Skypoint by Phil Ford

he sat back-to-back with his partner overlooking their panoramic Bay view while Andrew worked on the latest in a series of novels featuring his gay Cardiff private eye detective hero and played Bowie loud enough to shake the foundations.
    By this time Ewan had delivered Toshiko’s spritzer and pressed a glass of lager into Owen’s hand.
    ‘Cheers,’ said Ewan and raised his glass.
    Owen raised his own glass and pretended that something across the room had taken his attention, so that he turned and only wet his lips and didn’t actually drink any of the beer. Drinking the beer would not be a good idea, nor would eating any of the food Ewan and Wendy offered. He and Toshiko had earlier agreed that Owen would claim to be a little off-colour and excuse himself from the meal – but with the apartment full of guests it looked like it was going to be easier than expected to get around the problem. When he got the chance he would also put his beer down and by the time everyone else had drunk a few glasses they wouldn’t notice that the level of Owen’s glass never seemed to fall.
    Now they were being introduced to a starched woman who was probably in her thirties but dressed and acted like she was twenty years older. Marion Blake wore her hair in coiled braids that made Owen think of Carrie Fisher in Star Wars , only he got the feeling he was never going to see Marion in a bronze-ribbed bikini. He wasn’t sure that he would want to. She was skinny, with lips that seemed permanently pinched into a disapproving pout. She looked like the kind of woman who would have lived behind flickering net curtains and filled her nights behind them writing letters of complaint, if she hadn’t been living in a tower block. She was PA to the chairman of a Cardiff-based export company, she said. When she moved on, Andrew and Simon told them that from what they had seen of their neighbour, and her frequent visits by the man who had to be her boss, they suspected that her personal assistance extended to more than keeping his diary straight.
    Owen was sure the two writers were winding them up, but, hell, he should know better than anyone that things could take on a pretty skewed reality when no one was looking. He glanced at his watch and wondered briefly what time they would get out of there, and how long it would take Toshiko to drift off to sleep afterwards. He had a regular appointment with some pretty skewed reality of his own later tonight and he didn’t intend to miss it – and he didn’t want Toshiko asking him awkward questions about where he was going, either.
    ‘You probably know everyone in SkyPoint, then,’ Toshiko was saying to Andrew and Simon. ‘I mean, if you work from the flat. You’re probably around more than anyone else.’
    ‘Well, it doesn’t take a lot to know everyone,’ Simon told her. ‘There’s hardly anyone else in the place.’ He waved at the dozen-or-so people in the apartment. ‘The place is like a bloody ghost town in the sky.’
    ‘They built all these apartment buildings in Cardiff and forgot to work out how many people there were that could actually afford to live in them,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s the same right across the city. There are apartment blocks with no more than a handful of people living in them. It’s crazy.’
    ‘I heard that some people moved in here, then just took off,’ Toshiko said, and sipped her spritzer.
    Andrew’s eyes narrowed behind their red frames. Owen wondered if it was the kind of suspicious gaze the gay ’tec in his novels gave the killer when they let something slip.
    ‘You’re very well informed,’ he said with a smile.
    ‘Our lawyer had heard some rumour,’ Owen said quickly, though he didn’t think Andrew was doing anything more than playing with Toshiko. And he didn’t think Andrew was probably the shapeshifting wall-walker, either. He didn’t see a creature like that morphing into anything quite as camp as Andrew.
    ‘Well, we heard the same,’