Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,20

pitch for a few minutes and then stopping, hands on thighs, gasping for breath? Football didn’t seem to be doing them any good.

And then he remembered a snatch of conversation from the previous night. Lucy, talking about a diet clinic, and how the weight had just melted away from her. Something herbal, she’d said.

That was it. When Rhys got into work, he’d get the address of this diet clinic off Lucy, and he’d make an appointment.

The future suddenly looked very bright. Gwen didn’t know it, but Rhys intended to become a new man, just for her.

‘So which one of us is Ant, then?’ Owen asked. He spread the photographs out across the metal surface of the autopsy table, sliding them around as best he could until he had a two-dimensional representation of a dead Weevil, life-sized, made out of A3 close-ups.

‘Which one’s the straight one?’ Jack asked. He was prowling around the darkened balcony of the forensic lab like a tiger.

Owen thought for a moment, then swapped the photographs of the left and right hands over. ‘They’re both straight. Or they’re both funny, depending what you mean by “straight”.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m positive.’ He stood back, admiring his handiwork. He had to admit, in the absence of a real Weevil corpse it wasn’t at all bad. If he half-closed his eyes, it almost looked as if there was an actual body on the table. Not one that he could cut open, of course, but one he could examine minutely if he wished. Toshiko had offered to take several different digital images of the same areas and turn them into a 3-D virtual image, but there was something about the physicality of the images that appealed to him. It was a bit like looking at X-rays. The images were about the same size.

‘All right, which one’s got the most charisma?’

Owen thought for a moment. ‘Actually, they both look like Chuckie dolls.’

‘Chuckie dolls?’ Jack asked, still moving.

‘Evil plastic children’s toys turned serial killers.’

‘I must’ve been away that week. Jeez, you take a few days off with the flu and you miss an entire invasion attempt. I hope you guys wrote it up for the record.’

Owen glanced up at him to check whether he was serious or not, but this was Jack, and it was impossible to tell. He might have been serious; he might have been joking. He might have been both at the same time – Jack was like that. ‘Er… yeah, we wrote it up. Ianto has all the Chuckie dolls preserved in the Archive. Ask him about it.’

Jack was behind Owen now, looking down at the Weevil image. ‘Ant or Dec? Ant or Dec? Remind me – why are we choosing sides?’

‘For when these photographs get out on the Internet and we have to pretend that we faked them in order to discredit the whole thing. Like in the film.’

Owen could hear the shudder in Jack’s voice. ‘Jeez, I’m not going through that again.’

Owen looked up at him. ‘What – you were involved with that? Faking the Roswell footage?’

‘No, I meant I don’t want to go through seeing the film again. That’s two hours of my life I’d rather have dedicated to gargling rhino dung.’

‘Have you ever—’

‘Don’t go there.’

‘Watch me backing away.’ Owen walked around to the other side of the table and took a closer look at the Weevil’s half-eaten face, then tracked down the neck to the chest. It was hard to make out, but there were structures half-revealed through the tears in the flesh that bore no relationship to ribs. This was going to require a lot of careful study.

‘What about cause of death?’ Jack asked.

‘Little to add to what you spotted back at the warehouse. Something chewed on its face, neck and chest. The tooth-marks are clear on the flesh and on the bone – or at least what passes for bone in Weevils. I can do a plaster cast and a quick computer animation to tell you what kind of teeth, but I’m guessing it has to be something really quite frightening in order to subdue a young Weevil and chew its face away.’

‘Young?’

Owen nodded. ‘Barely out of its teens, judging by the size. If you put this one next to the one we have down in the cells, this would definitely be the lesser of two Weevils.’ He glanced up at Jack. ‘OK, moving on. The initial attack was quick, but I think it severed a major blood vessel – or the next best