Ensnared

by Clare Solomon

  “Then Uxor’s decision could get Larsha killed,” Reese said. The family would fall apart if that happened and The Prince crew would likely be blamed for it, not that that mattered compared to a young woman’s life. “It means we’ve got five hours left to find Larsha or her kidnapper.”

  Unless they got incredibly lucky he didn’t see any way for them to manage this and, judging by the silence from Reese’s companions, they felt equally daunted by the situation Uxor’s reaction had put them in. What kind of father would take such a risk when his daughter’s life was on the line?

  Poppy got out her hy-phone and dialled. She pressed a button so the men could hear the conversation and said into it, “Keith, have you found anything in the public camera footage.”

  “I’ve got it playing now. Nothing so far but I’ve also managed to get into the audio system from the cameras in the guest bedrooms.”

  “Useful,” Reese said at the same time as Poppy asked, “Is that legal?”

  “Well, it’s um...” He drifted off.

  “Then don’t tell anyone else about it,” she ordered, apparently not too bothered that he was breaking the law on the station. Given what the stakes were, Reese was happy to ignore it too – laws, after all, changed from one part of the galaxy to another – and Nick made no objection. “Let us know the second you see or hear anything helpful. Anything at all. Uxor has had a ransom note and he’s refusing to pay it. Larsha could be in deadly trouble soon.”

  “Poor girl,” Keith’s voice said. “Okay. I’ll keep in touch.”

  Poppy rang off and said to her brother and Reese. “That’s a start, at least. We’ll have to keep going room to room asking for information and scanning for clues unless anyone has a better idea.”

  He glanced at Nick who shook his head. “Perhaps one of us should speak to Kedos again,” Reese suggested. “If anyone would know if Larsha arranged this whole thing herself, it’s probably her and, if we can prove that Larsha wasn’t in on it, we might be able to persuade Uxor to change his mind and pay the ransom.”

  “I’ll go and talk to her,” Poppy said and headed back to Uxor’s room.

  “Let’s approach the interviews differently,” Nick suggested to Reese. “Paul Ninety should be able to tell us exactly who’s staying on the station as well as provide a list of station personnel. Why don’t we find out who has a criminal record and go and knock on their doors.”

  “All right.” Reese didn’t want them to spook the kidnapper but, with the time they had to solve this case running out, it might increase the odds of them finding the criminal in time.

  Chapter Nine

  IT TURNED out that there were currently eighty-four people on the station who had criminal records. In a place housing over two thousand people, the number wasn’t too surprising but it would be a miracle if they got anywhere before Larsha’s time ran out and worry for her fluttered in Nick’s stomach.

  “I’ve never heard of him,” one alien told them at the door of his room, having refused to allow them inside. He was a bit shorter than them, with dark fur and several tails that had gone rigid when they said they were detectives and the appendages were now knotting and untying themselves repeatedly, suggesting he was lying through his teeth.

  “Garren, you’re a convicted thief and you’re trying to tell us that you don’t know the name of the man who owns entire planets?” Reese said, leaning in the doorway. “I bet you know the income of everyone who steps onto this space station.”

  The man’s tails shot up straight in the air again, vibrating with tension and, with Reese staring at him as if he knew something incriminating already, Garren soon caved. “Yeah, okay, maybe I did hear that but I don’t know nothing about a kidnapping. I wouldn’t do something like that to an innocent young girl. Well, a girl.”

  Nick frowned at the way he amended his words. “Then you met her and didn’t think she was all that innocent?”

  “No, no.” Garren waved his hands in denial, looking flustered. “I never saw her myself but... Look, don’t tell anyone I was the one who told you this.”

  “We won’t,” Nick said. It struck him that his translator was staying silent: Garren was speaking English with an American accent not unlike his own, which was weird.

  Garren studied him and then leaned nearer. He smelt of something sour that was either his race’s natural odour or was something he had ingested. “There’s quite a bit of public and private gambling on the station. The public stuff is all regulated and there are rules and limits on it but the card games that go on in private rooms are for much bigger stakes and they aren’t exactly legal. The girl, Larsha, was gambling heavily. That was what a couple of people told me. I don’t know which games she went to but I heard she was winning and losing big amounts.”

  “What are the names of the people who told you about Larsha?”

  “No.” Garren’s tails stopped waving about and froze again, ramrod straight. “I can’t answer that.”

  “A young woman’s life might be in danger,” Nick said.

  “I don’t wish anything bad on the girl but I don’t want anything nasty happening to me either.”

  “We could arrest you,” Reese said.

  “That’s a nice thing to say when I’ve been doing my best to help you.” He sounded genuinely affronted and his tails puffed out until they looked three times wider. “Anyway, you can’t. I know the laws of this station. Unless you have evidence directly linking me to a crime, you have no grounds to arrest me.”

  This last sentence was a quote from some rule book, Nick was sure. They couldn’t bluff him and he wouldn’t willingly say anything more, that was clear. “You’re right. Thanks for telling us this much. We’ll leave you alone.”

  Garren vanished back into his room, the door closing in front of their faces just as Nick’s hy-phone rang. He answered it and heard Sycophant Two’s voice. “I’ve heard something from the audio feed that you’ll want to listen to.”

  “We’re on our way.” He disconnected the call and caught Reese’s arm, tugging him into motion, as he relayed what Keith had said.

  They reached one of the intersections that had corridors going off in four different directions. With the walls and carpets in different colours, that meant eight bright, clashing colours competing with each other and threatening to give him a headache.

  “Any clue which is the right way back?” he asked Reese, who slipped on his glasses and asked them to show the route. He was pointing to a corridor with yellow walls and an orange carpet when a large object crashed into the wall of a different corridor. The sound of the object was metallic but it was painted brown, with darker lines and whorls, to resemble the trunk of a tree.

  A male human wearing a skirt appeared and ran to retrieve the object. “Och, sorry to startle you,” he said cheerfully, when he saw them. “It’s the log-tossing contest.”

  He disappeared before Nick could make any sense of this. “Huh?”

  “It’s a Scottish tradition,” Reese said. “Let’s go.”

  He began moving at once, heading down the new corridor, and Nick hurried to catch up. “Tanya said there was some kind of Scottish event going on at the moment. Have you been to something like it while you were in Britain?”

  Reese didn’t look at him. “Let’s just focus on what Keith has to tell us.”

  Reese had reacted like this over the music of the bagpipes too. Why should a festival on the station upset him? Was this something to do with his family, something that had caused him to lie about them? Whatever the reason, Nick’s curiosity was less important than for Reese to be happy, so he said, “Sure,” and smiled at his companion. Reese gave an answering grin, although it was dimmer than usual.

  They got back to the ship – its grey slug-like appearance contrasting with the sleeker models either side of it – at the same time as Poppy appeared from a different corridor. “What did Kedos say?” he asked her.

  “That there was no way Larsha would be involved in the k
idnapping. She was quite indignant and horrified that we might believe that.”

  They boarded together and passed Tem and one of the new soldiers in the docking bay inspecting their crafts. Reese gave them a wave, which was ignored. They headed on to find Tanya in the control room with Keith.

  “What have you discovered,” Poppy asked, sitting down on a computer unit. The two men remained standing around the seated duo at Keith’s station.

  “Listen.” Keith pressed a button on his computer.

  There was a crackling hiss of noise and they all leaned closer to try to hear it better. For several seconds nothing more could be heard and Nick began to wonder if Keith had gone back too far on the recording.

  Out of the blue came the sound of a male voice with an accent Nick couldn’t identify; probably one of the hundreds of inhabited planets that had developed their own way of speaking. It didn’t help that the recording was a bit muffled and distorted. “There. The letter is written.”

  “I tell you before that it pointless,” a woman’s voice replied. She had the same accent as Uxor so this was presumably Larsha. “Father has seventeen other children and he’s never once wanted me. He won’t currency you anything to get me back.” She, unfortunately, knew her father well.

  “You’d better hope you’re wrong,” the man said in a nasty tone.

  The woman sounded panicky. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t worry – I’ll take it off soon but I don’t want you yelling for help. We’re getting out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you think I’m a fool? They’ll find us if we stay in one place for too long.”

  There were some muffled sounds – a muted gasp and several heavy uneven steps, as if someone was being pushed along. The door opened and closed once again and then there was only the sound of static.

  Keith switched it off and Poppy said, “Is there any way you can identify the kidnapper from his voice?”

  “No. There’s too much static and, unless he has a galaxy-wide criminal record, his speech wouldn’t even be in the Galactic Police Database. I should be able to trace which camera this audio came from in a few hours, though.”

  That would take them dangerously close to the ransom deadline, if not beyond it, Nick thought. Larsha seemed more real to him after listening to her words and he was afraid for her.

  “They’re already gone,” Tanya said. “The captor made that clear.”

  “But they may have left evidence behind,” Poppy told her. “If we can at least get the man’s identity we can start to make better progress.”

  “You know best,” Tanya said and Nick could only hope that she was right.

  Chapter Ten

  THEY PLAYED the audio recording to Uxor and Yalfi, hoping it might make Uxor relent over the ransom payment. Reese watched Uxor’s expression when Larsha said her father had never wanted her in his life but, if the words affected him, it wasn’t visible from his face or behaviour. Yalfi, on the other hand, made keening noises at the sound of her daughter’s voice and Nick patted the shell that came over her shoulders, looking distressed.

  “We’re aware that Larsha made some mistakes in the past,” Reese said to Uxor, “but it must be clear from this evidence that Larsha is in real fear for her life. Won’t you re-think your decision about the ransom? It could be her only hope of surviving this.”

  “No.”

  So much for their hope that he would be affected by the sound of his daughter’s fear and want to help her. He might have doubted that the kidnapping was real before but it was obvious now that it wasn’t a ruse and Reese wanted to shake Uxor to get some emotional response from him.

  They left the couple and Poppy said, “We’re down to less than four hours now.” Even she seemed more concerned over this than Uxor did and Reese, thinking about his own past, wondered how such heartless people came to exist.

  In under four hours the ransom deadline would be up and the kidnapper would decide what to do with an unwanted prisoner. The knowledge made Reese feel panicky, as if there was an hourglass for Larsha that was running out of sand. There was so little that they were even allowed to do to find her.

  “At least we now know a few more things to help us solve this,” Nick said, ignoring a maintenance bot that scuttled past, reaching no higher than their knees. “We know that Larsha really has been kidnapped and that the kidnapper is male.”

  “It sounded as if he knew the station quite well as he had more than one room lined up to hide her in and he knew about the lockers,” Reese said, “so we can probably eliminate anyone who had only arrived on the station just before Larsha was taken.”

  “There are around two thousand guests here right now,” Poppy said. “Even with those restrictions, we’re still probably left with about one thousand. We have to do better than that – we don’t have the time or resources to look into that number of people.”

  “Then let’s start with the criminals,” Reese suggested.

  “I have another idea.” Poppy got out her hy-phone and dialled. She held it to her face and said, “Keith, can you tell when your recording of Larsha and the kidnapper was made? The exact day and time? Good. I’ll be right there.”

  She turned to the men. “We only knew that Larsha was taken some time in the night, so that didn’t help us in questioning people, but we can eliminate any guest who was seen by others at the time that the recording was made. It will take time but, unless Keith can find the room where she was kept sooner, it might be our only chance to find Larsha. You two follow the criminal angle – you might get lucky with that – and I’ll recruit a few people from the ship to help me put together a list of who’s left unaccounted for after interviewing guests about their whereabouts when the recording was made.”

  “Okay,” Nick said and she left them alone. He got out his hand-held computer and brought up the list of criminals they had begun speaking to earlier. “All right. If we eliminate all the women, we’re left with forty-one criminals.”

  “Let’s go and talk to them,” Reese said, eager to start doing something useful. He refused to let Larsha die just because she had a father who wouldn’t do anything to save her.

  Chapter Eleven

  “WE’RE TRYING to find Larsha, the girl who was kidnapped two days ago,” Reese said to the young man in front of him, who had a handsome, innocent face yet had a criminal record for assault, theft and attempted murder. He was the ninth person they were interviewing and, as suspects went, he was a strong possibility. “Can we come in?”

  “All right.” The man’s lack of concern over them seeing his room made Reese’s heart fall but it was possible that he was still guilty and was hiding Larsha somewhere else. This could be where Keith’s earlier recording had come from.

  They walked inside and found that the lemon and violet room had little sign of being inhabited. The bed was neatly made, another comfie sitting as an unused yellow blob nearby, the cupboards were closed and the only personal belongings were a comb, a bottle of deodorant and shampoo.

  “You look as if you’ve just arrived,” Reese said, although he knew that the man had been on the station for more than a week.

  “I’m just naturally tidy.” He looked like a teenager, although his criminal file had stated that he was twenty-two, with curly brown hair and wide eyes.

  “And your name is Jean Korloff – is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Nick held up the photo of Larsha on his computer and the man peered at it. “Have you seen this woman on the station?”

  “This is the girl who was taken? Yes. I saw her walking about, alone and with others of her race.”

  Reese straightened, happy to have someone recognise Larsha. “Where was she walking?”

  “I saw her in the restaurant with others and late at night on her own a couple of times.”

  “You didn’t see her with anyone other than the Homs – the people of her own race?” Nick asked.

  “No... Wait. Yes
, actually I did. Four or five nights ago I saw her down in the lower section of the station – where guests aren’t really supposed to go – and she was talking to a Dedwo alien.”

  “You didn’t catch the person’s name?”

  “No. I had seen him before but I have no idea what his name is.”

  “Can you tell us where you were two nights ago?”

  “Asleep, I imagine.”

  “What about last night between twenty-two and twenty-three standard hours?” This was when the recording had been made.

  “I’m not sure. I was either at the station restaurant or here.”

  “Was anyone else with you?”

  “Probably not. I said hello to other guests I recognised in the restaurant but that was it. I’m here on business so I don’t have time to get to know other people.”

  “Can you think of anything else you can tell us about Larsha?”

  Korloff shrugged. “She might have been scared of the alien she was talking to. That’s just the impression I got.”

  “We’ll look into it,” Reese said. “Thank you for your help.”

  They left the room and Nick got out his computer. “The list of guests we have doesn’t mention race so I’ll have to look up their full booking in details to find the Dedwo alien. This could take a few minutes.”

  “At least it might be...”

  A voice spoke behind him. “John?”

  Reese froze, the name transporting him back in time to a past he tried every day to forget: he could almost hear the Highlands accent of the foreman and see a bunch of thin children with him in the factory. He should have known that his luck had gone bad when he first heard that damned bagpipe.

  A hand touched his arm, forcing him to give some kind of response. He reluctantly looked round and saw a burly man with red hair and a crooked nose. It took him a second to recognise Iain – they hadn’t seen each other for more than ten years, after all and Iain used to be as small and skinny as the rest of them. That meant he might be able to bluff it out. A movement at his side reminded him that he wasn’t alone: he couldn’t let Nick find out about his past; it was unthinkable. Reese had to make this the best lie he’d ever told.