by Tom Kratman
At some point, earlier that evening, Rashid had started getting lairy (or, rowdy, as I put in my report), accusing everyone of discriminating against his dad. One of the French kids said it was Dr. al Damer who killed Besma, and Rashid started attacking him. The Muslim teenagers sided with Rashid and, when he started losing, everyone fled to B Deck.
At least, that’s the story according to Jan-Frederick Muller, a friend of Besma’s dead boyfriend. Rashid’s mates, of course, had a different story. But to be honest, I didn’t care whose fault it was.
You don’t fight on a spaceship.
It’s not Star Wars.
And most of them were underage.
Anyway, by the time I’d finished, Rashid had sobered up. He sat in the cabin with a coffee, looking faintly sheepish, while I asked him questions. He was a lot more Westernized than his sister, clean shaven with gelled hair, and a UNCS Cheng Ho T-shirt and jeans underneath his regulation canvas trousers.
“They’re just fucking Islamophobic,” he said, in a strong American accent. “My dad’s a liberal guy. I’m a liberal guy. How can they believe crazy stuff like he killed my sister?”
His side of the story was that his so-called European friends started accusing his dad of murdering his sister. When he defended him, they rounded up an angry mob and tried to storm al Damer’s cabin. “I was just trying to protect my dad,” he said.
“I’m going to need to talk to your dad,” I said.
His face turned faintly gray. “Please don’t tell him I’d been drinking. Please . . . He’ll kill me. I mean . . . not literally, he’ll kill me, I mean, he wouldn’t . . . actually kill me, you know . . . but . . . he’ll get mad.”
I didn’t get to tell him: you should have thought of that before you and your mates went Rebel Alliance and cracked an oxygen pipe. My communicator buzzed. It was Lizzie.
I went outside.
“We’ve got more from forensics,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“Nothing much of interest . . . ”
It was my spidey sense going again. “Except?”
“She’d got alcohol in her bloodstream. Both of them had.” Lizzie sighed and paused for a moment. “Don’t want to speak ill of the dead. But she shouldn’t have been drinking with a wee bairn on the way.”
“Baby is doing well?” I asked.
“Squirming away . . . she’s a real little fighter.”
“How long did they drink before they died?”
“Same time as the methanol.”
“Doped booze?”
“Ach, maybe. I’m not a doctor . . . or a detective.”
“Lizzie. Neither am I.”
I went back into the cabin. Now I had something to ask Rashid. I sat directly in front of him, leaning forward, with my elbows on my knees—a look that meant business.
“Tell me about your sister.” I said.
Rashid put his head into his hands, and began to sob. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”
“Your fault?” I asked.
“I was her brother. She was all I had . . . my family, my blood. I should have protected her better.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
He shook his head.
“The autopsy says that she died of methanol poisoning. She’d been drinking before her death.”
“NOOOOOOO . . .” He began rocking backwards and forwards, without looking up. I had a niggling feeling that he knew something, and it was causing him unimaginable guilt. I gave him a moment to compose himself. Then I asked, softly, “Your friends say that you often went drinking in the hydroponics bay.”
“Fuck, don’t tell my dad that.”
I sighed. “Rashid, you’re how old? fifteen, sixteen?”
“Seventeen.”
“That’s still underage in most jurisdictions; even if you weren’t supposed to have a religious objection to booze. Look, how about I’ll be vague with your dad—provided that you tell me what you know about your sister.”
He finally looked at me, nodding.
“Okay. When did you last see your sister?” I asked.
He swallowed and knotted his fingers together. “Last Friday, three . . . no four days ago.” He paused. “She was with her boyfriend, you know, Hans, who died. We were hanging out in the hydroponics bay . . . ”
“Drinking?”
He shuffled uncomfortably. “Yeah.”
“Where did you get the booze?”
He swallowed again. “Ryan. He’s an American botanist.”
“I know him.”
“He brews it in the botany labs. Seriously, though, he wouldn’t have murdered Besma, he’s got no reason to kill her. He really liked her. And he’s not the type.”
“We had psychometric testing to get aboard this boat. No one should be the type.”
He gave me a wide-eyed look of terror. I couldn’t blame him. I wasn’t exactly happy with the idea of sharing a three-hundred-meter-long flying can with a double murderer myself. “Is there anyone among your mates who might have wanted Besma dead?”
He shook his head again and put his hands across his face. I patted him on the arm and stood up. “Look, I’ve got to slap on a curfew for rioting, underage drinking, and damaging the ship, but—I swear—I’ll find who killed your sister and make sure they’re held responsible.”
He glanced up with a hopeful look.
I’d remember that look as long as I lived.
We just got lucky on casualties—it could have been a lot worse. Two of the kids needed to go to MedLab—one with a broken nose and the other with a stab wound in his chest. One of the Turkish guys had a mild concussion from being hit on the head with a pipe. I was bruised all over—hips, thighs, elbows—from rolling on the floor with Rashid. Nothing serious, but not how I’d have wanted to spend my evening.
Contrary to what you hear, cops like me don’t like fighting. We do the job for the pay and to catch criminals. If you get into a fight, you risk getting injured. It’s rarely worth the pain.
Larry insisted I go to MedLab to get checked out, but there wasn’t any point really. Bruises are bruises and I just wanted to go to bed.
I limped back to my cabin, stripped off my clothes and went out like a light. I dreamed of my daughter. She was running down a smoke-filled corridor, her arms outstretched towards me. Her body was engulfed in flames.
I woke to find my pillow damp with tears.
I’d never cried before my daughter died. There was a time after she did when I dreamed about her every night and woke every morning with a damp pillow. But since I’d applied for the Cheng Ho mission, I’d never cried at night. Not even when they quizzed me about her death.
Maybe it was the sudden anger of the kids that had got to me. I was used to people who hated cops and were out of control—it comes with the job. I was a dab hand at dealing with criminal scrotes who used any excuse for a fight and a bit of looting. And I’d seen my fair share of pub scraps where the combatants were drunk, lairy [aggressive], and mates again the next morning. But those kids . . . They’d been buddies for months and, the next minute, they were breaking noses and cracking oxygen pipes.
Riots weren’t supposed to happen aboard the Cheng Ho. The crew and colonists had been chosen to be tolerant and law-abiding people. Well, that’s according to the powers-that-be, anyway. So the reality was that we weren’t equipped for mass disorder. We were six security officers for a couple of thousand crew and colonists, no backup, no tear gas, water cannons or rubber bullets, and no riot gear. There was nowhere to lock up rioters. If anyone did anything wrong, we were expected to talk them out of it.
We’d been lucky this time to have a bunch of colonists willing to muck in and make up numbers. Even luckier that there weren’t any fatalities. I reckoned we wouldn’t be so lucky if—and it was an if—there was a next time. And, on a ship in deep space, that wasn’t a good thought.
My morning shift began with me walking to the cabin of Ryan, our friendly American
bootlegger, so that I could arrest him.
Ryan, as I’d learned last time, was a former university botanist who signed up for Cheng Ho because he had “nothing better to do.” He gave off the strong impression of a surfer bum, but minus any passion for surfing. He was also Angel’s boyfriend although, when he opened the door of his cabin, she was nowhere in evidence. His blond hair was mussed from sleep, and he had on stripy boxer shorts and a pair of Birkenstocks.
The smile dropped right off his face when he saw me.
“Fuck, I didn’t do anything,” he said.
“What do you think you did?” I said.
“B Deck last night,” he said. “I swear . . . I only supplied the booze. I wasn’t even there.”
I informed him that he needed to be arrested so that I could interview him. Afterwards, he was free to go. Then I read him the Miranda Warning off a card—a relief because, since the 2023 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, the British right to silence goes on for pages. I always joke that it works as a form of torture; the perp will confess just to get me to stop.
After that, I waited outside his cabin while he threw on a crumpled lab coat and boardshorts. He acted the same as our first meeting—not especially bothered about the situation. If anything, he was even less concerned than last time—possibly because he knew I wasn’t about to nick him for bootlegging. I fetched him a coffee and we walked back to the OpSec interview room.
“Ryan,” I said. “We have evidence to suggest that Besma al Damer and Hans Schwerz died from consuming methanol—administered deliberately, or by accident—in an alcoholic drink. We have reason to believe that the alcohol they consumed before their death came from your brewing operation.”
That took a minute to sink in. He began to drum his fingers on the table. “Shit. Shit. Shit,” he said. “Shit, man. I check all my booze. No way . . . ”
“They couldn’t have drunk the methanol accidentally?”
“No way! I taste everything before it goes out . . .” His voice tailed off, and he looked at me for reassurance, which I didn’t give him. Eventually, he stammered, “Seriously, dude. I loved Besma, she was the sweetest; I wouldn’t do a thing to harm her.”
“Apart from giving her booze in pregnancy?” I said.
He shrugged. “Well, I told her. But it’s her choice.” That was the kind of public-spirited comment usually reserved for the better class of drug dealer I’d arrested: the ones with an IQ greater than their shoe size.
I pulled up the transcript from his interview a few days before, and went through the details of his bootlegging operation. “Who else has access to your booze when it’s in storage?”
He shrugged. “Me and my mate. Well, actually just me and . . .” His voice trailed off.
“You and who?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Do you know of anyone who might have reason to harm Besma?”
He shrugged again.
“Look. I know you know something.”
He thought about it. “It’s nothing.” I waited. “It was just . . . I talk to, you know, my girlfriend.”
Now that was a surprise. “Angel?”
“And, a month ago, she got moved from A to C Deck . . . ”
I realized where he was going. Space was a premium on the Cheng Ho. The senior staff, medics and navigators, were allocated the larger cabins on A Deck. The smaller cabins on B Deck, like mine, you couldn’t swing a rat in. They simply weren’t big enough for a pregnant teen and her boyfriend. Someone—Angel—had been moved to a converted storage container on C Deck.
“. . . She was really mad about it,” Ryan was saying. “I mean, man, she’s not me. She’s kinda uptight.”
And that was the shape of it: Angel was angry about being moved to C Deck to make room for an irresponsible teenager.
It wasn’t much to go on.
I nodded to Larry to check out this story. Then I wracked my brains for questions to ask Ryan. I was sure he was involved. I had a niggling suspicion that he knew something, and was blaming his girlfriend to keep us off the trail. So I went through the details of his bootlegging operation yet again. Then I went through his movements in the twenty-four hours after the couple were admitted to MedLab and the events leading up to his arrest.
“The five litres of vodka in your cabin . . .” I said.
Silence.
“Was that the same batch you gave to Besma and Hans?”
He shrugged. “Yeah . . . no . . . I mean, maybe, man.”
I pride myself on remaining calm and professional, but I felt myself losing it. There was a dead girl and Ryan was covering his arse.
“You know, I’d taken that vodka to my cabin . . . ”
The color drained out of his face. “Man, you’re not drinking it?”
I leaned forward. “There’s something wrong with it?”
“Man, seriously . . . it’s not . . . ”
I gestured to Larry, who was outside the interview room. “Look, I’m switching off the AV recording now.” I stood up. “Then I’m going to go to our evidence room, take your vodka and test every last bottle . . . ”
His back slumped in the chair. “You’re not?”
“Drinking it? No.”
At the door, I turned back to him. “If I find meths, mate, you are straight out the fucking airlock and floating your way home.”
Next stop . . . the five litres of vodka stacked in the evidence room. Larry and I carted it down to the chemistry labs for testing with firm instructions that it was evidence in a poisoning. You’d think that no one would nick bootleg vodka, but there isn’t much use for cash on the Cheng Ho. Booze, movie memorabilia, food rations—you name it, it gets swapped for just about anything. Social prestige, future favors, time off the work rota . . . yeah, we’ve nicked a few Toms-in-training [prostitutes] too.
No one’s obvious about it, of course. After all, we’re supposed to be building humanity’s home for the future here. But it still happens—the people with the most ‘stuff’ (what they called “social capital” in training)—get the best perks.
At 10:00hrs, Simon came on shift and I sent him off to arrest Angel. Then I went down to the botany labs and nicked the French bootlegger. He hadn’t seen Besma or Hans for a fortnight and claimed Ryan’s booze was nothing to do with him. Can’t say I believed him, but he didn’t act dodgy either.
I walked down B Deck to MedLab where Lizzie was on duty to ask if they’d finished on the forensics. She shrugged at me. I asked what had taken so long.
“Ach, it’s the equipment,” she said.
“Which equipment?” I saw the pain and confusion in her face, and added, “Sorry for asking.”
“Well, all the analyzers . . . ”
“. . . For blood tests?” I asked.
She nodded.
“For methanol poisoning?” I asked.
Her eyes widened. “No . . .” Her hands flew to her mouth. “. . . It couldn’t have been deliberate.” Lizzie was a sweet soul—she needed to catch up to reality. Eventually, she said, quietly. “The poor wee lass.”
I left Jamal to go through the MedLab audio-visual records and went back to my cabin to look up methanol poisoning. Now I’m no chemist—it was my worst subject—and half an hour on the ship’s intranet wasn’t going to change that.
So excuse me if this account isn’t the best. I’m not on this boat to be smart.
When you hear of old guys going blind on moonshine, that’s no joke. If you fancy amateur distilling, you should do your homework. Throw away your first runs; make sure you’re not producing methanol. Thing is, methanol is a lot like booze, but it breaks down in your body to formaldehyde. If formaldehyde sounds familiar, you’d be right. It’s the stuff they use for pickling the animals you see in museums. If you drink methanol, the formaldehyde hits your eyes and your gonads first.
So, if you drink the stuff and you’re a bloke, you’re pickling your balls.
[This also explained how the baby survived—premie
infants can’t make formaldehyde].
Now, I’m not a detective, and methanol poisoning isn’t your usual brand of southeast London murder (that’s usually teenagers stabbing each other). But, going by the symptoms, if you suspect it, you can confirm your suspicions with a gas chromatograph—if you can find one. You might be able to save the poor sod’s life by giving them alcohol, which competes with methanol for “binding sites”—whatever that means. As I say, I’m not a chemist.
Either way, you can’t get anywhere without a suite of blood tests. And, if your analyzers aren’t working, you’re flying blind.
At 13:00hrs, Jamal came around to show me the audio-visual records. They showed what I’d expected; Angel acting suspicious near the MedLab equipment. Looking behind her, entering the room, and messing with the equipment. Angel—a doctor—tinkering with analyzers in MedLab: that wasn’t evidence of anything. So I sent him to talk to the IT guys.
An hour later, I went back to OpSec. Angel was seated in the interview room. I looked at her through the glass. She wasn’t my usual brand of criminal scrote . . . the sort I caught running away with a blood-covered shiv. Her back was straight and her hands were folded primly in her lap . . . a proper little Miss Perfect.
“I want a lawyer,” she said, as I walked in, in her strong American accent. “I’m permitted competent and independent counsel under Filipino law.”
I folded my arms. “You can have the ship’s lawyer if you want,” I said. “But he’s been a bit busy; you’ll need to wait until he gets back on shift.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
I asked her some questions anyway. She’d been moved cabins. Was she angry about it?
She shook her head.
“Your boyfriend said you were angry,” I persisted.
Her lips formed an angry line. “Then my boyfriend is a fool. The cabin on C Deck is larger than my old one.”
“Did you blame Besma for that?”
“That little whore. No, I did not. Or, at least, not enough to murder her.” She frowned at me. “I’m not insane, Tony.”