'I might have missed some of the news reports, sure, but all of them? No… there's something skewed about this. If it had been going on all these years, I would have known about it already. OK, so Torchwood wouldn't have looked into it, the incidents are all typical police business and they would have had no reason to spot the link, but I would. I'd have had every reason.'
Ianto and Julia came back in.
'He's not here!' Julia said. 'How is that possible? We've checked every room, and there's no sign of him.'
Jack finished plugging in the video cables and turned on the bank of monitors. Each showed an empty room of the house. Flicking through the feeds it was plain that the only inhabited room was the one they were standing in.
'He might have gone outside,' Gwen suggested.
'Of course he hasn't!' Julia spat. 'Not after what we saw.'
'There's only one explanation, then,' said Jack. 'He must have vanished through one of the rents in space-time.'
'What?' Julia was incredulous.
'We've got repeated bursts of temporal and spatial distortion,' Jack explained. 'Something is causing space to fluctuate — like when we left one room and found ourselves in another. Ianto "fell" into one of those fluctuations and ended up here. Rob must have done the same, ending up-'
'Who knows where…' Julia bit her lip. ' Anything could have happened to him.'
'I hate to say it,' Jack offered, 'but if he's out of this place he's probably a lot safer than the rest of us.'
'Think how Ianto was,' Gwen added. 'I'm not saying it was pleasant-'
'It certainly wasn't,' Ianto agreed.
'- but you were OK in the end,' Gwen continued, giving him a slightly admonishing look.
'Damn right.' Jack put his hands on Julia's shoulders. 'If he's got out of here, then he'll be fine, just like Ianto was.'
'I don't know…' Julia looked at Jack, her body shaking. It was all finally getting on top of her.
'Do you trust me?' he asked.
Her eyes glanced around, her panic building, barely in check. 'I don't know…'
'You need to trust me, Julia. I've seen us all right so far, haven't I?'
She nodded. 'I suppose…'
'Yes, I have, and I'll get us all out of here safely…'
'And Rob…'
'And we'll find Rob, and everything will be just fine. Now listen, I need you to take this.' He handed her a pill and a half-full bottle of mineral water.
'What…'
'I need you to trust me, Julia, it's important. I wouldn't hurt you, now would I? Take this, and then we'll find Rob.'
She stared at him for a moment, then her shoulders sagged and she gave in, tossing the pill to the back of her throat and washing it down with the water.
'What are you giving her?' Gwen asked.
'Retcon, of course,' Jack replied.
'Oh Jack,' Gwen sighed. 'You didn't have to do that.'
'What?' Julia asked. Her head was tingling, like pins and needles behind her eyes.
'Sorry,' Jack said, 'but it's for the best.'
The penny dropped and Julia tried to run, but the drug was quicker than she was. She stumbled in the hallway, falling against the under-stairs cupboard as her legs refused to support her.
Gwen chased after her, holding up her arms to defend herself from Julia's weak blows. Slowly, the woman crumpled, the fight gone from her. Gwen looked up at Jack.
'You can be a pretty heartless bastard sometimes, Jack, you know that?'
'I just have a sense of priority,' he replied. 'We need to fix this, and she was going to be in the way. She'll be fine.'
'She'd better be.'
Jack rolled his eyes in exasperation. 'We have to see the bigger picture here, Gwen! Have you no idea how much trouble we're in? Right now, she is the least important problem we have — it's nothing personal, it's just fact — and I used the quickest and safest way of removing that problem.' He looked at Ianto. 'Right?'
Ianto ignored him, helping Gwen to pick up Julia's body. 'We'll put her in the lounge,' he said. 'She'll be comfortable there.'
Jack sighed. There were times when he wondered if they'd abolished pragmatism in this century.
Beneath the stairs, Rob was barely even aware of what was going on outside any more. The noise of his wife falling against the door to his private little world didn't even register as he hugged the taped-up shaft of the croquet mallet, digging his teeth into the wood and listening to it whisper awesome potentials into his head.
Some of the things it suggested in the dry creak of its wooden tongue were terrible, but he knew he would do them. And when they finally stopped him, put cuffs on his wrists and led him away, he'd tell them the truth knowing they wouldn't believe a word of it.
'The house made me do it,' he'd say.
SEVENTEEN
'Right,' Alexander said, checking the coordinates on the PDA he had stolen from a desk in the Hub against the street map. 'It's that house over there.'
He pointed at Jackson Leaves, just visible over its unruly privet hedge.
'Brilliant!' Joe shouted. 'Does that mean I can start singing again?'
'No it bloody doesn't,' Alexander replied. 'One more "Sweet Home Alabama" out of you, and I'll make you eat the steering wheel.'
'Oh.'
Alexander swore and whacked the edge of the PDA against the dashboard. 'Stupid thing's on the fritz, can't seem to make its mind up where we are. Let's get out and have a look.'
'Great!' Joe grinned and started swaying as if he was in a nightclub.
'I am definitely checking the dosage,' Alexander sighed.
'Do you want me to get your wheelchair?'
'No, I'm cured, it's a pissing miracle.'
'Wow!'
'Of course I want my wheelchair!' Alexander shouted.
Joe chuckled and got out of the car. By the time he'd got the boot open he was singing again.
'Right,' said Jack, as Gwen and Ianto came back into the dining room, 'we need to talk.' He kept flicking his way through the camera feeds, checking each room. 'You both think I'm heavy-handed. But the more I think about what's going on here, the more I think I need to be. How is she?'
'Sleeping on the sofa,' said Gwen. 'She's fine.'
Jack flicked a switch, and the lounge appeared on one of the four monitors. Julia was hunched, foetal, on the sofa.
Jack nodded. 'Good.'
He stretched in his chair, his lower back still hurting from where Locke had punched him. A purple and yellow bruise would certainly be blossoming there by now. 'This isn't investigation any more,' he continued, pointing at the monitors. 'This is surveillance. We need to know the minute something tries to get a jump on us. I'm starting to piece this together, and it's freaking me out.'
'I was there from the word go, frankly,' Ianto said.
'Something is causing major time disruption,' Jack continued. 'Think of the deaths: Danny Wilkinson drowns on dry land. But it wasn't always — go back a few centuries and that was marshland out there. You saw a woman killed by a tram that stopped running along that street years ago. Gloria Banks… I don't know, she sits down in her armchair and…'
'Bursts into flames,' Gwen finished.
'Yes! It could have been anything. Perhaps a bonfire was there once… or, I don't know, maybe it was a blacksmith's at some point?'
Gwen had been tapping on her laptop and she turned it around to show them. 'Or, during the Blitz, a bomb went off a few hundred metres away and the house was caught in the blaze.'
Jack glanced at the council report she had brought up. 'Exactly.'
'Blacksmith's?' asked Ianto with a smile.
'Whatever.' Jack rolled his eyes. 'The point is that something is causing temporal disruption on a massive scale. We're not just seeing things; these aren't after-echoes.' He turned to Gwen, thinking of their conversation earlier. 'This isn't residual haunting. The past has weight, it can interact with us, drown us, burn us…'