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It wasn't the first time an interviewee had tried to chat her up. Sarah Jane turned him down firmly, though more politely than she would if she hadn't been wondering whether he was going to accuse her of rampant speciesism. She was willing to be flexible on the human thing, but humanoid was a pretty vital requirement. Maybe, she thought, she was less open-minded than she liked to think.
"Fair do's," her subject and would-be amour said. "Can't blame a bloke for trying." His right wing had been edging around her shoulders. Now he drew it back, shuffling sideways along the top of the bench. "Mark my words, though, you make the most of what you've got, my love. Eat, drink, be merry, and shag yourself silly, because tomorrow a mad alien scientist might turn you into a pterodactyl." The folded leather wings hunched and lowered again in what she guessed was a sigh. "It could have been a penguin or something. I fly by the zoo sometimes, there's some lovely girl penguins. But no, I've got to be buggering extinct, haven't I?"
Sarah Jane cleared her throat and got out her tape recorder. "Anything you can tell me about Torchwood, Mr…"
"Oh, no names." He turned his small head so he could look at her with both eyes. "Don't want them to know it's me blowing the whistle on their secret little operation, do I? And you can keep quiet about my… condition and all."
Sarah Jane tried to imagine how that conversation with her editor might go. "There's a black ops team of alien hunters operating out of Cardiff," she'd say. "I know because the talking pterodactyl who lives on their roof told me all about them."
"I'll keep you anonymous," she promised.
Her anonymous source was poking his beak through the bag of prawn crackers she'd brought along, his requested payment. "They're not a bad bunch, you know," he said. "Torchwood. It's only really that Ianto. He's taken to lurking about in my roof at all hours. I said to him, I need my sleep, I'm bloody nocturnal! Which is through necessity, by the way, not nature, cause they go a bit funny in Wales when they see dinosaurs swooping about in the middle of the day - and he said he needed somewhere quiet to sit and think about things. He's got hidden depths of anguish, apparently. Walk a mile on these claws, mate, I said."
Sarah Jane tsked in sympathy.
"You get your story, I get my roof back, we're all happy except Ianto, who's never bloody happy anyway. All right?" The beady eye that was fixed on her turned hopeful. "Definitely no chance of a shag, then?"
"Definitely not."
"Oh, well," he said. "Suppose you lot can't all be as open-minded as Jack. Feed us one of these crackers, will you?"