by Phil Ford
Lucca toggled through the cameras. A lot of the apartments were still empty, but he knew they would fill up and generally the people who took them were young and attractive.
He remembered the couple that had been in the lobby when as he’d left that evening. They were the kind of people he liked to see moving in.
Well, she had been.
On the television screen he was looking at a bedroom on the thirteenth floor. Beside the time code at the bottom of the screen another graphic identified the apartment: this was number forty-four. The Lloyd family. Lucca didn’t know the names of everyone that had moved into the lower levels of his fortress, but Ewan Lloyd worked for him. He was an accountant, and a good one. He wasn’t crooked, but he didn’t ask questions.
When Lucca had first met him a year earlier, Ewan Lloyd was a man with a drink problem who could barely afford his next bottle of malt, never mind ask questions. There had been some sort of family trouble that had got him hitting the bottle; Lucca guessed it was something to do with the guy’s wife.
Wendy Lloyd was hot. Way too hot for someone like her husband, who was not only a pen-pushing number jockey, but was going bald before he hit forty and carried a belly like a beer keg. Whatever had possessed a woman like her to marry a man like that, it was never going to be long before she strayed. Lucca promised himself a piece of her one day, too, but not until her husband had in some way outlived his usefulness. There were some people that you didn’t give a reason to betray you – a good accountant was one of them.
Lloyd had pretty much dried out over the last six months; Lucca guessed that he and Wendy had patched up their marital rift for the sake of their little girl.
Lucca was about to move on from the image of the empty bedroom (as Wendy wasn’t slipping out of her clothes in there – and he knew that was a sight not to be missed) when the little girl walked in.
He wasn’t much of an expert on kids, but Lucca guessed she was five or six. They called her Alison. She had golden hair like her mum. Lots of it. She’d been lucky, Lucca thought as he watched her climb onto her parents’ bed with some kind of big rag doll bundled in her arms. As the cells that had made her had collided inside Wendy Lloyd they had sucked the best part out of her mum’s genes and given the finger to the fat, ugly drunk half of the conception. Maybe that kind of genetic deal meant Alison didn’t get her dad’s brains, either, but Lucca didn’t see how that mattered: his interest in women didn’t extend to their intellectual abilities. Lucca just hoped Alison’s parents stuck around at SkyPoint for another ten years or so.
Alison was sitting on the Lloyds’ bed now, cross-legged. She had placed the rag doll opposite her. It looked like it was supposed to be some sort of elf, or goblin or something. It wore a green cap with a bell on the end of it, and there were cloth shoes at the end of its long candy-striped legs that turned up at the toes. It was battered and faded, as if it had been the little girl’s companion and confidante her whole life, their only separation being periodic rides in the washing machine.
It sat on the bed with its legs splayed out, its torso bent forward a little to give it some stability. It looked like it was leaning forward, intent on her kiddie conversation. Lucca could see that Alison was filling the doll in on something of vital importance.
Lucca felt something inside him tremble: there was something heartbreaking about the innocence of a child. Deep down, in a part of him that he rarely visited, Lucca ached. Innocence wouldn’t last. The world would see to that.
Lucca switched channels.
He almost missed the guy in the long overcoat.
FIVE
The blonde with the legs who had earlier that afternoon adjusted her neckline for impact had been replaced in the SkyPoint lobby by a grey-suited concierge who probably weighed the equivalent of a fully loaded catering freezer and had the same kind of build.
Jack had checked the guy out as he and Toshiko sat in the SUV parked outside SkyPoint. They could have got past him, but Jack didn’t see the sense in drawing attention to their presence when there was always going to be a back door.
As back doors went, when they found it, it was probably one of the most secure Jack had ever seen, with the kind of digital lock you normally found on the airlock of a biohazard lab.
‘If I was a burglar, I’d look somewhere else,’ Toshiko muttered as she ran her eye over the lock, then placed a gadget from her messenger bag against it.
The back door sprang open.
‘If the Rift ever closes down, I can see a whole new career for you,’ smiled Jack.
Toshiko glanced at Jack. ‘Yes. Well, I have form, don’t I?’
Jack felt his smile shrivel. He had recruited Toshiko into Torchwood from a UNIT cell that hadn’t been big enough to lie down in after she had stolen classified plans for an experimental weapon. She had been coerced into the theft by terrorists who kidnapped her mother, but the price of springing her from the military jail had included severing contact with her family. He had given Toshiko her freedom, but freedom was a relative concept when you worked for Torchwood.
He led the way into the apartment building and Toshiko followed, closing the door gently behind them. They found an elevator and rode it to the tenth floor.
As the doors opened on the passageway, Toshiko took out another hand-held piece of tech. It flickered with liquid-crystal graphics.
‘No sign of Rift activity,’ she said, as they moved along the passageway and Jack scanned the doors for the apartment Gwen and Rhys had visited earlier that day.
‘What about residual energy?’
‘Nothing showing.’
Jack frowned. ‘Well, I don’t have a whole lot of experience in real estate, but the way I hear it those guys don’t generally walk out on a potential sale.’
‘I can only tell you what my instruments are showing, Jack.’
He nodded, accepting Toshiko’s findings, but not in the least bit comforted by them. They had reached the door they were looking for, and Jack stood aside to let her work her magic on the lock. Moments later, they were inside, the apartment’s movement detectors activating the lights for them.
‘Wow. This is nice,’ Toshiko purred, taking the apartment in.
‘Sure beats my place,’ Jack smiled, moving to the window and looking out across night-lit Cardiff. Home for Jack was little more than a cell in the bowels of the Hub. But then he wasn’t big on home comforts.
He spun away from the window and headed for the master bedroom. ‘Gwen said the guy vanished from the en suite bathroom, right?’
Toshiko followed, just two steps behind and reached the bedroom as Jack dived onto the massive bed in there like a big kid.
‘Now this is something I could use,’ he grinned.
Toshiko smiled. Jack was a big kid sometimes, all right, but he didn’t play kids’ games. She bet he could come up with some pretty interesting and enjoyable ways to use the bed.
For a nano-second she wondered if he was about to invite her to try out a couple, and she wondered if she would agree. Then he was off the bed, and springing towards the bathroom where the estate agent had vanished.
‘No obvious escape routes,’ he said, running his eyes over the stylish slate and granite. ‘Apart from the obvious,’ as he looked at the toilet.
He raised the seat and glanced into the bowl. ‘Nope. Nothing here.’
Toshiko ran her instrument around the bathroom. Again, the graphics gave no indication of Rift activity.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘People just don’t disappear.’
‘Actually people disappear all the time, Tosh. But there’s always a reason for it.’
‘Well the reason for this can’t be the Rift.’ She stowed her kit in the messenger bag.
‘So what do you suggest?’
‘There are possibilities. Teleportation.’
‘And who would want to teleport an estate agent?’
‘OK, then… Maybe he was never here.’
‘
Gwen and Rhys imagined him? You’re going to have to try harder than that,’ Jack smiled as he headed back into the bedroom.
Toshiko followed him. ‘I’m just going through the logical—’
She didn’t get any further. The sight of the concierge built like an industrial freezer stopped her.
He was standing in the bedroom, waiting for them.
‘What are you doing in here?’ the concierge asked with a voice that sounded like ice cubes being crushed.
Jack shrugged and gave the industrial freezer guy one of his smiles. ‘Looking for an apartment.’
The smile didn’t work, neither did the answer. The concierge looked at Jack with steel grey eyes that had about as much life in them as a mortuary slab.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
Toshiko noticed a thin curled wire that fed upwards from the concierge’s collar into an earpiece. She decided that the questions were coming from someplace else. He obviously didn’t draw his pay cheque on his intellectual qualities.
Jack gave the guy another smile. Not the high-beam dazzle-and-run smile; this one was lower intensity, the kind that drew you in and suckered you. Jack had a million smiles. One time, somewhere, Jack had been some sort of con man. She guessed that was how he came by the Smiles.
As he smiled at the industrial freezer guy, he also moved towards him, his hands opening wide in a gesture of coming clean. His voice came down a little, like a guy with something to admit, guy-to-guy.
‘Thing is,’ Jack was telling the concierge, ‘my girlfriend and me, we have this thing. About doing it in show homes. You get me?’
The concierge looked from Jack to Toshiko.
Toshiko tried her best not to look shocked by Jack’s suggestion. And she saw the slightest kink of a smile on the concierge’s thin lips. It didn’t make him look any more friendly.
‘I’m telling you, we’ve done it everywhere. Not just show homes, either. A couple of times we’ve let people selling their house show us around then asked for a few minutes alone just to talk it over, you know? And…’ Jack gave the concierge a friendly nudge.
‘So this place… well, this is like the Mile High Club for us. Anyway, we’re done now, so we’ll get off the premises. OK?’
Jack started to head for the door, but the concierge dropped one big hand on his shoulder.
‘No. You’re coming with me.’
‘Look,’ Toshiko said, ‘there’s no need to involve the police. We’ll just leave quietly.’
The concierge looked at her with his mortuary steel eyes and she knew he wasn’t about to involve the police anyway.
‘You’re coming with me,’ he said again.
‘Whatever you say,’ Jack told him, and took Toshiko’s hand, playing the boyfriend. ‘Come on, babe.’
Toshiko shot him a glance – babe?! – and Jack felt the concierge’s hand between his shoulder blades push him towards the door.
As he and Toshiko stepped through it, the bedroom door slammed shut behind them with a sound like a gunshot.
Jack and Toshiko spun around.
The door trembled on its hinges for a moment, as if someone on the other side were hammering and kicking on it.
But there was no sound.
And then the trembling stopped. Toshiko and Jack looked at each other.
Jack drew the Webley service revolver from his belt.
Toshiko pulled the Glock automatic from the shoulder holster hidden beneath her jacket. At the same time, she removed the Rift detector from her bag.
Jack threw her a glance. Her eyes told him she was ready. His hand twisted the door handle. And together they stepped back into the bedroom.
The empty bedroom.
Toshiko checked the bathroom, and Jack checked the dressing area. But there was no sign of the freezer-sized concierge. And there was nothing registering on Toshiko’s equipment.
‘I say we get out of here,’ said Jack.
And they did.
And in his penthouse Besnik Lucca watched it all.
SIX
There had been a time in his life when Owen Harper had done everything he could to fight sleep. He had lost count of the pills he had put down his neck to help keep it at bay. As a doctor, he understood the importance of sleep; as a man he resented the chunks of life that it stole from him. Perhaps on some level he had always known that his life would be cut short and had been driven by his subconscious to make the most of what time he had. What he could never have imagined was that, at the age of twenty-six, he would have his heart reduced to mincemeat, and yet he would carry on living; nor that, in that twilight of half-life that he now endured, he would ache so much for the intermittent release of sleep.
But just as there was no rest for the wicked, as his grandmother used to tell him (God bless her mercifully departed soul) there was apparently no sleep for the undead. And when booze just filled your belly till it swelled up like an overfilled waterbed and the only way of getting rid of it was to stand on your head, open your oesophagus and wait for it to flood out across the floor around you, there wasn’t much point in filling the small hours with endless partying. And since blood no longer pumped around his body, the fuel line had run out on sex.
If Owen had believed in reincarnation – and it was odd that being dead his views on religion and the possibilities of an afterlife hadn’t really changed at all (he just didn’t buy into any of it) – but if there had been any such thing as karma then, by Christ, he must have really pissed off the gods in some past life. When he’d been a junior doctor doing his time in the genito-urinary department, he had met guys who couldn’t get it up. And that to Owen was a walking death in itself. If there was such a thing as karma and the shot that Pharm bastard Aaron Copley had fired through his heart was cosmic payback for stamping on a beetle when he was Genghis Khan or something, then there really wasn’t any need to go the whole hog. Not being able to have sex, but still aching for it was the most relentless, torturous punishment Owen could think of. Those hooded characters in the Middle Ages with their red hot pokers had nothing on this!
He had taken out a membership card at a DVD rental store and he was probably their best customer: three movies generally got him through the worst part of the night. Trouble was, he’d already gone through most of the good ones. The tag line on one of them – a lousy vampire flick with too many bare bouncing breasts that had only served to remind him of what he was missing – had purred It’s cool to be a vampire. Well, a vampire was the walking dead like him, and Owen found it pretty bloody hard to come up with anything – any damned thing at all – that was in any way cool about being dead and still walking.
But he supposed that was Hollywood for you. If you asked an American movie producer, John Wayne won the war single-handed; Robin Hood was a Yank with thinning hair and the White Cliffs of Dover were a five-minute walk from Nottingham Forest; and the crew of the Titanic passed the last few minutes of their lives shooting the passengers. Vampires probably felt pretty pissed off with the rep they got from Hollywood, too. Maybe that was why they were sometimes known as Nightwalkers because, as Owen had discovered, when you were dead but the message hadn’t got through to your body, walking was pretty much all there was left to do.
So that was how Owen Harper spent the hours when decent folk went to sleep, and the not-so-decent partied.
And as miserable an existence as it was, being undead, Owen couldn’t help smiling at the irony of the situation. He spent hours every night walking the streets of Cardiff. He had already worn through two pairs of shoes. If he were still alive, he’d have been the fittest he’d ever been. He couldn’t drink, he couldn’t eat, and he couldn’t shag – but at least he still had his sense of humour.
Always look on the bright side of death, as Eric Idle had said.
Yeah, well maybe he wasn’t quite that relaxed about it. And he didn’t think he ever would be. But at least Torchwood was still paying him, dead or alive. That would keep him in shoe leather and it looked lik
e he was going to need it.
Come to that, now he didn’t need to eat and he couldn’t drink and heating in his flat wasn’t really much of an issue as he could feel neither cold nor heat, his wages were starting to stack up in the bank. Another of the ironies of a living death.
He did still buy the occasional coffee, however. Like now. He never drank it. It just went cold in the cup before him, but people were used to people sitting over drinks that they hardly touched in all-night cafés like this one. The staff left you alone with your demons. At 2am on a Tuesday morning, if you weren’t some sort of shift worker looking for a caffeine buzz to get you through the night and you were hunched over a coffee in a dive like Constantine’s, chances were you had demons of one sort or another.
And it was demons of a kind that had brought Owen here tonight and every night for the last three weeks.
But they weren’t his.
Except that he had kind of made them his own by deciding not to tell the rest of the team about the man he had seen ripped to pieces by two women in an alleyway at the back of the café.
They weren’t really women, of course. As the two of them had torn the poor guy apart like two halves of a butchered pig, their jaws had distended and expanded and the small pearl teeth that they had flashed at the poor sod just a few minutes before grew into razor-edged spikes. Their flesh had turned to scales. Their eyes had grown large and black, like those of a dead shark.
