Free Something in the Water by Trevor Baxendale Page B

of the Autopsy Room while the others watched from the walkway above. There was a deck of monitoring equipment at the end of the table, and a camera filming the autopsy. Owen circled the corpse, making a number of routine observations before attempting any invasive exploration.
    ‘The body is male, adult, although it’s not possible at this stage to make a guess at its age.’
    ‘Guess anyway,’ advised Jack. He stood in his shirtsleeves, arms folded. ‘You never know, you may be right.’
    Owen looked up at him. ‘Who, me?’ he said sarcastically. He straightened up and shrugged, fiddling with the badges which speckled the lapels of his white coat. ‘All right: at a very rough guess, I’d say he was aged between twenty and a hundred.’
    ‘You’re uncanny, Owen. Narrow it down.’
    ‘Your age,’ Owen said, without missing a beat.
    Jack smiled but said nothing.
    ‘Is there no way of telling who he was?’ Gwen asked.
    ‘I checked the missing persons records from the late seventies to the early eighties,’ Ianto said. ‘There are plenty of candidates, obviously. We need more data from the body before we can start sifting.’
    ‘What if it was a tramp?’ asked Gwen. ‘They wouldn’t necessarily be reported as missing, would they?’
    ‘I hate the thought of someone never being missed,’ said Ianto sadly. ‘It’s the ultimate humiliation, surely. So unimportant in life that no one even notices when you die.’
    ‘Theories, anyone?’ prompted Jack. He looked impatient.
    ‘Your old mate Professor Len was telling Tosh and me about a local witch who used to drag unlucky suitors down into the bog,’ said Gwen. ‘According to him, the last reported victim of Sally Blackteeth went missing on Greendown Moss in 1974.’
    ‘You think this could be him?’
    ‘It’s possible.’
    Jack nodded. ‘Find out. Get in touch with Professor Len.’ He turned to Owen. ‘Can you tell how he died?’
    ‘That’s what I’m here for,’ Owen said. ‘Initial observations: there’s no obvious sign of violence or mutilation. No broken bones that I can detect thus far. There appears to be some swelling of the neck and throat, but it’s not consistent with strangling. Probably the result of drowning.’
    ‘He was in the middle of the marsh.’
    Owen smiled humourlessly. ‘Wandered off the path, got stuck in the mud. No Professor Len around to help him when he got that sinking feeling. Glug, glug, glug …’
    ‘That could have been me,’ said Toshiko quietly. She had just appeared on the steps besides Jack, having showered and changed. All Torchwood personnel routinely kept a change of clothes in the Hub in case of emergencies.
    ‘My, doesn’t she scrub up well?’ said Owen.
    ‘Leave it out, Owen,’ snapped Gwen. ‘She’s had a bad fright.’
    ‘Not as big a fright as this guy had,’ Owen gestured at the corpse. ‘The thing is, and call me Mr Boring if you must, but I don’t see what’s so extraordinary about this corpse. He drowned in the marsh. It’s a police matter.’
    ‘No,’ said Jack firmly. ‘It’s a Torchwood matter. Tosh?’
    Toshiko held up a hand scanner. ‘Residual temporal energy all over it. If he didn’t actually come through the Rift, then he was touched by something that did. That makes it our business.’
    ‘All right,’ Owen said. ‘Let’s have a closer look, then.’ He picked up a large scalpel from the instrument trolley at his side and brandished it dramatically over the corpse like a sacrificial dagger.
    ‘God, I bet you were unbearable at med school,’ said Gwen.
    ‘He’s unbearable now,’ said Toshiko, but there was the beginning of a tiny smile on her lips.
    ‘About to make the first incision,’ Owen announced, suddenly professional. It was almost as if, with the banter and playing around over, he was ready to get on with the job he loved most of all.
    He approached the cadaver from the right, leaning over the chest, resting the tip of the scalpel blade against