SIXTEEN

Joe was starting to lose his rag but trying not to show it.

'I'm on my way, babe,' he promised into his mobile, 'but the gig ran late, and we had to fight for our money.' There was an earful of panic and Joe rolled his eyes. 'No... not really fighting... It's just an expression, isn't it?' He swapped ears and blew some of the rain off his nose, moving as quickly as he could across Roald Dahl Plass without slipping. That'd top the night off, flat on his back with a smashed guitar and Martinette dumping him for always being late. 'I'm getting the car now... Yes, straight there... Promise... Love you too, babe, and I'll see you in— Oh.'

There was an old man lying on the ground, a wheelchair on its side next to him.

'Some old bloke's had an accident,' Joe told Martinette. 'Fallen out of his wheelchair or something... No, of course I'm not making it up!'

He ran over to the man and turned him over. 'Bloody hell,' he whispered. 'I hope he's not...'

'Freezing his ageing knackers off waiting for some sap to walk over and help?' Alexander moaned. 'Yes, I'm rather afraid he is.'

He sprayed the contents of what looked like an inhaler into Joe's face, grabbing the mobile out of his hand before he dropped it. 'He'll call you later,' he said into the phone, cutting it off before the shouting on the other end got into full flow.

'Now,' he said, yanking the battery out of the back of the phone to disable it, 'that surprisingly potent drug that's running through your system is a little something I knocked up myself. There shouldn't be any long-lasting effects – none that your girlfriend will complain about anyway – but you'll find that for the next few hours you'll be inclined to do whatever anyone tells you.' He pushed himself up on his elbows. 'So how about getting me back in my wheelchair and giving me a lift to Penylan?'

'Why not?' said Joe with a doped grin that made it look like he had bad wind.

'Some kind of spatial displacement?' asked Ianto.

Julia groaned, 'I'm not up for much more of this.'

'If this is like what happened to me,' Ianto said, 'vanishing from one place and appearing in another, how come we're not all a bunch of ice cubes?'

'It's a question of energy,' Jack replied. 'The worse this situation gets, the less juice it takes to move a body from one place to another. Heat is the most readily available energy source in a human being. It took most of yours in the jump from outside to here. Now... well, things are becoming really disturbed, so moving between locations in space-time is becoming dangerously simple.'

He grabbed Julia and Ianto's hands. 'It's OK, though, we'll be safe enough. Let's just...'

They walked out of the room and reappeared in the kitchen.

'Hmm. Let's just try and get back to where we want to be.'

He kept talking as they walked through the kitchen door...

'This kind of disturbance can't last long.'

... into the lounge. Out of the lounge...

'Or if it does, the damage to the physical cohesion of this part of the universe will be so immense...'

... onto the upstairs landing.

'... we'll be beyond caring.'

They ran down the stairs, walked through the door to the dining room and were relieved to find themselves in it.

Gwen looked up from unknotting cable and stared at the three of them.

'Sweet,' she said, noticing that they were all holding hands. 'Glad you're all getting on so well.'

***

'It's bloody freezing in here,' moaned Alexander, twisting and wrenching at the heating controls.

'Heater doesn't work,' chuckled Joe.

Alexander glanced at him. He had the feeling he'd miscalculated the dose – the young man seemed positively euphoric. 'You live in Wales,' he said. 'You need a heater in your car, you silly masochist.'

'You try earning your living playing the guitar in pubs,' Joe replied. 'See how many luxuries you can afford.' He started to laugh uncontrollably.

Alexander sighed, reaching out to steady the wheel as Joe's giggles made him swerve. 'Get us there in one piece, and I'll buy you a new car.'

'Cool!'

Joe put his foot down and began singing as they motored their way through the one-way system.

'I need to find Rob,' Julia insisted. 'Has nobody seen him?'

'Not for a while,' Gwen admitted, 'but I'm sure he's OK.'

'In this place?' asked Julia, looking towards the dining room door. 'Do you think it's safe?'

'As much as it'll ever be,' Jack replied. 'Ianto, would you...?'

'Of course.' Ianto put his hand on Julia's arm. 'Let's go and find him.'

Jack started wiring the loose video and microphone cables to the equipment on the dining room table.

'I hope Rob's OK,' said Gwen. 'Things are getting pretty serious here.'

'So what's new?' Jack replied. 'Rob's bound to be freaked out, but he was handling it better than a lot of people would.'

'The first time we met him, he tried to bash your head in with a poker,' Gwen pointed out, 'and we're in a building that excels at sending people mad.'

'There is that,' Jack admitted as he began tuning the monitors in to the video feeds.

She turned her laptop screen towards him, the scan of an old newspaper on it, 'Recognise the face?'

Jack glanced at the screen and stopped what he was doing. The grainy black-and-white image showed an exceedingly large man being led away from the front door of Jackson Leaves by two police constables.

'I didn't see him,' he admitted. 'He attacked me from behind. Seems likely he's our man, though, doesn't it?'

Gwen nodded. 'Rupert Locke, convicted of six violent rapes in 1951.'

Jack shrugged. 'Don't remember him.'

'I'm surprised. There looks to have been a lot of coverage about it. He was completely unrepentant. Told the police "the house made me do it".'

Jack banged his hand against the table in frustration. 'That's the problem with all of this,' he said. 'It would have set alarm bells ringing at the time if I'd read it. It's hardly subtle, is it?'

'How do you mean?'

'All of these things happening around Jackson Leaves – a house I owned – you think I wouldn't have looked into it before now?'

'Perhaps you were too busy to notice? Being in Torchwood, it's easy to miss some of the more... conventional stuff.'

'I might have missed some of the news reports, sure, but all of them? No... there's something skewed about this. If it had been going on all these years, I would have known about it already. OK, so Torchwood wouldn't have looked into it, the incidents are all typical police business and they would have had no reason to spot the link, but I would. I'd have had every reason.'

Ianto and Julia came back in.

'He's not here!' Julia said. 'How is that possible? We've checked every room, and there's no sign of him.'

Jack finished plugging in the video cables and turned on the bank of monitors. Each showed an empty room of the house. Flicking through the feeds it was plain that the only inhabited room was the one they were standing in.

'He might have gone outside,' Gwen suggested.

'Of course he hasn't!' Julia spat. 'Not after what we saw.'

'There's only one explanation, then,' said Jack. 'He must have vanished through one of the rents in space-time.'

'What?' Julia was incredulous.

'We've got repeated bursts of temporal and spatial distortion,' Jack explained. 'Something is causing space to fluctuate – like when we left one room and found ourselves in another. Ianto "fell" into one of those fluctuations and ended up here. Rob must have done the same, ending up—'

'Who knows where...' Julia bit her lip. 'Anything could have happened to him.'

'I hate to say it,' Jack offered, 'but if he's out of this place he's probably a lot safer than the rest of us.'

'Think how Ianto was,' Gwen added. 'I'm not saying it was pleasant—'

'It certainly wasn't,' Ianto agreed.

'— but you were OK in the end,' Gwen continued, giving him a slightly admonishing look.

'Damn right.' Jack put his hands on Julia's shoulders. 'If he's got out of here, then he'll be fine, just like Ianto was.'

'I don't know...' Julia looked at Jack, her body shaking. It was all finally getting on top of her.

'Do you trust me?' he asked.

Her eyes glanced around, her panic building, barely in check. 'I don't know...'

'You need to trust me, Julia. I've seen us all right so far, haven't I?'

She nodded. 'I suppose...'

'Yes, I have, and I'll get us all out of here safely...'

'And Rob...'

'And we'll find Rob, and everything will be just fine. Now listen, I need you to take this.' He handed her a pill and a half-full bottle of mineral water.

'What...'

'I need you to trust me, Julia, it's important. I wouldn't hurt you, now would I? Take this, and then we'll find Rob.'

She stared at him for a moment, then her shoulders sagged and she gave in, tossing the pill to the back of her throat and washing it down with the water.

'What are you giving her?' Gwen asked.

'Retcon, of course,' Jack replied.

'Oh Jack,' Gwen sighed. 'You didn't have to do that.'

'What?' Julia asked. Her head was tingling, like pins and needles behind her eyes.

'Sorry,' Jack said, 'but it's for the best.'

The penny dropped and Julia tried to run, but the drug was quicker than she was. She stumbled in the hallway, falling against the under-stairs cupboard as her legs refused to support her.

Gwen chased after her, holding up her arms to defend herself from Julia's weak blows. Slowly, the woman crumpled, the fight gone from her. Gwen looked up at Jack.

'You can be a pretty heartless bastard sometimes, Jack, you know that?'

'I just have a sense of priority,' he replied. 'We need to fix this, and she was going to be in the way. She'll be fine.'

'She'd better be.'

Jack rolled his eyes in exasperation. 'We have to see the bigger picture here, Gwen! Have you no idea how much trouble we're in? Right now, she is the least important problem we have – it's nothing personal, it's just fact – and I used the quickest and safest way of removing that problem.' He looked at Ianto. 'Right?'

Ianto ignored him, helping Gwen to pick up Julia's body. 'We'll put her in the lounge,' he said. 'She'll be comfortable there.'

Jack sighed. There were times when he wondered if they'd abolished pragmatism in this century.

Beneath the stairs, Rob was barely even aware of what was going on outside any more. The noise of his wife falling against the door to his private little world didn't even register as he hugged the taped-up shaft of the croquet mallet, digging his teeth into the wood and listening to it whisper awesome potentials into his head.

Some of the things it suggested in the dry creak of its wooden tongue were terrible, but he knew he would do them. And when they finally stopped him, put cuffs on his wrists and led him away, he'd tell them the truth knowing they wouldn't believe a word of it.

'The house made me do it,' he'd say.