and he was about to open it for a look, but Gwen pushed it shut again.
‘Well, this site isn’t safe to go wandering around in,’ persisted the workman. ‘I’ll have to let the gaffer know about—’
Gwen dismissed his objections. ‘I don’t need your gaffer’s permission. I just need you to get out of the way. Anyone else in there? Anyone else arriving for another shift?’
‘We’re the last. All done for the day. Just locking up,’ said the younger man, eager to sound helpful.
‘But the floors aren’t all in yet,’ protested his older mate. ‘Not beyond the fifth, at any rate. And the external sheeting doesn’t go beyond that, either.’
Gwen leaned right back, and stared up into the early evening sky. The building construction loomed over her, a vertiginous cliff of scaffolding and grey concrete. Far above, a dirty orange crane poked out above the top floor. Green fabric netting flapped in the breeze around the unfinished office block, a rippling sign announcing that it was a Levall-Mellon development.
‘The site manager’ll have my guts. I can’t be blamed if you lot get yourselves killed.’ The construction worker’s tone had changed completely now. Gwen recognised it from a dozen similar encounters with her new team. The people you encountered started out superior, arrogant. And when faced down by anonymous authority, they were cowed into submission. Or, like now, they started looking to offload the responsibility they’d made such a fuss about to start with. That’s when you knew they weren’t going to be a problem, because they no longer wanted that authority.
She pointed to the yellow hard hat clipped to his waist. ‘I’ll need that,’ she said. He hesitated. ‘Come on, we haven’t got all day.’ She pulled the door open again. ‘Lock this behind me.’
Beyond the chipboard barrier, it was gloomier than in the street outside. Gwen paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. She tried the hard hat and found that the guy’s head was much bigger than hers. She gave up trying to adjust it, and placed the hat on the edge of a rusting yellow skip. The skip was half-full of rubble, grey chunks of broken wall and spiral scraps of concrete reinforcement steel.
The thing Jack had kicked through the door had fetched up against the angled side of the skip. How had Wildman been able to spit that out, Gwen wondered. It had unfurled now, like a snot-coloured starfish with four legs. The thing quivered for a moment before it went stiff, leaking yellow bile into the grey dust.
Gwen flipped open her palmtop computer, thumbed a fastkey, and dialled Toshiko at the Hub. ‘We’ve pursued Wildman down Blackfriar Way. Into the construction site. Wildman’s covered some distance since we spotted him.’
‘Interesting,’ Toshiko replied. ‘He must have made a miracle recovery. The reason we couldn’t get his secretary earlier was that she drove him home, because he wasn’t feeling well.’
‘Just an excuse, d’you think?’ asked Gwen. ‘A reason for them to sneak off for an afternoon shag?’
‘Unlikely,’ said Toshiko. ‘From what I can make out, Wildman is a bit of a sad bachelor. No suggestion that he’s got a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Or a close relationship with an animal.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’ Gwen eyed the dead starfish thing that Wildman had spat out at Jack. ‘There’s certainly something that’s not quite right with him,’ she said. ‘I’m going in to support Jack. Can you get police back-up to close off this whole area, and then get here yourselves?’
‘OK,’ confirmed Toshiko.
‘Was Mitch all right?’
‘Mitch?’ asked Toshiko.
‘The policeman at the pick-up.’
‘When did you start worrying about the police?’
‘I never stopped,’ Gwen told her. ‘So, was he OK?’
‘Didn’t notice,’ admitted Toshiko. ‘We were too busy scraping up bits of victim. Talk to you later.’ And she ended the call.
Gwen could hear running on the floor above her. Shoes pounding and scraping on dusty concrete. She scanned this floor, and saw where they must have gone. She stepped through a gap in the wall where emergency doors would later be fitted, and looked up into the stairwell. Concrete stairs made a four-sided spiral up into the building. There were no rails in place, so she hugged the wall, staying well away from the edge where, flight by flight, the drop became sheerer and more disorienting.
Her lungs were starting to burn as she approached the eighth floor. Beyond the next landing was the scuffling sound of shoes on concrete. Gwen she slowed her progress and peered out carefully.