smashed against the zookeeper. She plunged into the low earth moat around the zebra enclosure.
Ianto scurried quickly and quietly to help her. The woman was dazed and confused. He pulled her bodily up the embankment. Further along from where she had fallen, Ianto could see an earlier human victim of the Brakkanee. The white hair and the crumpled beige coat meant it could only be Walter. His wife knelt awkwardly beside him, sobbing, her hand still clutching his as he lay splayed out on the dry earth.
The creature had sensed movement below, and swung its two dreadful heads in small arcs as it attempted to pinpoint Ianto’s position. Jack had seen this, and threw himself forward, yelling wildly. The two heads flicked immediately in his direction.
The Brakkanee dipped one head and seized him by the left leg. Jack was snatched into the air, shaken like a chew toy, and flung aside. He tumbled down the chain-link fence and crumpled in a heap, his leg mangled beneath him. The other alien head cocked as it considered this new victim.
A grey-green mist began to envelop the Brakkanee. During the commotion, the Achenbrite men had managed to remove equipment from their suitcases and erect tripod-mounted rifles. These weapons had balloon-shaped barrels, and sprayed a fizzing cloud of energy that wrapped itself around the contours of the alien. The Brakkanee shivered, shimmered, and began to shrink. Within a minute, it was small enough for one of the Achenbrite men to cover it with his suitcase, then snap it securely shut with the alien trapped inside.
Jack lay motionless by the fence. Ianto’s instinct was to run to him, but he overcame the urge. Jack would be fine. There were other priorities.
The Achenbrite men were storing pieces of equipment back in their cases, and barking orders to each other. Ianto walked stealthily back to the tiger enclosure while they bickered: ‘You left
The ginger guy looked surprisingly cowed for a big bloke. He was coming this way. Ianto had to get the device unburied before he got here.
The Achenbrite man saw what he was doing. ‘No!’ he yelled. ‘Stop that!’
Ianto managed to scrape the mud away from the edge of the alien tech. He prised it loose, pulled it free.
‘Put it down!’ bellowed the other man, pounding towards him. The giant guy was practically on top of Ianto now. ‘The defence system’s still active!’
The alien device scorched in Ianto’s hand. There was a fiery blast of heat and light, and everything went white, whiter, whitest. And faded away to silent black.
ELEVEN
Rhys followed the directions they got from the traumatised shopkeeper. He steered the Vectra straight through town, negotiating the Saturday morning traffic. Progress was slow, and he annoyed Gwen by cracking open a can of Coke he’d found in the glove compartment and slurping it noisily.
‘What’s the point of having cup holders if I never use them, eh?’
They were headed to an address in Rhiwbina, a suburban area of North Cardiff near to the golf course. Gwen called Toshiko, who was already back at the Hub. They’d managed to find Gareth’s surname from the electoral roll for his address. Toshiko had pulled up the photos from Gareth Portland’s university matriculation card and passport, and sent those to Gwen’s PDA. A solemn boy, with long hair and high cheekbones, stared back at her with insolent green eyes.
Throughout the remainder of the journey, Gwen tapped her fingers irritably on her knees at every delay. A young mum wrestling a buggy across a pelican crossing. A kid on a bike steering from pavement to pavement across a T-junction without checking for cars.
A fire engine wailed past them, traffic falling away for it in a slowly rippling wave. Rhys pulled over to let the emergency vehicle through. Gwen tutted, but then apologised.
‘I haven’t got blue lights on this thing,’ Rhys grumbled.
‘Not fitted as standard on our company vehicles.’
Gwen ached for the device that Toshiko had installed in the SUV that would change traffic lights to green as they approached. ‘Should have got the Astra when we had the choice,’ she grumbled. ‘Nippier about town in the rush. Easier to park, and all,’ she added as they went past a space that was just too small to reverse into.
After a few minutes fiddling around with the Cardiff A-Z, Rhys parked around the corner from their destination.
‘You’re on a double yellow,’ Gwen noted.
Rhys laughed at her as he slammed his car door. ‘When did Torchwood worry about parking tickets?’
Gwen gave him her ‘you’ll-be-sorry’ face and said: ‘It would be abusing my position to get a ticket cancelled for Harwood’s Haulage.’ She crossed the street, and laughed at his momentary hesitation before he jogged to catch up. ‘Had you going there,’ she smiled.
Gareth’s house was set back from the road, a large Victorian redbrick building with wide bay windows. A thick twist of dark smoke spiralled out of its tall, highly decorated rubbed brick chimneys.
Gwen’s first assessment was that it would be difficult to approach the building covertly because of the noise they’d inevitably make over the gravel driveway. Once they got to the main gate, however, the need for stealth evaporated. There were tyre grooves, deep and wide in the pale gravel, where a fire engine had swung in off the road and charged towards the house. That smoke wasn’t coming from the chimneys – the upper floor of the house was alight. The roof had slumped and collapsed like melted wax on the far side, bringing down a couple of bedrooms with it. The crew rolled up the corrugated side of their fire appliance and attached thick hoses.
‘It’s a day for this kind of thing, isn’t it?’ observed Rhys.
Flakes of paper and ash were lifted from the fire into the air, and fluttered down into the driveway. Rhys showed a couple of half-burned examples to Gwen. ‘We found the right place.’ The charred fragments were still recognisable as MonstaQuest cards. ‘Just got here a bit late, eh?’
‘I wonder if he printed and packaged them in the house?’ pondered Gwen. She looked around, and spotted a dilapidated wood-framed garage that stood separate from the house against the tall pine hedge. ‘Maybe there’s more stored over there?’
A small group of nosy locals had already gathered to gawp at proceedings. Gwen approached them and listened in.
‘Hell of a row,’ said a woman in a pink dressing gown and slippers, who was holding court among her neighbours. She was clearly not the type to miss out on a local tragedy. Her bedraggled hair was half-fixed with curlers, like an impromptu crown. ‘They say that she’s still in there. She’ll be burnt to a crisp by now.’ This last observation was delivered with a mixture of horror and relish.
‘Who’s that then, Mrs Stackpole?’ asked a mousy woman in the group.
Mrs Stackpole tilted her head regally towards her inquisitor. ‘His girlfriend,’ she explained condescendingly. ‘The mother never liked her, apparently.’ Her voice dropped as though she was imparting a top secret. ‘Ideas above her station. Maybe that’s what the row was about. Heard it from my bathroom window, when I was doing my hair.’
‘Leaning out of your bathroom window, more like.’
‘It overlooks the far side of the house,’ retorted Mrs Stackpole. ‘Can I help it if there’s shrieking and banging and Lord knows what other commotion? They were shouting fit to raise the roof, I shouldn’t wonder. And blow me down, if the roof doesn’t actually fall in! I thought it was an explosion.’
‘That’d be the bolt of lightning,’ piped up a thin woman in a tartan coat.
Mrs Stackpole didn’t appreciate the interruption. ‘Lightning indeed, Mary. There’s not a cloud in the sky.’
‘I saw it myself, from across the way,’ insisted Mary.
Mrs Stackpole pouted in disbelief. ‘Well,
Gwen favoured her with a big smile. ‘I was looking for Gareth.’
Mrs Stackpole set her mouth in a grim line of apology. ‘I’m sorry, my love. He and his girlfriend were in the
