Skypoint

safe in bed upstairs and not in an undersized coffin beneath the ground – that was no longer something horrific, but a marvel. Alison had died and come back, and Wendy had read stories of the things that people had seen on the Other Side. It wasn’t that her faith in the Afterlife needed confirmation, but her daughter had been in the presence of the Divine – who wouldn’t want to know what that was like?

But Wendy hadn’t liked what she heard.

That there was nothing beyond death but cold darkness. Ewan understood the devastation of Wendy’s world-view – more than that, her view of creation, of everything – and he tried to comfort her. He tried to tell her that maybe Alison was wrong. She was just a small child, after all. And she had gone through such a lot. Wendy couldn’t expect her to really remember what happened to her being – her soul, whatever she wanted to call it – as the medics had worked on getting her heart to work again next to the car wreck. And at first he had thought that Wendy had understood that, and had accepted his logical reasoning. But then he had come to realise that that wasn’t the case at all. He caught it in his wife’s eyes sometimes when she didn’t think he was looking, when she was watching Alison play with Mr Pickle.

Wendy hated their daughter.

More than that, she didn’t believe that it was their daughter. What had come back in Alison’s body was an agent of Satan, a demon that had come to destroy her faith by spreading lies about the end of hope.

The realisation that his wife was going mad and – more than that – that he couldn’t cope, was what led Ewan Lloyd to the bottle and, ultimately, to the edge of what was to become Besnik Lucca’s roof garden.

By that time Wendy was in hospital. It was a good place that had patience and cared. It was also costing Ewan a fortune that he couldn’t afford. Things had got completely out of control – his drinking had put his business into a spiral that was accelerated by the cost of helping his wife, which made him drink more… He was a drunk drowning in a whirlpool. And, just then, the sooner it sucked him into oblivion, the better. Wendy was getting better, and Alison didn’t seem to suspect anything of the truth about her mother’s absence, but his family was shattered beyond repair all the same – because he hadn’t been able to cope.

He knew they would all be better off without him. Wendy would land some good-looking bloke with a full head of hair and no beer belly – the kind of man she always should have been with – and Alison would get a stepfather who would be able to look after her properly. A real man who wouldn’t just try to drink himself out of any problem that reared its head.

At around seventy metres off the ground, the wind whipped at you even on a calm day, and Ewan had been standing on the edge of the construction for quite a while, summoning up the last pulse of courage to take that final step. As he had edged towards the ledge, he had actually hoped that the force of the wind and the bottle and a half of scotch that had got him up there in the first place would combine to remove that final difficult step from his plan. Typical of the loser that he was, he thought, he even wanted the wind to do the tough part. He had kind of hoped that a good gust of wind would just unbalance him and a couple of seconds later he’d be on the pavement below, splattered like a lost ice cream. He supposed that it would be a strawberry or a raspberry ice cream. Something with a lot of red in it, anyway.

But the wind hadn’t taken him to his death. Instead Besnik Lucca had stood at his side and offered him a second chance.

Ewan had never laid eyes on Lucca until that moment, but of course he had heard the name; he knew that he was the major individual investor in the SkyPoint project and that it was his money that had been giving him a headache on the day that had set his life on course for the wastepipe. In between the time Alison had come out of her coma and the beginning of his realisation that his wife was going crazy, Ewan had started to ask questions about that money, and about Lucca. The fact that he hadn’t found any satisfactory answers had, in its way, told him all he needed to know. The money was dirty; Lucca was a crook. Then his life had started to fall apart. And if the financial foundations of the SkyPoint job had also started to flake and crumble, everyone would have been buried in the rubble. So he had turned a blind eye to the financial irregularities, but he knew that Lucca had caught wind of his interest.

There had been a phone call.

It hadn’t come to the office, and it hadn’t been on his mobile. It had been at night, just after he had made sure Alison was OK in bed, as he did every night an hour or so after she had gone up. So it was around eight o’clock, and the phone in the hallway of his home started to ring.

None of his clients had his home number. If they needed to get him urgently outside of office hours then they had his mobile number, and he never turned that off. But Lucca had been sending him a message, and it wasn’t contained in the words he spoke down the phone.

Lucca had identified himself and had said he wanted to congratulate Ewan on the excellent work he was doing on the SkyPoint project. He was impressed by his diligence, he said. And also by his professional discretion. He hoped, he said, that Ewan would allow them both the opportunity to work together again in the future.

Ewan had understood every word that Lucca had not said.

I know where you live.

And when Lucca spoke into his ear as they stood together on the edge of oblivion above Cardiff Bay, Ewan recognised the accent immediately, and he felt the pressure of his hand on his shoulder.

He told Ewan that he could help him.

If he could not summon the courage to take his own life, Lucca would help him with the hand that he had placed on his shoulder.

Ewan looked down and saw that Lucca’s gleaming black shoes were even closer than his own were to the edge and the fall into the old docklands below. He also saw that Lucca’s other hand was extended towards him, as if he wanted Ewan to shake it.

Lucca told him that if he cared more for his family than he did for himself he would take the offered hand and he would work for him, and life would be good once again.

Ewan looked into Lucca’s black eyes and shook his hand, and knew that he was more truly lost than ever.

And now, a year later, he sat on a whore’s toilet seat with a broken ankle and his mobile phone in his hand, trying to reach the Devil.

Lucca picked up just as Ewan was about to give up, ready to smash the phone against the bathroom’s granite flooring.

‘Hello, Ewan. Where are you?’

‘What?’ Ewan snarled. He was hurting and he was angry. Angrier with Lucca than he knew he had any sense to be. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t bloody see me!’

Ewan knew all of Lucca’s secrets. Not just the financial ones. He also knew about the cameras, even the one that watched his wife undress. When the Devil took your soul, he took everything else, too. And Lucca knew those secrets were safe with Ewan Lloyd. Weak men knew who their friends were and, if they forgot, their disposal was easy. A weak man who was also wise knew that, which was why he trusted Ewan Lloyd.

Lucca didn’t respond to Ewan’s anger, he said nothing and waited for the injured man to gather his wits.

‘I’m on the eleventh floor,’ he said in the end, trying to keep his voice low – the last thing he needed was that Torchwood guy catching him on the phone to Lucca. ‘The whore’s flat.’ Ewan knew all about Marion Blake. He knew a lot of things about everyone that moved in to SkyPoint. Accountancy for Besnik Lucca covered a wide range of fields.

‘Who is with you?’ Lucca asked.

‘Wendy and Alison. Marion. And the man with the Jap wife. Only I think that was some sort of cover.’

‘Ewan, you are so perceptive,’ Lucca taunted down the phone line.

‘What the hell is going on, Besnik? Who are these people and what the hell is this talk about something being on the loose here? Ryan Freeman says something came through the wall and took his wife!’

‘Everything is under control,’ Lucca purred.

‘Listen, Besnik, if there’s anything dangerous up here, I want to get my wife and daughter out of here. You owe me that much.’

‘I owe you?’ Lucca said it slowly, disbelieving, without humour.

Ewan pushed a hand over his head, it came away wet with sweat and, for the first time in months, he needed a drink. ‘I just want my little girl safe,’ he said.

It went quiet on the other end of the line. For a long time Ewan thought he had pushed it too far. And Besnik