The waiter came over to clear the plates away and then pour them coffee. Conversation stopped while he worked. Toshiko spent her time looking through the window of the restaurant at the bay outside. A small ferry was docking as she watched. Passengers were waiting on its deck to disembark.
‘OK, people — what’s the connection between Marianne, Lucy and Gwen’s boyfriend?’ Jack asked.
‘The Scotus Clinic,’ Gwen said.
‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’
‘It’s a diet clinic based here in Cardiff. Lucy definitely went there, and Rhys went there too. He told me about it last night. He wanted to lose weight because he thought I was falling out of love with him, the idiot.’
‘And how does it work?’ Toshiko asked.
‘They get two pills: one to start the weight loss and one to stop it. I think if we investigate we’ll find out that Marianne went there too.’
‘She did,’ Owen said.
Jack gazed at him with interest. ‘OK, Sherlock — how did you know that?’
‘Cos she had a leaflet in her handbag.’
‘And what were you doing looking through her handbag?’
Owen looked affronted. ‘I was looking for clues, and stuff.’
‘And what were you really doing looking through her handbag?’
He ducked his head. ‘I wanted to see whether she has a boyfriend or not.’
‘And has she?’
‘Dunno. You can’t find anything in a woman’s handbag. It’s not organised along logical lines. I only found the leaflet by accident.’ He looked around. ‘That’s why women don’t make good surgeons, you know? Blokes, they put down their scalpels and retractors and stuff all in the right order so they can just reach out again and pick it up without even looking. Women, they just throw it all down higgledy-piggledy on the tray, and then wonder why they pick up a clamp when they want the forceps.’
Gwen looked over at Toshiko. ‘Do you want to tear him a new arsehole?’ she asked, ‘or shall I?’
‘He doesn’t really mean it,’ said Toshiko, but she avoided Gwen’s gaze.
‘How is Marianne?’ Jack asked. ‘Her fingers looked pretty raw from what little I saw.’
‘Yeah, and her face wasn’t looking too hot after you finished rearranging it with the fire extinguisher.’ There was an undertone of dark anger in Owen’s voice, but Toshiko couldn’t tell whether it was directed at Jack or at himself. Or perhaps at both.
‘If I hadn’t, she’d have been treating your face like people treat kebabs on a Friday night.’
‘Yeah, well…’ Owen paused, gazing out of the window at the distant headland. ‘I had to amputate her fingers,’ he said finally, casually, as if he was talking about the weather, or last night’s TV. ‘The damage was too great. She’d stripped all the skin and bone off. I can’t keep her unconscious — there’s not that much sedative in the whole of Cardiff — so I’ve had to chain her up in the cell. Actually chain her to the wall so she can’t eat any more of herself, with what remains of her hands bandaged up. Last I saw she was trying to reach the bandages with her mouth, she was that hungry.’ It seemed to Toshiko that his gaze was fixed on something much further away than Penarth Head. There was something hard about his face. ‘I remember taking an oath once to “Do no harm”. I’m not sure with Marianne what “doing no harm” means. Whatever happens, she suffers.’
This time it was Gwen who reached out a hand to touch Owen’s, an almost unconscious gesture of sympathy and understanding. Toshiko had been just about to reach out herself. When she saw Gwen’s hand move, she pulled hers back, reaching instead to pick up her napkin, fold it, put it down again.
‘What about Lucy?’ Gwen asked. ‘You didn’t put her in the same cell, did you?’
This time it was Ianto who answered. Toshiko had almost forgotten that he was with them at the table. ‘No, we managed to get her into the cell next to Marianne before she woke up.’
‘And her boyfriend?’
‘I went back and cleaned the place up. There’s no sign that anything happened. I actually brought his body back to the Hub so that Owen could do an autopsy, if he wanted.’
‘The fun never ends,’ Owen muttered. ‘Corpses, stacking up, every day. Bodily fluids and rotting flesh. I’d smell better if I worked in a fish and chip shop. And the hours would be better.’
‘That looked like a nasty gash on her head when I picked her up,’ Ianto continued, having paused politely while Owen talked, ‘but it was healing fast by the time we got her into the cell. I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever is affecting these women is helping them heal faster.’
‘They’re not alien,’ Owen scoffed. ‘They’re ordinary Welsh girls. Whatever’s happened to them hasn’t given them magical powers. It just makes them hungry and psychotic.’
‘I don’t know.’ Gwen was worrying her lower lip with her teeth. ‘Remember what happened with the Weevils. For a start, they’ve obviously developed a far greater strength than normal. Lucy was close to breaking my neck, and Marianne — if it was Marianne — was able to take down a fully grown Weevil. Something’s changing them physically, as well as mentally.’
‘And remember the reactions of the other Weevils,’ Toshiko added. ‘The ones by the wharf, and the one in the cells in Torchwood. They were wary. They were frightened. I don’t think that was just the fact that this girl had killed one of them.’
‘No, that usually just makes them mad,’ Jack said, with feeling.
Toshiko looked around at her colleagues. ‘I know biology is Owen’s area rather than mine, but I am wondering if these girls are giving off some kind of chemical scent which Weevils find disturbing.’
‘I’ve just remembered something.’ Gwen thumped the table with her fist. ‘There’s been so much going on that it just went out of my head, but Rhys told me that someone tried to kidnap Lucy a few days ago. I’d assumed that it was connected to her boyfriend — some kind of unpaid drug debt or something — but now I’m wondering if it’s connected to whatever they’re infected with. But who could it be?’
‘Someone at the Scotus Clinic, perhaps?’ Jack drummed his fingers on the table. ‘I’ve got to say, I don’t know whether there’s anything here for Torchwood or not. It still sounds more like a shared delusion, or some tropical disease to me, pheromones and super-strength or not. We’re set up to look for signs of alien activity in the area and stop it. I just don’t see the evidence here.’
Toshiko looked over at Gwen. Her boyfriend was infected. If anyone was going to push Jack into investigating this, it had to be her.
Owen and Ianto gazed at Gwen as well, waiting for her to react.
‘It might be alien influence,’ she said, as if it were only her and Jack at the table, ‘or it might be something more mundane. Either way, we need to find out. I think we should investigate the Scotus Clinic, and then make a decision based on what we find there.’
‘Does Rhys remember enough about the clinic that he can draw us a map? Always useful to know where you’re going.’
‘I’ll ask,’ she said.
By the time Jack and Gwen had made their preparations, looked at blueprints and plans, checked out their weapons, argued over who was going to drive the SUV and then made their way, still bickering, through the Cardiff traffic to the office block that housed the Scotus Clinic, it was lunchtime. The lobby was crowded with men and women in smart office-wear, either heading out for coffee and sandwiches or back to their offices. People in green coveralls were watering the various plants and vines that were placed strategically around. The air was filled with the incessant ping of lifts arriving.
Jack looked around. There was something about lobbies that never changed. He’d been in hotels and office blocks from the nineteenth century all the way through to the forty-ninth, on a panoply of planets between Earth and the Horsehead Nebula, and it was always the same. People rushing around trying to look important, grabbing food on the move. Nobody taking time to sit down and relax, sip a cocktail, close their eyes and daydream for a while. Everyone had somewhere better to be, and they never seemed to get there.