Skypoint t-8

by Phil Ford

  Only the guy with the ponytail and the highbrow paperback would never see that.

  Didn’t matter how bright a man was, when a sexy woman smiled at you – that was all you saw. When you were looking at twin smiles that glowed like that, it was like being hit by closing car headlights and suddenly you were no better than a dumb rabbit.

  When the man smiled back, Owen knew the guy was dead. Whatever the twins really were inside the flesh that they wore so well as they worked the men in the coffee shop, they were predators. And Owen watched, fascinated, as they stalked their prey across the half-dried puddles of cold coffee on the old scratched table. All it really needed was David Attenborough whispering a commentary in his ear.

  He wasn’t close enough to hear what the women said to the ponytailed student/lecturer, all he could do was read the body language, but it wasn’t a long dialogue. Just a few minutes later all three were pushing back their chairs and moving towards the coffee-shop door and the darkness that waited outside. Owen watched them in the window, and started to work out what he was going to do. Fascination with these hunting creatures was one thing, they had provided a distraction from his nocturnal boredom, but he couldn’t let this go the whole way …

  As they passed him and opened the door onto the street Owen could feel the heat of excitement coming off the ponytailed guy. If he’d looked, Owen was sure he’d have seen it building up in the guy’s crotch. Owen let them slip through the door, and the girls were laughing at something the guy had just said. Their laughter made Owen think of Disney fairies; it was delicate and musical and unreal. As the door closed behind them it cut the sound off. Owen watched them turn left, one twin either side of the student/ lecturer as he slipped an arm around each girl’s waist. Then Owen slid off his chair and headed after them. He checked for the automatic tucked into the back of his belt; his hand was still busted from that bad night with Toshiko a few weeks back (it would always be busted since his body no longer had the ability to heal), but he knew he could still handle the gun OK. He didn’t really want to use it on the two pretty girls, but Torchwood had given him a pretty reliable sense about things around Cardiff, especially at this time of night, when things that looked a little odd were, in reality, probably right off the scale. He didn’t want to shoot the two girls, but he knew that was not what they were.

  As he opened the door, a drunk the size of a grizzly bear lurched through it off the street and waded blindly into Owen on rubber legs. Something unintelligible slipped out of the drunk’s mouth as his eyes scrambled for focus and gave up. Owen thought it might have been an apology, and told the drunk that it was OK, then tried to get around him and out of the door, but the drunk clapped a meaty shovel of a hand against Owen’s shoulder and said something else, his eyes still swirling in his head like a couple of goldfish in twin bowls.

  V gt nmney. Lsst’t. Cnn yuu …

  Owen told the drunk that he didn’t have time for this, but the drunk wasn’t listening. He put his other hand on Owen’s other shoulder, and Owen wasn’t sure if the guy was trying to fix him with a look or just trying to stand up.

  Y’lk lk nss kndablk …

  And the guy with the ponytail and the two sexy girls that were something else entirely were getting further and further away …

  Owen really didn’t have time for this.

  He kicked the drunk hard just under the kneecap and the guy went down like a detonated apartment block. Owen was out on the street a moment later, and turned left but there was no sign of the ponytailed guy or the two women.

  Shit.

  Owen ran. He knew they couldn’t have gone far, but around here it was a maze of backstreets and alleyways. Each one was a black hole that could hide anything. Owen took the first one he came to. Logic suggested that was what they would have done. He pulled the gun from where it nestled in the small of his back and moved into the darkness of the alleyway, creeping quickly but silently. One thing about being dead, you never ran out of breath.

  That was when Owen had seen that he was too late to save the man with the ponytail, and he had taken cover behind the dumpster, overcome by sick fascination as he watched the two women-things devour him, bones and all.

  It was over in no more than five minutes – the girls killed and ate with a bloody choreography that was both practised and obscenely natural – but the worst part came at the end.

  As they finished their feast, the girls’ alien transformation went into reverse as if it had been a reaction to their hungry bloodlust and now, sated, the spikes, scales and crunching jaws were shrinking away, the monsters metamorphosing back into the slight, vulnerable young women Owen had seen walk into the coffee shop. Only now they were on their knees in the filth of the back alley, licking up the blood and last remains of their victim from the dirt-encrusted paving and from his shredded clothing that was now all that remained of the man that had been drinking a two-shot white Americano in Constantine’s just a few minutes earlier. But that wasn’t the worst part.

  Owen watched in fascinated horror as the slighter of the girls held a ragged strip of shirt linen in both hands and licked the blood off it the way people lick a yoghurt lid clean. Then, together, they gathered the dead man’s clothes and moved towards the dumpster with them.

  Owen sank back further into the shadows. For a moment he forgot he was dead and tried to hold his breath.

  They threw the savaged bundle of rags into the bin, and then came the worst part of all. The really bad bit – that was worse than any amount of flesh-tearing, bone crunching and blood-licking. The part that made Owen grateful that he no longer slept, that he would never have dreams that could be haunted by what he heard as the two women held hands and walked off into the darkness.

  Their laughter. Musical and ethereal. And enough to chill a dead man’s bones.

  Owen didn’t move from the darkness from behind the dumpster for maybe a full minute. And when he did, he looked down into his hand and saw that he still held the automatic, fully loaded, not a shot fired.

  Why didn’t you use the gun?

  And he didn’t know what scared him the most.

  That was why he had kept what he had seen to himself. When morning came, he had gone to the Hub, seen Jack, Ianto and Toshiko and he hadn’t said a word. But that night he had returned to Constantine’s and he had waited for the twins to show up. They hadn’t, but Owen knew that they would. Some time. They were hunters and hunters always returned to the site of a good kill. Lions hunted at waterholes, these things stalked bars and coffee shops.

  A couple of days later, the Hub’s computer system picked up a missing persons report on the Cardiff police system. Owen recognised the guy with the ponytail. Jean-Claude Gabin, a French philosophy student. He had been reported missing by his flatmate. The police had so far failed to find any trace of him. Owen doubted that they would. But people went missing all the time, and most of them turned up again safe and sound – even in Cardiff. Jean-Claude Gabin wouldn’t show up on the Torchwood radar unless parts of him showed up in the gutter, and the twins had been too fastidious for that.

  So that night Owen had walked the streets of Cardiff once more until daybreak. And he had spent hours bent over a cooling, and cold, mug of coffee in Constantine’s. But the twins hadn’t shown up again.

  And tonight he was here again.

  For all he knew – or cared – the kid behind the bar could be just putting the same cold Americano in front of him that Owen had been bent over for the last week as he waited.

  All that mattered was that he was there when the twins returned.

  SEVEN

  Goldman and Grace had offices that looked out on the Castle. Jack Harkness stood before the estate agent’s massive window that was filled with colour photographs of the city’s prime housing market – much of it located high up in the sky – and his eyes roved across the interior shots of stylish twenty-first-century accommodation to the looming presence of the Castle reflected in the glass from behind him. Thi
s was where ancient Cardiff met the modern city, in an estate agent’s window. It was kind of fitting, he thought. And then his eyes roved some more, and found his own reflection.

  Not bad.

  Not bad at all, considering all that he had been through over the years.

  And there had been a lot of years for Jack Harkness. He had decided to quit counting them a long time ago. Time hadn’t held the relevance for Jack that it had for most people in a very long… well, time.

  It was one of the first things you revised your opinion on when you were a Time Agent, and your work took you across galaxies and aeons, and it was a tough job to work out which was the cooler.

  Eventually, however, he had wound up in London in 1941. The Blitz. He and the Time Agency had had a parting of the ways by then, and Jack was more of a lone operator doing what he had always done best – taking care of himself. And that had been when he had met the man that was going to change his life. And, pretty soon after, the concept of time and the point of counting it in years, even centuries was going to come pretty low among Jack’s priorities.

  Jack had decided that when you couldn’t die, it was best not to keep count of the years. For one thing, there was no need: the counting of time was, after all, just a measurement of mortality. For another thing, it was the best way of keeping sane.

  So Jack didn’t worry about the passing years, he just tried to get on with enjoying immortality.

  ‘If you’ve finished admiring yourself, shall we go in now?’

  The voice lanced through Jack’s thoughts. And he saw himself smile in the window, the pictures of modern Cardiff before him, the ancient Castle behind him, and Gwen Cooper – no, Williams – beside him. He reminded himself that he was going to have to get used to that new second name. Marriage, he thought, was good for her. She was lovelier than ever.

  ‘You know,’ he told her, ‘Rhys is a lucky man, Mrs Williams.’

  Gwen froze and stared at him. She blinked, then took out her mobile phone, her gaze never leaving his.

  ‘Rhys? Hi… No, everything’s… Yeah, later… Yeah, lovely… No, it’s… Look, Rhys, will you stop a minute? Thanks. It’s just…’ She paused, took a breath. ‘It’s just I’ve been thinking, love, and I’ve decided I’ll be keeping my own name. You know, for work and that. It’s not that I… What?’

  She listened for a moment, then broke out in a huge grin.

  ‘I love you, Rhys Williams.’ She switched off her phone.

  ‘What’d he say?’ Jack asked.

  ‘He said, “Yeah, I know that, love.”’ Gwen beamed back at Jack.

  And maybe that was what Jack needed. Confirmation that she was happy, that she knew she had done the right thing a little over two weeks ago.

  Jack smiled. ‘Let’s go see what they’ve got to say about your disappearing estate agent, PC Cooper,’ he said, and he opened the glass door for her to go into the showroom ahead of him.

  Gwen swept into the front office of Goldman and Grace, Jack close behind her, and together they took the place in. Nothing extraordinary. Jack had lived in the Hub for a long time, and they didn’t have estate agents where he came from in the fifty-first century, so he didn’t have a whole lot of experience on which to judge, but he guessed this was par for the course. Good photographs, well presented; relevant details, clearly arranged. The same went for the staff: well presented and clearly arranged. And it didn’t take long for one of them to settle on the new arrivals – not like a bird of prey, more like a blackbird delicately probing for nourishment.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the blackbird enquired.

  It was a tall woman in her late forties, dressed elegantly. She was smiling, and it was almost convincing. But not quite.

  Jack let Gwen open the business. She was the cop, after all.

  Gwen gave the blackbird her own smile. ‘Hi. What’s your name?’

  The blackbird’s smile faltered a little. People usually told her they were looking for two or three bedrooms, or somewhere with a garden, they didn’t ask her name.

  ‘Jan,’ the woman said.

  ‘Well, Jan, we’re making enquiries about a colleague of yours. Brian Shaw.’

  Gwen saw the defences go up around Jan like the USS Enterprise on red alert.

  ‘What sort of enquiries. Who are you?’

  Jack saw one of the SkyPoint brochures and started flicking through it. He made it look like idle curiosity. At the same time he said, ‘Is he about?’

  ‘It’s his day off,’ she said.

  ‘You sure about that?’ he asked.

  ‘Look, what is this? If you’re the police I’d like to see some ID.’

  But Jack hadn’t finished. ‘You see, the way we hear it, he’s disappeared.’

  ‘I really don’t know what you think you’re playing at, but if you don’t leave I’m going to call the police.’ And Jan picked up the closest phone to prove she meant business.

  The phone was on the desk of a guy of about twenty. He had ginger hair, and a razor nick on his neck. There was a corresponding tiny smear of blood on his collar, which Gwen judged was a size too big for him. The office junior, she guessed. And she caught his eye for a moment. She read the anxiety there.

  ‘Call the police if you like, Jan,’ Jack told her. ‘When you do, be sure to mention the word Torchwood. They’ll appreciate it. It’ll save them a wasted journey.’

  Jan was out of her depth. Luckily, she had a lifeguard. He came in a pinstriped suit and had silver whiskers and his name was Grace.

  ‘I’ll handle this, Jan.’

  Jack and Gwen turned to see the pinstriped man in the doorway of a back office. As they did so, he went into smiling mode. With him, it went with an offered manicured hand.

  ‘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 the
mselves 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?’