‘I bet they still wear them,’ Jack said. The wind ruffled his hair like a playful hand. ‘I bet when all the Civil Servants arrive in their offices in the morning they lock the doors, unlock their desks and take out their ceremonial bowler hats to wear where nobody else can see them. Like a kind of administrative version of the Klu Klux Klan.’

‘Have you got some kind of downer on the Civil Service?’

He still didn’t turn around. ‘In an infinite universe,’ he said, ‘there are undoubtedly planets out there where the entire population has grey skin, wears grey clothes and thinks grey thoughts. I guess the universe needs planets like that, but I sure as hell don’t want to have to visit them. I prefer the thought that if there’s a planet of Civil Servants then there’s also a planet where everyone has an organic TV set built into their back, and you can just follow people down the street, watching daytime TV to your heart’s content.’

The colour was slowly bleeding from the sky in front of Jack Harkness: yellows dissolving into oranges, oranges melting into reds, and everything dripping from the sky, sliding off the back of the night and leaving velvet darkness behind.

Gwen gazed at Jack’s back, trying once again to try and separate out the complex mess of feelings she felt for this man. When he talked about Civil Servants wearing bowler hats, it was almost as if he had only recently seen them. When he talked about alien planets, she could almost believe that he’d been to them. Almost. But that would have been mad. Wouldn’t it?

She wondered, not for the first time, how her life had managed to take such a right-angled turn without any warning. One day she was taking statements and guarding crime scenes whilst technicians in overalls scraped evidence up into plastic bags, and the next she was part of Great Britain’s first and last line of defence against… what? Invasion. Incursion. Infiltration. A whole bag full of words beginning with ‘In’, because that’s where things were coming. In — to her reality. In — to Cardiff.