Torchwood: Exodus Code

colleagues had been slow to respond to this crisis because it was happening only to women, and, worse, it was happening inside women’s heads. A far too scary place to inhabit if you listened to some of these men.
    ‘As you are well aware from my report, sir,’ she said, ‘we’ve so far found nothing in common among these females except that there’s never only one woman affected. Almost every cluster has at least five or six women in it. We have yet to trace only one woman in an area suffering from this mental illness alone.’
    ‘So perhaps that might suggest each cluster has something in common.’
    Dr Ormond looked up at her assistant who had entered the office and was tapping his watch face. Three minutes until the press conference.
    ‘As you will also note in our report,’ said Dr Ormond impatiently, gathering the notes for her speech from her desk and sliding them into her leather portfolio, ‘each woman in each cluster that we’ve been able to identify has been thoroughly investigated and we have found no correlation in their symptoms and nothing at all in common in their backgrounds. We’ve tested their ground water and their major food supply, their oxygen levels and their blood types. We have nothing.’
    ‘But you will continue to investigate?’
    ‘Of course! But—’
    Before she could finish her sentence, before she could present him with her plan to continue the investigation, the Health Secretary interrupted her and excused himself. From the speaker, Dr Ormond could hear a mumbled conversation, raised voices and then she heard chairs scraping. A new deeper, softer male voice came on the line. ‘Trimba, this is Alan Pride. May we speak frankly?’
    She looked up at her assistant, who shrugged and rolled his eyes. Alan Pride was the PM’s right-hand man, his amanuensis, his conscience (such as it was) and, when necessary, his fall guy. Alan Pride was in his fifties, and a man of one or two intriguing contradictions. Born to a coalmining family in the north of England, Pride had earned a scholarship to the London School of Economics, where he and the PM had become close friends. A Harvard MBA had been followed by rapid progress to the board of an international bank. When the market crashed, Pride stepped down. Admitting his own bank had been complicit in making bad loans, he testified in front of Parliament and the US Congress against many of his fellow bankers who, he believed, had shamed themselves and their profession. Selling his mansion in Connecticut, his pied-a-terre in Paris and his house in Kensington, he disappeared from the public eye for a few months. His appointment in Downing Street had caused a minor uproar in predictable sections of the press but, as usual, that hadn’t been enough to outweigh the support of the Party.
    Was Pride a changed man or simply a man who’d changed his approach to power? Trimba Ormond hadn’t made up her mind. ‘What is it you’d like to ask, Mr Pride?’
    ‘Do you have a plan for what our local hospitals should do with these women who are… suffering? Because you know as well as I do that our mental health facilities are already stretched to capacity. Before you take any of this report to the public, I’d like to talk to you about some ideas I have on the matter.’
    Dr Ormond sat back down at her desk. ‘With all due respect, Mr Pride, I have a press conference about to start. I think we need to share what we’ve discovered right now. Before things get worse.’
    ‘That’s not your call to make, Trimba. I’ll see you in my office tomorrow at 9 a.m.’
    Dr Ormond slammed her portfolio onto the speaker, disconnecting the call. She instructed her assistant to cancel the press conference, but gave no indication if she was going to reschedule. The press would not be happy, and neither would her colleagues. She made a few edits on the press release, then handed it to her assistant.
    ‘How does that sound?’ she asked.
    Her assistant read the release aloud. ‘While we, in collaboration with other national and regional organisations, have not yet uncovered the cause of this widespread outbreak of mental illness in women, we have determined that the number of cases has not increased dramatically. We must, however, remind all care-givers of suffering women that, although it seems not to be contagious, it can be life-threatening to its sufferers and to their loved ones. Therefore, until we can find a way to eliminate, or at the very least