My tales treat the BBC TV series as the only canonical Torchwood, though I have incorporated some additional background from 'The Torchwood Archives' - BBC Books, 2008. This one picks up directly after the episode 'Greeks Bearing Gifts'.

- 1 -

What do you do on the morning after your boss killed your lover?

If you're me, Toshiko Sato, you go into work at the Hub - headquarters of Torchwood Three in Cardiff - and confront your colleague, Owen Harper. I found him in his nook, examining a small alien artefact.

"Tell me about all these deaths Mary is supposedly responsible for," I demanded. "I want to know everything!"

"OK, Tosh, cool yer jets," he said. "Jeez. Like I told Jack there was something about the corpse we found alongside her transporter, something about the whole missing heart thing that was niggling away at me so I went back through my old RCI hospital records and found this..."

He swivelled on his chair and brought up a file on his computer screen:

'Lucy Marmer. 43. Brought in DOA Sept 2001. Unidentified trauma. Ribs shattered. Heart removed. Records and post-mortem results passed to police as part of Operation Lowry.'

"I remember her being brought in," he said. "Not something I'm likely to forget, that. At the time I hadn't seen anything like it. And she was one of ours, a paediatric nurse. She was found by her son and you can imagine the state he was in, finding his mum like that. So I went into Scotland Yard's database and looked up Operation Lowry. Basically, it's an ongoing investigation into a series of deaths that go back to 1970. The first one was a Myra Bennett. Body found by daughter. Cause of death - a hole punctured through the ribcage. And the heart was missing. Same with Sally Chappel in 1972, Richard Playle in 1973 and then roughly one a year, up until Lucy Marmer. The only tenuous link I could find between all the victims is that none of them were particularly exciting. They were all quiet or shy, four of them were estranged from their families but none of them were the kind of people to have enemies. Sound familiar?"

It was a lot to take in. Mary - my Mary - ripping the hearts out of all those people and more? No, I didn't believe it, I didn't want to believe it.

"Got a minute Toshiko?"

It was my boss Captain Jack Harkness, Mary's killer, calling me into his office. As I made my way up there I found myself replaying the events of last night, how Jack gave Mary the transporter and how she and it then vanished as they dematerialised.

"Has she gone home?" I'd asked him.

"I reset the coordinates."

"Where to?"

"To the centre of the sun. It shouldn't be hot. I mean, we sent her there at night and everything."

"You killed her," I said, appalled.

"Yes."

I don't think I'll ever forget how cold and pitiless his voice was when he said it, how cruel his joke. Afterwards, when he we talked about what had happened, I told him what he wanted to hear, not what I really thought.

"So," said Jack, sitting down behind his desk, "how are you feeling this morning?"

After the death of the person I loved and all the revelations about her I was barely holding it together.

"I'll manage," I said.

"Good. What do you know about Mary's people?"

"She never told me their name."

"Fortunately, I recognized the technology in her transporter as Arcateenian. The Arcateenian are a benevolent race of artists, singers and poets who travel the galaxy spreading love, peace and harmony," said Jack. "Their only weakness is that they need a lot of energy to survive on Earth for any length of time and maintain their basic humanoid form, otherwise they die and it dissipates. A couple of weeks, they're fine. Any longer and they have to get home. That would be why the guard Mary killed left no corpse for us to find. There was a bunch of them at Woodstock, travelling North America in a VW Camper Van with their specially composed lyrics all over it, not that any non-Arcateenian could read them, of course. The hippies all just thought they were these really groovy symbols, man."

"Mary described her world as savage, with enforced worship in temples the size of cities, and execution squads roaming the streets. She claimed dissent of any kind meant death, or transportation to what they'd call a feral outpost. Like, for instance, this planet two hundred years ago."

"She lied to you," said Jack.

"I was wearing the pendant when she told me, and it didn't feel like a lie."

"Then she was a very good liar."

Or, I didn't say, she was telling the truth. There were things Mary could and did keep from me, but when I was wearing that telepathic pendant I knew if I was being lied to. And despite me describing something to Jack last night as 'probably the only honest thing she ever did say', because I knew that's what he wanted to hear, the fact was that most of what Mary told me was the truth.

"I want you and Gwen to check out her address," said Jack, "she had a flat on..."

"Crwys Road. I know. I may never have been there but I know where Mary lives... lived. A mysterious woman approaches me knowing about Torchwood? Of course I ran a check on her."

- 2 -

"How are you holding up?" asked Gwen, picking the lock on the door to Mary's flat while I kept watch.

"I'll manage," I said, even though I wanted to curl up in a ball and die.

"Anything we should be worried about before we proceed any further?"

"Nothing that's registering," I replied, frowning at the readings on the small meter I was holding."

"Good, then guns out - can't be too careful."

Stepping over the letters on Mary's doormat - mostly junk mail at first glance, all addressed to Mary Novak - we proceeded slowly up the stairs to her flat. It was surprisingly small, consisting of just four rooms: bedroom, kitchen, living room, bathroom, and the short hallway connecting them. After a quick check to make sure no one else was there, we holstered our handguns. Gwen came into the bedroom to find me staring at the picture on Mary's bedside table.

It was a framed photo of me.

"Oh, sweetheart," said Gwen, coming up behind me and giving me a hug. "Maybe she did really love you after all."

There was no maybe about it.

"If you check out the other rooms, I'll search this one."

Gwen nodded sympathetically, and left me there alone. I sat down on the bed and gazed about me, taking everything in: the dressing table with its junk jewellery, lipsticks, eyeliners, and other make-up; the leather jacket draped over the back of the chair; the wardrobe stuffed to the gills with fashionable clothing, bags, and footwear; the cartons of cigarettes on top of that wardrobe; the bras and other undergarments strewn about the place; and next to the photo of me on the bedside table, a bottle of whisky, a glass, and an ashtray. What struck me most about this was how very ordinary it was. It was just the sort of bedroom you might expect of the young woman Mary appeared to be. Nothing about it screamed 'alien serial-killer'.

Under the bed I found a large box containing a photo album, a smaller box, and... a Rift key? Why did Mary have a Rift key? In the album were photos stretching back more than a century, those of Mary often showing her with other women. I flicked through this, stopping at a photo of her dressed in white go-go boots and a white mini-dress covered in large multi-coloured polka dots - very Mary Quant. It was a look that really suited her. She had her arm around the waist of a pretty blonde girl who was looking up at her adoringly, while in the background other women were dancing together. Underneath the photo Mary had written 'Me and Polly at the Gateways Club, London 1967.' She looked so happy it made my heart hurt. I closed the album and set it aside. That would be something for Ianto Jones to pore over later.

I opened the smaller box and inside were five more telepathic pendants of the sort Mary had given me and that I had destroyed last night. I picked one up ...

... and suddenly there she was standing in front of me - Mary - as large as life and as beautiful as ever. I let out a loud gasp.

"Take one and wear it to bed tonight," she said.

I was so surprised that I dropped the pendant and Mary blinked out of existence, as if she'd never been there.

"Are you alright, Tosh?" said Gwen, arriving a couple of seconds later. "Only I thought I heard you cry out and you look as if you've just seen a ghost."

"I'm fine," I assured her. "What's that you're carrying?"

"Nothing extra-terrestrial, I'm afraid. It appears our Mary Novak earned her living as a freelance computer programmer and this is a list of her clients. We'll need to do due diligence and check them all out in case she was up to something else we need to know about. You find anything interesting?"

"A Rift key, a photo album, and this," I said, holding up the small box. "Inside it are four more of those telepathic pendants."