Skypoint by Phil Ford Page A

Constantine’s, anyway, he guessed.
    ‘So there’s – what? – some creature living in there?’ Ianto suggested as he sat down at the table and took the first sip of Java. It was good. Of course it was.
    ‘Something that consumes people? Doesn’t leave a trace of them behind?’ Owen heard what he was saying and worried. If the thing in SkyPoint was the same thing that he had seen butcher the French philosophy student and then clean up afterwards better than those two old birds in rubber gloves on the telly – then he had to come clean to the rest of the team.
    But Gwen didn’t think that was it. ‘There wasn’t time. Rhys and me, we were only seconds behind Brian Shaw when he walked into the bathroom. If it was some sort of creature, we would have heard something. No way that we wouldn’t.’
    ‘And we didn’t hear anything like a creature when the security guy disappeared, either,’ said Toshiko.
    Jack pushed back his chair and started to prowl around the table. ‘So what happened? They didn’t get beamed up by Mr Scott. And, as far as our instruments can tell, there’s no Rift activity, so they didn’t just get sucked out of existence.’
    Gwen shook her head. ‘But it has to be the Rift.’
    Jack came to a stop; he’d done a full turn of the table and was back behind his own chair. He put his fists on his hips.
    ‘There’s only one way we’re going to find out,’ he said. ‘Who wants to play Happy Families?’

NINE
This is going to be weird.
    Owen was standing at the window of his new apartment looking across the Bay. The open-plan SkyPoint living area was filled with unopened boxes. There was no urgency in opening them – most had just been packed with old books to perfect the illusion of a couple moving into their new home.
    A couple.
    This was going to be very weird, he thought, and looked out across the water wondering just how the hell he was going to get through this.
    ‘Well, that’s me all moved in.’
    Owen turned from the window as Toshiko walked in from the bedroom. She was dressed in jeans and a thin sweater that clung to her tightly. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail. Owen guessed that this was what she looked like on a day off and realised with surprise that he had never actually seen Toshiko on a day off. She looked like a woman would the day she moved into her new apartment. She looked good. But that wasn’t going to make any of this anything like easier.
    ‘It’s a walk-in wardrobe,’ she told him. ‘I hung all my stuff on the right. You can have the left.’
    ‘No problem,’ Owen said. ‘I dress on the left, anyway.’ Toshiko didn’t look like she got the joke.
    ‘I’ll hang my stuff up later,’ he said. ‘Want a coffee?’
    ‘Great,’ she said. Her eyes sparkled.
    Owen crossed into the kitchen area and filled the kettle, then took a mug from the box of kitchen things that Ianto had put together for them. The mugs were stylish, tall and slim with silver rims. Very Ianto. Back in Owen’s apartment, the mugs he drank from ( whoa – hold that! – the mugs he used to drink from ) were a mostly chipped and tea-stained collection that looked like they had been accrued over the years from visiting workmen.
    He set one mug down on the work surface and set about working out the high-tech coffee machine that came with the kitchen. Ianto had packed them a full dinner service – the works, in fact – but they were never going to be setting more than one place for dinner here. Owen guessed it would save on the washing up. Six plates, six sets of cutlery – with luck he would be out of SkyPoint before the dishwasher was half full.
    He got the coffee machine working and suddenly the apartment was filled with music. Jazz. The Dave Brubeck Quartet. Owen looked across the room and saw Toshiko at the apartment’s sound system. Music seemed to pour out of every corner of the apartment.
    She was swaying with the rhythm of ‘Love For Sale’, and caught Owen