Skypoint

Ewan shrugged. ‘Speak is probably a bit of an exaggeration. I worked there for a while.’

‘Ewan is an accountant,’ explained Wendy. ‘And believe me, what they say is completely true. Boring as hell.’

As she spoke she slid an arm around her husband’s wide waist. Whatever she said, Owen could see that Wendy Lloyd loved her man, beer gut and all. He also noted that Ewan had orange juice in his hand. Maybe he was cutting down for his wife. Maybe it was three-quarters vodka.

‘Get you a drink?’ Ewan offered, maybe seeing Owen checking out his own glass.

‘Yeah,’ said Owen. ‘You got a lager?’

‘You got it,’ Ewan grinned, and shifted to Toshiko.

‘White wine spritzer, please,’ she said.

‘On its way. Wendy will do the introductions.’

And Ewan moved off towards the kitchen as Owen realised the other guests had been closing on them. He resisted the urge to back away, and came up with a smile to share among them.

‘Hi. Owen Harper. This is my wife, Toshiko.’

He found that he was getting strangely used to saying that.

For all their hunting-pack circling, the assembled SkyPoint residents seemed to be a pretty friendly, if mixed, bunch. As Ewan had promised, Wendy led the way with the introductions.

Mark and Roslyn Bridges were a middle-aged couple who lived on the eighteenth floor. They were both lawyers who worked for the Welsh Assembly. He was tall and lean with hair that had turned iron grey and probably made him look a few years older than her really was. She was a lot shorter, slightly built, but somehow looked the tougher. She was wearing a black dress right now, but Owen got the feeling that back in their apartment she wore the trousers.

There was a younger couple who lived on the nineteenth and, apparently, right on top of the Bridges. This was Alun Griffiths and his girlfriend Julie Jones. Alun was a photographer who worked in fashion and his girlfriend was a model who – he said – didn’t.

‘Too short,’ Julie explained. ‘But who wants to be a clothes horse when you’ve got bloody melons like these,’ she laughed, clutching at them playfully with scarlet-tipped fingers. She laughed like a noisy flushing toilet, and her boyfriend sounded like a busted boiler kicking into life when he joined her. Toshiko caught the look between Mark and Roslyn and got the impression that the soundproofing between floors maybe left something to be desired.

Andrew and Simon Taylor were a gay couple who had moved into SkyPoint after exchanging their civil ceremony vows a few weeks ago and were more delighted than anyone to welcome Toshiko and Owen to the building.

‘They’ll stop calling us the newlyweds now,’ Andrew told them with a smile that was so wide it threatened to dislodge the big red-framed glasses he wore. Andrew and Simon were both writers. Simon wrote travel guides – it was work that took him all over the world, but when it came down to the word-punching he sat back-to-back with his partner overlooking their panoramic Bay view while Andrew worked on the latest in a series of novels featuring his gay Cardiff private eye detective hero and played Bowie loud enough to shake the foundations.

By this time Ewan had delivered Toshiko’s spritzer and pressed a glass of lager into Owen’s hand.

‘Cheers,’ said Ewan and raised his glass.

Owen raised his own glass and pretended that something across the room had taken his attention, so that he turned and only wet his lips and didn’t actually drink any of the beer. Drinking the beer would not be a good idea, nor would eating any of the food Ewan and Wendy offered. He and Toshiko had earlier agreed that Owen would claim to be a little off-colour and excuse himself from the meal – but with the apartment full of guests it looked like it was going to be easier than expected to get around the problem. When he got the chance he would also put his beer down and by the time everyone else had drunk a few glasses they wouldn’t notice that the level of Owen’s glass never seemed to fall.

Now they were being introduced to a starched woman who was probably in her thirties but dressed and acted like she was twenty years older. Marion Blake wore her hair in coiled braids that made Owen think of Carrie Fisher in Star Wars, only he got the feeling he was never going to see Marion in a bronze-ribbed bikini. He wasn’t sure that he would want to. She was skinny, with lips that seemed permanently pinched into a disapproving pout. She looked like the kind of woman who would have lived behind flickering net curtains and filled her nights behind them writing letters of complaint, if she hadn’t been living in a tower block. She was PA to the chairman of a Cardiff-based export company, she said. When she moved on, Andrew and Simon told them that from what they had seen of their neighbour, and her frequent visits by the man who had to be her boss, they suspected that her personal assistance extended to more than keeping his diary straight.

Owen was sure the two writers were winding them up, but, hell, he should know better than anyone that things could take on a pretty skewed reality when no one was looking. He glanced at his watch and wondered briefly what time they would get out of there, and how long it would take Toshiko to drift off to sleep afterwards. He had a regular appointment with some pretty skewed reality of his own later tonight and he didn’t intend to miss it – and he didn’t want Toshiko asking him awkward questions about where he was going, either.

‘You probably know everyone in SkyPoint, then,’ Toshiko was saying to Andrew and Simon. ‘I mean, if you work from the flat. You’re probably around more than anyone else.’

‘Well, it doesn’t take a lot to know everyone,’ Simon told her. ‘There’s hardly anyone else in the place.’ He waved at the dozen-or-so people in the apartment. ‘The place is like a bloody ghost town in the sky.’

‘They built all these apartment buildings in Cardiff and forgot to work out how many people there were that could actually afford to live in them,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s the same right across the city. There are apartment blocks with no more than a handful of people living in them. It’s crazy.’

‘I heard that some people moved in here, then just took off,’ Toshiko said, and sipped her spritzer.

Andrew’s eyes narrowed behind their red frames. Owen wondered if it was the kind of suspicious gaze the gay ’tec in his novels gave the killer when they let something slip.

‘You’re very well informed,’ he said with a smile.

‘Our lawyer had heard some rumour,’ Owen said quickly, though he didn’t think Andrew was doing anything more than playing with Toshiko. And he didn’t think Andrew was probably the shapeshifting wall-walker, either. He didn’t see a creature like that morphing into anything quite as camp as Andrew.

‘Well, we heard the same,’ he confided, taking a step closer to Toshiko and Owen. ‘It’s happened twice, apparently. All very mysterious.’

‘They probably realised they couldn’t afford it and did a moonlight,’ Simon offered. ‘But Columbo here reckons there’s more to it.’

‘Oh?’ asked Owen, trying to make his interest sound casual.

‘It’s fiction writers’ dementia,’ Simon explained. ‘They always have to see a story in the simplest of situations.’

Andrew waved his partner’s dismissal away with an extravagant motion of his hand. ‘And some people are all too happy to swallow what they’re given.’

Simon raised an eyebrow and shook his head. ‘Sorry, did you just mistake me for Frankie Howerd then, or what?’

Owen saw Wendy having trouble pulling a wine cork and left Toshiko to find out if Andrew actually knew anything useful he could tell them (which he doubted).

‘Can I help?’ he asked her.

‘Oh. Thank you,’ she said and passed him the bottle. Owen suddenly realised he hadn’t actually tried to open a bottle of wine since snapping his finger, but he decided he was too deep in now to pull out. Luckily, he managed it OK.

‘Alison in bed?’ he asked.

Wendy nodded. ‘She’s not keen on crowds.’

‘So, you moved to SkyPoint because of the accident?’

‘That’s right.’

He could sense already that she didn’t want to talk about it.

‘Was it really bad?’ he asked.

Wendy put the bottle down on the work surface and looked at him. ‘Why are you so interested?’