Another Life by Peter Anghelides Read Free Book Online Page A

her PDA. ‘I’ve put a trace on.’
    ‘A vagrant would be good,’ nodded Owen. ‘No need to provide a cover story for their disappearance.’
    His casual tone enraged Gwen. She felt her neck and face flush with anger, and heard her own words almost before she knew she was saying them. ‘Vagrants are people too, Owen.’
    ‘Hark at her.’
    ‘Don’t patronise me! For all we know, another poor lad is lying dead in a gutter. Unfound at the moment. Unnoticed, certainly. Real people like you would just walk past him, even when he was alive. Maybe he was selling the Big Issue in town. Or maybe he was just wandering around trying to find somewhere to kip for the night, and the first time it looked like anyone was showing him any attention was when Wildman approached him, and that was the last thing he ever knew.’
    ‘I’m just saying,’ insisted Owen, ‘it’s not like Tosh is gonna struggle to conceal the death of some chewed up pikey when he turns up in a gutter somewhere in Grangetown.’
    Gwen slapped both hands on the table, an alarming sound that echoed off the glass walls of the Boardroom. ‘How can we know what made him come to Cardiff, this poor bastard we’ve not even seen yet? How can we say that his family aren’t somewhere out there, somewhere else in Wales, or further out? Wondering if he’s all right. Not knowing if he’s alive, but praying that he is. Not knowing that he died today.’ She blinked hard, and looked up at the strip lights in the ceiling to stop the tears. She wouldn’t give Owen that satisfaction. ‘Unfound? Unnoticed? Yeah. But unmissed? I don’t think so.’
    Owen leaned across the table to her, uncowed. ‘When you’ve been here a while longer, you’ll see it differently. I mean it. I’ll ask you again in a couple of months’ time, you’ll have changed your tune. I mean, I honestly hope I’m wrong about that…’
    ‘No you don’t,’ Toshiko said quietly.
    ‘No,’ admitted Owen after barely a pause. ‘I don’t.’
    Jack stood up. It was a casual gesture, and he made it look as though he was pulling together their cups and putting them back on the tray. But by doing so, he leaned over the table towards each of them. It was an elegant gesture of control, reasserting his authority. Calming the room.
    He smiled across the table at Owen. ‘Good job on the initial scan.’
    Toshiko’s PDA interrupted him with a beeping alarm. ‘Search result,’ she said, and put it up on the main screen. ‘Police report that matches our interest profile.’
    ‘Result indeed,’ Jack observed. ‘They’ve found Wildman’s car. Now where did I put my coat?’ Gwen pointed through the glass door to where she could see it on the railing outside. ‘OK, good, thanks. Tosh, here’s another search I’d like you to run.’ He slipped a folded piece of paper across the table to her. She looked at it briefly, nodded, and put the paper in a pocket alongside her PDA. ‘Owen, let us know what else you find after you’ve opened Wildman up.’
    And with this, Jack was off through the Boardroom door, beckoning for Gwen to join him.
    She caught up with him at the foot of the spiral staircase. ‘What’s the rush?’
    ‘The car wasn’t empty,’ he told her as they approached a solitary paving stone that lay incongruously in the floor of the Hub. ‘It pains me to tell you this, Gwen, but I don’t trust your former colleagues to handle this well.’
    ‘You can feel pain then,’ she said to him.
    He stood on the slab, and held out his hand to her. ‘Not according to my exes.’
    Owen retrieved his coffee from the table. It was just warm enough. He took it over to the glass window of the Boardroom, where he could stare down and watch Jack cross the floor of the Hub. Gwen was skipping down the stairs after him, like an eager puppy.
    She’ll learn, thought Owen. The magic wears off eventually. It’s a great job – the best he could imagine. But it was never quite the same after the first