Rhys stepped aside with a smile and motioned for Gwen to go first. And there really was no way she could argue with Brian Shaw – she was definitely impressed. The door led directly into a massive open-plan lounge-kitchen-diner (whatever the proper estate agent speak was for that), but it wasn’t the room that took her breath away – it was the Bay that lay beyond it.
The sun was now little more than a golden crest on the horizon, the sky had turned a deep, rich scarlet, and the water sparkled beneath it like a mirror scattered with jewels. Around it, the waterside development of the city gathered, cast in partial silhouette by the evening light, like an audience for the setting sun.
She felt Rhys beside her. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.
She wanted to tell him that the spectacle made no difference – there was no way they were moving. Instead she breathed, ‘It’s beautiful.’
Behind them, Brian Shaw grinned. ‘And that’s only the view. Wait till you take a look around the apartment.’
‘Yeah, right, mate,’ said Rhys, eager as a kid with a sled on a snow-swept Saturday. ‘Show us everything.’
And Brian Shaw went into demonstrator mode. The lounge – which would easily accommodate the entirety of Gwen’s old flat – was ready-wired with a wall-mounted TV screen that doubled as a mirror and looked like you could organise a drive-in picture show around it. When Brian fired it up, the Hi-Def picture blazed, and the sound boomed from hidden speakers all around the room. Rhys made a note: the beach landing in Saving Private Ryan was going to be mega on this baby. The speakers were also hooked into a sound system that emerged from the wall at the touch of a remote-control button (and the same remote operated the TV, the powered window blinds, the dimming lights, and probably the toilet flush, for all Rhys knew).
The kitchen was no less high-tech and stylish, all black granite and chrome with halogen lights over the work surfaces that somehow knew where you were and intensified intelligently to light your chopping, mixing, or whatever else you got up to on the kitchen counters. (And sometimes Rhys and Gwen got up to stuff that wasn’t strictly speaking culinary.) The fridge was connected to the internet and could order the groceries for you, the eco-friendly washing machine measured the water it used and fed itself with detergent. The dishwasher did everything but load itself.
You got used to high-tech gear when you worked for Torchwood – it had spent a century scavenging alien technology and developing it for its own needs – but Gwen’s idea of a cutting-edge kitchen gadget was a shopping-channel gizmo for dicing onions. She wondered if Jack had maybe got some backdoor deal with a kitchenware developer manufacturing alien food-blending technology.
Then the estate agent led them through into the master bedroom. In the room they shared at the moment there was just about enough space for a double bed and one wardrobe with a rail that sagged with clothes. Gwen had a small dressing table, but she had to sit on the side of the bed to use it as there was no room for a stool. But here the superking bed was the width of a Cadillac and there was space to park another one either side. There wasn’t a wardrobe – there was a dressing room.
‘Didn’t you say you always wanted a dressing room?’ Rhys grinned.
Gwen gave him a look. Yes, she’d always wanted a dressing room and this place was fantastic – but, come on! There was still no way they could afford to live here. Unless maybe she started selling alien tech to the blender people.
Meanwhile, Brian Shaw was on the move again, sliding back a dark, frosted-glass door. ‘Through here we have the en suite wetroom, furnished in grey slate and black granite.’
The estate agent walked into the bathroom, and Gwen caught Rhys’s sleeve as he went to follow him.
‘This is madness, Rhys,’ she whispered. ‘It’s beautiful, yes, I know. But we just can’t afford any of this. We’re just wasting this man’s time.’
Rhys looked into her eyes, touched her cheek. ‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘Maybe not now. But one day. Soon. You and me, this is what we want, isn’t it? The best we can get.’
Gwen smiled at him and squeezed his hand. ‘I’ve already got that.’
He winked at her. ‘Come on. Let’s go see the granite lavvy.’
Gwen burst out laughing and Rhys led her through the frosted-glass door.
They took it in. It was – as the estate agent had said – all grey slate and black granite, with stark white fittings and chrome taps.
But there was no sign of Brian Shaw.
Rhys glanced back over his shoulder, like there was any chance at all of Shaw having slipped past him unseen. ‘Where did he go?’
The logical mechanics of Gwen’s mind, the cerebral technology that refused to give in despite all that she had seen after the last year or so, shifted a gear. ‘He must have come out when we were talking.’
And she was already out of the wetroom, calling out for the estate agent. ‘Mr Shaw?’
But there was no answering call.
Gwen swept through the flat quickly. The apartment was big, but it wasn’t that big. And Brian Shaw wasn’t in it.
She found Rhys still in the wetroom. She wasn’t sure if he was really considering the possibility that Brian Shaw had vanished down the plughole.
‘He’s not here,’ she said.
‘He must be somewhere. He walked in here not twenty seconds ahead of us. There’s no window.’
Her logic-gearing did another shift. Given that this was Cardiff, and that Cardiff was built on a tear in time and space that sometimes warped what most people took for reality, sometimes the logical explanation for the inexplicable came down to two words…
‘The Rift,’ she said.
Rhys looked at her, shook his head. ‘Oh, no. Not here?’
‘So you explain it to me, Rhys. You tell me how Brian Shaw walked into the bathroom and disappeared without so much as a flush.’
He couldn’t.
She kissed him gently.
‘What was that for?’
‘I’m sorry, Rhys. I’m going to have to go back to work.’
THREE
Toshiko Sato loved equations the way that other people loved poetry.
Those people, the poetry lovers – the people that most others probably thought of as normal – found truth and emotional support in the structure of words, the rhythm and the cadence of their sounds. Toshiko had never fully trusted words. They were so easy to misinterpret, or to be misused. A lot of people could be very clever with words. And they used them to break your heart. Not so many were quite that clever with numbers, few really understood them beyond their significance on a bank statement, and fewer still appreciated their simple, truthful beauty in the way that Toshiko Sato did. Because, at the end of the day, everything came down to numbers, from the physics of an atomic bomb to the shape of an autumn leaf swept away on the wind. Everything came down to mathematics. It was that kind of vision that made Toshiko special. It was also, she knew, what made her a freak.
The fact that she was in love with a dead man who wouldn’t quit walking and talking was par for the course.
Superfreak!
She looked up from the figures on her computer screen – calculations on Rift energy fluctuations – and watched Owen bound up the steel staircase to tend his collection of alien plants. He didn’t move badly for a man who had had his heart smashed to a pulp by a .44 calibre bullet just a couple of months earlier. He still had the hole in his chest; like the finger that he had purposefully broken before her one night in a vicious black mood, it would never heal. One morning, he had turned up in the Hub with flowers poking out of the wound and told everyone he thought Torchwood’s subterranean base needed cheering up. Being dead hadn’t killed Owen’s sense of humour. Or perhaps, like her numbers, it was just a way to cope.