Lucy lived. She was there looking for Lucy, and if she just opened the door it would make Gwen’s job easier. Alternatively, if her boyfriend opened the door it would save Gwen the trouble of having to break in.
Breaking and entering. How had it come to this? If there was one thing they had drummed into her in the police force it was that in order to enforce the law they had to uphold it. By committing minor infringements — illegal entry, planting evidence, forcing a suspect to confess to something they hadn’t done — all the police did was to abandon the moral high ground. It didn’t matter that they were doing it in the name of the greater good; by doing it, they subverted the greater good. They became criminals arresting criminals, which turned the whole thing into a glorified gang war.
And yet here she was, just about to break into someone’s house, with a gun tucked into the waistband of her trousers. Prepared to do anything — even kill, if it was necessary in order to preserve her own life — and all in the name of the greater good. All in the name of saving the human race from the dark things that hid in the darkness, waiting for their chance to get in.
She shivered. What was it about Grangetown that made her suddenly feel dirty and old?
She rang the bell again, but there was no answer. Slipping her hand in her pocket, she took out a Leatherman, a multi-purpose folding tool that one of her police colleagues had introduced her to. The thinking person’s Swiss Army Knife, he had called it. Quickly she folded out a flat knife blade. Making it look as if she was putting a key into the Yale lock then, blocking her hand with her body, she slipped the blade into the gap between the door and the jamb and, while she levered the blade, she used her shoulder to apply pressure to the door. Most locks only engaged for a few millimetres or so, due to clumsy fitting, and some pressure in the right place could just ease the cam of the lock away from the housing.
And it worked. The door gave under her shoulder, and she quickly eased her fingers around the wood as it moved, trying to ensure that it didn’t suddenly fly in, banging on the wall.
Gwen moved into the shadowed hall and closed the door behind her, partly so she didn’t alert anyone in the house to her presence, partly so she didn’t alert anyone in the street to something unusual, and partly so her eyes could adjust more quickly to the darkness.
The first thing that struck her was the smell. Dirty washing, dirty plates, and something else. Sour metal. That very particular smell of blood.
She eased the Glock 17 from her waistband and held it high, pointed at the ceiling, safety clicked to off. Ready for anything.
Gwen entered the front room first, easing herself around the half-open door, alert for movement. There was nothing. The room was empty; bare floorboards, a sofa that had seen better days, DVD cases and discs scattered around the floor, and a surprisingly large HDTV set with full audio-visual set-up. Including speakers by the TV itself and on either side of the sofa. Her police training told her that it had probably been nicked; her knowledge of Lucy told her that the girl probably bought expensive toys for her boyfriend with her wages, which he eventually got around to selling to fund his drug habit. Cruel, but she’d seen it so often before.
After checking behind the door, she moved back into the hall. The kitchen was straight ahead, and she could see its length from where she stood. Piles of plates, crockery, cutlery, pans, all waiting to be washed. Several tinfoil takeaway containers with sauces of various kinds dried into them. No people.
The cupboard doors stood open, and there were packets of rice and biscuits on their sides, sticking out into the kitchen. Someone had been ransacking the place, looking for something. Looking for food, perhaps.
The door to the back room was closed, and she pushed it open with her gun.
The smell of blood — dryness, rust and sourness — intensified.
The body of Lucy’s boyfriend was slumped across the bed in the back room. He was naked. His throat had been ripped out: blood had fountained across the ceiling, the bedspread and the wall behind the head of the bed. Chunks of flesh had been torn from his shoulders, his chest and his arms. His head was turned away but, judging by the blood that stained his cheeks, his eyes had been pulled out of his head.
Or sucked out.
Sucked out and eaten.
Gwen moved into the room, still alert for any movement but aware that she was probably too late. It looked as if Lucy had already had her snack.
The duvet had twisted about his lower half, probably as he fought to get away from his attacker, but there was a pool of glutinous blood congealing in its folds. Gwen had no desire to check, but she was pretty sure that his genitalia had been ripped away and swallowed whole. She only hoped he’d been dead when it happened. Junkie or not, nobody deserved that kind of death. Especially at the hands of their girlfriends.
Bile rose in Gwen’s throat, bitter and acid, at the thought that this might have been Rhys. She might have returned from Torchwood to find him like this. On their bed. Twisted up in their duvet. Half-eaten.
‘He tasted strange.’
The voice came from behind her. Gwen cursed, even as she turned and brought the gun up.
Lucy was standing behind the door. She stepped forward, the door starting to close as her body pushed past it. It was difficult to tell where the blood stopped and her clothes began. Her mouth and chin was smeared with it. Under other circumstances, Gwen might have thought she was vomiting the stuff, but she knew different. The blood wasn’t Lucy’s.
‘It must have been the drugs,’ Lucy went on. ‘The heroin. It made him taste strange. Bitter, and a bit tingly.’ She paused, and seemed to take in Gwen, and the gun, for the first time. ‘How’s Rhys?’ she asked brightly. ‘I hope he’s OK.’
THIRTEEN
Gwen stared at Lucy.
The girl’s eyes were wide, pupils surrounded by whites on all sides. She was licking her lips convulsively.
‘I was looking for you,’ Gwen said cautiously.
‘That’s good,’ Lucy said. ‘I was hoping someone would come. I thought it might be Rhys, but I was hoping it was you.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve already tasted Rhys. He’s kind of spicy. Must be the amount of Indian food he eats. But I haven’t tried you yet. I wonder what you taste of.’
Gwen brought her gun up in both hands, arms bent at the elbow, knees slightly bent as well, ready to absorb the recoil if she had to fire the gun. Classic shooter’s pose, as taught to her not by the Cardiff police force, who had never armed her in eight years of duty, but by Jack, who had within three days.