Jack had listened patiently to Owen’s lecture. Now he asked, ‘Have you got a better idea?’
Owen shook his head. ‘A shapeshifting wall-walker. Shit.’
‘Sounds like that’s where we came in.’ Jack grinned.
‘Shapeshifting wall-walker shit.’
But Toshiko wasn’t in the mood for jokes. ‘That means it could be anyone living at SkyPoint.’
‘It also means we can’t evacuate the building to deal with this,’ said Gwen. ‘If what we’re after really is one of the residents, then we’d be just letting them out through the front door.’
‘Yeah,’ said Owen. ‘And the neighbours have invited us round for dinner. Better just hope we’re not it.’
FOURTEEN
Mr and Mrs Harper went out for dinner that night at just after seven, as they had arranged.
They had got back from the Hub around six-thirty. Owen said he needed a shower. His ability to smell things had been lessened by his no longer being able to breathe, but the receptors in his nose still worked, and his brain was still analysing the signals they picked up, so he was still vaguely aware of the stink of the duct clinging to him. Toshiko said she needed one, too. She took the en suite off the bedroom and Owen made use of the shower in the guest bedroom, warning her not to be long. It had been a long time since Owen had shared an apartment with another woman – not since Katie, the woman he had wanted to marry – but he remembered how long they could take to get ready.
Although they had two bedrooms, they had decided to keep all their clothes in the master bedroom’s walk-in closet. A cleaning service for the apartment came as part of the SkyPoint deal and their clothes hanging in separate rooms might have raised eyebrows and possibly suspicions elsewhere in the building. The bed itself was not an issue as Owen wouldn’t be sleeping anywhere.
Five minutes later, Owen was showered. Then he remembered that his clothes were across the apartment in the other room. He considered putting on the clothes he had shed onto the bathroom floor – his body no longer sweated and the clothes would have been fine, had he not been crawling around in the building’s ducting system a couple of hours earlier. Cursing, he wrapped a towel around his middle and padded towards the master bedroom.
He could hear the shower still running, and slipped quickly through the sliding door into the clothes-lined dressing room.
And found Toshiko in there, naked.
She gasped and pulled the outfit she had been considering across her body.
Owen spun around, putting his back to her. ‘Sorry.’
‘You could have knocked,’ she said.
‘I thought you were still in the shower. It’s still running.’
‘Don’t you leave the shower running after you get out, to wash it down?’
‘No.’
‘I wouldn’t want to take a shower at your place, Owen.’
Behind him he could hear the rustle of fabric as naked Toshiko hurriedly got less naked. Trouble was, it was the naked Toshiko that he was going to be seeing all night. And, Christ, what he wouldn’t do for an erection right now.
She pressed past him in the doorway. She was wearing a satin blouse that clung to her like a silvery membranous skin and a dark skirt that hugged her shape. He only remembered seeing her in a skirt once before – that had been Gwen’s wedding: she had looked good then; she looked good now. Her hair was still wet. He felt an urge to push his fingers through it.
She was looking for a hairbrush among the things that she hadn’t yet unpacked – the search helped cover her embarrassment. When she looked up he was still watching her. She thought that he probably didn’t realise that he was staring. There were still droplets of water glowing on his skin under the bedroom’s recessed halogen lights.
She looked away abruptly.
‘Sorry,’ Owen repeated, and sounded like a schoolboy caught thinking things he shouldn’t have. ‘I’ll get some clothes.’
And he disappeared into the dressing area, closing the door after him.
Toshiko found the hairbrush and dragged it through her wet hair and thought about Owen standing in her bedroom, wet and all but naked. There hadn’t been many men in her bedroom like that. There hadn’t been many men, full stop. She had never been particularly good at building that kind of relationship. The lovers in her life could be counted on one hand; just a couple of fingers, if one-night stands didn’t count – and she knew that they didn’t. That wasn’t love, it was just lust, no matter how they tried to dress it up. And lust was OK, it was passionate and it took you some place that was all exploding physical sensation, and you could lose yourself there for a while. But Toshiko wanted love. As she’d looked at Owen standing all but naked in her room, she had tried not to look at the hole that had been blown in his chest by Aaron Copley’s gun, but her eyes were drawn to it as inevitably as the droplets of shower water on Owen’s shoulders travelled over his biceps and down his arms. The bullet hole was dark, ringed by livid ragged flesh. And as she looked at it she knew that she might probably love Owen until the day she died, but he could never love her.
She realised that she was crying when she heard the dressing-room door open, and she quickly wiped the tears away. She heard Owen clear his throat, uncharacteristically nervous.
‘How do I look?’ he asked.
Toshiko turned to look at him. ‘You look fine.’
‘Don’t want to let the missus down,’ he shrugged and gave her a smile.
Toshiko felt a crack in her heart deepen a little more.
‘You won’t,’ she said, and told him she wouldn’t be long. Owen nodded, hoping they were over the awkwardness, and told her he would be waiting in the lounge.
A few minutes later they were together outside Wendy and Ewan Lloyd’s apartment, the secrets of their sham marriage hidden from view.
‘Come on in! Come on!’
Wendy had appeared at the door the second time Owen pushed the bell. She had tied back all that blonde hair and was wearing jeans now and a white shirt with the sleeves turned back. She was the kind of woman you could take anywhere dressed like that. Toshiko thought she would probably have made sackcloth look classy. And she wondered if Wendy Lloyd was also a shapeshifting wall-walker that could render you to a pulp of cellular matter.
‘Come on,’ Wendy said again, as she opened the door wide on the apartment beyond. Toshiko and Owen saw that they weren’t the only guests.
‘I thought we’d make a party of it,’ Wendy explained as she closed the door behind them. ‘Seemed like a good opportunity to meet everyone. To welcome you into the SkyPoint family.’
Toshiko exchanged a glance with Owen: if Wendy Lloyd wasn’t the creature that came through the SkyPoint walls, chances were that someone here was.
And silk blouses were all very well, but they didn’t hide the bulk of an automatic pistol shoved down your skirt waistband too well. She wore a small purse over her shoulder, but that wasn’t big enough for a gun, either.
Toshiko regretted her choice of wardrobe. And wished for the gun.
Owen counted twelve people in the apartment lounge. One of them, a balding man with a beer belly came towards them with an extended hand.
‘I’m Ewan,’ he said. ‘Wendy’s husband.’
Owen had failed to make the connection and hoped his surprise didn’t show. Had he stopped to imagine the kind of man that Wendy was married to, it wouldn’t have been the guy pumping Owen’s good hand right now.
‘Owen Harper,’ he said. ‘This is my wife, Toshiko.’
Ewan turned towards Toshiko, and beamed, dipping his head. ‘Ha Ji Me Ma Shi Te.’
Toshiko smiled, surprised and delighted. ‘You speak Japanese?’
