She just hoped he didn’t get too close to her. She wouldn’t smell of tobacco.
Lucca pulled a pack from his leather jacket and flipped it open with his thumb, then took an unfiltered cigarette from it with his lips the way they did it in old movies. Maybe he thought it would impress her – he looked the type. They were foreign cigarettes – Toshiko thought she could relax on him sniffing out her lie; those things would have destroyed his nasal receptors.
‘We’re like a couple of kids behind the bike sheds, yes?’ he said, and lit the cigarette with a lighter. There was an accent, but it wasn’t strong. ‘I see you came prepared.’
He was talking about the flashlight.
‘Basements are the only place you can go these days. It was the same at our last building. And the locks to keep us out are never really any good. I work in security.’ She extended her hand. ‘Toshiko Harper.’
Lucca’s hand closed around hers like a rattlesnake.
‘Besnik Lucca. Your secret is safe with me, Toshiko.’
‘If you won’t tell anyone, neither will I,’ she said and turned towards the elevator, hoping that would signal an end to the conversation. The elevator doors parted at her touch of the button and she stepped into the light of the cabin.
But Lucca came after her, carelessly tossing his cigarette onto the concrete basement floor. His movement was quick and predatory. Toshiko instinctively pressed herself against the elevator’s mirrored wall. The doors closed behind him, and Toshiko felt trapped and more frightened than she had been by whatever was in the ducting. She slid one hand behind her back and felt it rest on the grip of the automatic under her jacket.
‘Which floor?’ he asked.
‘Thirteen. Thank you.’
Instead he hit the button for the twenty-fifth. His floor.
‘I said thirteen,’ Toshiko said, trying to keep the tension out of her voice as she felt the elevator start to climb.
Lucca flashed Toshiko a smile that made her stomach quake. It wasn’t some kind of sinister Bond-style villain smile. It was quite the opposite. She had heard Gwen list the crimes that the police had tried but failed to pin on Lucca; he was the kind of man you didn’t want to share a lift with. But he was a good-looking man and that smile could make you forget all the bad stuff. That kind of smile could seduce a nun.
‘I know,’ he said, casually. ‘But that was the basement. I thought now you might like to see the view from the roof.’
‘The roof?’
‘I have the penthouse. There’s a roof garden.’
Well, it beat etchings.
‘Owen,’ she said, apologetically. ‘He’ll wonder where I am.’
‘Your husband.’
‘That’s – that’s right,’ she said.
Lucca touched the button for the thirteenth floor, and Toshiko felt the elevator begin to slow. At the same time, she felt his eyes on her. He made sure that she felt them.
‘So be it,’ he said. ‘But you must come. I promise you – up there – it will take your breath away.’
The elevator doors opened on to the thirteenth floor. Lucca moved aside and motioned with an open hand for her to step out. Toshiko released her hold on the pistol behind her back and stepped out into the corridor.
‘I’ll see you soon, Toshiko,’ he said.
The elevator doors closed on him, but somehow it was as if she could still feel him watching her. It felt uncomfortably like the sensation she had experienced in the basement, that the thing in the ducting was watching her. The thought disturbed her.
What disturbed her more was that for a moment – just a moment, she told herself – she had nearly gone with him to the twenty-fifth floor.
THIRTEEN
‘Basically,’ Owen told them, ‘it’s shit.’
They were in the medical centre of the Hub, Owen’s Autopsy Room: Toshiko, Jack, Gwen, Ianto and Owen, looking at a piece of shit.
It was a sample from the SkyPoint ducting.
When Toshiko had returned to the apartment, Owen hadn’t been there. He’d turned up a couple of minutes later and said he’d been looking for her.
Toshiko told him about what she had found in the SkyPoint ducting and took him there immediately. She didn’t tell him about meeting Besnik Lucca, and she didn’t know why. Owen had climbed into the ducting and taken a sample of the foul mess that she had found in there. He had said he could take a fairly educated guess as to what it was, just as Toshiko already had, but he wanted to get back to the Hub to do a proper analysis.
So two hours later they were standing around Owen’s sample in the Autopsy Room.
‘Something is shitting in the ducting?’ said Gwen, raising a single unimpressed eyebrow.
‘But not mice,’ said Ianto.
Owen had chosen the most stomach-churning sample he could find. It was, after all, Owen. Death had done nothing to leaven his schoolboy delight in putting the others off their dinners. The eyeball stared at them out of the gelatinous chunk Owen had collected in one of the plastic kitchen storage boxes Ianto had included among their moving-in props.
‘So spell it out for me, Owen,’ Jack said. ‘What are we talking about here?’
‘It’s human cellular matter. It’s been broken down. Digested, if you like. If you ask me, whatever did this, this is what it didn’t need. The waste product.’
‘Shit,’ said Ianto, horrified.
‘Exactly,’ said Owen.
‘No. I meant, shit.’
‘The poor bastard,’ said Gwen.
‘Bastards,’ Owen told her. ‘According to my scans there are at least three distinct DNA markers. Three people. Oh. And I found this.’
He produced a small plastic bag. There was something square and metallic inside.
Gwen reached for it and saw that it was a cufflink bearing the picture of a clown.
‘Brian Shaw,’ she said, flatly.
Jack started to move around the autopsy room. ‘OK. So now we know what happens to the people that get taken. What we don’t know is, what’s doing this and why.’
‘Food,’ suggested Toshiko. It seemed like the obvious answer.
‘I guess,’ said Jack. Though there were creatures in the universe that would kill you for other reasons – even procreation. It wasn’t too much of a leap to think that there might be things around that would turn a person into a pile of crap for reasons other than eating.
‘So, we know it’s some sort of creature. These people aren’t being torn away by some sort of force created by the Rift. There’s something living in SkyPoint and feeding off the residents,’ said Gwen.
‘SkyPoint is a big place. And it’s still largely empty. This creature could be anywhere,’ said Toshiko.
‘Or anyone,’ Ianto reminded them. ‘I’m sure we all remember how much fun a shapeshifter can be.’
He was looking at Gwen. Now that had been the Wedding from Hell. Gwen got bitten by a shapeshifter that passed on its unborn young in its bite. Next morning – the morning of her wedding to Rhys – she was fully pregnant with a baby alien. And then it’s shapeshifting mum showed up to rip it out of Gwen – that was Nostrovite childbirth; gas and air wasn’t an option.
‘This isn’t a Nostrovite,’ said Jack.
‘Thank God,’ said Gwen.
‘But there are all sorts of shapeshifters,’ Owen told them, ‘and they’re all tricky bastards.’
Jack was musing. ‘A shapeshifter that can move through walls and pull people out with them…’
‘That’s not just shapeshifting, Jack. That’s atomic realignment,’ Owen told him. ‘Changing shape is one trick. There are all sorts of ways different creatures pull that off, but moving a solid body through brick-’
‘You’re not telling me it’s impossible, Owen. I mean something got at those people and it took them with it the same way it got in. And those apartments may be fitted with every mod-con, but they don’t have trap doors.’