Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,21

thing in Weevils. It bled out, while its attacker was still chewing away.’

Jack looked sceptical. ‘There wasn’t much blood at the warehouse.’

‘I know. I think the attacker drank most of it as it gushed out.’

‘You can tell that just from an examination of the body?’

‘No,’ Owen admitted, ‘I just have an active imagination.’

The police station was simultaneously familiar and alien to Gwen as she walked through the largest of the open-plan offices, surrounded by police officers busy filing reports and making calls, separated from each other by shoulder-high dividers. Familiar, because she had spent a couple of relatively happy years there, walking its institutionally painted corridors, smelling the bacon butties all the way from the canteen to the interview rooms, putting her street clothes in her battered grey locker at the beginning of every shift and getting them out again at the end. Alien, because it was all behind her now. She’d moved on. Grown up. It was like coming back to school after you’d left: you suddenly noticed all the little things you’d been used to before – the cracked paint, the battered corners on the corridors where trolleys of files had bashed into them, the coffee stains on the carpets. And everything seemed so much smaller, and so much drabber.

‘You’ve got a nerve, showing your face around here!’

She turned, startled.

‘Mitch?’

‘Surprised you remember us, now you’re running with that Torchwood mob.’

She grinned. ‘I couldn’t forget you. We shared chips at three in the morning too many times for that. You’ve shaved your moustache off. You looked better when you had it.’

Jimmy Mitchell didn’t return the grin, or the banter. His face was set in a scowl that brought his heavy eyebrows together in a dark line and put a crease in the centre of his forehead. ‘Don’t try and sweet-talk me, Gwen. We know you removed evidence from the crime scene, and all we get told by the bosses is that we should proceed with the case with whatever evidence we have left.’

‘I promise you this, Mitch – whatever we took was incidental to your case, but vital to ours.’

‘Can I have that in writing?’

‘Bugger off.’ She smiled, to show there were no hard feelings. ‘What’s the story on the nightclub deaths, then?’

Mitch shrugged. ‘Looking like a self-contained thing. Five lads got into a fight and inflicted fatal wounds on each other. We’ve got all the weapons, including the broken bottles. Only thing is, we don’t know what they were fighting about. There were video cameras all over the club, relaying pictures to screens inside so the clubbers – narcissistic shits that they are – can see one another, and the management record everything just in case of trouble, but there’s nothing there to give us any clue. One moment they’re talking; the next minute they’re fighting; then they’re dead.’

‘Can you run me off a DVD copy of the video footage?’

He thrust his chin out pugnaciously. ‘Only if I can see whatever your people removed from the club.’

‘No way.’

‘That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.’

Gwen thought for a moment. ‘See, but not touch or take.’

He nodded. ‘I just need to make sure it’s not something we need to worry about – drugs, guns or stuff.’

‘It’s not. But I’ll bring it anyway. That café round the corner – the one that does the espresso strong enough to stand your spoon up in? Three o’clock?’

Mitch’s face relaxed slightly. ‘Look, kid – I know you’ve done good for yourself. Whatever Torchwood is, it’s got high-level cover. You people must be doing a phenomenal job. Whatever you hear, whatever we say, it’s not personal, OK? It’s just…’ He paused, groping for the right word. ‘It’s just jealousy, I guess. You turn up in your fancy car, with your fancy clothes, and you waltz into our crime scenes like you’re better than us.’

‘But isn’t that the same way you treat the Police Support Officers?’ Gwen asked.

‘Yeah, but we are better than them. What’s your point?’

‘No point. Can I have that DVD now?’

‘I thought we agreed on three o’clock!’

‘That was for the thing we took out of the club. I may as well take the DVD now, as I’m here.’

‘You don’t change, do you? You’re still a chancer. Wait here.’

He was gone for ten minutes, and while she waited Gwen read through the various Health and Safety bulletins that were pinned to the dividing boards. When Mitch returned, he was empty-handed.

‘I’ve set it up in the audio-visual suite. You can watch through it once,