Skypoint

to make their way up the steps.

Several floors below, Ianto and his companions in the elevator had made themselves as comfortable as they could on the floor. According to the acrylic plaque on the wall of the cabin, it was supposed to carry no more than ten people at a time. Ianto thanked God that they hadn’t been travelling at maximum capacity when the power went. It already felt like they were running out of oxygen. He knew that was ridiculous, the cabin wasn’t airtight; they weren’t going to suffocate, it was just getting hot, that was all. He had already peeled off his jacket and loosened his tie.

Ryan, the guy that had lost his wife, had stopped whimpering. He had stopped doing anything, in fact. He just sat in a corner of the cabin staring ahead of him, almost catatonic, probably playing over and over in his mind the moment that Gillian had been taken by something awful that came out of the wall. Ianto seriously hoped that they got him out of there soon, or perhaps the poor man would be caught in that hideous mind-loop for ever.

Simon and Andrew sat opposite Ianto, their arms looped together. It looked casual but he knew that they were each taking comfort from the contact. He thought about Jack, and hoped that he was all right.

He caught himself, and smiled. Like Jack wouldn’t be all right.

‘What’s funny?’

It was Simon. It was a fair question. Anything that diverted them from craziness in here seemed fair.

How long had it been already?

‘I know a joke about being stuck in a lift,’ Ianto said. He didn’t want to share Jack with them.

‘Really?’ said Andrew with zero interest. ‘I know about you.’

‘Me?’

‘Torchwood. I’ve heard about you on that radio show. Abigail Crowe.’

Abigail Crowe ran a late-night internet radio show from somewhere in the city. She played a few records – weird stuff mostly – but generally it was talk. Phone-ins and guests – and, mostly, more weird stuff. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable; after all, there was an awful lot of strange stuff that went down in and around Cardiff. Plenty of people noticed it now and again but, thankfully, not too many people put it all together or talked about it. Abigail Crowe tried to piece it all together, and she did so with the help of the people that rang her show.

A lot of them were nutters, of course – there were people who said they were witches and werewolves and some guy was on there a few weeks ago talking about how he had married a vampire.

Ianto listened to it occasionally, not that he was about to admit that to Andrew right now – and probably never to anyone in the team, either. And he had heard Abigail Crowe talk about Torchwood. People had heard the name; the police and the civil authorities were familiar with it – but no one actually knew exactly who they were or what they did. And that, of course, was always going to fuel talk. He had heard suggestions that they were some sort of black-ops outfit attached to the military, seeking out terrorist cells in Cardiff, and that was probably as close as anyone was ever going to get. For all Cardiff’s weirdness over the last hundred years or so, no one was ever going to come out and say they were the city’s answer to the Men in Black.

Even Abigail Crowe never said that. But she had hinted at it, once or twice.

‘You’re always around when something strange happens, aren’t you?’ said Andrew.

‘I have no idea. That would depend on how often something strange actually happens,’ Ianto pointed out.

Andrew shook his head and smiled. ‘Come on. The Official Secrets Act doesn’t apply in broken-down lifts. Everyone knows that.’

‘I wouldn’t know, I’ve never signed it.’

Andrew’s eyebrows rose above his red glasses like French windscreen wipers. ‘Really? So you’re not part of the government? So what are you, then? Who do you work for?’

The absolute truth was that Ianto didn’t really know. Torchwood had, of course, developed from the Torchwood Institute which was founded by Queen Victoria in 1879. He sometimes wondered if their pay cheques came from an office somewhere in Buckingham Palace. Maybe one day he, Jack and the others would all find themselves on the Honours List.

Most likely, posthumously.

Simon could tell that his partner was never going to get a straight answer out of the Torchwood guy.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘To be honest, I’m not interested in who you are, or what Torchwood is, but I think you do owe us some sort of explanation as to what’s going on here. And just what happened to that poor man’s wife.’

Ianto looked from Simon to Ryan, who, if he had heard a word of their conversation, made no sign of it.

‘All right,’ said Ianto. ‘There’s an alien in the building.’

He got no further than that because the elevator shook as if it had hit the side of a mountain – and the alien started to come through the roof.

TWENTY

The day that Ewan Lloyd met Besnik Lucca he had been moments from killing himself.

The trouble had started with the car crash. He had been at his office when the police showed up. He had been at his desk, immersed in figures relating to a major new construction project that one of the company’s clients had under way in the Bay. There was something about the finances for the project that troubled him, had been nagging at him for days, but he was damned if he could put his finger on it. Being an accountant was no different from any other job, sometimes you developed a sixth sense. A doctor could look at a patient, a mechanic could listen to an engine, and sometimes an accountant could look at columns of figures that seemed to make sense and know that in some way they didn’t. That was how he felt about the finances on the SkyPoint project. Something about them was wrong. He just couldn’t see what it was.

But the police officer that came through his door wrecked any interest he had in solving the puzzle.

Wendy and Alison had been taken to St Helen’s Hospital. The driver of another car had hit them at a junction. Wendy had only cuts and bruises; Alison was in intensive care.

The next week had been a fog to him and he had been lost in it. He had found Wendy at the hospital and they had held each other and cried until they both thought their hearts would shatter. And they had sat beside their fragile, bruised, broken daughter in her ITU bed every day, listening to the machines and the computers that kept her alive and monitored her condition. They stayed there, and they waited for a sign of life, and they prayed.

Wendy had always believed in God. Her parents were Methodist, from somewhere out in the Valleys where Sunday mornings were still reserved for threats of Hell and Damnation. She had moved to work at the university in Cardiff and Ewan had met her in a sandwich shop one lunchtime. They started seeing each other, but it took him six months of bloody hard work to get her into bed, and afterwards she had cried because she had sinned. Ewan had held her then, and told her that he loved her and known that this time he meant it. They had married in a Cardiff church – Ewan always suspected that she felt too sullied by premarital sex to return to her home chapel – but Wendy never lost her commitment to God. Ewan never understood it – his family were nothing more than Christmas Christians. But for seven days, as he watched his little girl battle death, Wendy’s faith kept him going.

But Alison came out of the coma. She survived. He didn’t know if it was a miracle, medical science, or if his daughter simply had one kick-ass will to live. As she had lain in the coma, Wendy had told him that Alison had died at the scene of the crash for five minutes, but that the paramedics had brought her back. She had told him this to reassure him that their daughter was a fighter and that, if she had beaten death once, then she could survive the coma and would come back to them.

Ewan didn’t care what had brought his daughter back from death – whether it had been God, science or voodoo – he just had his little girl back, and nothing else in the world mattered.

If this had been a show on TV, the tearful mum and dad that had watched over their still daughter for so long would have gone home with their miracle child as the credits rolled, and the audience would go put the kettle on with a warm glow in their stomach and maybe a little moisture in their eye. They would never stop to think about how things could turn to shit.

It started a couple of weeks later, when Wendy asked her daughter what she remembered about the crash. That wasn’t what she really wanted to know, of course. Wendy had talked to Ewan late at night after Alison had gone to sleep, cuddled up to Mr Pickle in bed. Her daughter had died and now to Wendy – who had her daughter