THIRTY
Ianto was waiting for them outside SkyPoint with the SUV when they came out of reception with Besnik Lucca, his hands fixed behind him with cable-ties. They left him sitting on the steps of the central police station with his ankles also bound with plastic and a package slung around his neck. Gwen made a call as the SUV screeched away and when the cops opened what hung around Lucca’s neck they found all the digital detail they needed to put him away for half a century.
They took the SUV back to Roald Dahl Plass, but Owen didn’t go with the others down to the Hub. He said he’d been cooped up in that bloody skyscraper too long, and he needed some air.
It was half past four in the morning. It wouldn’t be long before dawn broke. There might be time for just one coffee down at Constantine’s before the sun came up.
When he got there the cafe was empty.
This was no-man’s-hour for the nightshift workers and the clubbers. Neither the night before, nor the day after. In another hour or so there would be the early-shift workers, but until then nobody. Owen wondered if it was even worth buying the cup of coffee that he wouldn’t drink.
The chances of the twins showing up now were pretty remote.
He walked down to the counter, but the kid wasn’t there. Owen thought he’d probably gone to the bathroom, or was maybe taking a drag out back.
Then he heard something break.
There was a doorway behind the bar. Owen had no idea where it led – some sort of kitchen, he had always assumed. It sounded like a bottle breaking. A milk bottle. Nothing too strange about that in a coffee shop, he thought. Only afterwards there was no curse, no sound of someone sweeping it up.
Owen’s senses were electrified. He moved around the counter and into the kitchen area behind it.
The coffee shop kid – or what was left of him – was on the floor. The twins had divided him between them again and were quickly and efficiently devouring him.
Owen felt sorry for the kid. And that it was maybe his fault that he was dead.
Owen stepped into their line of vision and the two sisters looked up at him, with their shark eyes, blood and tatters of meat hanging from their distended savage jaws.
‘Ladies,’ he said.
This was a moment he had thought about a great deal since that first night hiding behind the rubbish while the girls chewed up the ponytailed French student. If ever there was a more certain way of ending this walking death, he couldn’t think what it could be. To be torn apart, eaten and digested by two carnivorous predators might be painful – but couldn’t be any worse than what he had been enduring. And he had seen that they were quick. More importantly, he couldn’t believe that there was any chance that his consciousness would survive. If he gave himself to them, it would be over.
No doubt.
They looked at him and he could see that they were hungry for more.
‘Come and get it,’ he said.
They looked at each other, and he could have sworn they actually smiled. And then they pounced.
And Owen pulled the automatic from inside his coat and tore them to pieces in mid-air with a spray of bullets.
He stepped back as the dead meat hit the kitchen floor tiles with a wet slap next to what had been their last supper.
He slid his gun back inside his jacket and checked himself in a grease-spotted mirror by the doorway for any blood-spray. He looked fine. For a dead man.
Quickly, he slipped back around the counter and got out of the coffee shop. The last thing he needed was to meet any customers coming in.
Instead he ran into Toshiko. She was waiting for him outside the door.
‘Tosh?’
‘I’m sorry. I needed a walk, too.’
‘You mean you followed me?’ he said.
She didn’t try to lie, there was no point. ‘What were you doing in there? You don’t drink coffee. You can’t.’
Owen pulled up his coat collar, the first threads of morning were starting to show in the sky and he thought the first chill of the autumn was coming with it.
‘You know, that’s right,’ he smiled. ‘But do you know something else, there’s so much more to life.’
She smiled, and wanted to take his hand. But didn’t.
They walked a few steps along the road in silence. A rubbish truck rumbled past them as Cardiff started to come to life.
When he turned to her again, he wasn’t smiling any more.
‘I don’t want to go back into the dark, Tosh,’ he said. ‘Not ever.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A writer’s greatest friend should always be his editor. A good one can make you seem so much better than you really are – so my greatest thanks to Steve Tribe for, if nothing else, the patience of a saint. Also to Gary Russell for his encouragement, talent and hard work in all we have done together.
Thanks also to Hayley for putting up with a clattering keyboard into the the wee hours, and to all the cast of
But biggest thanks to Russell for creating such marvellous shows and proving that there is a place for fantasy on British TV, and thanks also – and to Julie – for letting me be a part of it.
