Owen was taking his turn at being domestic. Etsuko had only been at her new primary school for a week when chicken pox broke out and all the children were sent home. So far Etsu hadn’t presented any symptoms. Neither had Genkei. That was because Owen had immediately given then both a dose of a vaccine he had developed from an alien pharmacy that had been shipped up to Glasgow from the archives of the old defunct Torchwood One at Canary Wharf. Jack Harkness was overseeing the closing down of the building at last, and some surprising stuff was turning up. It seemed as if the London section of Torchwood were holding the possible cures for just about every disease known to planet Earth. There was still a lot of work to do, it had to be said. They weren’t sitting on any instant solutions, but he felt angry every time he looked at the research left unfinished. He could have been getting on with it for the past half decade if he’d known about it. Jack apologised for the oversight, and he accepted it from him, since it wasn’t really his fault. But there must have been people who knew. They weren’t all killed or upgraded. Some of them could have spoken up.

At least he knew enough so far to stop Etsuko developing a nasty disease that would make her life miserable for weeks. But that meant there was a healthy five year old with far too much energy for one little body to hold and the Hub really didn’t offer her enough amusement any more. He and Toshiko were taking it in turns to work from home for now. Darius was capable of handling any routine work in the medical room. Toshiko was happy anywhere she had a computer in front of her. Munroe was as good an office administrator as Ianto Jones was down in Cardiff. Shona and Dougal had moulded into a great field team who could handle everything that aliens might throw at them for a day or two.

He had a pile of paperwork that he could be getting on with, case notes going back a month that he had found reasons not to do in the office.

He found reasons not to do them at home, too. Yesterday the weather had been good and he had enjoyed an afternoon on the park with Etsuko. She loved playing on the swings. He never tired of pushing her. It would probably surprise most people who knew Owen to discover that. Those who knew him as a hard drinking womanising hedonist a few years ago wouldn’t even recognise him. Those who knew him as the one who usually had his hands buried in the entrails of aliens or some Human cadaver that had been listed as ‘unnatural’ and sent down to his mortuary would never expect such a soft side to him, either.

Once, a long time back now, he HAD been an ordinary doctor, and a good one, he thought. He took care of patients who were generally grateful for his bedside manner. He took satisfaction in knowing that they were getting well through his ministrations. He had been a kind man, then. He had been a happy man with a girlfriend he adored and planned to marry.

Then all that changed. He became less happy, harder, bitter. He preferred to deal with the dead instead of the living. He told himself he didn’t care about anything or anyone except Owen Harper.

Then all that had changed and now here he was, a family man who didn’t mind one little bit spending an afternoon in the playground with his little girl.

But today it was raining. Etsuko was sitting at the kitchen table with a jigsaw. So far it was keeping her amused. It was sixty pieces, quite an advanced puzzle for a five year old, but she had all of her mother’s genes, after all. Toshiko’s grandfather was one of the people at Bletchley Park that cracked German codes and shortened the war. Owen didn’t know much about her parents, but he knew Toshiko had inherited her grandfather’s smarts. She was a straight A student all through school. She was headhunted from university for an MOD think-tank, and then she went to Torchwood where she adapted alien technology to fight alien threats in much the same way her grandfather had fought the Nazis.

Etsuko had the potential to be all that and more, and it started with doing jigsaws that said ‘aged eight and over’ on the box.

Even so, when he turned to put the breakfast pots in the dishwasher and turned back, he was surprised to see the puzzle complete. He looked at it carefully. Every piece was in the right place. Etsuko was smiling proudly.

“Did you do that, sweetheart?” he asked. “All by yourself.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding emphatically. Then as Owen continued to look at her she shook her head. “No, Bobo helped.”

“Bobo?” Owen was puzzled. “Who is Bobo?”

“He’s… secret,” she answered. “He’s cross. I wasn’t supposed to tell you his name.”

She looked worried, but not as worried as Owen.

“He has no business being cross. I’m your dad, and you don’t have secrets from me, sweetheart. Who is Bobo?”

“He’s my friend,” the little girl said. “Don’t send him away. He’s my bestest friend.”

“Best friend,” Owen corrected her. “No such word as bestest.”

“He’s my best friend,” she repeated. “He’s invisible.”

Of course, children did have imaginary friends. It was a harmless enough fantasy. But Owen wasn’t so sure that was what he was dealing with here.

He went to the cupboard and brought another puzzle. This one was far more complicated. It was a three-dimensional puzzle ball that became a world globe when it was finished. He put it in front of her. She tipped the pieces out onto the table and studied them carefully. The challenge was different to an ordinary square puzzle with a frame of straight edges as a guide, but he had an idea she would work it out eventually.

He turned away and made a big deal out of putting the coffee percolator on. He wanted her to think she wasn’t being observed. But he kept watching her as he did so. She was obviously working some of it out for herself, but it also seemed as if somebody was guiding her hand. She would reach towards a piece and look around and nod, then choose another piece instead. The southern hemisphere was already starting to form under her nimble fingers and in less than ten minutes the whole globe was done.

“Bobo is quite clever, isn’t he?” Owen commented.

“Yes, he is,” Etsu answered. “But he’s shy. He won’t talk to you.”

“Does he talk to you?”

“Yes.”

Owen wasn’t sure what to say or do next. He wasn’t a psychiatrist, still less a child psychiatrist. Besides, he wasn’t completely sure that it was an imaginary friend she was talking about.

“Can I have another puzzle?” she asked.

Owen looked in the cupboard and found a thousand piece ‘View Over Loch Ness in Summer’ that had been a never opened impulse buy when they were up there with Munroe one weekend. Neither he nor Toshiko had time for jigsaws. Etsuko’s eyes shone as she viewed the pieces. Owen stood well back with his coffee and tried not to make it obvious that he was watching. Again, he put some of it down to Estuko being a bright child for her age, anyway. Her natural gifts were enhanced by the time he and Tosh spent on her in educational pursuits. She was already ahead of her peers in reading, writing and maths. She could do simple programming on a computer and her vocabulary was well advanced for a five year old. But a thousand piece puzzle was really meant for bored adults.

Within ten minutes, though, she had completed the border and started filling in the monotonous blue sky. Again, he noted the way she seemed to be being directed when she selected pieces. Now and again she whispered something quietly and seemed to be listening to a reply, but Owen couldn’t hear anything.

He wondered if he ought to be worried or not. Etsuko seemed happy enough. He wondered what an ordinary parent would do, one whose child wasn’t born by parthenogenesis and who hadn’t spent her babyhood in the Hub of a secret organisation that monitored alien interaction with Earth.

“Does Bobo go to school with you?” Owen asked, trying to think of non-confrontational questions that wouldn’t scare her.

“No,” she answered. “He stays in my bedroom when I’m outside the house. But he wants to go one day.”

Bedroom? Owen didn’t like the sound of that. Anyway, the fact that he stayed in the house was reassuring.

“When you’ve finished your puzzle shall we go out in the car?” he said. “We can go to McDonalds and then go see your mum at work.”

The idea appealed to her, of course. Children could always be bribed by fast food. But she had to finish the puzzle, first. Owen was reluctant to leave her in the company of an invisible jigsaw expert called Bobo, but he had a phone call he wanted to make without her hearing. He went to his study and closed the door.

When he returned, ten minutes later, the puzzle was done. Etsuko was happy to get her coat on. Owen was not so happy when she waved to ‘Bobo’ at the kitchen window as the car was pulling out of the drive.

Out of his rear view mirror he saw the mint green Ford Escape pull up in front of the house. Dougal and Shona were going to go through the place with every kind of scanner known to Torchwood. If Bobo was anything but a product of a little girl’s imagination they would find out.

“What does Bobo look like?” Owen asked casually.

“He’s invisible,” Etsuko replied.

“Well, so are you sometimes, but I know what you look like,” Owen answered. “You can see him, can’t you?”

“Yes,” she admitted, contradicting her previous statement.

“Where does he come from?”

“I don’t know. He’s my friend.”

“I’m sure he is, sweetheart. But I don’t think he ought to be in your bedroom, you know. I think you have to tell him not to go in there.”

“But he sleeps in the cupboard,” Etsuko told him. “He keeps the bad things away.”

“What bad things?” Owen asked. The more he heard of this, the more worried he was. If it was a game she had made up, then that was probably all right. He didn’t like the idea of the ‘bad things’ but considering the amount of time she had spent at Torchwood, in Cardiff and here in Glasgow, where ‘bad things’ turned up on a regular basis, it was small wonder she could imagine them.

On the other hand, if there was something that threatened her….

“Etsu, if you’re scared of anything, you know you can tell me, don’t you? Or mummy. We’ll keep the bad things away.”

“Yes,” she answered. “But Bobo looks after me, too.”

And that seemed to end the conversation as far as Etsuko was concerned. Owen didn’t want to keep questioning her about him, anyway. He didn’t want to upset her. He took her to McDonalds in the glass-roofed Enoch Centre, only a short walk from the Torchwood Hub and bought a thoroughly non-nutritious Happy Meal with the latest Disney toy to amuse her. He watched her while she ate. She was just like any other child out with her dad at a fast food restaurant, happy and carefree. The strange relationship she had with the mysterious Bobo wasn’t worrying her in any way.

It was worrying the hell out of him, but there was nothing he could do about it until he knew more than he did now.

After McDonalds, with no messages from Dougal and Shona on his mobile, yet, he decided to take her to the Glasgow branch of Hamleys toy store. He and Toshiko both drew good salaries from Torchwood’s account, but they didn’t spoil either of the children with over expensive toys. This was an exception to the rule. He wanted to see what Etsuko would go for given the run of a store dedicated to pleasing youngsters.

She went to the games and puzzles and upped the ante on the thousand piece Loch Ness scene by choosing a one thousand five hundred piece circular puzzle – no straight edges – depicting all the characters and scenes from Lord of the Rings in a colourful and complicated way.

“Bobo will like this one,” she said.

“Never mind what Bobo likes,” Owen told her. “Do you like it?”

“Yes,” she said with the emphatic nod.

“All right, but we’re going to the office now. You’ll have to wait until we get home for Bobo to help you with it. Would you like a toy to play with in the Hub, too?”

The offer of TWO toys was unprecedented. She chose another jigsaw puzzle, a smaller one, only five hundred pieces, with cartoon dinosaurs as its theme. Owen paid for both toys and took his daughter by the hand as they stepped out into the rainy mid-morning in Glasgow. He left the car in the shopping centre car park and let Etsuko splash in the puddles in the bright red wellingtons she had chosen for rainy day footwear. He didn’t feel like the frustrations of city centre driving for the mere quarter of a mile to the Hub.

He had warned Toshiko he was coming in and needed to talk to her about Etsuko. When they emerged from the lift Munroe Macdonald was waiting for them. He knew more about raising children than any of them. He greeted Etsuko warmly and offered her an apple with a smiley face etched into it with a penknife and took her to his workstation where his late wife’s collection of ceramic miniature animals was always a popular distraction. Owen brought Toshiko to the rest area and made coffee for them both before he told her what he had discovered.

Toshiko was horrified and guilt-ridden.

“I should have paid more attention to what she was doing,” she said. “I always noticed her whispering to herself when she was playing. But I thought it was just making up stories for her dolls, that sort of thing. I never imagined.… Is this thing dangerous?”

“We don’t even know it IS a thing, or just something she made up,” Owen reminded her. “The guys haven’t called in yet. When they do, we might know more.”

“She said it… this Bobo… is in her bedroom… at night.” Toshiko fixed on the most disturbing aspect of it all. Owen… what if…. She said HE…. What if he’s….”

“I’m a doctor as well as a dad,” Owen reminded her. “I never specialised in paediatrics, but I’d know what to look for. I’ve done my share of bath times and put her to bed often enough. If she was being abused, I would know. Besides, as far as I know she shows no signs of being scared by this… whatever it is. She calls it her friend and says it protects her from bad things.”

“I still don’t like it,” Toshiko said.

“Neither do I, but the important thing is not to upset Etsu. I’ve been thinking about it. She’s just started school and doesn’t really know anyone there, yet. She went to the nursery down the road from work instead of near home where she might meet the same kids she would know at school. That might have been our mistake in hindsight. She might be feeling isolated. And Bobo was in the right place at the right time to latch onto her.”

“Whichever way we look at it, I can’t get around feeling it’s our fault for being working parents and not spending enough time with her,” Toshiko said. “I thought we were doing ok with both our children, but maybe we’re not as clever as we thought.”

“Yeah,” Owen sighed. “I keep thinking the same thing.”

His mobile beeped. There was an incoming call from Dougal. It was accompanied by a photograph he had taken with his own phone’s camera function. Owen showed it to Toshiko. She groaned in despair.

The walls of Toshiko’s bedroom were pastel pink, usually adorned with cheerful posters and pictures. But now there was something extra - a recreation of the jigsaw image of Loch Ness in what looked like wax crayon.

“I take it Etsuko isn’t an undiscovered art prodigy?” Dougal asked.

“No,” Owen responded. “And that wasn’t there when she got up this morning. He must have done it.”

In the few minutes between him leaving the house with Etsuko and Dougal and Shona turning up?

Now he WAS starting to feel scared.

“Have you found anything?”

“No organic lifesigns. No indication of a personal cloaking device, shimmer, perception filter,” Dougal responded. “There’s no alien being hiding in your kid’s wardrobe. I can promise you that much. But we have detected large build ups of ectonic energy, especially in the child’s bedroom, but also in the kitchen and living room, the places where she would play.”

“Ectonic!” Owen resisted the urge to swear. Toshiko didn’t like him doing that around the children, even when they were out of earshot. “You mean we’ve got a…. f…. We’ve got a ghost in our house?”

“That’s our best guess, boss,” Dougal answered in an apologetic tone. “What do you want us to do, now?”

What could they do? Call a priest to exorcise the house?

“It’s lunchtime. Feel free to make yourself a cuppa and raid the fridge for sandwich makings. Then lock up and come back to the Hub. Thanks for trying. I appreciate it, guys.”

As he closed the call, Darius attracted his attention. Toshiko went to sit with Munroe and watch Etsuko’s activities with him while he went to find out what the office vampire was excited about.

“I searched the historical database for anyone called Bobo,” he said. “There are any number of clowns by that name throughout the decades. I remember one myself in Paris in the 1860s. He was a vampire, like me - with the same sexual inclinations as me. We had some good times in gay Paris….”

“This is sounding a bit too much like one of Jack Harkness’s rambling detours from the facts,” Owen said. “Also TMI about your love life, sunshine. How many Bobo the clowns are known to haunt private houses in Glasgow?”

“None, boss,” Darius answered. “But I did find this.”

The lithograph image on the screen was not of a clown. It was of a boy, eight, possibly ten or twelve years old. He was dressed in Victorian clothes and Owen knew very well that malnutrition among the working classes often stunted natural growth and made it hard to guess the true age of children in historic pictures. This child wasn’t dressed in working class clothes as such. He was in a black suit with his hair carefully combed. It was a poster for a speciality act at Glasgow Theatre.

“Bo Boland, The Boy Wonder,” he read. He said the name out loud again. “Bo Bo… land.”

“Bo-Bo to little Estsuko?” Darius suggested. “Close enough, do you think?” Darius tapped some more keys and a side bar came on the screen with a biography that looked straight from Wikipedia. “Robert Boland, known as ‘Bo’ was a Victorian music hall sensation. Though never attending any formal school, he astounded educationalists and psychiatrists of his day. From the age of six he performed as the ‘Boy Wonder’ doing complex mathematics in his head, solving logic puzzles and doing quick life sketches of members of the audience. He was tested by scientists at the University of Edinburgh who could find no apparent reason for his genius. The Archbishop of Glasgow proclaimed him a miracle, suggesting that his abilities were God-given. After his death in 1876 of diphtheria, aged just nine, there was a movement to have him canonised, but lack of any actual proof of him performing miracles caused the campaign to fade out. He is buried in the Southern Necropolis but his grave has become neglected and overgrown in recent years.”

“Etsuko has never been to the Southern Necropolis,” Owen pointed out. “I wouldn’t take her somewhere as creepy as that, especially after the trouble we had there last year.”

“He lived in Tollcross,” Darius said. “He died there, too. There were some old back to back terraced houses knocked down in 1935 when the estate you live in was built.”

“Fuck,” Owen swore, well out of Toshiko’s hearing. “You mean… he could have been lurking all along. But is there any mention of a ghost in the area before?”

“Nothing on record,” Darius answered. “But… I seem to remember that you bought your house at a bargain price. You mentioned it at the time. The previous owners wanted a quick sale.”

“Fuck,” Owen said again. “The bastards knew we had kids. I talked about putting up a swing in the garden when we looked it over. They never said anything.”

Well, would anyone trying to sell a house mentioned that it was haunted? That was taking ‘full disclosure’ too far.

“It’s just a guess, boss,” Darius pointed out. “Perhaps they didn’t know anything about it. After all, Etsuko is an exceptional child, herself. Perhaps Bo Boland was attracted to her for that reason. A… kindred spirit.”

“I don’t like the idea of Etsu being a ‘kindred spirit’ of a Victorian freak,” Owen responded. Then he thought about what he had said and regretted it. If Bo had been his child, how would he feel about him?

He wouldn’t put him on a stage like a performing monkey for people to gape at, anyway. Since Etsuko was born in the unusual circumstances that surrounded her, since they learnt of her ability to become invisible, he had done his best to treat her as normal, to make sure she didn’t stand out from other children in any way. He wanted her to have a normal life as far as possible. The thought of singling her out in the way somebody had singled Bo Boland out sickened him.

“Owen!” Toshiko came to him with a sheet of paper from the printer. He looked at the page and then looked at her questioningly. “Munroe let Etsu play with the identikit face building programme. The one we got from the police and enhanced to allow for alien features as well as Human. This is what her friend Bobo looks like.”

Toshiko wasn’t looking at the high quality printed image that had been produced on Munroe’s computer. She was staring at the picture of Bo Boland on Darius’s screen.

“That’s him, isn’t it?” she said.

Owen held the printed picture up beside the screen and nodded. Allowing for a certain blandness in those identikit images, and the fact that the poster was a drawing not a photograph, they were pictures of the same boy.

“Etsuko’s invisible friend is a child who died in 1876.”

Owen tried to think of some other explanation, but there wasn’t one. Etsuko had never seen this music hall poster before. She was sitting at the other workstation which was facing the other way. She had never heard of Bo Boland before. Besides, she hadn’t called him that. She had her own name for him.

That was what convinced Owen, curiously enough.

“What do we do about it?” Toshiko asked. “We can’t let a ghost hang around the house with our child.”

“I don’t know,” Owen admitted. “I really don’t.”

“Maybe you should talk to him,” Darius said. He was reading a more complete biography of the Victorian child genius written in 1887 by a Torchwood agent who had taken an interest in his case. “The poor Kudikas never had any real childhood, and no parents worth speaking of. His father deserted his mother before he was born. She left him at the workhouse when he was only a few months old and disappeared from his life. He was taken from there by the owner of the music hall who noticed his skill with numbers while looking for skivvies to clean the theatre. He managed the boy’s stage career and provided room and lodging for him, but he never had anyone to ‘care’ for him in a parental way, and no formal education because it was feared it would crush his natural genius.”

“Poor little bastard.”

“He died in the free hospital after contracting the disease that killed him,” Darius added. “Diphtheria was a painful illness, and nobody to take any notice of him but overworked nurses in a huge ward full of patients. He must have been so alone.”

Not for the first time, Owen noted that Darius, the unDead Vampire, was displaying the most Human and Humane emotions of them all. He and Toshiko, while sympathising with the plight of the long dead child had mostly just been thinking of the welfare of their own daughter. They hadn’t really thought deeply about Bo Boland’s feelings. They had assumed that had stopped being an issue in 1876

“Talk to him?” Owen repeated. It was a startling idea. “A Victorian ghost?”

“Yes,” Darius insisted. “You talk to me. I’ve been around longer than he has. Why not?”

“Well, for a start, we don’t know how to talk to him,” Toshiko pointed out. “Etsu is the only one who can see or hear him.”

“Then talk to him through her,” Darius responded in a tone that implied that it was patently obvious.

Owen and Toshiko looked at each other. Then they made a decision.

“Just us, then,” Owen said. “Not the whole Torchwood circus. We’ll do this quietly.”

Toshiko agreed. She looked around at Etsuko. She was working on her dinosaur jigsaw with Munroe. She was getting on very well with it. Bo Boland had taught her well. Her hands searched among the colours and shapes deftly and fitted the pieces easily and quickly. They waited until she was finished before telling her it was time to go home.

“I want to show Bobo the picture I made of him,” she said. Owen put the image into a plastic folder and gave it to her to hold on the journey home. That satisfied her. She held the picture tightly and sang a little song to herself as she sat in her child seat next to Genkei’s baby carrier. Neither Toshiko nor Owen recognised the song, but it sounded suspiciously like something a Victorian music hall performer might know.

“How long as this been going on and we didn’t even know?” Owen asked Toshiko. She shrugged. Again there was the guilty feeling that they hadn’t done the best for their child.

“Sweetheart, how long have you known Bobo?” Toshiko asked.

“Since I went to my new school,” she answered. “I was crying. He told me not to cry because he would look after me.”

“Why were you crying?” Owen asked. “Etsu, I thought you liked school. You told us you had fun in your lessons.”

“I like lessons,” she answered. “But there are boys in the playground. And you said I wasn’t to be invisible at school. And they chase me.”

Toshiko sighed softly and looked out at the rainswept streets of Glasgow.

“It was the same when I was at school,” she said. “I was fine in class, even when the lessons were so simple I was bored. At least I could open my books and read ahead, learn something new. But ‘playtime’ was a nightmare. There was always some bully making things miserable. I never belonged to a crowd, so there was nobody to stop them making a beeline for me. I was different. I was Japanese, I was small, quiet, I liked books. It was a red flag to them.”

Owen said nothing. But he could have told a similar story. He was the one without a dad, the skinny kid, the one who read books. It was as good as a tattoo on the forehead saying ‘victim here’.

“When we were kids, teachers were stupid. Now, they’re supposed to be trained to deal with that sort of thing. I think we need to go down to the school and raise some hell. But that can wait for now. We’ll deal with Bobo first.”

The house was quiet, of course. There were a few signs that Shona and Dougal had been in, the cups and plates from their lunch left drying by the sink, a chair slightly out of place, a vague sense that somebody else had been here.

But they also had the unnerving sense that somebody was STILL here. Toshiko looked around the kitchen as if seeing it in a different way now.

“Sweetheart, call Bobo down to talk to you,” Owen said. “Tell him it’s all right.”

Etsuko ran up the stairs to her room. She came down a few minutes later.

“Is he with you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Come into the kitchen and do your new jigsaw puzzle with him.”

They let her settle down to the task, first. Then Owen put a question to her.

“Is Bobo’s real name Robert Boland?” he asked. “Can you ask him that, sweetheart?”

“He said yes,” Etsuko answered. Apparently he didn’t need the questions relayed. He heard them fine. “But he doesn’t like that name. He wants to be called Bobo.”

“All right, we’ll call him Bobo. Ask him why he came to our house.”

“Because I was crying,” she said without hesitation.

“Is that the only reason?” Toshiko asked.

“And because he wanted a friend,” Etsuko added. “And I wanted a friend, too.”

“What about the bad things he said he would protect you from?”

“Bad dreams,” she said. “He makes them go away.”

“What do you have bad dreams about?” Owen asked. He was slightly relieved. As benign as Bobo seemed to be, he had been conjuring some lurid ideas about the ‘bad things’ that might lurk in the night. He knew what was out there, after all.

“About boys chasing me in the playground,” she answered. “They scare me.”

“I am SO going to give those teachers hell,” Owen muttered darkly. “Is that the only thing you’re scared of, sweetheart? Boys in the playground.”

She nodded.

“Bobo said he would come with me to school, and chase them.”

“I think I’d like to see that,” Owen answered. “But it might be better if your mum and I handled the boys at school.”

“If you weren’t scared of the boys, and you weren’t crying, would Bobo go away?” Toshiko asked, wondering if it was that simple.

“He wants a friend,” Etsuko said. “And I want him to be my friend.”

Owen and Toshiko looked at each other.

“She’s known Darius since she was three, and he’s scarier than any ten Victorian ghost,” Toshiko said. “I don’t know. If we left them alone…. The only thing is, I don’t think I like him being in her bedroom at night. That’s not… appropriate. He’s still a boy, even if he is a ghost, and older than her.”

“I agree,” Owen said. He looked at Etsuko. She was engrossed in her jigsaw and her private conversation with her friend. “Sweetheart, Bobo can stay. He can be your friend. But he has to sleep in the landing cupboard at night. And he’s not allowed in the bathroom at any time. And neither of you have to worry about boys at school. I’ll be sorting those out. Is that all right with him?”

Estuko looked into what seemed to be empty space, then nodded.

“Bobo says yes,” she answered.

“If he breaks the rules, you have to tell me,” Owen added. “I mean that. No bedroom, no bathroom.”

“Can he learn to read my books with me?” Etsuko asked.

“I don’t know, can he?” Owen asked. “Can a ghost learn to read”

“It’ll be interesting to find out,” Toshiko said. “It’ll be one for the Torchwood archive, anyway.”