“They’re all likely to be low level members, probably not the sort to have Gillespie’s ear, but we can bring them in for the drugs stuff and investigate the EHPL stuff without them knowing. Not much, but it’s a way in.”
“Excellent,” Tarkken said, his mood lifting. “Is there anything we can do to support?”
“Not at this stage. Want to make sure it all looks routine. Ruffle their feathers just enough to make some things happen, but not enough for them to suspect what we’re really after. We’re doing the arrests tomorrow. I thought perhaps it would be a good idea for you to come to the debriefing afterwards.”
She gave him the time and location.
“Thank you, I’ll be there,” Tarkken said.
An awkward silence followed, before Superintendent Jackson took a heavy breath.
“Will it just be you? I wouldn’t want to tip anyone off that the Intergalactic Community has any sort of interest…”
“It will just be me,” Tarkken said. “I can wear Human clothes.”
There would be no hiding his eyes once he was indoors and couldn’t wear sunglasses without drawing attention. But people didn’t tend to notice eyes until they were right in your face, anyway. Tarkken thought he could get away with it.
“Good. Then we’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
Chapter 3
A PERSISTENT NOISE DRAGGED MARTA OUT of unconsciousness. It took a while for her half-asleep brain to sort through its confusion and realise it was her phone ringing. Groping across her bedside cabinet, Marta found the offending object and looked at the screen.
With the incoming call taking up the entire screen she couldn’t even see what time it was. Too early, she thought, pain lancing through her head as she sat up. She pressed the heel of her palm against her forehead, steadying herself a moment as the pain retreated back into the base of her skull, a low throb of tiredness that she could mostly ignore.
She’d been up late working on her latest jobs, trying to get through as much as possible as soon as possible. She wasn’t in the red yet, but if things with her father continued down the path they’d started on, she would need more of a buffer than she had.
The person calling was one of her father’s new housemates, which did not bode well.
“Hello?” she said, trying not to sound like someone who’d just woken up and failing miserably.
“Marta, I’m sorry to call you.” It was Lukas, the guy she’d dealt with most of the time when acquiring the room. He seemed like a decent, no nonsense sort, and Marta didn’t think he would call her if there wasn’t good reason. “It’s just… we’re having a slight issue with Piotr.”
The ‘slight issue’ was that her Dad had made friends with a well known local drug dealer and had brought him back to the house for drinks. Marta looked at the time as soon as she hung up the call and found herself thinking that at least it was twelve - an acceptable time to be drinking. This attempt to convince herself that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been failed, her second thought immediately afterwards being that it was lunch time. Just about twenty-four hours since she’d left Piotr at the house yesterday. And he’d already befriended the local crook.
It was like he had some sort of magical ability to detect the scent given out by practising criminals and follow it all the way to its source. If there was one person in a crowd of five hundred who had once stolen from a till at work, or nicked someone’s bike from a shed, or dipped into someone’s handbag while they weren’t looking, Marta would have bet good money on her father being able to identify them.
“I’m coming over,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Dammit, they were decent people. They’d taken a chance on her father, and already he was letting them down. Letting her down. It was her deposit that secured the room, and if he and his dodgy friends made a mess of anything, it was Marta who would be out of pocket.
Her head didn’t feel any better for a quick shower, so she made a coffee in a travel mug and sipped it while she rode the tube out to where her father now lived. The caffeine buried the headache for now, but she knew it would come back to bite her later. With the sleep fog and the pulsing pain gone, she had more room to feel annoyed, her anger at her father building with every Underground station she passed.
After everything she’d done to get him set up and on the right path, the least he could do was give her way a token effort for a day or two.
By the time she arrived at the house, Marta was ready to wage war, but one look at Lukas’ face when he answered the door and the fight drained right out of her.
“Already gone?” she said.
He nodded. “Marta, this arrangement…”
“Only works if he’s not an asshole, I know, believe me,” Marta said, “I don’t want to put on you. But please, let me talk to him. Give him one more shot. If he still can’t toe the line, then do what you have to do.”
Lukas considered her for a moment. Like Piotr, Lukas had been born in Poland and came to England later, although he’d been much younger than Piotr, only the barest hint of an accent when he spoke. He had a handsome set to his features and was always ready with a smile. Marta supposed when she’d spoken to him, she’d seen a representation of everything she wanted her father to be. Polite, hardworking, honest.
And now she could see him warring with himself over whether or not to give Piotr another chance. She’d put too much on him - both in hoping he could be a positive role model and in asking him not to give up on Piotr just yet.
Marta didn’t know if her desperation swayed him, or just his own decency, but he nodded. “Do you want to come in for a minute? As you came all this way.”
Marta shook her head. “It’s fine. I’m going to go find him and drag him home.”
Lukas gave her a quick glance up and down, probably noting her slight frame, diminutive height. The only things that had ever been big about Marta were her hair and her mouth. She was relying on the latter to get her father out of whatever situation he’d got himself into.
“Good luck with that,” Lukas said, managing somehow to sound like he really meant it.
As soon as he shut the door, Marta took out her phone, clicking on to the tracking app she’d had installed. Her father was savvy enough to turn off location data if he didn’t want his phone to be tracked, but Marta was one step ahead of him on that front. She’d taken the hardware apart and slipped a tiny tracking device inside the phone, separate to the software installed on it. Her father’s inability to accept consequences played in her favour here. She didn’t think it would even occur to him to suspect that she might want to track his whereabouts enough to bug him.
The app took a minute to refresh his location, and when it did - no surprises - it showed her father in a local off license. It was only a short walk away, and Marta set off towards it, keeping the tracker app open in case he moved.
Marta remembered raging to Asha once about her father and his drinking. It was during the brief time between Piotr’s two stints in prison. Marta, fourteen years old, had plenty to be angry about. Asha was usually good to join in when Marta started complaining about anything, but as she’d raved about her father being a drunk, Asha had only gone quiet. A while later, Asha had told her own story of woe about living with an alcoholic father who cared more about his next drink than he did about his children. Piotr’s problem was no where near that bad. He wasn’t thinking about alcohol from the moment he woke up - could go days, weeks even, without taking a sip. The problem Piotr had was when he did drink, it knocked what little sense he had right out of his head.
This was Marta’s fear as she followed the tracker - now moving away from the off licence towards a residential street. That before she could reach him, he’d have bragged about his ability to crack security systems and found himself on a new crew ready to hit a load of high end shops overnight. She only hoped she got to him before he opened the four pack of cheap lagers he’d probably just bought.
The tracker stoppe
d at a house and Marta picked up her pace, walking as fast as she could down the street towards it. It was one of those tall, thin terraces that had been split into multiple different bedsits, but not like the funky little bedsit Marta had lived in at eighteen, along with a load of other young people trying to make their way in the big city. That property had been tired, but looked after, Marta and her housemates working hard to make it homely in the shared areas with what little money they had. The house Marta stood in front of now was the kind of horrible, run down accommodation that Piotr would have been allocated if she hadn’t worked so hard to find him better. And he had just gravitated right back here.
“Why do I even bother,” Marta muttered to herself as she walked up to the door.
She rang the doorbell, and a scrawny looking man gave her a leering look as he answered.
“I’m looking for Piotr Kowalczyk,” she said. “Just arrived here. Small guy, big personality.”
“Don’t know no Piotr,” the guy said, shrugging one shoulder. His jumper was grease stained, like he’d eaten last night’s takeaway pizza straight off it.
Marta pulled out her phone and called her father.
“Dad, I’m at the door, you better come answer.”
“Moja córka, I’m not home at the moment…”
“I know you’re not,” Marta said. “I’m not at that door.”
Overhead, someone looked out of the second floor window.
“Let her up,” he yelled to the man at the door.
Grease Stains shrugged a shoulder and stepped out of Marta’s way. She held her breath as she took the stairs two at a time, trying to keep out the smell of mouldering carpet and takeaway boxes. The handrail was sticky to touch and Marta snatched her fingers back, cursing. She would need more than a quick shower to decontaminate herself after this.
On the second floor, there were two rooms, one with the door shut, the other open, her father’s voice booming from inside it. As she stepped inside and caught a look at the guy her father had befriended, she understood completely why Lukas had called her.
He had the skin and bones look of someone addicted to the substance they were selling, pale, yellowish skin and sunken eyes. When he smiled, he reveal browned teeth, several of them missing. The tattoos on his neck screamed ‘prison’ and the stink coming from the room said he hadn’t been well acquainted with any sort of cleaning product - for house or body - in a very long time. Plenty of the kids Marta had known in the care homes had grown into adults like this, and she knew well the vice grip that drugs held over people who had been foolish and desperate enough to try them. If she’d had the energy, she might have felt sorry for him.
“Dad, I thought you had a full day of filling out job applications today?” Marta said, keeping her tone light, not keen on getting into a full blown argument in front of this stranger.
He waved a dismissive hand. “I looked. All rubbish. A man of my talents should be earning much more than the pennies they’re offering.”
Beneath the rage and the embarrassment, Marta felt a pinch of guilt. Sure, her father’s skills probably needed a bit of polishing, but he was the one who’d set her on the path to coding and code breaking. She couldn’t claim to have learned everything from him, he hadn’t been around enough for that, but she’d learned a good deal perched on his lap while he taught her the different languages computers speak. They had the same aptitude for pattern analysis, problem solving. Marta was sure in a couple of weeks he could get back up to scratch and good enough to do jobs on the Forum. She could set up that introduction for him, give him that in.
But she wouldn’t. And it wasn’t just because she didn’t think he’d be able to keep his greed in check enough to avoid the out and out illegal jobs that got posted there. It was because he ruined everything. Marta wanted, needed, something in her life that he couldn’t touch. Couldn’t spoil. If she didn’t have the Forum to run back to, she didn’t think she’d have the energy to keep dealing with him.
“Do I need to remind you where you were just yesterday, Dad,” Marta said. “Until you prove you’re a changed man, not just one who got to the end of his sentence, no one is going to take you on for any kind of job with a high level of responsibility.”
She tried to be oblique, tried not to give anything away about his particular skill set to the guy listening to every word they said.
“If I can break in to their security systems, I can show them where the weaknesses are, stop other people doing the same,” Piotr said.
Marta manage not to smack him. Just.
Another reason she wouldn’t be letting him anywhere near the Forum - he had no inkling about things that were better left unsaid.
“I’m sure there are, Dad,” she said. She knew there were, it was exactly the work she did herself, but she wasn’t about to announce that. “But even if you knew where to look for jobs like that, they’re still not going to employ you. They won’t trust you.”
“Why not?” Piotr sounded affronted.
“Why not?” Marta’s headache pulsed hard behind her eye, her temper on the edge of her control. “Dad, I don’t trust you. Your own daughter. You really expect a business to take any kind of risk on you? I wouldn’t.”
Piotr looked like he couldn’t begin to fathom why that might be the case. Marta had to marvel at his capacity for self delusion.
“Moja córka, why wouldn’t you trust me?”
Marta took as deep a breath as she could allow herself in the stinking room. “Because, Dad, it takes much more than just using a cute nickname to be a father to someone. I’m not ten any more. I don’t just trust you on principle. And you know what earning my trust would have looked like? Doing those job applications like I asked you to. Making steps towards earning an income so I don’t have to pay your rent next month.”
“When I get a better job, I’ll be able to do more than just pay the rent, we can have better lives, the things we deserve…”
“No,” Marta said, cutting him off before he started listing the expensive things. Wide screen televisions and diamond jewellery and designer clothes. She’d heard it all before. “Listen to yourself. This is exactly what you were saying last time you got out, and we both know what happened then. You’ve got to stop with this fantasy of being some minimum effort millionaire. You want a better life, then work for it like everyone else does. Work hard. At a real job. Not dealing drugs like this guy.”
“Hey,” the guy said. “Who says I’m a drug dealer?”
Marta picked up the set of digital scales from the sideboard, the top of them dusted with a fine white powder.
“I suppose these are for the cakes you’ve been baking?” she said.
He scowled at her, and Marta had a brief moment to consider the wisdom of antagonising a guy she knew nothing good about. Then a cacophony of voices sounded at the front door, followed by the bang of heavy footsteps running up the stairs.
Police officers poured into the room, all of them making a lot of noise meant to disorient and intimidate. Marta froze where she was, Piotr actually put his hands in the air, while the guy whose bedsit it was just sighed and sat down in one of the two kitchen chairs.
Marta looked at the set of scales in her hand, then turned and held them out to the nearest officer.
“I know you probably hear this all the time,” she said, “but this is not what it looks like.”
Chapter 4
TARKKEN ARRIVED AT THE STATION MID-afternoon, calling Superintendent Jackson from outside. She sent a minion down to collect him, bringing him through to the briefing room. A few of the other officers cast curious glances his way, but none of them said anything. In the smart jeans and shirt Angela had picked out for him, he didn’t stand out from the average crowd, but here amongst the suits and ties, he looked a little under dressed.
The debrief was mostly an allocation of various follow up investigations that had arisen out of the arrests they’d made. There were witnesses to interview, substances to be te
sted, phones and computers to be examined. None of which was of any interest to Tarkken. He understood that the police had to have systems and rules so powers couldn’t be abused, admired them for it, even. But it was frustrating how in this one circumstance, they couldn’t just kick doors down and arrest people until they had Nick Gillespie behind bars where he should be.
“The difficulty we have,” Superintendent Jackson said to Tarkken once the others had filed out and they had the room to themselves, “is that what we know about Nick Gillespie we could write on the back of a postage stamp. He’s come out of nowhere. Well, he’s come out of Ireland, that we do know. The Garda over there know his name and know he’s not exactly above board, but they aren’t sure how. Made a lot of money, too much money and too fast. Got married to an English girl and moved over here.”
“What do we know about her?” Tarkken asked.
Superintendent Jackson grimaced. “That she disappeared in mysterious circumstances about a year ago. Jennifer Gillespie, born Jennifer Harris. Dead, almost certainly. He killed her, we just can’t prove it. We searched the house, found nothing out of place. All her clothes, all her belongings were still there - phone, handbag, none of it disturbed and no sign of any sort of struggle. This was before the days of the EHPL, understand. Since then, he’s left that property, gone underground.”
“I suppose if the wife’s family think he killed her, too, they won’t be harbouring him.”
“Wife had no family, as far as we could tell. She came up through the system from a young age. Had her fair share of problems - shoplifting, a bit of burglary at her worst. Exactly the sort of girl vulnerable to being charmed by a wealthy, powerful man, to stick with him even when he starts showing his true colours. Knowing what we know now about Nick’s capacity for violence, I doubt it was a good marriage.”
Her eyes went distant a moment, distant and sad. Regret radiated off her. She might have risen through the ranks to Superintendent, but in her heart Katherine Jackson was still a beat cop, walking the streets of her city and trying to keep them safe. She felt personally responsible for letting Jennifer Harris down. For not being able to keep her alive in the first place, and for not being able to solve her murder.
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