Border Princes by Dan Abnett
‘Oh, no!’ cried Owen. ‘Oooh no, no, no, no, no!’
He leapt up from his work station the moment he saw James shuffling into the main space of the Hub.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, reaching James.
‘I woke up,’ said James.
‘Lovely. Go back to bed.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Listen, mate, when a doctor – like me – puts a patient – like you – in bed, staying there is part of the deal.’
‘I’m OK.’
‘We’re getting you back into bed,’ said Owen. ‘That’s first. Then I’ll run a bunch of standard tests. Then, and only then, will I say if you’re OK.’
‘Can I have coffee?’ James asked. He saw Ianto up by the coffee machine, busy. He waved. Ianto waved back.
‘No, you can’t,’ said Owen, and began to steer James back towards the door.
James could see Jack in his office. The door was closed, and he was on the telephone, deep in conversation.
‘What’s Jack doing?’
‘He’s got a bee in his bonnet,’ said Owen. ‘That whole secret early warning thingy whatsit. He’s making some calls.’
‘To who?’
‘Oh, like he’s going to tell me,’ snapped Owen.
‘But at a guess?’
‘The Pentagon, NASA, Project Blue Book, NATO, UNIT, International Rescue, Starfleet, and the Fortress of Solitude,’ replied Owen, ‘but that’s me just speculating wildly.’
‘Where’s Gwen?’ James asked.
‘She’s gone out with Tosh. She told me to say hi. There was a kiss too, but I’m not prepared to pass that on.’
‘Where’s she gone out to?’
Colonel Joseph Peignton Cosley was as forbidding as his home. Fifty-ish, jowelly, with a Kitchener moustache that suited his choice of army attire, he glared at Gwen, his hand on the pommel of his cavalry sabre, as if expecting her to kick off some trouble any minute.
‘That’s him in 1890,’ said Toshiko, reading off the plaque.
Gwen folded her arms and continued to stare at the large, gilt-framed painting.
‘He looks a bit of a...’
‘A what?’ asked Toshiko.
‘Twat,’ Gwen said. ‘Not the kind of bloke you expect to know secret things about the fate of the world. More like the sort of bloke who’d know how to horsewhip his manservant or shove a bayonet into some African person.’
‘“Horsewhip his manservant”?’ asked Toshiko.
Gwen glanced at her. ‘I know. Even as I said it, I knew it was going to sound dodgy.’
‘At least Owen isn’t here,’ said Toshiko. ‘Otherwise he’d be adding that to his little book of squalid euphemisms.’
The long, panelled hallway was gloomy and quiet. Other dingy paintings hung on the walls above items of stately, roped-off furniture. Heavy morning drizzle beat against the grand windows. From a nearby room, they could just make out the sound of a Cadw guide leading a tour.
Toshiko was leafing through the guidebook she’d bought. She’d opted for the fat, expensive guide instead of the thin illustrated pamphlet.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘whatever he looks like, he’s the man. Maybe he had hidden depths? Maybe the artist didn’t do him justice?’
‘Maybe he didn’t know what it was he had either, which was why he gave it to Torchwood?’
They walked on. Toshiko nodded to a smaller painting.
‘That’s Mrs Colonel.’
‘Oh!’ said Gwen. ‘Poor love. Do you think they’d have got a smile out of her if her husband hadn’t spent so much time horsewhipping his manservant?’
Toshiko snorted.
‘English, was he?’ asked Gwen.
‘Of course,’ said Toshiko. ‘His family had owned land up here for several generations. Old money, gentry. It seems he invested wisely in coal and shipping, army career not withstanding. Hang on...’ she leafed through the guide. ‘Yeah, an older house stood on this site. He had it demolished in 1868 to build this place in all its Victorian melodrama.’
‘That’s like an architectural style, is it?’
‘Absolutely.’
Cosley Hall lay some fifteen minutes west of the city in parkland beyond Wenvoe. They had arrived just after nine thirty, and driven in through the imposing gates and up the long, planned drive to a house hiding beyond a screen of trees. Prior to her purchase of the guidebook, Toshiko had supplied an improvised guide commentary. The gates, she announced had been ‘specially imported from the Carpathians’ and the outbuildings to the west of the main house had been ‘a stabling block for the Cosley family’s pedigree pack of killer dachshunds’. The house and grounds were now in the care of Cadw, having been left to the Nation by the last of the Cosley line, who had died in 1957 of a ‘surfeit of toff’.
‘Don’t make me laugh, I’m not in a laughing mood,’ said Gwen, laughing as she got out of the car.
Much funnier was the fact that, once it had been purchased, the guidebook as good as corroborated Toshiko’s invention. The gates might not have actually been Carpathian, and the dachsunds might actually have been beagles, but other than that she’d been close to the truth. The last of the Cosley line, William Peignton Cosley, had left the hall in a bequest to the Crown, following his death from a stroke in 1964.
Entry to the house and grounds was free, though a donation was appreciated. They’d asked the Cadw guide on the till – a young, blonde, studenty girl with a stud in her nose – if there were any papers or written records from the Colonel’s era. The girl said she didn’t know of any on display or available for inspection. There were quite a few books in the library, but most of them dated from the 1920s and 1930s, when the last Cosley, William, had built up a collection of geological works.
Gwen and Toshiko wandered around the hall for an hour or two. Whenever they were out of sight of other visitors, or the guides and the tour parties, Gwen surreptitiously took a portable scanner out of her coat pocket and swept it around, to zero effect.
They stopped eventually in the dining room, and gazed at a dinner table set with crystal and silver for forty guests who would never actually arrive. The voice of a guide drifted in from down the corridor behind them. A door closed somewhere.
‘I feel a bit of a plank, actually,’ said Gwen. ‘Jack said this would be a bust and he was right. Of course. I don’t know what I thought we could do here. Imagine the skill with which he’ll have gone over the place already.’
‘It was worth a try,’ said Toshiko. ‘Your logic was spotless.’
They traced their way back out of the baronial Victorian dwelling, pausing one last time in front of Colonel Joseph Peignton Cosley.
Gwen fixed the portrait right in the eyes. ‘What did you know? What were you told? Where did it come from? Who gave it to you? What the bugger did you think it was?’
‘Why are you talking to a painting?’ Toshiko smiled.
‘God knows. Made me feel better. Come on.’
They were walking back through the reception area, past the postcards, and the books on kings and queens, and the novelty pencil sharpeners, when the studenty blonde girl with the nose stud called out to them from the till.
‘Oh, there you are,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d already gone. I asked Mr Beavan about you, about the questions you were asking, I mean. Hang on a jot.’
The girl picked up a walkie-talkie. ‘Mr Beavan? Yeah, no, they’re still here. In reception. OK, lovely.’
She put the walkie-talkie down again. ‘He’ll just be along,’ she said.
Mr Beavan appeared about five minutes later. He was a small, neat, grey-haired man with pinched cheeks and large bags under his eyes that gave him a sort of treeshrew-like appearance. He was wearing a Cadw guide pullover.
He was, he said, head of staff at Cosley Hall, and had been since 1987. He knew a thing or two about the place.
‘Ellie tells me you were asking about the family records. Papers, diaries, that sort of thing, was it??
‘Especially concerning the Colonel,’ Toshiko replied.
‘Interested in old Joe are you? He was quite a fellow. India, the Far East, South Africa. He was under Baden-Powell for the Relief of Mafeking.’
‘We’d heard rumours,’ said Gwen.
‘What can you tell us about him?’ Toshiko put in swiftly.
‘Very much a principled man,’ Mr Beavan said, seriously. ‘Upright and convinced of his role as a defender of the realm and a protector of the people. He was astonishingly generous to the local community and the people who worked on his estate lands. I think he rather fancied himself as a local lord, ruling his demesne. Charmingly old-fashioned notion of the good old feudal system. Rose-tinted specs, I think, as was often the case in the late-Victorian age. Romantic dreams of a classical Britain that had never actually existed. He was very fond of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, funnily enough. Arthurian subjects.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Gwen lied.
‘Old Joe wasn’t the first in his family to feel that way,’ said Mr Beavan, warming to his theme. ‘His father and his grandfather both thought of themselves as border princes. As in the old days, along the Welsh Marches. Noble soldiers guarding the threshold between adjoining lands. The Colonel was very much taken with that notion.’
‘A bloke like him, then, usually leaves journals and diaries, doesn’t he?’ asked Gwen.
‘Well, we know a huge amount about his life and career. British Army records are fairly thorough. And his family business interests are well documented. Chamber of Commerce, the municipal archives.’
‘But personal stuff?’
‘Well, that’s why I pricked up my ears when I heard you’d been asking. There always had been suggestions that Colonel Joe kept quite extensive diaries, throughout his life, but we’d never found them. Then, quite by chance, about six years ago, one of the team turned up a bill of service in an old ledger of accounts, dated 1904. The bill related to a haulier, who had been employed to transport, um, ‘sundry personal items’ I think it said, all the way over to Long Marsh, just outside Manchester. It was very exciting.’
Gwen and Toshiko glanced at one another. ‘I can imagine,’ said Gwen delicately.
Mr Beavan smiled. ‘Ah, well, you see, the Colonel died in 1904. Cosley Hall was taken on by his son Ernest, and his widow, Francie, upped sticks and moved away. She went to live out her last remaining years with her own family, the Cassons, who owned Long Marsh. A little research suggests that she took many of her late husband’s most personal and private effects with her. Journals, for example.’
‘So,’ said Gwen, ‘Colonel Cosley’s stuff is at this Long Marsh place, then?’
‘Sadly, no,’ said Mr Beavan with another smile. ‘I wish it was that simple. If it was, I’d have popped over there myself long since to take a look. No, Long Marsh was shut up in about 1930. The Cassons lost a fortune, in the shipbuilding trade, I think it was. The family was ruined, anyway. Long Marsh swiftly fell into decay, got pulled down, and I believe there’s a cinema there now. Most of their possessions were sold against debt, but the contents of the library, and all the family papers, were gifted to Manchester Museum, where they remain to this day.’
‘On display?’ asked Toshiko.
‘No, no. Not at all. Uncatalogued in museum storage. I’ve known students and a couple of would-be biographers get a licence to trawl the catacombs. Thankless task. But the last one who did was Brian Brady, who’s working on a full biography. He pops in quite often, though he lives up in Manchester somewhere himself. He told me he’d found quite a lot of fascinating material. If you’d like his number...’
‘Oh well,’ said Toshiko, as they crunched back across the gravel to the SUV. ‘it was worth a try.’
Gwen pulled her phone and dialled the number Mr Beavan had given her.
‘You’re not serious?’ asked Toshiko.
‘Hang on,’ said Gwen, holding up her hand. She shook her head and lowered the phone. ‘No, I just got an answerphone.’
They got into the SUV. ‘You’d seriously go all the way to Manchester after some old diaries?’ asked Toshiko.
‘No,’ said Gwen. ‘That would be daft. I just wish it wasn’t the only lead we had. I hate going back to Jack empty-handed, especially when he’s told me I’ll be coming back empty-handed.’
Toshiko started the engine. ‘You do know that proving Jack wrong is not the primary objective of our work?’
‘Bugger. Isn’t it?’ said Gwen.
James looked up as Owen walked back into the care room.
‘Well? Am I ever going to play the violin again?’
‘Like Maxim frigging Vengerov, mate,’ said Owen. ‘Your unqualified diagnosis that you were OK was pretty much spot on. I’m not picking up anything this morning that gives me cause for concern.’
‘So I can get dressed and leave this room?’
‘Yup. Provided you take it easy. Really easy.’
‘OK.’
Owen turned to leave.
‘Hey,’ said James.
‘What?’
‘How thorough are those tests?’
‘What do you mean?’ Owen frowned.
‘How thorough are the tests you ran on me? On anyone in this situation?’
‘Scale of one to ten?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Six, seven,’ said Owen with a shrug. ‘I mean it’s a pretty good, cover-the-bases work-up, bloods and CAT, looking at the obvious. A thorough assessment.’
‘What would it pick up?’
‘What do you want it to pick up?’ Owen asked. He looked at James quizzically. ‘What is this? You’re freaking me out.’
James opened his mouth to reply then laughed and closed it again. He looked down at the floor, then back up at Owen.
‘What?’ asked Owen, in half-jokey frustration, shaking his hands in the air.
James pursed his lips. ‘Could you... could you run some more tests on me? More critical ones? More thorough ones?’
‘How much more thorough?’ asked Owen.
‘Scale of one to ten?’
Owen nodded.
‘What do you think?’ James asked.
Owen raised his eyebrows and whistled. ‘Shit. Why?’
James let out a long breath before replying, as if he was trying to make sure he was doing the right thing.
‘I think...’ he began. ‘Christ, I can’t believe it’s you I’m confiding in.’
‘Doctor-patient privilege,’ said Owen.
‘Yeah. Even so.’
Owen pursed his lips and pointed a finger in the direction of the door. ‘You want me to get Jack, then?’
‘No.’ James stood up. He paced for a moment. Then he sat down on the chair again. ‘No, not Jack. Not yet. I need you to help me with this, Owen. If it all comes up clear, Jack need never know. Nor Gwen. Just be our secret. You will then be permitted, from time to time, to take the piss out of me for being an idiot, and no one will ever know why.’
Owen frowned. He closed the room door, picked up another chair from the corner and carried it across to face James. ‘OK. You’re talking some fairly bonkers talk now. What’s going on?’
‘I’m scared,’ said James.
‘Of what?’ Owen asked him.
‘Myself,’ he said.
In the middle of the afternoon, after the lunchtime rush (though it wasn’t much of a rush at the Mughal Dynasty buffet lunch), Shiznay managed to sneak away as soon as she’d cleared the last of the dishes. People were busy elsewhere, with other things. Her mother had gone shopping to the garment market. Her father, as was his custom, was taking a slow hour to read the day’s paper before gearing up for the evening shift. He did this sitting alone in the restaurant with the radio on.
Shiznay snuck upstairs. She could hear the little transistor set buzzing away.
The Mughal Dynasty had once been two large Edwardian semis, and all the rooms in the upper floors retained most of their original fixtures and fittings,
Her brother was away for the whole weekend. He’d left the previous evening to visit his friends in Birmingham.
Her brother didn’t know Shiznay had discovered, about a year before, a spare key that fitted his room.
Checking there was absolutely no one around, Shiznay unlocked the door and went in.
Pale afternoon light slanted in through half-drawn curtains. Kamil’s room was a mess as usual, a jumble of clothes and CDs and PlayStation games. There were some pin-up pictures of pneumatic women stuck on the wall. Naked pneumatic women, in general, one of the main reasons Kamil denied his mother access.
Mr Dine lay where she had put him, sprawled across Kamil’s unmade bed. She’d wash the sheets later. Kamil probably wouldn’t notice anyway.
Mr Dine stirred and looked up at her. He looked just as bad as he had done the previous night, though at least his stab wound seemed to have stopped leaking.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispered. ‘I just came to check on you. I brought you some stuff.’
She held up the bottle of mineral water she’d taken from the cooler downstairs, some fresh fruit and a tub of ice cream.
TWENTY-FIVE
There was a stiff breeze coming in off the Bay, but the rain had cleared. The sun had come out, weak and watery, but a sun nonetheless, and the sky was big and full of voluminous white clouds.
It was just the middle of the afternoon, with an hour or two of daylight left. The Friday-night traffic had started already, murmuring in the Cardiff streets behind him.
Dressed, showered and shaved, James walked down to the end of the Pierhead boardwalks and stood at the rail, looking out towards the Norwegian Church and the chemical works beyond the Queen Alexandra Dock. A water taxi chugged by, leaving a tail of foam behind it.
He’d spent a long time shaving and showering in the Hub’s bathroom, a long time staring at himself in the mirror. Both of his eyes had remained resolutely brown.