‘Which fairy story?’ he asked.
‘Rapunzel,’ she told him.
The story of a golden-haired girl locked in a high tower. She didn’t seem to see the irony of it. Why would she? Did kids get irony at six, or whatever she had said she was earlier.
‘Mr Pickle likes it.’
It looked like Mr Pickle was the doll. Pickle the Pixie. Why the hell not?
‘Do you play with the other kids up here?’ Owen asked, casting a glance around him, wondering where Alison’s mother was.
‘What other kids?’
‘There aren’t any other kids living here?’
‘Not yet. Mum says there will be one day.’
‘Must be a bit lonely.’
Alison shrugged.
‘Did you have plenty of friends where you lived before?’
Alison frowned. ‘Don’t remember.’
See, this is why you don’t get on with kids. Always playing bloody games. And what the hell are you doing squatting on the floor with her like this? When her mum shows up what sort of a pervert is she going to take you for?
Owen got to his feet, feeling the child’s eyes on him. He couldn’t make up his mind if they were suspicious – maybe she already had him down as a perv (kids these days grew up too quick; maybe they had to) – or somehow betrayed, like she didn’t want him to go.
‘What sort of accident did you have?’ she asked.
She was looking at his hand again.
‘I shut it in a door,’ he lied.
‘That was stupid.’
Not so stupid as breaking your own finger to prove a point. That was stupid when you were alive, when a walking corpse did it and the damage was never going to get fixed – now that was really stupid!
‘Yeah,’ he admitted.
‘I had an accident,’ she said.
‘Oh?’
‘A car hit me and Mummy, and I died.’
Owen felt oddly like the world had just shifted around him. Not by much, just a couple of disorienting degrees. Just for a moment. He knew the feeling, it had happened to him before. The first time had been when he saw the thing that had been living in his fiancée’s head: the alien parasite that had killed her, the thing that had led him to Torchwood. The last time he had felt it had been when Jack had brought him back from the dead and he had realised what he was. It was the feeling that the world was never going to be the same again.
She wasn’t dead like him, he understood that. She had been hit by a car and either paramedics had got her heart going again at the scene or she had died for a few seconds later in the operating theatre. Either way, she had been to the same place he had. She had seen the same thing he had, she had felt it. And if his tear ducts had worked he would have wept for her. Inside, he cried anyway.
‘What happened?’ he asked, his voice little more than a whisper, and he found that he was crouched down with her again.
Alison looked at him, and it didn’t feel like he was looking into the eyes of a child, yet her voice was without drama, matter-of-fact: ‘Do you mean the accident, or after?’
‘Oh, there you are! Alison, I’ve been looking all over the place for you!’
It was her mother. She was crossing the strange twenty-fourth-floor indoor park towards them.
Owen automatically got to his feet and smiled at Wendy Lloyd.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello again,’ she said.
She smiled, but it wasn’t quite the same as before, when she had turned up on the doorstep. The smile was pulling against tension. Nothing strange in that, Owen thought: you find your daughter in a lonely park talking to a stranger (and some of the worst strangers can live just over the road from you). What mother wouldn’t be a little tense?
‘How many times have I told you to stay out of the tunnels, Alison. They’re not safe.’
Alison held up the pixie doll like it was his fault. ‘Mr Pickle says they’re pixie tunnels, and I’ll be safe with him.’
Owen was confused. ‘Tunnels?’
Wendy shook her head, despairing with her daughter. ‘The ventilation ducts. She just loves playing in them. I mean, it’s not like they’re that big or anything.’
She shifted her look from Owen to Alison as a warning. ‘I swear she’ll get stuck in there one day, and we’ll never get her out.’
She looked back at Owen, annoyed with her daughter but managing a smile. Compared to the dangers out in the big wide world, this they could really handle. ‘We keep taping the duct covers up, but she just peels it off and gets through.’
Owen smiled, and looked at Alison. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much, another six months or so and it probably won’t be a problem.’
Alison was going to grow out of her fascination pretty fast.
‘If I haven’t turned grey by then,’ Wendy said.
Alison folded her book under her arm and took her mother’s hand. ‘I was telling Owen about my accident.’
Owen saw the smile on Wendy’s face falter and die and she swung the child up into her arms. It was a protective motion, but Owen wasn’t sure that she was protecting Alison from him.
‘You know we don’t talk about that, Alison,’ she said to the child. Then she looked at Owen. ‘It’s a time in our lives we’d rather forget about.’
She and her husband had nearly lost their little girl – had lost her for however short a period – who wouldn’t want to put it behind them? Owen nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘One reason we moved to SkyPoint,’ Wendy said. ‘No cars running past the front door.’
‘Guess not,’ he agreed and looked around him at the area that had been designed for the SkyPoint community to relax in without fear. ‘It certainly is quiet.’
‘That’s the way we like it,’ said Wendy, and carried Alison away to the elevator with her.
Owen watched them go, and thought about Rapunzel.
TWELVE
Toshiko had slipped the gun back into her belt just before she reached the elevator in the basement. When Lucca moved out of the darkness there like a phantom she wasn’t sure if he had seen it, or if perhaps she should show it to him anyway – business-end first.
She knew who Lucca was; Gwen had pulled the villain’s files up in the Hub Boardroom and given them all a run-down on the guy who lived at the top of SkyPoint. There wasn’t much likelihood that he had anything to do with what had brought Torchwood to the apartment tower, but he was a nasty complication that Gwen believed Toshiko and Owen would do well to avoid.
So much for that.
Toshiko jumped as Lucca materialised out of the dark, his face lit up like a Halloween mask by her flashlight. He had been lucky, she realised, that she hadn’t pulled the gun on instinct and blown his head off there and then. From what Gwen had told her, he wouldn’t have been missed.
‘You made me jump!’ she gasped, at once recognising Lucca and making ready with some kind of story to cover being down there.
Lucca’s eyes glittered like diamonds in the torchlight. When he smiled his teeth shone, white and sharp.
The smile didn’t make Toshiko feel any more comfortable.
‘You’re not supposed to be down here,’ he said.
‘I was just looking for somewhere to smoke,’ she said, hoping she got the mix of apology, embarrassment and what’s-it-got-to-do-with-you just right. ‘My husband doesn’t like me lighting up in the apartment.’
‘You could have gone outside.’
‘And look like one of those sad people that they make hang around doorways these days? No thanks.’