‘Oh…’ She racked her brain. It all seemed so long ago — the echoing space of the Hub, the conversation with Toshiko, the ride to the top of the building where she knew that Jack tended to hang out when he wasn’t with them — and now the memory was strangely obscured by the image of a muscular body and a huge coat wrapping itself around the wind and billowing like a leather sail. ‘Yeah… Tosh asked me to let you know something. She’s picked up little bursts of electromagnetic energy somewhere in the centre of Cardiff. It’s not one of the standard frequencies. She’s keeping an eye on it.’

‘OK.’ He paused. ‘Keep your mobile handy. Just in case.’

A sudden flush of anger at Jack’s casual assumption that she would come running when he called brought a bloom of heat to her cheeks and forehead. ‘What — just in case I actually manage to get a few hours to myself? Just in case I actually get a life?’

‘You can walk away any time you want, Gwen,’ Jack chided, a dark voice speaking to her out of darkness. ‘I don’t own you. Go back to the police, if that’s what you want. But you know what will happen. You’ll be on the outside again. You’ll see us walking past you, pushing through the barriers, taking control of your crime scenes and stripping them of whatever we want, and you won’t be part of it any more. Can you stand that? Having taken that peek over the garden wall into the wilderness, can you really pretend that it doesn’t exist and that the garden — the nicely ordered garden — is all there is?’

‘Go to hell,’ she said bleakly. ‘You know I can’t.’

‘Go to your restaurant. Make small talk with your friends. Fashion, politics, house prices, sport… It really doesn’t mean anything. Not when it’s compared with the stuff that’s drifting in through the Rift. This is real life. Down there — it’s just fantasy.’

She turned away and pushed open the door that led down through the interior of the building.