‘Maybe it’s the milkman come to sign us up,’ Owen theorised with a frown. He headed for the door. ‘What do you like on your cornflakes in a morning?’
He opened the door to a tall woman with cascading blonde hair in a white dress. If she’d had wings coming off her shoulder blades, he’d have believed in angels. Beside her stood an economy copy. Same golden hair, same finely sculpted cheekbones, same blue-green eyes. Just in jeans and a T-shirt with a kitten face on it.
The little girl smiled up at Owen. ‘Hello, I’m Alison. What’s your name?’
Kids were about as alien as it got for Owen. Some guys couldn’t talk to women. He never had a problem there. But kids…
The mother spoke before he had to. ‘I’m Wendy, this is Alison. Sorry, my daughter always likes to get in first.’
‘What did you do to your hand?’
Alison had noticed Owen’s bandaged fingers.
‘I had an accident,’ he told her.
Behind him, he felt Toshiko come to the door. He felt her hand slip around his waist, the way a wife might squeeze her husband’s waist when she found him at the door talking to a cute blonde stranger.
‘Hello?’ she smiled.
‘Wendy Lloyd. This is my daughter Alison. We live just there,’ she said, indicating the half-open door across the passageway. Number forty-four.
‘Just wanted to welcome you to the block.’
Toshiko leaned forward to shake Wendy’s hand. ‘Toshiko,’ she said. ‘And Owen.’
‘Hi,’ said Owen.
Toshiko looked down at the little girl and tugged playfully on her kitten-face T-shirt. ‘I like your kitty cat.’
‘Mummy says I can have a real one when I’m six.’
‘And how old are you now?’ Toshiko asked.
‘Five and three-quarters.’
‘Not long to wait then,’ said Toshiko.
See, thought Owen, that’s what he couldn’t do – find something to talk about with kids. Largely because all you could talk to them about was kitty cats and puppy dogs and dolls and toy cars. And, quite frankly, he didn’t give a shit.
Toshiko straightened up and asked Wendy if she and Alison wanted to come in. Owen, she said, had just put some coffee on. Maybe Wendy caught the look of horror that flashed across Owen’s face.
‘No, it’s all right, you’re probably up to your necks in packing cases. I know what it’s like on moving-in day. But if you want, why not come over later for dinner? You’ll probably be too tired to cook, and we’re just sending out for an Indian. You can meet my husband, and I can bring you up to speed on all the SkyPoint gossip.’
Owen was forming a polite decline when Toshiko said they would love to.
Wendy’s smile shone, and Owen had another vision of angels.
‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘Come round about seven and we’ll dig out the take-away menu.’
‘See you then,’ said Toshiko.
And Wendy led Alison away by the hand. The little girl was still watching them as Wendy closed the door of their apartment behind them.
Toshiko slipped back through their door. ‘At least the neighbours seem nice.’
Owen followed her back into the apartment and kicked the door shut with his heel. The Dave Brubeck Quartet had moved on to ‘Cassandra’. Maybe that would have chilled out his mum and dad, but right now it didn’t do anything for him.
‘What are you playing at, Tosh?’
She looked back at him, genuinely puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Going around the neighbours for dinner. Look, this isn’t for real, you know. Whatever’s going on inside your head, Tosh, this isn’t us living happily ever after. I’m here to find out what’s making people disappear around here, not to fulfil some warped fantasy of yours.’
Toshiko’s eyes burned with a moist rage. ‘Is that what you think?’
‘Oh, come on, Tosh. This is your dream come true.’
‘Actually, Owen, no it isn’t! This is nothing like my dream come true!’
She couldn’t look at him any more. She crossed to the window, stared out across the water and wished she could throw herself into it.
Owen stood still, watching her. He could see her trembling with pent-up rage. He felt like an idiot. How the hell could this be anyone’s idea of a dream come true – pretending you were married
Still staring out of the window, determined to keep at least some control of her emotions, Toshiko said, ‘I know what we’re doing here, Owen. It’s my job, too. And that’s all I’ve got, my job.
‘But the instruments have drawn a blank. There’s not the first sign of Rift activity. And that means the only way we’re going to find anything out is from the people that live here. I’m sorry if that means we have to make it look like we love each other, but believe me, Owen, that is no dream-come-true for me. It doesn’t even come close.’
Owen stood at the window and looked out over the Bay with her. He wanted to touch her, wanted to tell her that he was a prick, and that he was sorry. But he thought she would tell him to shove it, and he didn’t blame her.
Instead he said, ‘I suppose we should count that as our first marital.’
TEN
Toshiko didn’t want Owen to think a joke was going to get him off the hook just like that.
With barely a word she had gone into the bedroom and grabbed the messenger bag that carried her equipment then told him she was going to take a look around as she went through the front door.
‘I’m getting on with the job,’ she said as the door closed.
It didn’t hit her until she got into the elevator that she was following the ritual of domestic politics she had grown up watching her mother employ on her dad.
Her mother had never actually tutored her in the fine art of male-female power games, but it was the sort of thing she would have said. And the young Toshiko had seen her employ the gambit so many times, she had come to understand its mechanics the way a lion cub learns to hunt.
Toshiko rode the elevator down to the basement. As long as she was playing sexual politics with Owen, she might as well get on with what she had told him she was doing, she thought. When she and Jack had snuck into SkyPoint before, she had been unable to pick up any Rift activity, but she had been wondering if it was possible that the building itself was somehow masking the energies that would normally mark its presence. She didn’t have the first idea how that could be the case, but she figured that the best place to look for a clear trace was at the building’s foundation.
So, the basement.
It wasn’t part of the regular itinerary for residents using the elevator – access to the basement was through a button with a key that Toshiko guessed would be carried by the building’s maintenance people. But it was going to be a pretty special key that stopped Toshiko Sato going where she wanted.
A few seconds later, the elevator doors opened in the SkyPoint basement.
She had pulled up the SkyPoint blueprints in the Hub before Jack and she had made that first visit. She now had them on the screen of her hand-held computer. The basement was below SkyPoint’s underground car park, and that put her now at twelve metres below the surface. She shivered. It was cold down here. Nothing all that strange
