Slowly, gingerly, James sat up. He worked his shoulder slightly, then leaned over and turned up one of the lamps. He saw his watch lying on the cabinet and picked it up. Nearly ten a.m. Quite a sleep.
With care, testing out his aches and pains, he swung his legs around and got out of bed. There was a hospital dressing gown on the back of the door.
‘Oh, no!’ cried Owen. ‘Oooh no, no, no, no, no!’
He leapt up from his work station the moment he saw James shuffling into the main space of the Hub.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, reaching James.
‘I woke up,’ said James.
‘Lovely. Go back to bed.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Listen, mate, when a doctor — like me — puts a patient — like you — in bed, staying there is part of the deal.’
‘I’m OK.’
‘We’re getting you back into bed,’ said Owen. ‘That’s first. Then I’ll run a bunch of standard tests. Then, and only then, will I say if you’re OK.’
‘Can I have coffee?’ James asked. He saw Ianto up by the coffee machine, busy. He waved. Ianto waved back.
‘No, you can’t,’ said Owen, and began to steer James back towards the door.
James could see Jack in his office. The door was closed, and he was on the telephone, deep in conversation.
‘What’s Jack doing?’
‘He’s got a bee in his bonnet,’ said Owen. ‘That whole secret early warning thingy whatsit. He’s making some calls.’
‘To who?’
‘Oh, like he’s going to tell me,’ snapped Owen.
‘But at a guess?’
‘The Pentagon, NASA, Project Blue Book, NATO, UNIT, International Rescue, Starfleet, and the Fortress of Solitude,’ replied Owen, ‘but that’s me just speculating wildly.’
‘Where’s Gwen?’ James asked.
‘She’s gone out with Tosh. She told me to say hi. There was a kiss too, but I’m not prepared to pass that on.’
‘Where’s she gone out to?’
Colonel Joseph Peignton Cosley was as forbidding as his home. Fifty-ish, jowelly, with a Kitchener moustache that suited his choice of army attire, he glared at Gwen, his hand on the pommel of his cavalry sabre, as if expecting her to kick off some trouble any minute.
‘That’s him in 1890,’ said Toshiko, reading off the plaque.
Gwen folded her arms and continued to stare at the large, gilt-framed painting.
‘He looks a bit of a…’
‘A what?’ asked Toshiko.
‘Twat,’ Gwen said. ‘Not the kind of bloke you expect to know secret things about the fate of the world. More like the sort of bloke who’d know how to horsewhip his manservant or shove a bayonet into some African person.’
‘“Horsewhip his manservant”?’ asked Toshiko.
Gwen glanced at her. ‘I know. Even as I said it, I knew it was going to sound dodgy.’
‘At least Owen isn’t here,’ said Toshiko. ‘Otherwise he’d be adding that to his little book of squalid euphemisms.’
The long, panelled hallway was gloomy and quiet. Other dingy paintings hung on the walls above items of stately, roped-off furniture. Heavy morning drizzle beat against the grand windows. From a nearby room, they could just make out the sound of a Cadw guide leading a tour.
Toshiko was leafing through the guidebook she’d bought. She’d opted for the fat, expensive guide instead of the thin illustrated pamphlet.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘whatever he looks like, he’s the man. Maybe he had hidden depths? Maybe the artist didn’t do him justice?’
‘Maybe he didn’t know what it was he had either, which was why he gave it to Torchwood?’
They walked on. Toshiko nodded to a smaller painting.
‘That’s Mrs Colonel.’
‘Oh!’ said Gwen. ‘Poor love. Do you think they’d have got a smile out of her if her husband hadn’t spent so much time horsewhipping his manservant?’
Toshiko snorted.
‘English, was he?’ asked Gwen.
‘Of course,’ said Toshiko. ‘His family had owned land up here for several generations. Old money, gentry. It seems he invested wisely in coal and shipping, army career not withstanding. Hang on…’ she leafed through the guide. ‘Yeah, an older house stood on this site. He had it demolished in 1868 to build this place in all its Victorian melodrama.’
‘That’s like an architectural style, is it?’
‘Absolutely.’
Cosley Hall lay some fifteen minutes west of the city in parkland beyond Wenvoe. They had arrived just after nine thirty, and driven in through the imposing gates and up the long, planned drive to a house hiding beyond a screen of trees. Prior to her purchase of the guidebook, Toshiko had supplied an improvised guide commentary. The gates, she announced had been ‘specially imported from the Carpathians’ and the outbuildings to the west of the main house had been ‘a stabling block for the Cosley family’s pedigree pack of killer dachshunds’. The house and grounds were now in the care of Cadw, having been left to the Nation by the last of the Cosley line, who had died in 1957 of a ‘surfeit of toff’.
‘Don’t make me laugh, I’m not in a laughing mood,’ said Gwen, laughing as she got out of the car.
Much funnier was the fact that, once it had been purchased, the guidebook as good as corroborated Toshiko’s invention. The gates might not have actually been Carpathian, and the dachsunds might actually have been beagles, but other than that she’d been close to the truth. The last of the Cosley line, William Peignton Cosley, had left the hall in a bequest to the Crown, following his death from a stroke in 1964.
Entry to the house and grounds was free, though a donation was appreciated. They’d asked the Cadw guide on the till — a young, blonde, studenty girl with a stud in her nose — if there were any papers or written records from the Colonel’s era. The girl said she didn’t know of any on display or available for inspection. There were quite a few books in the library, but most of them dated from the 1920s and 1930s, when the last Cosley, William, had built up a collection of geological works.
Gwen and Toshiko wandered around the hall for an hour or two. Whenever they were out of sight of other visitors, or the guides and the tour parties, Gwen surreptitiously took a portable scanner out of her coat pocket and swept it around, to zero effect.
They stopped eventually in the dining room, and gazed at a dinner table set with crystal and silver for forty guests who would never actually arrive. The voice of a guide drifted in from down the corridor behind them. A door closed somewhere.
‘I feel a bit of a plank, actually,’ said Gwen. ‘Jack said this would be a bust and he was right. Of course. I don’t know what I thought we could do here. Imagine the skill with which he’ll have gone over the place already.’
‘It was worth a try,’ said Toshiko. ‘Your logic was spotless.’
They traced their way back out of the baronial Victorian dwelling, pausing one last time in front of Colonel Joseph Peignton Cosley.
Gwen fixed the portrait right in the eyes. ‘What did you know? What were you told? Where did it come from? Who gave it to you? What the bugger did you think it was?’
‘Why are you talking to a painting?’ Toshiko smiled.
‘God knows. Made me feel better. Come on.’
They were walking back through the reception area, past the postcards, and the books on kings and queens, and the novelty pencil sharpeners, when the studenty blonde girl with the nose stud called out to them from the till.
‘Oh, there you are,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d already gone. I asked Mr Beavan about you, about the questions you were asking, I mean. Hang on a jot.’
The girl picked up a walkie-talkie. ‘Mr Beavan? Yeah, no, they’re still here. In reception. OK, lovely.’
She put the walkie-talkie down again. ‘He’ll just be along,’ she said.