2
7:42 PM
There is a woman on television and she is looking at me and she is a whore.
She says words I do not like to hear. They give me the bad feeling and make me itch on the inside until I cannot listen to them anymore. I press the switch and the television goes dark and the room goes dark, but I know she is still there, inside the television, looking at me and speaking words I do not like to hear.
I get up from the chair and do not look at the television and walk four steps to the window. The window is dirty on the outside but clean on the inside. Outside is the street. It is dark, like the television is dark.
There is a woman on the street and she is laughing at me and she is a whore, like the woman on the television is a whore.
Like all of them are whores.
I shout at the woman on the street but she does not look up. I shout until she has walked all the way along the street, past the blue door and the red door and the door I do not like to look at. I shout until my throat hurts, but the woman who was just right there on the street is not there anymore.
I walk four steps to the chair and press the switch and the television is no longer dark. The woman is back looking at me and smiling now, smiling now, smiling now.
Her name is written on the screen in large white letters on a dark blue background.
Her name is written exactly like this: Sharon Madison.
Sharon Madison is a whore.
And whores must be punished.
Andy Davidson hovered just inside the yellow and black tape, doing his best to keep out of everyone's way. The cold was seeping into him, jabbing at his kidneys and grabbing at his balls.
He was thinking about his old school careers advisor, wishing he would traipse round the corner now, so he could punch him right in the fucking face.
Join the polis, Andy. You'll like the polis. Being in the polis is magic.
Oh aye. Magic.
"What a fucking night."
"Christ," Davidson yelped, head whipping round. DCI Swanson stood on the other side of the tape, hands in her pockets, eyes on the guys in the white paper suits.
The street light above her turned her face into a landscape of shadowy craters. Big Boobed Swanson, wi' a face like the moon.
"Not quite." Swanson's eyes left the paper suits and went to the two sheets lying side by side, a few feet apart on the ground, two someone-sized lumps beneath them.
"What we got?"
"It's a belter, this one, ma'am. Way, way out of my league." He blew out his cheeks.
"Don't know where to start, really."
She waited patiently for him to elaborate.
"Aye, well it's been a night of belters for some of us, Detective Inspector. Half of Cardiff's leathering seven shades of shite out of the other half. The whole city's gone mental." Andy huffed, "Hear about that business with the school? Dad and his two kids."
Swanson nodded grimly. "Drugs. Bet it's drugs. But this is getting us nowhere. Who's our victim?"
"Right, well, we're actually doing all right there, as it happens." Davidson fumbled open his notebook, his hands shaking - only partly from the cold. "Young lady. Just turned twenty-four this month, according to her driving license."
"Name?"
Davidson angled the book towards the light and tried to decipher his own scratchy scrawl. "Sharon," he announced. "Madison. Sharon Madison."
For the first time since arriving on scene, the Chief Inspector looked his way. "What... the Yank bird? Off the telly?"
A pause. A pointless glance at the notebook. "Um... I don't... I don't know."
"Aye you do," Swanson said, eyebrows meeting in the middle. "Blonde haired piece. Does the weather. Pretty wee thing."
She rocked back and forth on her heels. "Probably no' any more, mind you."
"Aye, well, you can say that again." Davidson scribbled in his pad. 'Weather;" he said, his pen scratching the word onto the paper. "I'll get someone looking into it."
"What about the other one?"
"Other one?"
"The other victim."
"What other victim?"
A slab of a hand emerged from a pocket. A manicured finger jabbed past the guys in the white paper suits. "That other victim."
Davidson blinked.
"For fuck's sake. The sheet. The other sheet."
"Oh, right, the other... aye, sorry, ma'am, it's been a long... The other sheet." Davidson shook his head. "No," he said. "That's her, too."
"What? What are you—?"
"That's the thing, sir… ma'am, She's been, uh... She's been cut in half."
The eyebrows crawled halfway up Swanson's forehead. Air whistled through her teeth. "Aye? Jesus. That's a new one. What's top and what's bottom?"
"No, that's not what I... It's not..." Davidson sighed and then gave up trying to find the words. He raised a hand and pointed instead, first to one sheet, then the other.
"Left half. Right half."
Swanson didn't say anything at first, just stopped rocking on her heels, slipped her other hand out of her pocket, clenched her jaw then let it relax.
Even when she did speak, almost half a minute later, it wasn't anything worth writing home about.
"Bollocks."
"Funny," said Davidson, not smiling. "That's what I said."
"That's not possible. No way. No way that's possible."
"Apparently it is, Ma'am," Davidson told her, with the look of someone who'd seen first-hand precisely how possible it was. "And, well, you see, the thing is..."
Swanson turned to him. "What?"
Davidson looked across to the sheets, both of them washing-powder white. "The cut in half thing?" he said. "That's not even the weirdest bit."
She frowned as she knew what that meant.
She pulled out her phone and checked for the message that she knew would be waiting politely in her in-box.
Incoming Message
Ianto Jones
Torchwood