by Phil Ford
Shaw led them across the reception area and into the waiting mirror-panelled elevator. He was maybe thirty-five, with sandy, swept-back hair that had started to thin at the front. He wore a dark suit over a white shirt that gleamed like a soap-powder ad, and a tie sprinkled with tiny clowns. When Gwen caught a glimpse of his cufflinks there were clowns there, too. It looked like the sort of birthday combo a girlfriend might buy her fella if he had a quirky thing about guys with red noses and baggy trousers. Brian Shaw may have been an estate agent, but maybe he was a nice guy, after all, she thought.
The elevator took them up to the tenth floor and the doors slid open with a ping that was so discreet, it could have been the sound of a pin dropping. Smiling, Brian Shaw led them out into a passageway lit with frosted-glass uplighters.
‘There are twenty-five floors. A hundred and twenty-five apartments in all,’ Shaw explained as he led them along the passageway to a black door. ‘Two-bedroom and three-bedroom, all en suite.’ The door was marked thirty-two in small unobtrusive brushed steel lettering. There were no digits on the doors, Gwen noticed; figures were maybe too gauche for SkyPoint’s understated residents.
‘Fully equipped kitchens, appointed to the highest standard,’ Shaw continued as he unlocked the door with an electronic key. ‘And as you see, security here is both discreet and practically unbreachable.’ And that was a comfort with a man on the top floor who, according to one story, deep-fried a man’s bollocks while he was still attached to them. ‘I think you’re going to be quite impressed,’ said the estate agent, and he led them into the apartment.
Rhys stepped aside with a smile and motioned for Gwen to go first. And there really was no way she could argue with Brian Shaw – she was definitely impressed. The door led directly into a massive open-plan lounge-kitchen-diner (whatever the proper estate agent speak was for that), but it wasn’t the room that took her breath away – it was the Bay that lay beyond it.
The sun was now little more than a golden crest on the horizon, the sky had turned a deep, rich scarlet, and the water sparkled beneath it like a mirror scattered with jewels. Around it, the waterside development of the city gathered, cast in partial silhouette by the evening light, like an audience for the setting sun.
She felt Rhys beside her. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.
She wanted to tell him that the spectacle made no difference – there was no way they were moving. Instead she breathed, ‘It’s beautiful.’
Behind them, Brian Shaw grinned. ‘And that’s only the view. Wait till you take a look around the apartment.’
‘Yeah, right, mate,’ said Rhys, eager as a kid with a sled on a snow-swept Saturday. ‘Show us everything.’
And Brian Shaw went into demonstrator mode. The lounge – which would easily accommodate the entirety of Gwen’s old flat – was ready-wired with a wall-mounted TV screen that doubled as a mirror and looked like you could organise a drive-in picture show around it. When Brian fired it up, the Hi-Def picture blazed, and the sound boomed from hidden speakers all around the room. Rhys made a note: the beach landing in Saving Private Ryan was going to be mega on this baby. The speakers were also hooked into a sound system that emerged from the wall at the touch of a remote-control button (and the same remote operated the TV, the powered window blinds, the dimming lights, and probably the toilet flush, for all Rhys knew).
The kitchen was no less high-tech and stylish, all black granite and chrome with halogen lights over the work surfaces that somehow knew where you were and intensified intelligently to light your chopping, mixing, or whatever else you got up to on the kitchen counters. (And sometimes Rhys and Gwen got up to stuff that wasn’t strictly speaking culinary.) The fridge was connected to the internet and could order the groceries for you, the eco-friendly washing machine measured the water it used and fed itself with detergent. The dishwasher did everything but load itself.
You got used to high-tech gear when you worked for Torchwood – it had spent a century scavenging alien technology and developing it for its own needs – but Gwen’s idea of a cutting-edge kitchen gadget was a shopping-channel gizmo for dicing onions. She wondered if Jack had maybe got some backdoor deal with a kitchenware developer manufacturing alien food-blending technology.
Then the estate agent led them through into the master bedroom. In the room they shared at the moment there was just about enough space for a double bed and one wardrobe with a rail that sagged with clothes. Gwen had a small dressing table, but she had to sit on the side of the bed to use it as there was no room for a stool. But here the superking bed was the width of a Cadillac and there was space to park another one either side. There wasn’t a wardrobe – there was a dressing room.
‘Didn’t you say you always wanted a dressing room?’ Rhys grinned.
Gwen gave him a look. Yes, she’d always wanted a dressing room and this place was fantastic – but, come on! There was still no way they could afford to live here. Unless maybe she started selling alien tech to the blender people.
Meanwhile, Brian Shaw was on the move again, sliding back a dark, frosted-glass door. ‘Through here we have the en suite wetroom, furnished in grey slate and black granite.’
The estate agent walked into the bathroom, and Gwen caught Rhys’s sleeve as he went to follow him.
‘This is madness, Rhys,’ she whispered. ‘It’s beautiful, yes, I know. But we just can’t afford any of this. We’re just wasting this man’s time.’
Rhys looked into her eyes, touched her cheek. ‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘Maybe not now. But one day. Soon. You and me, this is what we want, isn’t it? The best we can get.’
Gwen smiled at him and squeezed his hand. ‘I’ve already got that.’
He winked at her. ‘Come on. Let’s go see the granite lavvy.’
Gwen burst out laughing and Rhys led her through the frosted-glass door.
They took it in. It was – as the estate agent had said – all grey slate and black granite, with stark white fittings and chrome taps.
But there was no sign of Brian Shaw.
Rhys glanced back over his shoulder, like there was any chance at all of Shaw having slipped past him unseen. ‘Where did he go?’
The logical mechanics of Gwen’s mind, the cerebral technology that refused to give in despite all that she had seen after the last year or so, shifted a gear. ‘He must have come out when we were talking.’
And she was already out of the wetroom, calling out for the estate agent. ‘Mr Shaw?’
But there was no answering call.
Gwen swept through the flat quickly. The apartment was big, but it wasn’t that big. And Brian Shaw wasn’t in it.
She found Rhys still in the wetroom. She wasn’t sure if he was really considering the possibility that Brian Shaw had vanished down the plughole.
‘He’s not here,’ she said.
‘He must be somewhere. He walked in here not twenty seconds ahead of us. There’s no window.’
Her logic-gearing did another shift. Given that this was Cardiff, and that Cardiff was built on a tear in time and space that sometimes warped what most people took for reality, sometimes the logical explanation for the inexplicable came down to two words…
‘The Rift,’ she said.
Rhys looked at her, shook his head. ‘Oh, no. Not here?’
‘So you explain it to me, Rhys. You tell me how Brian Shaw walked into the bathroom and disappeared without so much as a flush.’
He couldn’t.
She kissed him gently.
‘What was that for?’
‘I’m sorry, Rhys. I’m going to have to go back to work.’
THREE
Toshiko Sato loved equations the way that other people loved poetry.
Those people, the poetry lovers – the people that most others probably thought of as normal – found truth and emotional support in the structure of words, the rhythm and the cadence of their sounds. Toshiko had never fully trusted words. They were so easy to misinterpret,
or to be misused. A lot of people could be very clever with words. And they used them to break your heart. Not so many were quite that clever with numbers, few really understood them beyond their significance on a bank statement, and fewer still appreciated their simple, truthful beauty in the way that Toshiko Sato did. Because, at the end of the day, everything came down to numbers, from the physics of an atomic bomb to the shape of an autumn leaf swept away on the wind. Everything came down to mathematics. It was that kind of vision that made Toshiko special. It was also, she knew, what made her a freak.
The fact that she was in love with a dead man who wouldn’t quit walking and talking was par for the course.
Superfreak!
She looked up from the figures on her computer screen – calculations on Rift energy fluctuations – and watched Owen bound up the steel staircase to tend his collection of alien plants. He didn’t move badly for a man who had had his heart smashed to a pulp by a .44 calibre bullet just a couple of months earlier. He still had the hole in his chest; like the finger that he had purposefully broken before her one night in a vicious black mood, it would never heal. One morning, he had turned up in the Hub with flowers poking out of the wound and told everyone he thought Torchwood’s subterranean base needed cheering up. Being dead hadn’t killed Owen’s sense of humour. Or perhaps, like her numbers, it was just a way to cope.
Toshiko had been in love with Owen Harper for two years, since he had joined Torchwood. Then he had been a man scarred by the loss of his fiancée to an alien brain parasite who had tried to lose himself in booze and a nightly succession of anonymous club-shags. But a part of her believed that she had come to love him even more since the bullet from that automatic had ripped his chest apart.
Superfreak!
And the big circular airlock door rolled aside. And Toshiko was grateful for the interruption to her thoughts.
Gwen was back.
‘I thought you’d gone home,’ Toshiko called.
Gwen was unique within Torchwood – she had a home and a life to go to. Which was why Toshiko and Owen were still at the Hub. And Jack and Ianto were still around, somewhere, doing something – albeit probably more recreational.
Gwen was closing on Toshiko, urgent. ‘I need you to look for Rift activity in the Bay area.’
Owen stuck his head over the railings above, a faintly luminous blue-green plant in one hand, and a small plastic watering can in the other. ‘Something cracking off?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
Gwen got Toshiko to check the coordinates for the SkyPoint location. She drew a blank.
‘Nothing,’ Toshiko said. ‘No records of Rift activity. Nothing at all.’
Gwen frowned.
‘Hey, watch that. You’ll get lines.’
The voice sounded American. Whether or not Jack Harkness was American was something else. They all knew that wasn’t his name. The real Jack Harkness had died in an aeroplane over England in 1941. Their Jack – this Jack – had never felt any compulsion to tell them his real name; he said it didn’t matter. The man that went by the name he once used belonged to another time, and no longer existed.
The mysteries that surrounded Jack Harkness were impenetrable but, as they had come to learn, unimportant. What mattered was that Jack – wherever he was from, whoever he really was – would always be there for them.
Until he disappeared again. And even then, he would be back.
But Jack wasn’t going anywhere right now. He wanted to know what had broken Gwen away from her new husband so quickly and brought her back to the Hub. He was buttoning the last couple of buttons on his blue service shirt as he asked and, as Gwen quickly ran through events at SkyPoint, she saw Ianto Jones appear. He was as discreet as the tailored suit on his back, and the only hint of any connection between Jack’s buttons and Ianto Jones was the latter’s momentary adjustment of his tie as he glanced into the reflective surface of an inactive monitor.
Jack heard Gwen out without a word, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Just vanished?’
‘All but in front of my eyes,’ Gwen confirmed.
‘But according to my instruments, there’s no indication of Rift activity in that area,’ Toshiko said.
‘But estate agents don’t just vanish into thin air,’ Ianto observed. ‘We’re just not that lucky.’
Owen was sitting on the steel steps that led to his alien hydroponics. ‘But if there’s no sign of Rift activity...?’
‘I know,’ Jack smiled. ‘Intriguing, isn’t it?’ He glanced at his watch, then at Toshiko. ‘You want to go flat-hunting?’
‘I’ll get my gear,’ she said.
And Ianto was already holding Jack’s old RAF greatcoat for him as he shrugged it on.
‘I’m coming, too,’ said Gwen.
But Jack shook his head. ‘No you’re not. First day back to work after your honeymoon? You’re going back home to Rhys, cook him dinner or go buy fish and chips. Watch TV. Make-believe life is ordinary just once more. For his sake.’
Gwen thought about arguing, and then thought about Rhys. Life was never going to be ordinary, but Jack was right, she owed it to Rhys to pretend it was. If only tonight.
‘You ready?’ Jack asked Toshiko as she pulled a messenger bag of Rift and alien-hunting tech in place over her shoulder.
‘Ready.’
‘It’s apartment thirty-two,’ Gwen called after Jack and Toshiko as they headed towards the airlock. ‘Tenth floor.’
‘Thirty-two. Tenth floor,’ Jack called back without looking, and the huge circular door rolled back into place.
It was only then that she wondered whether she should have mentioned the border-line psychopath that lived on the top floor. But she decided that Jack had handled worse things than Besnik Lucca.
FOUR
The crisp white linen shirt that Besnik Lucca had been wearing earlier that evening when he had left SkyPoint was no longer white.
No amount of laundering was going to fix it.
Arterial blood didn’t come out. He supposed that was in the nature of it. Arterial blood wasn’t supposed to come out. But the edge of a razor blade sliced across each thigh of a double-crossing kid hung upside down like a pig on a hook will bring it out, all right. Especially on the first cut, when the blood pressure is still high. That was the gush that had caught him on the chest – and Lucca hadn’t been the one doing the cutting. Lucca had a man who was good with blades to slice flesh for him. It was he who appreciated that hanging a man upside down before you cut the femoral artery meant that death took that much longer. And Lucca appreciated that kind of expertise, especially when it came to dealing with low-life scum at the bottom end of his organisation who entertained dreams of ripping off their boss. The exsanguinated eighteen-year-old’s corpse would serve as a reminder to those other foot soldiers of their position in life. It was worth one spoiled shirt. Lucca was only thankful that he had removed his Armani jacket to personally soften the kid up a little before the blade man had practised his craft.
Lucca left the kid strung up, sobbing and dying, and wishing to God that he had never even thought of cutting flour into his boss’s coke and cutting him out of the extra profit. As he left, despite the ruined shirt, Lucca was smiling.
Fifteen minutes later, Lucca had crossed the city and was sliding his black Porsche into the underground parking bay reserved for him beneath SkyPoint. He had listened to Wagner as he drove. Lucca loved Wagner and, almost 200 years apart, they had both had their reasons for going under the wire to escape Latvia so he felt they shared a kindredship.
The parking bay was alongside the apartment block’s service elevator that would take Lucca directly to his floor. No one would see the blood on his shirt. It was the very reason he had specified this parking bay as his own when he put money into the SkyPoint project.
By the time he had tapped the entrance code into the security keypad and stepped into the elevator, he had forgotten the name of the kid he had left bleeding to death o
n the other side of town.
As the heavy steel doors of the service elevator closed on Lucca, the only witness to his arrival was a hidden security camera, but that didn’t worry him. The only place those pictures were going was a panel of monitors in his own apartment. Besnik Lucca was forty-two years old, and he planned to see at least as many years again – and he knew the only way to do that was to be tough, and to be careful. And that was why he had invested so much money into SkyPoint: it wasn’t just an apartment block rising like any other on Cardiff’s crowded skyline – it was Besnik Lucca’s fortress.
Lucca left the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor and keyed another code into another security pad, then pushed the door open into his penthouse. Lights automatically activated as he stepped across the threshold. That meant that no one had been moving around in there, and that meant that Carmen was still on the bed where he had left her. There was no chance that she had dressed and gone out; he hadn’t given her the code that would allow her through the door. She didn’t go anywhere unless he said so. And in the two weeks since he had brought her back to the apartment, the thought of going anywhere had never seemed to cross her mind. But heroin was like that. You could get a taste for it pretty fast.
He didn’t bother to look in on the girl. He walked straight past her door and into his own bedroom. The city and the Bay lay at his feet, dark now but sparkling with the lights of bars and restaurants, and other apartments. He stripped off and enjoyed the reflected image of himself, a naked god astride the city below, then stepped into the shower and purged himself of the stink of the young drug dealer’s death.
There was a TV screen built into the marble of the shower wall and a waterproof remote hung alongside the soaps and lotions Lucca kept beside the shower controls. He used it as the shower water beat down on him like a warm tropical storm, and the screen lit up with footage from the SkyPoint lobby.
A time code at the bottom of the screen told him he was watching something from mid-afternoon when nothing was really happening down there, apart from the blonde girl from the estate agency admiring her reflection in one of the smoked windows. He smiled as she adjusted her neckline for a fraction more exposure. The girl had no idea about Lucca’s hidden surveillance network. No one but Lucca and the people who had installed it did. If anyone ever came to get him – some other company intent on his turf, or someone from the old country that was still looking for his head; maybe even the cops – then Lucca would see them coming, and he’d be ready. And he was prepared, even if they were clever and struck from within. It wasn’t just the public areas that he’d had rigged; the apartments were all wired, too. Which offered the kind of specialised programming you didn’t get with conventional cable, even premium rate.