Jack sighed. ‘They’d better not clamp it while we’re gone.’
The nightclub was empty of living people, although Toshiko could smell their presence in the humidity of the atmosphere: sweat, stale tobacco, cheap aftershave and cheaper perfume. The overhead lights had been turned on, and their glare transformed what had probably been something high-tech and impressive in the near-darkness into something that Toshiko felt was rather tawdry. Not her kind of place. She wasn’t really sure what her kind of place was, but this wasn’t it.
A long bar took up most of one wall, stocked with hundreds of upside down bottles of spirits, beer taps and drink dispensing hoses left limp across the bar. The surface of the bar was translucent acrylic, and it was lit from beneath. When the overhead lights were turned off, it would form the major source of illumination in the club, but now it just served to highlight how much the walls needed a new coat of paint.
The central area was reserved as a dance floor. It was scuffed by too many pairs of feet, and stained by years of spilt drinks, but none of that would have been evident with the lights off. Scaffolding hung from the ceiling, and spotlights hung from the scaffolding, fitted with motors so they could rotate and pan around, randomly picking dancers out of the crowd. Elsewhere, tiny video cameras could follow the spotlights, transmitting their images to flat-screen monitors that were located around the walls.
Tables were scattered around various platforms on different levels separated from one another by chrome rails and steps.
‘Nice place,’ Jack commented as he strode in. ‘I wonder who did the decor for them. I might just have them redo the Hub in the same style.’
‘What, with a bar?’ Owen asked.
‘Or maybe I’ll just get Laurence Llewellyn Bowen to come in and put swags of velvet and stencilled oak leaves everywhere,’ Jack continued. ‘Just for a change.’
‘Swags?’ came a voice from the doorway.
‘“Swag” — an ornamental drapery or curtain that hangs in a curve between two points. There’s a proper word for everything, you know, and a lot of them are falling into disuse. I’m thinking of making it a Torchwood rule that every conversation has to include at least one word that nobody else knows. Thanks for turning up, by the way. How was dinner?’
Gwen walked into the club. ‘What little I had of it was great. Hi Owen. Hi Tosh.’
Owen nodded once, then glanced away. Toshiko gave her a friendly smile.
‘What have we got?’ Gwen asked.
Jack walked over to the bar and pulled himself smoothly up until he was standing on it, looking down on the team. ‘A quick recap. Tosh has been tracking an intermittent energy surge of a frequency and modulation that doesn’t match anything in use on Earth at this point in time. She triangulated it to this area of Cardiff where some suspicious deaths had just occurred. The two seem linked, so I’ve thrown the local coppers out, allowing us to take a look around. I can’t imagine that aliens living in Cardiff would choose to come here for a night out — there are clubs nearby that cater far better to the discriminating traveller — so I suspect that someone here was human and was dabbling with something they shouldn’t have been in possession of. Swag, in fact, which is a word also used to mean “stolen goods”.’
‘Where are the bodies?’ Owen asked.
Jack looked around. ‘There’s a couple of overturned tables over there,’ he said, pointing. ‘The smart money says that’s where the bodies will be. Remember, we suspect that the deaths are due to some kind of alien tech, so keep an eye out for it. Someone may have taken it away, of course, so we also need to check the bodies for identities and any clues.’
‘And also remember that the whole thing might be a coincidence,’ Gwen added, ‘and the person who had the alien tech, if there was alien tech, left when the fight started rather than get involved.’
‘Let’s get started,’ said Jack. He jumped down from the bar and led the way across to a low plateau some ten feet above the dance floor, accessible via a set of stairs.
Jack was right. Sprawled across a clutch of tables and chairs that had been pushed apart and overturned were five bodies. Young men, all of them. There was a lot of blood, stark on white T-shirts, and a lot of broken glass. Looking at them, it struck Toshiko that sleeping bodies still had a certain amount of muscle tension pulling the limbs into distinct shapes. Dead bodies lost that tension. They just lay there, like carelessly thrown rugs.
‘Owen?’ Jack prompted.
‘Don’t touch anything if you can help it,’ Gwen said quickly. At Owen’s questioning glance, she added: ‘There’s still a police investigation that needs to occur. We only take stuff that’s not from this Earth, and we leave without disturbing anything. Like the Country Code, only a lot weirder.’
Bending down between the bodies, Owen quickly checked them over. Toshiko admired the rapidity with which his hands and eyes operated: so similar to the way that she checked over technological devices she had never seen before. A combination of knowledge, skill and instinct. Owen was an exceptionally good doctor.
‘The wounds are nothing out of the ordinary,’ Owen said. ‘Standard contusions and stab wounds mainly, with the occasional knuckle-shaped bruise and one punctured eye caused, I suspect, by a broken bottle. Just your usual Wednesday night in Cardiff. No laser burns, no strange bite-marks made by non-human teeth, no sign that the life force has been sucked out of them.’ He grinned. ‘I suspect the only sucking they were in for tonight was the home-grown variety.’
‘I’ve got a couple of knives,’ Gwen added. ‘Two are still being held in the corpses’ hands, one is half-under one of the bodies. They’re nothing speciaclass="underline" basic folding knives, available at any camping shop or school playground.’ She systematically checked through pockets for ID cards, credit cards, anything that might tell the group who the kids were. ‘I have a Craig Sutherland,’ she said, ‘a Rick Dennis, a Geraint Morris, a Dai Morris, presumably related, and an Idris ab Hugh. I’m working on the theory that we have three local Welsh lads and two students at the Uni, probably fighting over some girls. How often have we heard that story before?’
She straightened up, still holding the various cards she had taken from their pockets. Cards, Toshiko realised, they would never be needing again.
‘Over to you, Tosh,’ Jack said. As she knelt down next to Owen and prepared to search amongst the bodies for anything else, anything that shouldn’t have been there, she noticed Jack walk over to join Gwen. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his greatcoat and there was a strange look on his face.
‘They could have grown up to be anything,’ he said. ‘Scientists who might have invented the first practicable star drive, allowing humanity to escape an increasingly overcrowded and polluted Earth. Artists who could have encapsulated the human spirit in sculptures and paintings and forms yet to be invented, but which would have lasted for millennia. Politicians who might have brought peace to the Middle East. Or, if nothing else, they might have been happy, with partners and kids and barbecues on a Sunday afternoon. And none of that will happen now. They’ve been erased from the world for the sake of a few harsh words and the chance of a snog with the wrong girl.’
‘Some lads would risk anything for a snog with the wrong girl,’ Owen said, straightening up and wiping the blood off his hands with a Kleenex. ‘Not me, of course,’ he added, catching the way that Jack, Gwen and Toshiko were looking at him. ‘But some lads I met. Once. Er… anything else, boss?’
Toshiko removed a small scanner from her pocket, about the size and shape of her thumb but matt-black and with an antenna on top. Switching it on, she swept it back and forth across the bodies, waiting for it to beep. If it did, then something in the area was transmitting somewhere in the electromagnetic spectrum.