‘He may have a point.’
Gwen looked around the Boardroom. ‘You know, you could do with some stuff to brighten this place up. You should start a collection of your own.’
Jack indicated the Hub, behind and below him. ‘I have you lot,’ he said. ‘That’s enough to be getting on with.’
‘Look, it’s quiet now, and there’s nothing I can do until tomorrow. Can I get back to my meal, please? Even if it’s just for the mints?’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Jack said and, as Gwen left the Boardroom, he turned and gazed out of the window again, back down into the depths of the Hub.
The meal was long finished and, by the time Rhys had drunk two cups of coffee, he had worked out that he wouldn’t be seeing Gwen again that night.
Which, he thought, as he gazed across the table at Lucy’s bright, open face, wasn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world.
The restaurant had filled up to overflowing and then gradually emptied again whilst he and Lucy ate. And while they talked. In fact, it seemed like they’d never stopped talking, even though Rhys seemed to have eaten all of his own food and what was left of Gwen’s as well. Now the white tablecloth was spattered with various sauces, the metal platters were piled up to one side, and the hot towels had cooled down some time before.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ he said, ‘but I can’t believe you stay as thin as you do and eat so much. I’m going to have to live off watercress for a week to make up for this.’
‘I never used to be able to,’ she replied. ‘It’s these tablets. They’ve really changed my metabolism.’ She smiled. ‘I can’t believe how much fun this has been,’ she said, gazing into Rhys’s eyes. ‘I really needed this, especially tonight. Thanks.’
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I enjoyed myself too. I’m only sorry…’
He trailed off, and Lucy made a sympathetic face. ‘I guess it must be hard on you, with Gwen suddenly going off on urgent business all the time. I wouldn’t have thought there was that much serious crime in Cardiff. I mean, you never really get to hear about it, do you?’
‘Not often,’ Rhys admitted. ‘I used to listen to the local radio stations every night when Gwen was called out, just in case there was a report of a bank robbery, or a raid on some crack den, or something. Just in case she’d been hurt, you know? But there never was. Closest I ever got was a nutter on a phone-in show talking about UFO sightings. He had a thing about them. It worried me for a while, the fact that every time Gwen was out working, I’d listen to the radio and he’d be on, at two in the morning, talking about UFOs. Then it occurred to me that he was probably doing the same thing on the evenings when Gwen wasn’t out working, but I was fast asleep and couldn’t hear him.’
‘You don’t sleep when Gwen’s out working?’
He looked down at the tablecloth. ‘I get lonely when she’s not there,’ he said. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it?’
‘I think it’s rather sweet.’
He looked up at Lucy, not really thinking about what he was doing, but when his eyes met hers a sudden shiver ran through him. Part of him wanted to look away, but part of him wanted to keep holding on to her gaze for ever. He ended up looking away, then looking back to check what she was doing, and when he found that she’d done the same he blushed. And so did she.
Her eyes were brown, flecked with green, and her lashes were startlingly thick. Freckles were sprinkled across her cheeks and the top of her nose. Her mouth looked soft. He could see the tip of her tongue touching her teeth.
‘She never talks about what she’s been doing,’ he said suddenly, surprising himself with the words. ‘Which kind of worries me. I know it’s all meant to be a big secret, and I guess there’s some security reason why she can’t tell me the details of what she does, but I wouldn’t mind if she just gave me the highlights. “Hey, I abseiled down into a white slave trade convention tonight!” Or “Someone fired a machine gun at me and ruined my nice white blouse!” But she never says anything. Just “God, I’m tired.” Every night.’ He laughed bitterly.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is… ah. Shit. Shall we go? It’s getting late.’
Instead of replying, Lucy reached out across the table and put her hand over his. He felt a jolt run through him. ‘I’d like to help,’ she said softly. ‘You’ve been so good to me tonight, and I’d like to make things better for you. If I can.’
‘I’ll get the bill,’ he said. He could have sworn that he sent his hand a message that it should pull itself out from underneath hers, but somehow the message didn’t get through, and his hand just stayed where it was.
And, thanks to the immutable laws of cosmic irony, which Rhys believed in as much as he believed in anything spiritual, that was the perfect time for Gwen to walk back into the restaurant.
THREE
Owen was whistling again.
At least, Toshiko assumed it was Owen. Jack was in his office, doing whatever it was that he did up there, Ianto was out in the little Tourist Information Centre they kept as a back entrance and Gwen had left, Toshiko assumed, to return to her interrupted meal with her boyfriend. It was just Toshiko and Owen in the central atrium of the Hub, and she wasn’t the one who was whistling.
And if she had broken the peace and calm of the Hub at night with something as crass as whistling, it would have been soft and mystical, not an out-of-tune whine which wandered up and down several octaves apparently at random.
She tried to block it out by concentrating harder on the alien device on the table in front of her. There was something about the lavender colour and the smooth curves of the metal that made her think of Japanese art: the surface was incised in patterns reminiscent of formal calligraphy, and the colour was reminiscent of her father’s favourite Hokusai etchings. It wasn’t from Earth, of course. Her brain was just looking for comparisons, connections, similarities. But it was oddly comforting, compared with the harsh, hard-edged technology she usually ended up examining.
Toshiko had started off by using a microwave imager to get a picture of what was inside the shell. And that’s how she thought of it: a shell protecting something delicate, vulnerable. The image she got was fuzzy, in shades of green and blue, and so she had turned to an ultrasound scanner, using the vibrations from whatever was inside to map out the interior structure. The results had been ambiguous: there were definitely voids within the shell, separated from each other by denser areas, but it wasn’t as clear as she had hoped. The transmission X-ray system which she had wheeled in, based on the kind of thing used in dental surgeries but with some significant improvements of her own, had just revealed a series of what looked like grey-white whorls and spirals that didn’t really help.
And that whistling was driving her crazy. Tuneless, atonal, and yet strangely mournful.
She glared over at Owen, but he was sitting with his back to her, oblivious. He had his hands behind his head, and he appeared to be leaning back and listening to something on his headphones. Didn’t he have any work to do? Didn’t he have a home to go to?
Looking at the images from the three separate imaging systems that she had employed to no good effect, letting her eyes skip back and forth from one monitor to the next, Toshiko felt her mind teetering on the edge of revelation. It was as if there were something momentous sitting just beyond her reach: she knew it was there, but she couldn’t find a way of getting to it.
Her eyes slid from the turquoise contours of the microwave image to the grey spirals of the X-ray, and she suddenly noticed a correspondence: a curve that started off in the microwave and then apparently stopped dead, but in fact continued on in the X-ray, appearing there out of a dark void. And once her brain had made that connection, others suddenly sprang out. How could she have missed them? There was a picture, there was a coherent whole, but not revealed through any one sensor. Working feverishly, she whipped the cables out of the backs of the various monitors and fed them all into a central image-processing server. It took her ten minutes, during which she was so busy she couldn’t hear Owen’s sad whistling at all, but when she had finished she had all three images being projected at the same time onto the same screen.