‘Mr and Mrs Williams,’ he said. ‘We’ve got an appointment with Mr Shaw.’
The blonde girl in the short black dress uncurled her legs and smiled at Rhys, and Gwen felt a pang of something. Not so much jealousy as proprietorial supremacy.
Rhys is all mine, love, signed and sealed, so you might as well put those legs away, for all the good they’ll do you.
The blonde whispered into the phone that sat alongside the brochures, and Rhys gave Gwen a smile as he took in the reception. Gwen noted with delight that Rhys barely looked at the girl’s legs. Was that marriage for you, or just excitement over the apartment they were going to see? A part of her wanted to tell him again that, whatever this Mr Shaw showed them, there was no way they could afford it. She had never been entirely sure who it was that signed the Torchwood pay cheques – the money just appeared in her bank account on the first of every month – but, whoever they were, the wages bore no comparison to the dangers involved in their earning. As a general rule, if you wanted to make a fortune it seemed you had to come up with another way of ending the world, not saving it.
An elevator door opened as the blonde girl put down her phone. The man that stepped out of it wasn’t the estate agent, although, immaculately groomed and dressed in black Armani, he could have been. Gwen had never laid eyes on Mr Shaw and she had never met the good-looking, lean man that stepped from the elevator – but she had seen him before. She never forgot a police file.
And there were a lot of files on Besnik Lucca. No convictions, but a whole heap of paperwork that went nowhere.
Lucca caught Gwen’s eye. He wouldn’t know her. Wouldn’t know that she used to be a cop. But there was something in that glance that made Gwen’s stomach churn. Lucca was in his early forties, the slightest threads of grey in his thick, black hair. He was tanned, worked out and moved like a man who owned the space he moved through. He looked nothing like a Weevil. But he had the same look in his dark eyes. He was a predator.
Lucca switched his glance from Gwen to the blonde girl, whose eyes were already ripping the Armani from his shoulders and tearing apart the crisp white linen beneath.
He smiled at her. He didn’t need to say anything.
The girl shivered with excitement, the way she might had his fingers teased her flesh with a sliver of ice. ‘Good evening, Mr Lucca.’
Lucca backed up his magnesium-flare smile with a wink, and the girl’s skin prickled with secret goose bumps as the man in black slid out of the building.
Gwen thought she had only met one other man that could have that kind of an effect on women, and other men. And she knew there were dark places within Jack Harkness, but they were nothing to the black pit of Besnik Lucca’s soul.
She watched the smoked-glass doors close behind Lucca and turned to the blonde. ‘Excuse me. Does that man live here?’ she asked.
The girl smiled back, thinking she knew exactly what Gwen was thinking. She couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘Mr Lucca has the penthouse,’ she said.
Gwen grabbed Rhys’s arm and started dragging him towards the door.
‘I’m sorry, Rhys. No way can we live here.’
Rhys pulled himself free.
‘What are you talking about? Why?’
‘That man. I know him.’
‘The guy in the Armani?’ And then a light went on in Rhys’s head. ‘Oh no – don’t tell me. He’s an alien. Right?’
Gwen glanced back at the blonde girl. They were halfway between her table and the sliding glass door, and she was watching them with a distracted curiosity, or perhaps she was hoping Lucca had forgotten his mobile or car keys or something and would sweep back in again. Either way, Gwen just hoped she hadn’t heard the A-word.
‘No, he’s not,’ she said, and tried to make it as forceful as she could, considering it was a whisper. ‘But he is a crook. And not just any crook, probably the biggest, most dangerous, bastard of a crook in Cardiff – if not Wales.’
Rhys looked at her, took it all in, and said, ‘So?’
‘So? What the hell do you mean, so?’
‘Gwen, you’re not a police officer any more. What does it matter what the bloke in the penthouse does for a living? Do you know what that guy on the floor below us now does?’
‘I know he isn’t Besnik Lucca. When I was on the force we had a file on him so big they needed a fork-lift to move it around. Robbery, extortion, prostitution, pornography, murder, Rhys. We were investigating him for every crime in the book.’
‘Investigating. So none of it was ever proven?’
‘Who the hell are you, his lawyer?’
‘What does it matter, Gwen? So he lives on the top floor of the block. I promise I won’t invite him to the house-warming.’
‘Rhys, the man is a killer.’
‘Gwen, there are killers in the sewers. They don’t stop me taking a crap when I need one.’
Gwen stopped dead, somehow felt a carpet being ripped from beneath her. She wanted to tell him that this was different. Instead she felt one corner of her mouth trying to curl into a smile. God, she hated it when Rhys made her smile when she didn’t want to.
And that was when the elevator doors opened again, and the estate agent walked out towards them, one hand springing out ahead of him, intent on some serious welcome-pumping.
‘Mr and Mrs Williams. I’m Brian Shaw. Welcome to SkyPoint.’
Rhys took Shaw’s hand and shook it, but his eyes were on Gwen.
Oh what the hell? We’re only looking, aren’t we?
And Gwen shook his offered hand, and smiled, pushing her worries about Lucca to the back of her mind. Sod it, she was just going to enjoy the tour. If anyone was going to burst Rhys’s bubble, less than a month into their marriage, it would be the bank manager.
Shaw led them across the reception area and into the waiting mirror-panelled elevator. He was maybe thirty-five, with sandy, swept-back hair that had started to thin at the front. He wore a dark suit over a white shirt that gleamed like a soap-powder ad, and a tie sprinkled with tiny clowns. When Gwen caught a glimpse of his cufflinks there were clowns there, too. It looked like the sort of birthday combo a girlfriend might buy her fella if he had a quirky thing about guys with red noses and baggy trousers. Brian Shaw may have been an estate agent, but maybe he was a nice guy, after all, she thought.
The elevator took them up to the tenth floor and the doors slid open with a ping that was so discreet, it could have been the sound of a pin dropping. Smiling, Brian Shaw led them out into a passageway lit with frosted-glass uplighters.
‘There are twenty-five floors. A hundred and twenty-five apartments in all,’ Shaw explained as he led them along the passageway to a black door. ‘Two-bedroom and three-bedroom, all en suite.’ The door was marked thirty-two in small unobtrusive brushed steel lettering. There were no digits on the doors, Gwen noticed; figures were maybe too gauche for SkyPoint’s understated residents.
‘Fully equipped kitchens, appointed to the highest standard,’ Shaw continued as he unlocked the door with an electronic key. ‘And as you see, security here is both discreet and practically unbreachable.’ And that was a comfort with a man on the top floor who, according to one story, deep-fried a man’s bollocks while he was still attached to them. ‘I think you’re going to be quite impressed,’ said the estate agent, and he led them into the apartment.