Skypoint

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 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?’