Time Lost

by C. B. Lewis

  Ben hadn’t been able to tell them much: his father shouted to him to hide, so he went to their secret room and closed the door. The rule was if he had to hide, he had to stay there until his father came and told him it was all right.

  Jacob hadn’t pressed for answers. The boy was shaken, and even with a member of social services there, it didn’t feel right to push him. He’d helped Ben into a clean set of clothes, persuaded him to eat something, and wasn’t at all surprised when the boy clung to him as if he were a security blanket.

  Based on the photographs around the house, Sanders and his son were close and seemed happy enough. It was unlikely, then, that a loving and protective father would have willingly left his child indefinitely closed up in a safe room. The fact that he’d told his son to hide seemed to support the theory that it was more than simply a home invasion.

  Jacob slid the images across the screen with his fingertip.

  There were checks running on the TRI, but so far, there was no plausible reason standing out for the man to be targeted. There were some pieces of scientific equipment in the house, but nothing that seemed particularly valuable. Even the technology set up in the rest of the house was made up of standard, basic units. Nothing seemed to have been taken, except the man himself.

  Sanders’s whiteboard flicked onto the screen again, thick with codes and symbols. One of Sanders’s colleagues was on the way in. Perhaps they would be able to make sense of it for him, or at least point the inquiry in the right direction.

  Ben shifted in his sleep, whimpering. Jacob set aside the screen to settle the boy, murmuring nonsense and rubbing his back and shoulders. The boy nestled against him but didn’t wake, although one small pale fist clung to Jacob’s shirt.

  Jacob’s quill buzzed. He raised his hand and touched his earpiece. “Ofori.”

  “Sir, we have a Mrs. Ashraf in reception.”

  She was Sanders’s colleague and also emergency contact, which would kill two birds with one stone, if she was cooperative.

  “Good. Have her brought up to my office.”

  The woman was escorted in five minutes later. She was small, probably close to his own age, matronly and soft-featured, with an ornately twisted veil around her head and shoulders. She stopped short in the doorway, her worried expression giving way to relief.

  “He’s all right?” Her voice was lowered just enough not to wake the boy, and Jacob knew she had to be a mother.

  “Worn out,” he replied just as quietly.

  He motioned her closer to the seat on the opposite side of his desk, wincing when she had to lift a stack of papers off the chair. She looked for a vacant spot on his desk and ended up just adding it to the most stable pile. It looked—as always—like a hurricane had swept through the office. He’d never really taken to the in-tray and out-tray, and for all that they mainly did digital reports, there was still paperwork for all occasions.

  “Are you the gentleman who called?” she asked as she sat down.

  He nodded. “DI Jacob Ofori. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you much information on the call, but you can see I was….” He paused, then smiled crookedly. “Occupied.”

  The woman nodded. “Can I ask what happened?”

  “The investigation is ongoing presently, so I’m afraid there’s not much we can tell you.” He paused for a moment as Ben moved, tucking his head under Jacob’s chin. “We suspect there were intruders. At least two that we know of. It appears Mr. Sanders fought one of them off, but we’ve found no trace of him or the other intruder. This young man was hiding in a safe room on the upper level.”

  Mrs. Ashraf went pale, and she clasped her hands tightly together in her lap. “Do you think the intruder abducted Tom?”

  Jacob shook his head. “We can’t speculate until we start putting together the evidence. We have people combing the grounds of his home, but with the lack of security hardware in the area, it’s very difficult to put together a timeline at the moment.”

  She nodded. “You won’t need to interrogate Ben, will you?”

  “I don’t think there’s much he can tell us,” Jacob admitted. He tilted his head to look down at the boy to be sure he was still asleep, then back at Mrs. Ashraf. “Can you think of anyone who would want to harm Mr. Sanders? Or any reason why he would be targeted?”

  She shook her head. “He’s just a scientist.”

  Jacob gazed at her. Just a scientist made it sound simple, but people who were just scientists didn’t get abducted from their homes or beat off assailants with a hammer. He slid his slate across the desk to her, showing an image of the whiteboards. “Is this his work?”

  The woman picked up the slate and studied it. “It looks like it, but I don’t recognize these formula. Thomas was always playing with different technology and experimenting on things outside of the office.”

  “Anything that might be financially interesting to people?”

  She was very good, and if he hadn’t spent more than twenty years in his job, he might not have spotted the twitch of her mouth and the way her eyes flicked down then up again.

  “He develops new hardware and software for enhanced historical research,” she said after barely a split-second of a pause. She even met his eyes, defiant, daring him not to believe her. “Some of the facts we uncover aren’t always popular with people.”

  “Such as?”

  She shrugged. “It was our institution that provided the information about the Potiorek conspiracy.”

  He vaguely remembered the story: it had been all over the news three years before, a claim that the death of the Austrian Franz Ferdinand at the hands of a Serbian anarchist, triggering World War I, had been planned from within his own country.

  The only reason it had made national news at all was because countries all over Europe kicked up a fuss about it. Some believed it, some didn’t, but the fact was that people thought it was worth noticing. That meant it must have been credible.

  He hadn’t really paid that much attention at the time. Rory was still around then, and Jacob had enough going on without worrying about some old Royal who got himself killed more than a century before.

  “A lot of people weren’t happy about that,” he observed.

  “We were talked down as a conspiracy theory,” Mrs. Ashraf said, “but some people were very vocal about the institution. Do you think maybe one of them might have done this?”

  It was a deft attempt at redirecting his focus away from the institution, which made him wonder what it was she—or they—were trying to hide.

  “We’ll definitely look into the possibility,” he said as he gently shook Ben’s shoulder. The boy stirred drowsily, then jolted in panic at his unfamiliar surroundings. “Easy,” Jacob said gently. “You’re safe.”

  Ben looked up at him, then nodded.

  “Ben?” Mrs. Ashraf rose on the other side of the desk.

  “Aunt Mariam!” Ben scrambled off Jacob’s lap and ran around to her, clinging to her. He was whispering urgently to her, no doubt telling her what had happened, and she wrapped him up in her arms.

  “I know, Ben. The police are looking for him now.” She looked across at Jacob. “Is it all right for me to take him home now?”

  Jacob rose. “Of course. I’ll come by your office tomorrow, if that’s all right, so we can discuss the subject further.” He smiled. “It’s more convenient for you that way, and it should only take an hour at most.”

  Not a request, which made it impossible for her to make an excuse to keep him away.

  She was silent for a moment, then nodded. “I’m usually there any time after ten o’clock in the morning. Ask at the front desk, and they’ll have you brought to my office.” She kept her arm around Ben’s shoulders. “I’ll see you then.”

  Ben looked up timidly. “Bye,” he said in a small voice.

  “Bye, Ben.” Jacob met Mrs. Ashraf’s eyes. “You take care of him.”

  “Of course,” she replied.

  He went to the door of the of
fice as they walked away. It was a comfort to know the boy was in safe hands. There could be no mistaking the protective way Ashraf had almost wrapped herself around him.

  Jacob sighed and returned to his desk, sitting down.

  He pulled up all available data on the TRI and the Potiorek conspiracy, for background reading. She might have been trying to redirect his attention, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was wrong. If the Potiorek conspiracy had created some enemies, it wouldn’t hurt to turn over a few stones and see what was crawling beneath.

  His team was waiting in the briefing room when he finished putting together the additional information from Mrs. Ashraf. He stopped in briefly to see Danni and found the pathologist was still working on the body. The preliminary reports confirmed blunt-force trauma as the cause of death, but her investigation into the synthetic eye was still ongoing.

  “Any luck on facial recognition?” he asked as he entered the briefing room.

  Several officers were going through data.

  “Nothing.”

  Jacob paused, looking at Foley. “You mean no luck?” he said.

  She shook her head. “I mean nothing. Unless he’s been going around with a paper bag over his head for his whole life, he’s never been caught on camera. We tried as many variables as we could, but they were only close likenesses.”

  Jacob looked up at the incident screen and the image of the man currently in the morgue. His face and body gave nothing away.

  “Anything interesting on him?” he asked, slipping his hands into his pockets. He found his key ring, and out of habit his fingers started sliding each key around the ring, one by one.

  “Plain shirt, trousers, underwear, and socks,” Detective Constable Anton said from his desk. He was one of the younger members of the CID. “His jacket was some kind of synthetic. High-end. Definitely not off-the-rail. Possibly something high fashion, but we’re running a search for ones like it. Pockets were all empty.”

  “Nothing special on the shoes,” Detective Sergeant Temple added. She was six years Jacob’s junior and had been chasing in his wake for longer than either of them cared to recall. “Could have been bought at any standard retailer.”

  Jacob rocked on the balls of his feet. “So we have a one-eyed cyborg fashionista who shows up out of nowhere. He ends up fatally beaten to death by a mild-mannered scientist who works for a historical research facility.”

  Anton snickered. “Happy Monday, sir.”

  Jacob gave him a look. “Don’t even start.” He rubbed his forehead. “CSU are still processing the data, but looks like the second assailant may have cleaned up after himself. It would explain the empty pockets, and the lack of any other trace.”

  “If he was abducting Sanders, wouldn’t he have his hands full?” Temple asked.

  “You would think,” Jacob agreed. He tapped one of the images, bringing it to the front of the screen. “According to CSU, there’s evidence that someone scrubbed at patches of the floor quite recently.” He pointed out the highlighted patches. “See what I mean?”

  Anton nodded. “And the blood wasn’t worth mopping up, because the body couldn’t be hidden, so that was fine to leave behind.”

  “Exactly.” Jacob brought up several more images. One of them was the shelf unit that stood against the back wall of the room. There was a bloody handprint visible on the edge of one shelf. “This is where we think Sanders was caught. What happened to him after that, we have no idea. The downside of everyone using pods these days is that we’ve got no tire tracks left behind. Sanders could have been carried out to a pod and there wouldn’t be any sign of him or it.”

  Sometimes, he missed the old days.

  Until CSU finished processing everything, they would have to start from another angle.

  Jacob looked around at his team. “Okay. Temple, I need you to start digging into the TRI. I’ve sent you all the extra information Mrs. Ashraf provided when she came to collect the Sanders boy, but I need you to dig deep. I don’t think Sanders was just a quiet little scientist. These men targeted him for a reason, and we need to find out what it was.”

  “Would Ashraf be able tell you?”

  Jacob grimaced. “There’s the problem,” he said. “If Sanders is more than just a scientist, she works with him. If he was working on something and keeping it hidden, I’d say it’s even odds that she would want to keep a lid on it as well.”

  It could be that she was genuinely trying to be helpful by pointing him in the direction of the TRI’s potential enemies, but her expression, the split-second hesitation, the calculation in her eyes, said otherwise. She was hiding something.

  Until he was sure, the team didn’t need to know.

  “Foley. Singh.” He turned to the two constables. “We’ve requisitioned you for footwork on this one, since we’re a couple of people short. I’ll need you to start making the rounds of friends and associates to see if they point any fingers at likely enemies. Anything that raises a flag, you bring to us.”

  “What about the TRI?” Singh asked.

  Jacob shook his head. “Leave the TRI to me. I’ve got an appointment there tomorrow. Anton, we need as much as you can get on Sanders’s history outside of family and friends. He was about my age, so he’s been doing what he does for a long time. If there’s anything there, no matter how far back, we need to know about it.”

  “What about him downstairs?” Foley inquired, nodding toward the image of the corpse. “If we can’t identify him, what do we do with him?”

  Jacob scaled up the image on the board. “A man doesn’t just pop into existence to get his head beaten in,” he said. “He came from somewhere. We just have to find out where. Could be non-UK national, so put out a call internationally. Run the DNA again. Widen the fields of the search. Go older or younger. Could be he has a close relative with similar DNA. We might get lucky.” He raised his eyebrows, looking around. “Clear?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Chapter 4

  SANDERS BARELY even made the evening news.

  There was a brief comment about the fact that he was missing and that the police were making inquiries. Most people wouldn’t even have noticed it, and that got under Kit’s skin. Tom deserved more than just a passing glance. By rights, they should have been shouting his name from the rooftops.

  Kit scowled as the news continued as if they hadn’t just glossed over Sanders.

  He wanted to rant at somebody about it, but the only people he could do that with would be other staff from the TRI, and he had a sneaking suspicion none of them would want to discuss it with him.

  It wasn’t even like he could ring home and talk to his mum about it, no matter how much he wanted to. What could he tell her? Oh, hello Mum. Just a bit upset because my boss may have been kidnapped by someone from another time. Nothing to worry about.

  He couldn’t even tell her the truth about where he worked because of confidentiality clauses slapped all over him. Or anyone else from outside the TRI either. It was a catch-22 situation: talk to someone outside and get fired, or talk to someone inside and get nothing.

  So, an evening of trying not to think about it, then.

  Kit snapped “Music” to switch the media unit from visual to audio. A gesture raised the volume until he could feel the bass vibrating through the floor. Every day at the TRI, he had to keep the volume low, which was frustrating. He’d tried putting his music on at his volume there once before, but apparently no one else appreciated music from the 2010s as much as he did. Or feeling the bass, which was half the pleasure of it.

  He was sitting on a beanbag at his coffee table, his legs crossed beneath him. The lamps at either corner illuminated the mess of wires and gears spread in front of him. It looked like a toolbox had thrown up all over the surface.

  He flipped over the gearbox, reaching for the screwdriver.

  It was a silly project, but with Sanders gone, Ben would be missing him. Everyone in the TRI had met Ben at least once. He was a good boy, and
so smart already. The last thing he needed was to be worried out of his mind, so a distraction was in order. Okay, maybe it was an old-fashioned toy, and knowing Sanders and his engineering skills, Ben probably had a crate of them, but Kit was hard-pressed to imagine any boy of Ben’s age who wouldn’t want to have a toy robot, even if it was a homemade one.

  He hummed along with the music as he worked. Song after song played, and once in a while he refilled his thermal beaker from the coffee pot. The robot took shape in his hands, a delicate little biped with a shining, hand-drawn smiley face.

  His eyes were growing heavier with each detail he added, but it had to be finished, a present to pass on to Mariam for Ben. Had to finish. Ben needed a distraction. As soon as possible. Had to be finished. Tonight. Now.

  He woke up when the television blared to life, illuminating the whole room.

  Kit sat up with a startled jolt, hands scrabbling across the table. The robot was safe and intact in front of him, and he squinted at it. He set it carefully on its feet and pressed the control. The little figure walked across the table, and he grinned fuzzily at it.

  “Full speed ahead,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

  That was always his trouble.

  He liked building things too much. Ever since he’d moved out of his mum’s flat, and then away from his flatmates, he didn’t have someone to give him a kick and remind him humans needed sleep. Especially when he had other stuff he didn’t want to think about, and hid in work instead.

  He was running on caffeine fumes as he stumbled into the shower and turned the spray to icy in a vague attempt to wake himself up. It wasn’t entirely successful, but he was awake enough to pack the robot up in a retired shoebox and head for the door.

  It was chilly and miserable outside with the wet gusts coming in from the coast. Kit shoved the shoebox inside his coat and pulled his hood down as low as he could as he made his way toward the trams.