Ianto dragged his fingers through his hair and looked up at the small CCTV monitor in the corner of Jacks office, Gwen was sat looking at the woman nodding occasionally while she talked her head down as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. He took a deep breath in through his nose and started to speed read those last pages. He only needed an idea of what they had done and he knew that Owens reports read like the best pages of Chemistry Today, if there was such a publication, really Owen did waste his talents on drink and women. Used to thought Ianto correcting himself.

Even skimming these pages was unpleasant reading, so much more personal and brutal that anything even Owen could manage in his darkest moods with the Locuts and Rats, the Rat Jam experiment he had cleaned up after came to mind. The particularly sickening thing was that they just seemed to be doing it to provoke an ever increasing reaction, observations of the ambient conditions in the holding cell made him think it was in the layers that had been lost in the building of the barrage – Torchwood ran wide and deep, when they had sunk the pillars in the mid 90s they thought they had found underwater caves, no one telling the construction company that they had a top secret alien research facility. Jack had told the story one night after a particularly drunken team building event – aka a night at the pub – and how much retcon it had taken to convince the surveyor that you really did need that much concrete for a shaft 6 metres by 15 metres. Ianto had tried to follow up on those rooms, he always thought it was a shame when there was something without a record but Jacks mood had changed instantly and he had left it. It was probably a good thing he didn't know that Ianto had the original architect drawings in one of the vaults, they didn't have recton them and the poor guy had been found hanging from a tree a few weeks after completing them so he couldn't tell anyone.

There were only a few pages left in the document but it was finally too much for Ianto to cope with and his last cup of coffee and much of his last meal finally escaped his stomach. The finally few pages were truly horrendous, devoid of any humanity and even without medical training he could see the recorded vital signs slowly fading. Then abruptly the medical green pages stopped, he turned the page and was looking at the manila brown of the folder, he looked back a few pages and then stupidly flicked back through expecting the page to reappear. As he did so he noticed that caught in the bindings behind that last page were the remnants of another incident report, the jagged edges of a page ripped out.

Ianto sat back and took a swig of the water that permanently sat on Jacks desk to get rid of the foul taste left in his mouth. He closed the files and pursed his lips, he would have to clear up the vomit before it left a permanent mark on the wooden floor and empty the bin, he needed to see if there was an electronic record of that missing incident report, scratch that he would give Tosh that pleasure. But first he had put an end to what was happening downstairs, the least he could do was stop history repeating. He went to put the files back in the drawer but realised the effort would be useless, Jack was going to know that he had been through his things and boy was that going to take some explaining, but so was Jacks curious attitude.



Shaking just a little Ianto went to the interrogation room and politely knocked on the wire frame of the door, Jenny looked up as if she was about to be shot and Gwen smiled in that ever so polite way that she used when she was trying to give some cryptic message.

"I wondered if anyone wanted coffee?" He asked quietly, trying to play Gwens smiling game

"Triffick" said Gwen in her smiley voice, her Welsh accent came out more when she was stressed.

"Would you like to give me a hand?" Suggested Ianto trying to get Gwen alone so he could talk to her.

"I think we could all do with a break, don't you?" Jenny just nodded and held up her hands for the handcuffs.

"Don't worry about that, we won't be long." Said Ianto tugging at Gwens arm.

Jenny smiled and laid her head on her arms as the Torchwood pair sidled out of the small room and went up to the kitchenette.

"She's no threat" said Gwen confidently as Ianto started to grind some fresh coffee. The bile rose in his again.

"I read the files." He said quietly and turned to look Gwen in the eye. "It was horrible, what Torchwood used to do in the name of science and understanding. You need to know what they did to her before you go back in there, I wouldn't have blamed her for being a threat."

Gwen looked at Ianto, he worn his heart on his sleeve and it was showing, the milk jug he was holding was shaking alarmingly so she stepped forward and took it off him, he rubbed his arms in a friendly gesture which was all it took to crack him.

"God but Torchwood was full of monsters for such a long time, and I could have been one of them. I was supposed to go to J section next, the things they did, they pain they caused her and they cover it all up. Why would she come back here?"

"Well that's an easy one to answer" Said Gwen guiding him to the far side of the kitchenette and the bar stool that hardly ever got used. "To cut a long story short she was hoping that the rift would open up and swallow her, a bizarre sort of suicide because she didn't really know how to cope with a few things. I agree with you that the past was a dark place for Torchwood, but perhaps it's the best place now we can help her come to terms with her differences, find her somewhere, pull a few strings. I mean where else on planet earth would she find someone else who she can discuss the drawbacks and pitfalls of immortality?" She asked trying to lighten the mood.

Ianto jumped up like a scalded cat,

"No, we don't let Jack anywhere near her."

Gwen looked at him quizzically, over the last few weeks – ever since Jack had suddenly re-appeared in fact – Ianto had taken Jacks side in every argument.

"He's a liar and a charlatan, all that shouting and postulating earlier about signing requisition slips and he sparked off at her, well his name is on the transfer order to bring her here." He sniffed loudly and wiped his nose on the edge of his sleeve before Gwen could fish a tissue from her pocket. "You know he once told me he had done many things he wasn't proud of, he was a con-man and a thief before he got landed here permanently." Gwen nodded this was old news and while she didn't think she would 

when she heard it she had got over it. "He also told me some of the things he did for Torchwood, he said he would do anything just to stay by the rift because he knew at some point the Doctor would be back. Go to Man, he said he was, Go to Man for anything they didn't need to explain like disposing of bodies and getting information." Ianto couldn't say the words, he didn't want to cement the thought that Jack could have done all this.

"Are you trying to tell me you think Jack was involved in this torture?" Said Gwen quietly

"I don't know, read it Gwen, tell me I'm wrong but he signed the papers, he wanted it hidden, you tell me."

"Right" said Gwen decisively, "Executive decision, you go and put our guest in the boardroom, this has gone on long enough. I will go read these documents when they get back head Jack off at the pass and we will have this one out in the open."

"You won't have long to wait, Owen called in a few minutes ago to say they are on the way back."

"Righty ho, no time like the present then is there, coffee ready?" she asked quietly and Ianto hit the button over the coffee press. Her smile was waning, confronting Jack was a great idea on paper but in practice it could be messy. What did she have to loose? She asked herself, all he could do was fire her, Retcon her – which hadn't worked in the past, Retcon Rhys and make her forget the past two years of her life. On the plus side she might have some time to organise this wedding of hers.

She took the coffee and headed across the hub, pausing at the screen on Toshs desk to see where the tracker had the SUV, a good ten minutes away even with Jack driving like a maniac. Right, these files, couldn't be worse than the stuff CID would throw at the probationary PCs so they could have a good laugh when they went green. Good training for Torchwood really. Gwen skimmed the pages, she could see why Ianto was so upset but was still having trouble with Jacks attitude. It was gruesome reading and tallying with the things that she had been mentioned in the interview, Gwen could sense Torchwood spin in action it had been a well honed system of lies and half truths in the period that had started in the 1950s. Jack maintained that it was all due to the fact that the Americans had started their own "Alien department" after Roswell and Torchwood lost a valuable source of artefacts and therefore a large chunk of the money that came from alien technology. Ianto had often parodied one of the lessons he had been at in his induction when the speaker had started getting all frothy at the mouth about the fact that this had caused the decline of the British Empire and if the Yanks had only been sensible we could have invented the digital watch and ruled the world.

There was a warning shout from Ianto, the SUV was coming into the underground parking area and Jack was ordering Chinese for lunch. She had less than two minutes to work out what the hell to say. She hoped Ianto would have the sense to separate the other two and send him straight here, she fiddled with the papers again and then stood up, this was a stand up type of conversation. She walked over to the wall of windows and watched as Jack came up from the basement levels with a heavier than normal step and he looked up. There was a slight register of surprise but she guessed Jack might know 

exactly what was about to happen. He walked in his office and clocked the files on his desk.

"Not where I left them" he said looking directly at Gwen and looked over at the CCTV screen pressed a few of the controls and ended up with the boardroom, "And not where I left it."

"Jack, I understand you know what you think she did, but I think you might be as much of a victim in all this." Gwen was trying the 'it's not you it's me' approach to negotiation.

Jack hung his long smoke blue coat on the old fashioned hat stand and twisted his head from side to side to release the muscles.

"Give me todays conspiracy theory then."

He said going over to the small metal safe in the corner, which wasn't really just a small safe but the entry point to a vast mechanical retrieval system for the most sensitive of information and artefacts. Gwen outlined the case as she saw it, in a very methodical police type manner. She included the parts about the Doctor, which raised an eyebrow, the original work Jenny had undertaken at Torchwood, the change in position and the eventual betrayal leading to the interrogation. She left out the part about Jack signing for her transfer for the moment.

Jack turned back to her with an old fashioned book in his hand, bound in black leather with gold writing on the spine and front cover and the central image of the Torchwood Helix.

"You've heard of the Torchwood Black Book I take it?" he said passing it to Gwen who took hold of it like a hot potato. This fabled tome had been written by Torchwood and given sealed to every military unit in the country, it was supposed to contain instructions on how to destroy every known alien threat – which was in Torchwoods opinion everything of non-earth origin. Friendly or not there was a detailed taxonomy, drawings, internal and external and instructions on which aliens they had to keep for further examination. It was only supposed to be opened when ordered but the Doomsday scenario had never taken place, apart from Canary Wharf, when the ironical thing was the world was saved by public enemy Number One.

"Heard of it, yes, I thought the government had ordered all known copies destroyed after they shut down One"

"No Prime Minister has ever told me what to do." He said gently opening the book a few pages in "Sometimes you need to be reminded how low you can sink." He said pointing at the name of the sub-author "Freda Jones"

"Make no mistake Dr Orange didn't have the mental capacity to string together a sentence let alone a book." He said of the first name on the cover page. "Read what she says, the venom about the Doctor and his companions, she interviewed them all."

Gwen was rapidly patching things together from the morning in the interview room. Jenny had mentioned this work, she had also mentioned this book and how other people had twisted things to fit their own end. As she flicked through the tome there were some excellent drawings of Hoix and a Weevil. The first chapter had pages of drawings of men all numbered as reincarnations and Gwen knew she was looking at the many faces of the Doctor, followed by named faces labelled as companions. It was startling to see a 

near rendition of Martha and someone that could have been Jack, but the hair was wrong. Jack was waiting patiently for Gwen to admit he was right and throw that thing in a cell, whoever had made that book was a sick individual who had devoted a career to systematically tracking down and recording things with the sole intent of destroying them.

Gwen flicked back and forth it was a murders handbook but it only told half the story. She flicked back to the title page to confirm what she suspected. She had to be gentle about this, Jack was about to get a good dose of the truth.

"Jack this isn't all it seems, I think this is all Torchwood spin and they got you."

Jack raised and eyebrow which told her he was about to contradict her so she ploughed on.

"Look at the date Jack, this was published well after she was supposed to have committed suicide she was in the vaults here by then. They were torturing her Jack, not the other way round."

Jack looked confused, over the years his imagination had added layers to the original story he had been given.

"But why would she have all this information?" He asked as if that would prove her guilt.

"I think she was the same as you were before you found your Doctor, just searching for answers. You know this information wasn't just collected when she worked for Torchwood she has been writing bits and pieces for 400 years, they stole it and turned it into something evil." Gwen let the implication hang in the air while Jack digested it.

"Think about it Jack why was Torchwood set up? Your Doctor is, was, an enemy of the crown, they weren't going to make him sound all goody twoshoes now were they?"

Jack sat down, he had to admit that as normal Gwen was making sense in a senseless world. If he thought about it rationally and added all the pieces together, he sighed, he should have trusted his instincts. He had felt a connection 90 years ago, she had tried to help up on the Plass – evil bitches did not try and save people. He tapped his fingers on the old files and chewed his lip before looking up a Gwen.

"I admit there is a possibility you could be right." He said slowly flicking the top few pages.

"So what are we going to do Jack?"

"Well I know what I'm gonna do," said Jack quickly standing up "I'm gonna do lunch" Gwen turned to follow his gaze and saw Ianto carrying three paper bags into the boardroom. He was moving across the room before she asked her final question.

"Then what Jack?"