At his desk, he opened up the secure email the Met had set up for him, logging in to find a message from Superintendent Jackson. Her team had been working through the night on the information they’d gathered from their arrests and she had distilled what they’d found down to a few sentences.
Four out of five of the men arrested were frequenting a location called The Starbright Lounge - a dance club that sprawled across the basements of about four buildings. Not much was known about it, and it had a legitimate online presence - marketing itself as a ‘secret’ venue. Password required to get in. There were forums dedicated to identifying the password for the night, and it seemed that as soon as someone got wind of it, they tended to share it with everyone. Not particularly secret.
“It could be something, it could be nothing,” Superintendent Jackson said when Tarkken called her. “It’s not like dealers don’t go to clubs to pick up customers. But… four of them going in a short period of time, three of them on the same day. It doesn’t feel right.”
And feelings, Tarkken knew, were a currency afforded some value by the police. They believed in instinct and intuition - but only so far. Hard evidence was the other thing they needed.
“We’re setting up cameras and surveillance,” Superintendent Jackson said. “We’ll have eyes on who’s coming and going from the club in a few days time.”
“Can’t you just send someone inside?” Tarkken asked.
“Too dangerous,” she said. “We haven’t got enough information to make a risk assessment. I’m not sending anyone in blind.”
Rationally, Tarkken could understand that, but the headache had him feeling a little irrational.
“Can’t just send someone inside!” he complained to Cribishk when he showed up a few moments later. “Can’t walk into a building in their city in reasonable confidence that they’ll walk out of it again. Humans!”
Cribishk simply sat, letting him rant, almost managing to keep the smirk from his face.
Almost.
“I have half a mind to just go and have a look around myself,” Tarkken grumbled, coming to the end of his steam.
People always assumed that getting wound up made them feel worse, but Tarkken found it helped his headache a little to blow a valve once in a while - giving the reins to his own emotions meant he didn’t have to worry about anyone else’s.
“I’d almost say you could get away with it,” Cribishk said. “You look Human enough. But you don’t act it. You’d need someone to go with you. A local. Someone who could tell you what to say.”
“I’m capable of speaking English,” Tarkken said.
“Sure,” Cribishk said. “Just not capable of understanding what they mean by it half the time.”
There was something in the way Cribishk said this that felt inclusive, like he wasn’t criticising Tarkken so much as Humans and their baffling habit of saying one thing and meaning another.
Like the word ‘sick’, which, alongside meaning ‘ill’, meant both that something was disgusting and in some way desirable or enviable. How was one supposed to know which context they were meaning? Even the translator had difficulty with the nuance sometimes, and if Tarkken were to speak English himself, he’d have to turn it off.
No, Cribishk wasn’t wrong in his assessment. He would need help. A local.
A mop of curls and bright blue eyes narrowed in a glare flashed through his mind.
Marta would have been the perfect person to ask. If only she weren’t so… Marta.
And if he hadn’t told her already that he didn’t need her help.
He could accept in hindsight that it had been a miserably stupid thing to say. At best, he’d have come across as arrogant, domineering. At worst, like a complete asshole. He rather suspected it would be the latter. If he’d have thought about it for five seconds, he would have come up with a gentler way to let her down. Asha wouldn’t want me to put you in danger, or, you have enough to worry about with your father.
Although perhaps that would have been a bit patronising.
Sometimes, Tarkken felt doomed to repeatedly get it wrong where Marta was concerned, despite her being the easiest person to read he’d ever met. As if the overwhelming obviousness of her feelings made it harder, somehow, to say or do the right thing.
“I’d love to be able to give the Prince the update that Nick Gillespie is in custody, or at least very close to being in custody, when he arrives home,” Tarkken said. “But it always feels like we find something out, and it comes to nothing.”
Cribishk grunted. Tarkken could feel the hints of anger and shame fizzing about the bodyguard. They all of them carried a weight of guilt for what happened on that day. Though nothing terrible had come of it in the end, they all knew that it well could have. They’d all failed in their jobs in one way or another, despite how Asha and Cael liked to protest otherwise.
Catching Nick Gillespie… It would be a sort of atonement. Not just for Tarkken, but for everyone on the security team that day.
Tarkken’s comm chimed with an incoming message. He picked it up, expecting an update from Cael, who had promised to check in from time to time during the trip to the Olympia. But it wasn’t Cael’s name across his screen. It was Marta’s.
A sense of relief warred with reluctance. He didn’t like how he’d behaved towards her yesterday, wanted to make that right. But he didn’t want to encourage her, either. Didn’t want to have to be near her again.
But he needed a local. And if Marta was on side…
He clicked through to her message.
I know I’m probably the last person you want to talk to - trust me, the feeling is mutual - but I have some information that might help you. I am prepared to put our differences aside and work together to help the people we love. Are you?
Ethan had been up to something, then. She’d seen him go somewhere on the tracker - maybe even to the Starbright Lounge. And if she truly was, as she put it, prepared to put their differences aside, then perhaps it would be as easy as just asking her to check the place out with him.
Tarkken looked to Cribishk.
“Do you think Asha would be against the idea of Marta Kowalczyk becoming involved in this investigation?”
Cribishk’s expression was inscrutable, but his emotions told of his amusement at Tarkken’s expense.
“You are going to work with Marta?” he said.
“I have the option,” Tarkken said stiffly.
Cribishk shrugged a shoulder. “I think Marta is capable of making up her own mind.”
And Tarkken knew where she stood.
I hate the thought that that asshole is somewhere out there, gunning for my girl.
It was probably the only reason that she was prepared to give Tarkken anything after the way he’d behaved yesterday.
If he was going to call her, he had to be better. Had to rise above the fact that everything about her irritated him. Her noisy emotions, the way she always had an answer to everything, and that ridiculous hair, so much of it, always in his face, just begging for him to run his fingers through it and…
Tarkken blinked.
Where the Hell did that come from?
He dragged his thoughts back to the task in hand. Marta had information. Calling her was tantamount to agreeing to work with her. Was he prepared to do that? Did he have a choice?
No, he decided, he couldn’t get anywhere with the information the police had given him. Not without her help.
He picked up his comm and dialled.
“Are you calling to tell me to back off, or to hear what I have to say?” she said.
Hearing the words without a wash of her emotions to go with them made it easier to know what he had to say.
“I’m calling to apologise for being short with you yesterday,” he said. “And to say that perhaps my assessment that I didn’t need your help was a little…”
“Stupid?” Marta supplied.
“Hasty,” Tarkken decided, ignoring the smirk on Cribishk’s fa
ce.
Marta snorted. “Whatever it takes to soothe your ego. Want to hear what I’ve got?”
“Please.”
“Ethan showed up at a house last night. Big house. Very grand. I had a friend of mine who does PI work look in to it. The owner is a Deborah Fiennes. Elderly lady. Typical posh wife - husband made a small fortune in the banking industry, while she did charity work. Search online for the Jennifer Fiennes Foundation.”
“Jennifer?” Tarkken said, typing it in to the Human internet.
He had the strange sense of something being just outside the reach of his memory. A tickle in the back of his head that said he had heard that name before.
“Yeah, quite sad. Deborah’s only daughter. She was in a car accident in her early twenties, left her in a vegetative state. Round about the same time, Mr Fiennes gets diagnosed with terminal Cancer. Looks like Deborah took all that grief and channeled it in to her charity work. She was still doing it up until a couple of years ago.”
Tarkken clicked on the link, scanning through the home page of the Foundation website. The Foundation supported disadvantaged children and young adults, through bursaries and scholarships, as well as through workshops and interactive sessions around mental health, study skills and other skills they might need to thrive.
Tarkken clicked through to the ‘about’ page, that sensation of a realisation being on the edge of his awareness intensifying. A picture of a young woman, perhaps in her twenties, but only just, smiled out of a frame. Beneath it, a caption identified her as Jennifer Fiennes.
“That’s not what she looks like,” Tarkken said.
“What?” Marta and Cribishk said at the same time.
Cribishk moved closer so he could see the screen. Tarkken could feel interest radiating from him, amongst it a slice of hope that they were finally going to get somewhere.
“Jennifer Fiennes,” Tarkken said. “I’m sure…”
He pulled up the database of all the Humans who had gone through the Match process. There were many now, more every day, but in those early days a year ago, there had been so few, Tarkken had known them all by name, done the searches and checks on them himself. And he was sure Jennifer Fiennes…
He opened the record. The woman who looked out of the photograph attached to it had a similar appearance to Jennifer Fiennes on the website - the same blonde hair, the same blue eyes. But beyond that the similarities started to end. Jennifer Fiennes of the website had a plummy, polished look, whereas Jennifer Fiennes of the profile had a spectral sort of beauty - a little bit haunted, a little bit damaged.
“Coincidence with the names?” Cribishk said.
“And the dates of birth?” Tarkken said. “And the address? Whoever this is, they’ve used Jennifer Fiennes’ identity.”
“What’s going on?” Marta asked.
“We have a Jennifer Fiennes on our database,” Tarkken said, “one of the first women to take the Match test. Her Match was lightyears away. He was prepared to come to her, but she insisted on going to him.”
“Someone stole the identity of a girl in a coma to take the Match test?” Marta said. “What were they trying to run away from?”
That sensation of a pending realisation tickled at the back of his brain again. A memory of another Jennifer.
“Or who,” he said, opening a new window on the Human internet and searching for Jennifer Gillespie.
The search engine pulled back article after article on her disappearance. Most of them with a picture.
“Gillespie’s wife?” Cribishk said, disbelief colouring his emotions.
“Gillespie’s wife?” Marta echoed. “Didn’t she ‘disappear’ a while back, like ‘he murdered her, we just can’t prove it’ disappeared.”
“Nick Gillespie didn’t murder her,” Tarkken said. “We shipped her off to another planet.”
It only took ten minutes of perusing the website to find the connection between Jennifer Gillespie and Deborah Fiennes.
“Here,” Tarkken said, sending Marta the link. “Look at the third picture down.”
“A young Jennifer Gillespie,” Marta said. “So she was one of the disadvantaged youths that Deborah Fiennes worked with. Plausible to believe that Deborah had a soft spot for her - passingly similar in appearance to her daughter, same name.”
“So when Jennifer Gillespie turns to Deborah for help as an adult, wanting to escape her husband…”
“Deborah gives her blessing for Jennifer to use her daughter’s identity.”
“Why, though?” Tarkken said. “We’d have given her a test, no questions asked, if she’d used her own identity.”
“You guys are so used to your perfect Match relationships that you’ve forgotten how bad relationships go,” Marta said. “If she was scared enough to run to a whole other galaxy to get away from our Nicky, then I imagine she’d be scared he’d find out that she’d taken the test if she didn’t use reasonable precautions.”
“Is there nothing your police force can do to protect people in that position?” Tarkken asked.
“Plenty,” Marta said. “But the fear is the thing. Abusers work hard to give their victims the impression that they’re all powerful, that there is no where they couldn’t find their victim, nothing they couldn’t do. Jennifer was probably too terrified to go to the police, probably thought appeasing him was the better option. Until you guys presented the perfect opportunity to get the hell out somewhere Nicky definitely couldn’t follow.”
“But he must have found out. He must know that we helped his wife leave.”
“Yeah, I don’t buy that a guy’s wife disappears and he randomly decides to hate on the Intergalactic Community without knowing the connection,” Marta said. “But while this is all fascinating, it doesn’t really help us. I don’t think your pet Superintendent is going to be kicking any doors in until she knows Nick Gillespie is behind them.”
“No,” Tarkken said. He hesitated a moment, still unsure whether involving her was the right thing - his personal feelings about the matter aside. Cribishk had gone, apparently no more enthralled by Internet research than the average person, so it wasn’t like he could look to anyone else for cues.
I think Marta is capable of making up her own mind.
“Superintendent Jackson did give me an update this morning,” he said, deciding to go with Cribishk’s initial assessment. “They’ve done whatever it is they do and they’ve discovered that a number of the people they arrested yesterday are frequenting a place called the Starbright Lounge.”
“Two minutes, I’m just looking it up,” Marta said.
He could hear the sound of her typing over the comm. Something about the sound relaxed Tarkken. He liked computers. Even the ship AI, the most advanced AI available, didn’t feel in the way that living, breathing people did. Sure, it could emulate hurt feelings, run algorithms that assessed appropriate responses and project them with a level of emotion that made them relatable. But none of it was real. Tarkken didn’t have to worry about seeing something the computer didn’t want him to, or try to block the computer out of his head. If only it were possible for him to only ever interact via comms.
“Okay, I think I’ve got it.” She read out the address.
“That’s the one. Superintendent Jackson is having the place put under surveillance, but she won’t send anyone in.”
“Not surprising,” Marta said. “It’s got four basements worth of rooms. Nightmare. You’d have to go in with so many officers, it would be chaos. And I just bet there’s a back entrance somewhere for people to slip out of. If Nick was hanging out there, they’d lose him even if they found him.”
“I thought she’d at least have someone take a look around not in uniform,” Tarkken said, the annoyance flaring up again.
“There are probably restrictions. Rules.” A pause. “We could take a look.”
As easy as that. So why did he have the sudden urge to try to talk her out of it.
“We don’t have the password,” he s
aid, feeling foolish the moment the words left his mouth.
“A bottle of fancy gin says I can find it in fifteen minutes,” Marta said.
“You’d have to tell me what constitutes fancy,” Tarkken said.
Marta laughed. “Do the Intergalactic Community even have clubs like the Starbright Lounge? Only, one of the main functions of such clubs, in my experience, is to get drunk and find someone to hook up with. People do go to them just to dance, but it’s a lot about the hook ups. Have you ever been to one? Are you going to stand out like a sore thumb if we go?”
“Yes the Intergalactic Community has clubs. No, I’ve never been to one. Not my thing. But I’m sure I can blend.”
“Not your thing? You don’t like dancing? Or you don’t like hook ups?”
Her tone was teasing. Not something he was used to from Marta, which surprised him as much as the nature of her questions.
“I can’t say I’ve dedicated enough time to either to make a reasoned judgement,” he said.
“You mean you’ve never been dancing and you’ve never had a hook up.”
“Well… no,” he admitted, and if there had been even a hint of pity in her emotions, he would have been mortified. As it was, sat several miles up above the planet, he didn’t have to be privy to what she was feeling. Not even Marta was that loud.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said, still typing away in the background. “And feel free to tell me to sod off, I won’t be offended. I’m just curious. About the dating thing.”
“What about it?”
“About how it even works. For you guys who aren’t Matched.”
“We don’t date,” Tarkken said. “Not in the Human sense of the word. Some people might… hook up. But many don’t.”
“So there are what, bars? Clubs? Singles nights? For the people who want to hook up, that is.”
“There are places,” Tarkken said. “Certain paradise planets - holiday destinations - are specified Unmatched only. But that’s as much so you don’t have to be around couples as it is so you can find someone who might be interested in sleeping with you.”
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