Skypoint by Phil Ford

about your job,’ Gwen told him, ‘but you have to tell us what you know.’
    The junior shook his head. ‘My job? There’s plenty of jobs. It’s my neck I’m worried about. You don’t know the kind of people that have got money in SkyPoint.’
    Gwen remembered the man that lived in the penthouse. ‘Besnik Lucca?’
    ‘Yeah, well then, you know what I’m talking about. Men like that want to see a return on their investment. It doesn’t matter to them that there’s something wrong with the place.’
    ‘So how many people are we talking about?’ Jack wanted to know. ‘How many have disappeared?’
    ‘Four that I know of. Not counting Brian. At first we thought it was just people running out on their payments, but not one of them was caught by the security cameras leaving. And those cameras spot everyone going into SkyPoint and coming out. The only way you can get out of that place without being picked up on video is jumping off the roof.’
    ‘Well, if they’d done that, you’d know about it,’ said Jack, dry as sand.
    The office junior looked from Jack to Gwen, confused and scared. ‘Where do they go? Where’s Brian gone?’
    Gwen touched his shoulder gently. ‘We’re going to find out. I promise you.’

EIGHT
    Ianto Jones took his coffee black, and seriously.
    When Torchwood One had been destroyed in the Battle of Canary Wharf, Ianto had been one of the few survivors, and he had returned to Wales looking for a job with the Cardiff operation. Jack had never had much time for Torchwood One, he didn’t like the way they did things and thought their disastrous handling of the Dalek-Cyberman situation had proved him right. So he was never going to have much interest in Ianto Jones, despite the cut of his suit, never mind how cute he might have been. But Ianto was determined, and he campaigned hard, though to Jack it felt like he’d got himself a stalker. And Ianto was ready to do anything to get himself a place in the Hub. He was an intelligent man with Honours in English Literature and History – but he’d just make the coffee and run the hoover around if that was what it took to get back into Torchwood.
    So, in the end, Jack had given him a break as the tea boy and the guy who rang for the pizzas. He had earned his stripes since then and no one really thought of him as the office boy any more. He was a lot more than that, especially to Jack. But no one else could make coffee like Ianto. And, truth was, Ianto liked to make coffee. There was more to it than pouring hot water over ground beans.
    The philosopher Sir James Mackintosh had said that the powers of a man’s mind were proportionate to the quantity of coffee he drank, and Voltaire had knocked back fifty cups of it a day, so Ianto reckoned there had to be something in it. And saving Cardiff from the kinds of things that came through the Rift called for quick, inspired thinking, so Ianto took it upon himself to make sure the coffee was good.
    Ianto Jones, saving the world with a dark roast.
    And that was what he set down on the conference room table now. A tray of four mugs. Dark Java.
    He handed the drinks around as people talked, worked out how they were going to handle SkyPoint, how they were going to find out what was going on there.
    ‘What have you got, Tosh?’ Jack asked as Ianto put a coffee mug in his hand.
    Toshiko referred to the notes from her computer research that morning. ‘SkyPoint is built on the site of old dock warehousing. I’ve gone back as far as I can, but there are no records of Rift activity in the location. So no historical precedent for what seems to be happening there now.’
    ‘And no records of disappearances?’ Jack asked.
    ‘Not specific to that site. Not that I can see.’
    ‘So this is something to do with the building itself,’ Owen pondered as he watched Ianto hand the coffees around. He remembered that Ianto made good coffee – better than the shit they stung you more than two quid for down at