by Phil Ford
‘Arwen Grace,’ he said. ‘This is my business. How can I help you, Mister…?’
Jack took the man’s hand and shook it. ‘Harkness. Jack. Captain.’
‘A services man,’ Grace noted with pleasure. ‘I did twenty years in the navy. I take it that you were a flyer.’
‘Of sorts.’
Gwen felt excluded from the club.
‘Gwen Cooper,’ she said, projecting her hand.
Grace shook it and smiled. He said he was charmed. And Gwen recognised the tone. He may have been charmed, but Gwen knew when she was being disregarded.
Grace indicated for them to follow him and led them into a comfortable if old-fashioned office. As he closed the door behind them, Gwen caught the ginger-haired guy she’d taken for the office junior watching them. And she recognised the look. She had seen it plenty of times before when she’d done the Cardiff beat. It was a look you learned quickly as a cop – of someone who knows something, but is too scared to talk.
‘The fact of the matter,’ Grace was telling them, ‘is that Brian Shaw has a few problems.’
Yeah, like vanishing into thin air.
But Gwen kept her mouth shut.
Jack had eased himself into the heavily padded leather chair that stood opposite the big antique desk the estate agent now moved behind. Gwen stood by the door with her arms folded. She wanted Grace to know that she wasn’t getting sucked in by his show of hospitality.
‘Personal problems,’ Grace clarified.
‘So you know where he is, then?’ Jack asked.
Grace took his seat behind the desk and leaned forward, sliding his fingers into a latticed bunch before him on his blotter. ‘I’m afraid Brian likes a drink a little more than is good for him. This line of work is extremely high-pressured. Not everyone can take it. Even those who are good at it go through their lean periods.’
‘I thought the property market had been going through the roof,’ Gwen said, and she knew it sounded a little like an accusation.
The estate agent cast her a benevolent smile. ‘Cardiff is a boom town, there’s no doubt about that. Developers are pouring money into building projects like there’s no tomorrow. The problem is that there are so many apartments going up, and the banks are falling over themselves to lend money, buyers are being spoiled for choice. I’m afraid the sharks are turning on one another amid a feeding frenzy of minnows.’
‘You’re saying Brian Shaw is under pressure.’
‘That’s right, Captain Harkness. And when under pressure, he normally ends up under a table somewhere. I’ve seen it before. We all have.’
‘When was the last time you spoke to Brian Shaw?’ asked Gwen.
Grace didn’t even have to think about it. ‘Yesterday evening. Seven o’clock. When we closed the office.’
Gwen glanced at Jack. He knew it, too: Grace was lying.
‘He had already been drinking,’ Grace continued. ‘I could smell it on his breath. I know how it goes with Brian. I like him, otherwise I would have sacked him a long time ago. But he’ll be on a bender for a couple of days, he’ll get it all out of his system, and then he’ll start selling like the devil’s on his tail.’
Jack got out of the chair and moved across the office to a picture on the wall – it was SkyPoint. ‘That’s kind of interesting, Mr Grace. You see we’ve got a report that Brian Shaw disappeared in the middle of showing a couple around an apartment here.’
Jack cocked a thumb at the picture of SkyPoint.
‘And when I say disappeared, I mean the way a magician does it. Now you see him, now you don’t.’
Gwen noticed Grace shift in his seat.
‘I don’t follow you,’ he said.
Gwen decided to show him the way. ‘He walked into a bathroom, and then he wasn’t there any more. There was no way he could have got out without being seen.’
‘Maybe we should go and talk to Brian ourselves,’ Jack said from over by the SkyPoint picture. ‘Maybe that’s the easiest way of clearing this up. You’ve got an address for him, haven’t you, Mr Grace?’
Gwen was nodding. ‘That’s a good idea. We can ask him how he managed to be here at seven last night when that was just about the time I saw him walk into the bathroom in apartment thirty-two and disappear.’
Grace shot her a look. ‘You were there?’
‘Want to change your story, Mr Grace?’ she asked.
His eyes snapped from Gwen to Jack, and back. He shook his head. His skin had turned to something like the colour of his whiskers. Gwen had seen this look before, as well. It was the look of a frightened man.
‘You’re mistaken,’ Grace said, his voice now little more than a whisper.
Jack strode across the room. ‘Thank you, Mr Grace. You’ve told us everything we needed to know.’
And Jack yanked the office door open and left. As Gwen followed him, she saw Grace’s eyes moving towards the telephone on his desk. He was going to have to ring someone, she thought, someone he didn’t want to talk to. She was going to have a job for Toshiko when she got back to the Hub.
As she followed Jack across the front office towards the street, she noticed that the ginger-haired guy was missing from his seat.
‘Everything we needed to know?’ she demanded as she caught up with Jack outside.
‘Well, we found out that he wasn’t going to talk. That tells us something. Whatever happened to Brian Shaw, this is about more than just a disappearing estate agent.’
They rounded a corner and found the black SUV where Jack had left it, parked outside the Hilton. Jack gave the young doorman a familiar smile. ‘Everything OK, Simon?’
The doorman smiled back. ‘I know you, Jack Harkness, you only want me for my parking facility.’
Jack grinned. ‘Well, you’re handy when I’m carrying a heavy load. I know you’ll take care of it for me.’
Gwen tuned out of Jack’s flirting, and spotted the ginger-headed office junior watching them. He was still looking anxious. More than ever. Gwen started to move towards him, treading carefully like he was a small animal ready to run for cover.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Do you want to talk?’
The office junior had one last second thought – she could actually see it pass through his mind, as his eyes flashed past her, charting an escape route – then he asked her, ‘What did the old man tell you about Brian?’
‘Well, I don’t think he told us the truth.’
‘He isn’t off on a bender. I’d know if he was. The old man, he doesn’t know, but me and Brian we’re… friends. I’d know if he was feeling the strain, he’d have told me. The old man is covering up.’
‘Covering what up?’ Gwen asked. Behind her, Jack had seen her with the office junior and was joining them.
The office junior hesitated.
‘It’s OK, you can trust us,’ Jack told him. ‘Whatever it is, just spit it out.’
‘It’s that place. SkyPoint.’
‘What about it?’ asked Gwen.
‘They’re trying to keep it quiet. The place cost millions and it’s still more than three-quarters empty. If word got out about the people disappearing there—’
‘People?’ Jack snapped. ‘Brian Shaw isn’t the first? This has happened before?’
The office junior flashed an uneasy look around him, scanned the street for faces that he knew, anyone from work. ‘Christ, if anyone finds out I talked to you…’
‘I understand you’re worried about your job,’ Gwen told him, ‘but you have to tell us what you know.’
The junior shook his head. ‘My job? There’s plenty of jobs. It’s my neck I’m worried about. You don’t know the kind of people that have got money in SkyPoint.’
Gwen remembered the man that lived in the penthouse. ‘Besnik Lucca?’
‘Yeah, well then, you know what I’m talking about. Men like that want to see a return on their investment. It doesn’t matter to them that there’s something wrong with the place.’
�
�So how many people are we talking about?’ Jack wanted to know. ‘How many have disappeared?’
‘Four that I know of. Not counting Brian. At first we thought it was just people running out on their payments, but not one of them was caught by the security cameras leaving. And those cameras spot everyone going into SkyPoint and coming out. The only way you can get out of that place without being picked up on video is jumping off the roof.’
‘Well, if they’d done that, you’d know about it,’ said Jack, dry as sand.
The office junior looked from Jack to Gwen, confused and scared. ‘Where do they go? Where’s Brian gone?’
Gwen touched his shoulder gently. ‘We’re going to find out. I promise you.’
EIGHT
Ianto Jones took his coffee black, and seriously.
When Torchwood One had been destroyed in the Battle of Canary Wharf, Ianto had been one of the few survivors, and he had returned to Wales looking for a job with the Cardiff operation. Jack had never had much time for Torchwood One, he didn’t like the way they did things and thought their disastrous handling of the Dalek-Cyberman situation had proved him right. So he was never going to have much interest in Ianto Jones, despite the cut of his suit, never mind how cute he might have been. But Ianto was determined, and he campaigned hard, though to Jack it felt like he’d got himself a stalker. And Ianto was ready to do anything to get himself a place in the Hub. He was an intelligent man with Honours in English Literature and History – but he’d just make the coffee and run the hoover around if that was what it took to get back into Torchwood.
So, in the end, Jack had given him a break as the tea boy and the guy who rang for the pizzas. He had earned his stripes since then and no one really thought of him as the office boy any more. He was a lot more than that, especially to Jack. But no one else could make coffee like Ianto. And, truth was, Ianto liked to make coffee. There was more to it than pouring hot water over ground beans.
The philosopher Sir James Mackintosh had said that the powers of a man’s mind were proportionate to the quantity of coffee he drank, and Voltaire had knocked back fifty cups of it a day, so Ianto reckoned there had to be something in it. And saving Cardiff from the kinds of things that came through the Rift called for quick, inspired thinking, so Ianto took it upon himself to make sure the coffee was good.
Ianto Jones, saving the world with a dark roast.
And that was what he set down on the conference room table now. A tray of four mugs. Dark Java.
He handed the drinks around as people talked, worked out how they were going to handle SkyPoint, how they were going to find out what was going on there.
‘What have you got, Tosh?’ Jack asked as Ianto put a coffee mug in his hand.
Toshiko referred to the notes from her computer research that morning. ‘SkyPoint is built on the site of old dock warehousing. I’ve gone back as far as I can, but there are no records of Rift activity in the location. So no historical precedent for what seems to be happening there now.’
‘And no records of disappearances?’ Jack asked.
‘Not specific to that site. Not that I can see.’
‘So this is something to do with the building itself,’ Owen pondered as he watched Ianto hand the coffees around. He remembered that Ianto made good coffee – better than the shit they stung you more than two quid for down at Constantine’s, anyway, he guessed.
‘So there’s – what? – some creature living in there?’ Ianto suggested as he sat down at the table and took the first sip of Java. It was good. Of course it was.
‘Something that consumes people? Doesn’t leave a trace of them behind?’ Owen heard what he was saying and worried. If the thing in SkyPoint was the same thing that he had seen butcher the French philosophy student and then clean up afterwards better than those two old birds in rubber gloves on the telly – then he had to come clean to the rest of the team.
But Gwen didn’t think that was it. ‘There wasn’t time. Rhys and me, we were only seconds behind Brian Shaw when he walked into the bathroom. If it was some sort of creature, we would have heard something. No way that we wouldn’t.’
‘And we didn’t hear anything like a creature when the security guy disappeared, either,’ said Toshiko.
Jack pushed back his chair and started to prowl around the table. ‘So what happened? They didn’t get beamed up by Mr Scott. And, as far as our instruments can tell, there’s no Rift activity, so they didn’t just get sucked out of existence.’
Gwen shook her head. ‘But it has to be the Rift.’
Jack came to a stop; he’d done a full turn of the table and was back behind his own chair. He put his fists on his hips.
‘There’s only one way we’re going to find out,’ he said. ‘Who wants to play Happy Families?’
NINE
This is going to be weird.
Owen was standing at the window of his new apartment looking across the Bay. The open-plan SkyPoint living area was filled with unopened boxes. There was no urgency in opening them – most had just been packed with old books to perfect the illusion of a couple moving into their new home.
A couple.
This was going to be very weird, he thought, and looked out across the water wondering just how the hell he was going to get through this.
‘Well, that’s me all moved in.’
Owen turned from the window as Toshiko walked in from the bedroom. She was dressed in jeans and a thin sweater that clung to her tightly. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail. Owen guessed that this was what she looked like on a day off and realised with surprise that he had never actually seen Toshiko on a day off. She looked like a woman would the day she moved into her new apartment. She looked good. But that wasn’t going to make any of this anything like easier.
‘It’s a walk-in wardrobe,’ she told him. ‘I hung all my stuff on the right. You can have the left.’
‘No problem,’ Owen said. ‘I dress on the left, anyway.’ Toshiko didn’t look like she got the joke.
‘I’ll hang my stuff up later,’ he said. ‘Want a coffee?’
‘Great,’ she said. Her eyes sparkled.
Owen crossed into the kitchen area and filled the kettle, then took a mug from the box of kitchen things that Ianto had put together for them. The mugs were stylish, tall and slim with silver rims. Very Ianto. Back in Owen’s apartment, the mugs he drank from (whoa – hold that! – the mugs he used to drink from) were a mostly chipped and tea-stained collection that looked like they had been accrued over the years from visiting workmen.
He set one mug down on the work surface and set about working out the high-tech coffee machine that came with the kitchen. Ianto had packed them a full dinner service – the works, in fact – but they were never going to be setting more than one place for dinner here. Owen guessed it would save on the washing up. Six plates, six sets of cutlery – with luck he would be out of SkyPoint before the dishwasher was half full.
He got the coffee machine working and suddenly the apartment was filled with music. Jazz. The Dave Brubeck Quartet. Owen looked across the room and saw Toshiko at the apartment’s sound system. Music seemed to pour out of every corner of the apartment.
She was swaying with the rhythm of ‘Love For Sale’, and caught Owen watching her. Suddenly self-conscious she smiled and turned the music down a little.
‘I’m sorry. Do you mind?’ she asked.
Owen shrugged and couldn’t help smiling. ‘I didn’t know you liked jazz.’
‘My mother’s a big fan. It used to be on all the time when I was growing up.’
‘Same here. I used to think it was the only thing that stopped my folks going for each other with the kitchen knives. “Take Five” would chill them out better than a case of red.’
‘Sorry. If it brings back memories…’ She moved to turn it off.
‘No. I like it. Like you said, it rubs off on you.’
Toshiko shook her head. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? We spend all that time
with each other and we go through all this stuff – but we know next to nothing about everyone else.’
Owen stiffened. ‘Yeah, well maybe it’s better that way.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You know what it’s like, Tosh. No one gets to retire from Torchwood. And it isn’t worth taking out a pension plan.’
She knew what he was talking about. She had gone back through the Torchwood records once. No one had ever left the organisation for another job, or to start a family, or to go live in a cottage by the sea. Personnel files all closed with the same word: DECEASED.
But Toshiko didn’t want to think about that. She forced a smile. ‘You’re a bundle of joy today.’
Owen fought down the urge to tell her that he didn’t get the opportunity for much joy these days. He wondered whether he should also remind her that they were at SkyPoint to do a job, and that they were not there playing House.
Owen’s heart may have stopped beating; it didn’t mean he didn’t have one any more.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
And he was sorry. If he hadn’t been dead, playing man and wife with Toshiko for a couple of nights could have been fun. He was also sorry because he liked Toshiko (strangely he had grown to like her so much more since there had been no chance of – and no point in – bedding her) and he knew that a big part of her was looking forward to their stay here. She had feelings for him that he could never return, and she knew that, but this SkyPoint job was the closest she was ever going to get to playing husband and wife – probably, with anyone.
This was her dream job, he thought. It would have made his stomach turn over, had it still been able to.
He should tell her now, he thought, that this was a mission – that they had a job to do – and anything else going on inside her head was just pure fantasy, and she should quit it right now. The trouble was, he didn’t have the heart to do that. How could he do that to a woman that loved him even though he was a walking corpse.
If you loved her, you would.
Christ, he hoped they could clear this business up fast.
