‘Most people spend their time looking up,’ she said eventually, ‘looking at the stars. You seem to spend far too much time looking down. What are you looking for, exactly?’

‘Perhaps I’m looking for fallen stars,’ he said after a moment.

‘It’s the people, isn’t it? You just can’t help watching them.’ She caught herself. ‘No, that’s not it. You’re not watching them; you’re watching over them.’

‘Ever seen a two-year-old tottering around a garden?’ he said softly, without turning around. ‘There might be poison ivy, or rose bushes, or hawthorn around the edges. There might be spades or secateurs lying on the lawn. The kid doesn’t care. He just wants to play with all those brightly coloured things he sees. To him, the world is a safe place. And you might want to rush out and cut back all those sharp, spiky plants so they can’t hurt him, and you might want to clear away all those dangerous tools just in case he picks them up and cuts himself on them, but you know you shouldn’t, because if you keep doing that then he will either grow up thinking the world can never hurt him, or he might go the other way and think that everything is dangerous and he should never go far from your side. So you just watch. And wait. And, if he does get a rash from the poison ivy, or if he does cut his finger off with the secateurs, then you get him to hospital as quickly as you can, in the reasonably sure knowledge that he’ll never make that mistake again.’

‘Like a tuning fork inducing sympathetic vibrations in a wine glass,’ Toshiko said, nodding.

Owen suddenly perked up. ‘I could do with one of those.’

‘You already have one of those,’ Jack said. ‘It’s called “common sense”. You ask yourself the question “Does she want a shag?” And your common sense chips in with the answer: “No, of course she doesn’t. I’m unshaven and seedy. She would rather stick knitting needles in her eyes.”’

Somewhere in the Archive, there was a section devoted to the records left behind by other Torchwood members; ones who had been carrying out experiments, just as Toshiko was. Ianto had showed her where it was, once upon a time. Videos. Photographs. An ancient daguerreotype. And one scratchy old wax cylinder that, Ianto told her, contained a man’s voice talking very calmly up to the point when he suddenly let out the most God-awful scream that Ianto had ever heard.

‘You’re a doctor. You saw the photographs of the dead Weevil. Whatever killed it had teeth. That means it has a mouth. That means it needs to eat. That means it… oh shit. I’ve run out of conclusions. You know what I’m trying to say. It’s real, not some spooky Scooby-Doo ghoul thing.’

‘Actually,’ Toshiko felt constrained to say, ‘the ghouls and ghosts and monsters in Scooby-Doo always turned out to be men in masks. Usually the caretaker.’ She noticed Gwen’s raised eyebrow. ‘I liked Velma,’ she said defensively.

‘Yeah, which only goes to prove that you’re not a true Scooby-Doo fan,’ Owen said. He was still watching the patch of darkness as it hugged the corrugated metal side of the warehouse, moving slowly but inexorably toward them. ‘The sixth incarnation of Scooby-Doo, dating to the early 1980s, had Scooby and Shaggy meeting up with real ghosts, vampires and all kinds of shit. Didn’t you ever see The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo? Or Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers?’

‘Sadly, no.’

‘Fun though this is,’ Jack interrupted, ‘I think we have a more pressing concern right now. Although I did think that Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf marked an absolute low in the output of the Hanna-Barbera studios.’ He stepped forward. Toshiko expected him to raise his gun, but instead he left it hanging by his side. ‘Hi,’ he said brightly. ‘We’ve kinda gone astray. What’s the best way back to the Millennium Stadium from here?’

Toshiko reached behind her and pulled the Walther P99 from the holster in the small of her back. The gun dragged her hand down. She felt wetness on the grip: oil, sweat, humidity – whatever it was, it made the grip slippery and the gun hard to hold straight. Long hours of training on the Torchwood firing range made her check there was a bullet primed and ready to go, and then made her click the safety off. The bullets were made of some alien alloy, and their noses had been hollowed out and filled with a Teflon fluid. The entry wound was the size of a penny piece; the exit wound was the size of a dinner plate. They could take down an elephant – if one ever went rogue in Cardiff. With one shot. And Toshiko hated them. They were technology gone bad.

He paused. Thinking. ‘Yeah, I’m from the East End. Plaistow. Terraced houses and council estates and old pubs. You could hear the Hammers playing at home from the back bedroom. Big cheer whenever they scored. Big groan when the goal went against them. I used to lie there and listen, Saturday afternoons. Used to make up my own commentary, as well.’

‘So why did you go to medical school?’

Good question, and one he tried not to think about too often. ‘Most of my friends ended up as car mechanics or estate agents. I could see all that ahead of me, and I couldn’t face it. I wanted to do something that meant something. And then…’

‘Go on,’ she said softly.

‘And then my dad died. Just upped and died. We found him in the bedroom one morning, slumped against the wall. He was wearing his shirt and his boxers and he had one sock off and one still in his hand. He looked… he looked like someone had said something to him that he couldn’t quite hear, and he was trying to work out what it was. One of the arteries in his chest had just given way. Aortic aneurysm, it’s called. I’ve done all the lectures, and I’ve seen photos in textbooks, and I’ve conducted autopsies of people who’ve died that way, but for me an aortic aneurysm will always be my dad, sitting there, one bare foot, and frowning.’

His face was wet. Tears were slipping from his eyes and spreading out across his cheeks leaving coldness behind. He hadn’t even realised he was crying. The grief was something separate from him that his body could get on with while he was talking.

‘I’m sorry,’ Marianne said.

‘And that’s why I became a doctor.’

‘So you could save people like your father?’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘So I could stop the same thing happening to me.’

You were right,’ Rhys murmured, breaking the self-destructive spiral her thoughts were descending into.

‘Right about what?’

‘Right about Lucy. About letting her stay here. Definitely a bad idea.’

Gwen laughed – more a hiccup than a proper laugh, but she felt the darkness recede from her mind. ‘I wasn’t anticipating anything like this, I must say.’

‘What were you expecting, then?’

‘I was—’ She stopped, embarrassed. ‘Look, I’d better sort that door out. We don’t want her coming back.’ She walked down the hall and pushed the door closed until it clicked.

‘Come on – what were you expecting?’

‘If you really want to know, I thought she was trying to get you into bed!’

‘She was.’ Rhys’s voice was calm, flat, although it was the calmness of encroaching shock. ‘I guess I was flattered. I guess I was even interested. But nothing happened, and nothing was ever going to happen.’

Gwen felt as if someone had poured cold water down her back. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I love you, and because I want to stay with you.’

‘Despite… despite the fact that things aren’t the way they were when we started seeing each other?’

‘Or maybe because of that.’ He shifted position slightly and winced. ‘It can’t always be like the first few days. Relationships change. People change. And so long as they change together, it’s OK. I’ll be honest, there’s a part of me that wants things to be as exciting as they used to be. But there’s another part of me that likes the snuggling up and watching telly together.’

‘She’s prettier than me. And she’s a bloody sight slimmer than me too.’

She wanted Rhys to say that she was prettier than Lucy, that she was slimmer than Lucy, but she knew that he would have been lying, and if there was one thing she wanted at that moment it was the truth about what was happening to them.

‘I have a feeling you’re working with guys who are handsomer and slimmer than I am,’ he said eventually. ‘But nobody can keep trading up for better and better partners. Not if they want anyone to ever trust them.’

‘Oh Rhys…’

Perhaps it was a weapon, perhaps it was a sex toy; Toshiko wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure she cared, either.