‘You’re looking out across the checkout lanes towards the store front,’ said Jack, freezing frame and pointing, ‘from above and to the right of the lanes. These are just shoppers here, OK. Checkout girl, checkout girl, checkout girl… OK. Let’s punch it.’
The footage began to play in real time. There was no sound.
‘There’s our guy. He’s trying to get out. The tubby guy there with the shopping cart has blocked the lane. And there’s James. He’s running up, he’s spotted the guy. The guy sees him. Decides to use the tubby guy’s cart as a weapon and… bingo.’
‘Whoa!’ said Toshiko. ‘Run that back. Did I see that right?’
Jack stepped the footage back and replayed. ‘Our guy rams with the cart and… pow!’
‘That’s not possible,’ said Toshiko.
‘And yet,’ said Jack.
‘How?’ she asked, looking up from the frozen screen image at Jack.
‘I’ve always envied Captain Analogy’s upper body strength,’ Jack said.
‘Stop making fun,’ said Toshiko.
‘Maybe the trolley wasn’t as heavily loaded as it looks on the footage,’ said Owen, ‘just empty boxes.’
Jack shook his head. ‘Nobody, and I mean nobody, slings a shopping cart the entire length of a store, not even an empty one, and especially not by gripping it at the top. You could shove it a fair way, tip it over, sure, and if you got under it, you could probably lift it and toss it a few yards, but not what we just saw.’
‘PCP, something like that,’ said Toshiko.
Owen shook his head. ‘He was clean as a whistle on the labs, and don’t you think we’d have noticed if our mate was off his chuff on hard drugs? So off his chuff, I’m saying, that he’s experiencing freakazoid physiological effects?’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ said Toshiko.
‘Don’t say anything,’ said Jack. ‘I got something else to show you.’
The snack trolley made its way down the aisle.
Gwen sat up and looked for some change. The rocking of the train was making her sleepy, and there was still more than half the journey to go. As she reached over, one of the magazines slipped off her lap.
She bent over to pick it up. She wanted to take it with her. There was a whole feature on Glenn Robbins and her career after Eternity Base that James would want to read. She folded the magazine open on the right page to remind herself.
The trolley was taking ages to arrive. It was having trouble negotiating its way past the students’ backpacks. They were getting up to move them, apologising.
Come on, I need bad train coffee, Gwen thought.
She noticed the small boy with his mother again and smiled. He was playing with a bright, plastic Andy Pinkus toy.
She thought about James. That put a bigger smile on her face. It was kind of sweet. She’d only been away a few hours, and she missed him, really missed him.
On cue, the MP3 offered up another track by Torn Curtain.
‘Coffee, tea, madam?’ the snack girl asked.
‘Sir?’
James realised he was being spoken to. He frowned. On the other side of the seafood chiller counter, the assistant was holding a taped-up plastic bag towards him.
‘Your fish, sir.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry, do you want this, sir?’
‘Yeah, thanks.’ He took the heavy little pack and put it in his basket. Where had his mind been? What had he been thinking about? He’d just completely zoned out in the middle of the shop.
He thought the walk might have helped his head, but it was worse. He had a pain behind his eyes, and his ears felt as if they were slightly blocked up. Everything had a boxy, hollow sound to it.
He wandered on through the shop, ignoring the expensive, pre-packed dinners with their enticing photos. Veg, that’s what he needed.
Why was that man looking at him?
Oh, he wasn’t.
He’d seemed familiar though. Where had he seen him before?
James drifted into the fruit and veg section. What did he need? He couldn’t remember what he was intending to cook. He had to turn the package over in his basket to read the label.
Sea bass. Right, sea bass. He needed tarragon, shallots, garlic, some new potatoes, some mangetout.
He pulled a plastic bag off the roll, and went over to the trays of garlic bulbs to select a couple. They looked good. The skins were the colour of vellum. They were some special quality strain of garlic, according to the label.
Someone reached in past him into the tray to pick up some garlic. James looked down at the invading hand. That was just rude. People could wait just a moment, couldn’t they?
There was no one beside him. The hand was his hand. He stared down at it. It didn’t look right at all. He didn’t recognise it.
James shook himself. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The hand was still there. It didn’t look like his, but it was. The fingers wiggled. It made a fist. He could feel its attachment to him.
‘This is stupid,’ he said out loud.
It was stupid. It was his hand, all right. Absolutely. There was nothing funny about it. It looked perfectly normal.
James realised he was breathing quite rapidly. The pain behind his eyes had grown a little sharper. He grabbed two bulbs of garlic, bagged them quickly, and dropped them into his basket. What else did he need? Apples. Apples? Apples. He picked up a packet of conference pears and put them in his basket with the garlic and the fish.
Why was that man looking at him?
Where had he seen that man before?
Ianto opened the box.
‘What’s that?’ asked Toshiko. She was very unsettled.
Ianto took the object out of the box.
‘It’s the side-arm Owen was carrying a week ago Thursday,’ said Jack, ‘the night we went after the Amok.’
‘It looks broken,’ said Toshiko. The weapon was buckled, as if it had been twisted in a vice.
‘You may recall,’ said Jack, ‘in all the hullabaloo, Owen ended up pointing it at James.’
‘To be fair, I wasn’t quite myself,’ said Owen.
‘No one saw what happened after that, but James managed to disarm Owen, grab the Amok, and get it contained.’
‘OK,’ said Toshiko. That agreed with her memory of events.
‘The gun got damaged in the struggle,’ said Jack.
‘It’s beyond repair,’ said Ianto. ‘I put it in the Armoury. I was intending to break it down and dispose of it.’
‘When I showed Ianto the mini-mart footage of James’s cart-tossing world record, he went to fetch it. It had been bugging him. Look at it close, Tosh. Real close.’
She took the broken weapon from Ianto and turned it over to examine it. ‘It’s been sheared around. Twisted. What could do that?’
‘What do those grooves suggest?’ asked Jack. ‘What do they look like to you?’
‘Well, fingermarks,’ said Toshiko, ‘but that’s just-’
Jack took the gun from her. He punched something else up on screen. ‘They’re fingermarks, all right. Fingers pressed into the steel so deep, they actually left prints in the metal. We got a match. Want to guess who with?’
‘Oh God, please don’t say James,’ Toshiko answered.
Despite the coffee, Gwen had nodded off for a bit. She woke up, and had to remind herself why she was on a train. She was going to Manchester, to see some bloke. That was it.
She felt like crap.
The doze hadn’t left her with a headache exactly, but she felt genuinely odd. It was a nagging, empty sensation, as if she’d lost something.
She looked around. Had she lost something? Had she mislaid something before she’d dropped off? A pen, her MP3, her magazines, her wallet, maybe that was it.
No. None of those things.
Then why did she feel quite so hollow? It felt for all the world like a sudden, plunging dip in blood sugar. She had a sort of craving, a yearning to get some unknown, unidentifiable substance back into her system. The simple lack of it was making her suffer withdrawal.