Another Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

about he was. Desperate.’
    ‘It was only a few seconds, I suppose, but it sounded like…’ Toshiko’s eyes looked haunted as she recalled it. ‘Well, like despair, I suppose.’
    ‘Not straight away. He didn’t start screaming until about halfway down.’ Owen tucked the digital camera back in his jacket pocket. He stared at the corpse. ‘Maybe you changed your mind, eh? No going back on that decision, mate. What got into you?’
    Gwen didn’t understand. ‘How could you have noticed that? It must have been over in seconds.’
    Toshiko pointed to their car. ‘We’d located you with the heat sensor array in the SUV. So we knew that he was on the edge.’ She indicated the protective shroud of material that protected the middle section of the Levall-Mellon site. ‘Just as well. With all that green stuff covering the outside, we couldn’t see into the building. And there’s no CCTV in operation up there, either.’
    ‘Nice explanation,’ Owen told her. ‘Refreshingly free from the technobollocks you usually give us.’
    Toshiko scowled. ‘Don’t parade your ignorance, Owen, just because you don’t understand the language.’
    ‘I thought you preferred to speak C-minus.’
    ‘That’s C++,’ she chided. ‘I also know that Java is more than coffee. And that Assembler has nothing to do with IKEA furniture.’
    ‘All those languages, Tosh, and you still don’t include English.’ Owen put his arm around Gwen’s shoulders and steered her so that they were looking up at the point from which Wildman had fallen. ‘He was just there. We noticed you were further away. Jack was obviously the tall bloke in the middle, and you were the one with boobs on the far side of the area. But never fear, freckles. If it had been you on the edge, I’d have been there to catch you. Falling for me, eh?’
    She disengaged his arm from her shoulder. ‘As if.’
    ‘All the pretty girls do, y’know. Before they know it, I’ve swept ‘em off their feet and they’re lying next to me…’
    Gwen rolled her eyes. ‘The only way you’ll end up lying next to a “pretty girl”, Owen Harper, is if you’re both knocked down by the same bus.’
    Far from being disappointed, Owen leered at her. A moment later, it was like he’d already forgotten. He drew back the smeared raincoat to reach into the corpse’s jacket pockets. This brief search produced a crushed wallet and an ID badge for the Blaidd Drwg nuclear research facility. ‘We got the right bloke then.’
    ‘I think “got” is putting a positive spin on it,’ Jack called out from above them.
    Gwen had left Jack back on the eighth floor when she’d hurried down to see what had happened to Wildman. Who knew what Jack had been doing up there since then. She remembered he liked to look out across the city at night from high vantage points, so maybe he’d been taking in the view up there while he had the chance. He must have decided to descend in style, because he was using the builders’ lift down the side of the building. As it started to vanish slowly behind the chipboard barrier that surrounded the lower floor, he jumped onto the top of the wooden partition and then leaped the remaining seven feet to street level, agile as a cat.
    ‘As interrogations go,’ Jack concluded, ‘it wasn’t one of my best. Hey, who parked that bus there?’ He cast a glance past it at the gathering crowd of rubberneckers. Further would-be eye witnesses were leaning out of upper-storey windows in adjacent buildings. ‘I guess we could try and continue this here, but clearing this bunch of ghouls away is gonna be like trying to keep flies away from shit. Get him back to the Hub and do the autopsy there.’
    ‘Oh great,’ moaned Owen. ‘We’ve got one corpse in the SUV already, and now we have to fit us and this carcass in there too.’
    ‘Quit griping. That car’s deceptively spacious,’ Jack told him. ‘Gwen and I will take the other vehicle.’
    ‘Let me think,’ Owen