Back at the Hub Jack spun back and forth in his chair while he waited for data to start coming through the system from their trackers. Gwen was working on some reports, so it was just him monitoring Ianto at the coffee house. Which was a good thing, given their conversation. Jack grinned. He was having fun. Well, as much fun as he could have watching Ianto roast coffee. It was a relief to see that Ianto had finally gone back upstairs. He toyed with the idea of heading back to the coffee shop, but knew he would only do that if he found something in that locked off room.
A display flickered to life as the tracker under the door finally came to life. He peered intently at what it was showing, but the area was pitch black. Fiddling with the controls, he switched to infrared to see if he could catch anything. Something loomed in front of the camera and he remotely zoomed it out. The image was fuzzy and he tried to get it to focus but was having no luck. He panned the camera around to see if anything else would show up. All he was getting was the outline of shapes, but nothing was clear. Jack sighed. There was something in there, but he didn't know what it was. It was giving him a bad feeling, however.
Upstairs in the coffee house Ianto worked the lunch crowd with Ticia. If anything, it was busier than it had been the day before as word spread about the change in quality. He tried to keep an eye on the back room so Mrs. Trundle couldn't slip any customers past him, but he didn't see her after she retreated into the back room when the crowd started arriving. He worked steadily through the afternoon, staying on when Terry came as they were so busy.
The three of them got into a rhythm, working together in tandem with one of them restocking and making pots of coffee while the other two served the customers. By late afternoon they finally had a lull, so Ianto made them each a cup of coffee as they sat down and relaxed.
"What a mad house!" Ticia exclaimed. She was exhausted.
"It's his fault," Terry said, nodding at Ianto with his chin as the other man sat down wearily. "He had to go clean the place up and make the coffee taste better. Now we have to work for a living!"
"This is how this place should be," Ianto retorted. "There's no reason why this place couldn't be profitable, if it is run right." He shook his head. "What is with her, anyhow?" He jerked his thumb towards the back and Terry shrugged.
"It didn't use to be like this until about four months ago. Mrs. Trundle used to be much more organized until one day when she went missing for a few days. There were a couple of others working here at the time, but I guess they got sick and tired and quit, since she was gone. That just left me and Ticia. Then she came back, and well I figured she had a stroke or something, because she just wasn't right in the head afterwards, if you know what I mean," Terry said as he took a sip from his cup. Ticia nodded in agreement.
"Does she live here?" Ianto asked. Both of the other workers looked startled. "She never seems to leave here, so I wondered where she lived."
"I thought she lived down the lane," Ticia said. "But I never really thought about it." They sat quietly and pondered their boss. Ianto was wondering when Jack would tell him if he had found anything. So far, he had gotten nothing in his contacts, so he assumed that there wasn't enough light for them to see anything.
The door opened and a customer walked in. Terry got up to help since he was the freshest and had gotten there later than either Ticia or Ianto.
Jack saw something pass his first camera and realized that the proprietor had come down the stairs. She walked out of the range of the camera and Jack assumed she was checking out the area that Ianto had been working in earlier. Her bulk blocked the camera and he could only assume she was prying the plywood away from the entry way. He turned to the other display and saw that light was slowly spilling around the wood as she worked it back.
She finally wrestled the wood back and stood in the entryway. A moment later she picked something up and turned it. It emitted a glow that lit the room up. Jack started recording. She moved into the room and pulled the wood back behind her, obscuring the view from the other camera. He shifted the camera inside the room about and looked around. The shapes he couldn't make out earlier came into focus. He stared intently at the screen.
"Shit," he swore softly. He turned towards his keyboard and started typing a message to Ianto.
