Apologies for the long wait between chapters, i've been ill recently and just haven't been able to get writing done. Suffice to say quality may have suffered a bit, and it's shorter than i would have liked, but here's the next chapter.
Over and out xxx
It hadn't been long before the news story broke.
Once the police were involved, they couldn't hide it from the public for ever, and others who has seen Ianto at the dance and then not heard from him since were starting to wonder about his whereabouts, and why they hadn't seen him recently.
The news channels had picked up on the story by the time it was a week since his kidnap, and they were showing awful old photo's of him and footage that must have been shot about three years ago, meaning that he wouldn't even be that recognisable anyway.
Sympathy had started to pour into the Jones household like strong breeze that permeated the windows, and the amount of well wishers arriving on the front step was insane. Tosh was pretty sure that she'd never sat through so many late breakfasts and early lunches and late lunches and afternoon teas and dinner and suppers in her life, but everyone who had ever been connected to Ianto seemed determined to show their face and tell the Jones' just how horrifically sorry they were that 'such a wonderful boy' had been snatched.
That wasn't to say, of course, that there wasn't a good portion of those writing to them who showed no sympathy whatsoever.
Many letters arrived at the house after the first day suggesting that the kidnap hadn't happened, or was staged, that it was a ruse for attention and that the Jones' had planned it all as a scheme to get publicity.
Others still went one step further in accepting that it was a real kidnap, not a staged one, but saying that Ianto deserved it. Many suggested that his privileged, rich existence made it okay for someone to kidnap him, to demand money of his relatives, more still saying that he deserved it, that he was a 'stuck up bastard' who had it coming to him.
Tosh tried to open all the letters she suspected were non-complimentary, and made sure that they formed an assembly line to open the letters when they could, positioning herself at the end so she had to deal with the ghastly content of the letters.
But she always somehow missed a few, and she and Rhiannon could always tell when they had an unsavoury letter, as his parents, Bryn and Meghan, would cringe, dropping the letter, his mother sniffling into her tissue as she battled hard not to cry.
It made Tosh want to wring the necks of anyone who spoke even one bad word about Ianto.
But they had to just continue on, hoping that something would happen, something would change the situation they found themselves it.
The police hadn't found anything since the scrap of chloroform imbued cloth in the back alley of the hotel, and nerves were starting to wear thin whenever they were mentioned.
She was still in contact with Dr Smith, and he seemed to be progressing a little further than the police had, somehow predicting a route away from the kidnap site and out towards the outskirts of the city, how Tosh did not know. But even he was starting to his dead ends with no new evidence available to go on.
No witnesses had come forwards, no one had seen anything suspicious around the hotel at the time it was supposed to have happened. Or at least that's what police said. Last time she had checked in with John, Rose had smiled and said that they might have a few leads on witnesses, but it would take a little while. She had no idea how, when the police couldn't manage it, but she wasn't going to complain.
She was just anxious for any news, any little smidgeon of news about Ianto that she might possibly be able to lay her hands on. She was tired of the announcements on the news getting responses just to realise that the person with so called 'information' was either lying or completely insane.
So it was a complete shock, and a distraction, when she was emailed out of the blue off an untraceable account (she checked) asking her, under her website codename, whether she was available for hire.
As a hacker.
For a second she dismissed it out of hand, just automatically didn't consider it because of the situation with Ianto. But she found herself going back to it after a while, re reading it through and wondering just how much help she could be in the investigation anyway. It had ground to a halt on the police side and was going very slowly on the private detective front, and she was going stir crazy shut up inside trying to help, and not managing to get anywhere or do anything useful.
At least this would be a distraction. Something that would keep her sane.
She emailed back, careful to make everything completely untraceable, even to the most skilled of hackers, and waited for details of what they wanted. She normally didn't do work on commission, preferring to pick and choose her own cases and her own battles to fight, but she reasoned it wouldn't hurt to see what they wanted.
And the reply came faster than she expected. Apparently the mysterious emailer wanted her to hack a CCTV system, one with face recognition, for some unspecified reason, although she figured it was probably to do with getting someone in or out of the property and not wanting the owner to know. She had no idea why, but sheer desperation to be away from the constant fear about Ianto made her accept the offer, at least preliminarily.
After struggling with her conscience over whether she should accept the emailer's offer while Ianto was still missing, Tosh eventually decided that it was better than sitting around getting more and more paranoid and anxious and not getting anywhere.
Ianto would have wanted her to carry on with her life and help other people.
So she emailed them back and tentatively accepted the offer.
The response she received was overwhelming to say the least.
Whoever it was started off by thanking her so profusely that she was blushing by the end of it, and she was pretty sure that the emailer was a man by the way that he seemed to unconsciously flirt when trying to flatter someone.
The gist of their proposal, apart from the bare bones that she had assumed from his previous email, was that a friend of his was trying to get himself, and possibly someone else, she wasn't sure, out of the house where the security system was installed, and needed the system software hacked and cut off to do it.
Whilst she thought the emailer didn't want her to know exactly why his friend needed to get out, she sensed that it was urgent, and that he wasn't asking for monetary gain, or even to commit a crime. He seemed to just be in it to help his friend, from a situation that he talked about like it was quite dangerous.
That was what swayed it for her really.
He just seemed so truthful, so sincere, that she couldn't not help him.
Ianto had always teased her about being too kind, too quick to see the good in people. But when someone was really in need, and she could do something about it, she did.
But meeting up with the guy was not what she was expecting.
She was expecting an older man, probably in his fifties, balding and a little chubby.
It made no sense really why that type of guy would know who she was and what she did, but that was still the picture that had formed in her head.
So she was pleasantly surprised, shocked even, when the emailer arrived to meet her in the small, out of the way café they had agreed on as a meeting place.
He was young, probably early twenties, in a battered leather jacket, with a great smile and a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.
Tall and lean, but in a quite muscled way, like he worked out but wasn't a gym maniac. Compact, but could still pack a punch.
And he, after glancing around and spotting the red pen she had behind her ear, the sign they had agreed on when they had decided to meet, was walking towards her and grinning so adorably that she felt her heart flutter in her chest.
A/N: Hope you enjoyed, although there was a lot of narrative and not much speech, if any. Let me know what you think x
