Perfect Match

by D. B. Thorne

  ‘Are you sure that you’re sure?’

  ‘Fucking said so, didn’t I?’ It was said without anger, without heat, but still, it wasn’t like Luke to speak to Solomon like that. Solomon nodded, didn’t reply, noting mentally that it appeared that his brother was into something more than usually dangerous right now. Though what that was he didn’t know and wasn’t anxious to find out.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘If you need me …’

  ‘I’ll call. Don’t worry.’ Luke stood up, and said, ‘Forget about it.’

  Visiting time was over soon after Luke left, and Solomon kissed his sister goodbye before heading home. On the way out of the hospital he called Fox, with a feeling of trepidation. Solomon had a weird capacity for visualizing data, for organizing and retaining facts, but he had no such affinity with people. He tried to understand them but often found himself reverting to clumsy and broad metaphors, lacking in nuance. He imagined Fox as a tall, precipitous mountain, cold and covered in ice, impossible to scale or get a grip on. This was about as far as he could get with her, where his understanding ended.

  Fox picked up after a couple of rings.

  ‘Inspector, it’s Solomon Mullan. We met yesterday.’

  ‘We did,’ she said, without warmth. She left an uncomfortable pause, then said, ‘And how can I help you?’

  ‘I’ve just been at the hospital. Were you aware that my sister had tested positive for barbiturates?’

  There was a pause on the other end, then Fox said, ‘I heard. Yes.’

  ‘Then I assume you are taking the case more seriously now.’

  ‘Oh?’ Solomon pictured Fox, her frank gaze, short hair, her sharp, unfriendly features. ‘Why is that?’

  For a moment Solomon didn’t have an answer. ‘Because why would my sister give herself a potentially lethal dose of barbiturates?’

  ‘Mr Mullan,’ said Fox, ‘your sister leads, as you yourself told me, an unconventional lifestyle. Probably unhappy, given her profession. You tell me why she might voluntarily ingest a substantial quantity of sedatives.’

  ‘She didn’t try to kill herself, if that is what you’re insinuating,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Didn’t she?’

  ‘No. I know my sister.’

  ‘Unfortunately I never had the luxury. So instead, I’m going on the most likely explanation, given the information I have. And I’m treating your sister’s situation as either an accident, or attempted suicide.’

  ‘Which it isn’t.’

  ‘Which it may or may not be, but for the purposes of the investigation right now, that is the working hypothesis.’

  ‘And her date? Her non-existent date, what was he called?’ Solomon pretended to have difficulty recalling his name. ‘Tobes?’

  ‘No record of them having ever met, and she never made it to the bar. Instead she was found four miles away, near her home, in a canal. So it’s not a priority.’

  ‘Not a priority,’ repeated Solomon, his voice suggesting that Fox had just attempted to pass the earth off as flat. ‘And Robert White?’

  ‘We’ll get to him,’ said Fox. ‘But again, no suggestion that he had anything to do with it.’

  ‘I imagine that asking him would be a start.’

  ‘I’ve got your number now,’ said Fox, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘I’ll call you if anything changes.’

  ‘I would encourage you to look at her date again,’ Solomon said. ‘There’s something about that message. Their exchange. There’s something there.’

  ‘I’ll keep you posted,’ Fox said. ‘I need to go.’

  Solomon walked out into Whitechapel, its street stalls and tide of people, his dead phone still pressed to his ear, and was so outraged by what Fox had just told him that he hardly registered the shocked faces of the people pushing their way past him, or more accurately, away from him.

  six

  SOLOMON DIDN’T LIKE TO THINK OF HIS APARTMENT AS A prison. He reasoned to himself that its luxury and privacy, its connection to the outside world, and its front door, which he was free to use at any time even though he didn’t, were all inconsistent with a penal institute. On the other hand, he knew every square centimetre of it, in far more detail than the longest-serving lag was likely to know his cell. He could mentally reconstruct each room, map out its dimensions, calculate its surface area, its volume, perform any number of three-dimensional mathematical tricks. He could convert the total space into polygons of various shapes and build them into elaborate structures, all the while remaining true to the sum of its original measurements. All this he could do without even needing to open his eyes.

  Rather than a prisoner, he preferred to liken himself to an Arctic scientist, stranded at some remote outpost, entirely free to venture outside but unfortunately penned in by hostile and indifferent forces. This felt a more positive and precise analogy, although in the case of the scientist, those forces were polar bears and shifting ice floes and sub-zero blizzards. In Solomon’s case, they were people, basic interactions, the challenge of buying milk without unwanted looks and judgement. And so like survival at a distant outpost, Solomon relied on the reliable delivery of supplies, his connection to the outside world dependent on robust communication networks. He had no need to leave the safety of his apartment, provided he planned well and nothing went wrong.

  But opening his apartment door and seeing the note on the floor, he was reminded of the conditional fragility of his existence. Sorry we missed you. His weekly grocery delivery, gone back to wherever it’d come from. Which meant the only food he had for the next week was frozen. Unless he wanted to visit a shop, which he didn’t. He didn’t know how close to starving he’d have to be before he faced a busy supermarket, but he wasn’t there yet, wasn’t even close. He sighed, bent down and picked up the note, crushing it in his hand. Screw it. He would live. He could always ask Luke.

  But then, hadn’t he just received a long-awaited message, a faraway transmission of hope and opportunity? He checked his notifications, but there was nothing more from Kay. That beacon had blinked out.

  What hour now?

  That was what Tobes-no-surname had written to his sister. What hour now? The phrasing was strange, archaic. Solomon sat at his desk, searched Convent, bar, London, the place where his sister and her date had arranged to meet. It existed, that was certain, a converted warehouse building in Shoreditch that had never actually been a convent, but he guessed the idea of getting smashed in a defunct house of God must appeal to trendy twenty-somethings’ sensibilities.

  Solomon couldn’t help thinking that there was something wrong with the whole exchange. Something odd, stilted, artificial. But then, what did he know? It had been years since he’d dated, and he never would again. Emojis, abbreviations, acronyms, all of this was a grammar that he wasn’t hard-wired to understand.

  He sat back and thought. The untraceable name, the unmatchable profile shot, the strange phrasing, What hour now? Even Tiff hadn’t understood that one, had answered with a string of question marks. He didn’t care what Inspector Fox said, something about this was not right. Not right at all.

  The other characteristic that Solomon shared with an Arctic scientist was that, in the solitary time he had, which was the entirety of it, he researched. He read and watched and listened and learnt. Learnt and learnt and learnt. And since he had nothing better to do and nowhere he felt comfortable in going, he figured that he might as well start doing the research that Inspector Fox didn’t seem to want to.

  A search of crimes linked to dating apps returned thousands of results, telling him that violence against women had risen seven-fold in the last year. Soared. Skyrocketed. Headlines gave more detail:

  WOMAN CLAIMS SEXUAL ASSAULT FOLLOWING DATE COLLEGE STUDENT KIDNAPPED AND BEATEN WOMAN DIES FLEEING HER DATE ONLINE DATE MURDERED AND DISMEMBERED

  That last result related to a crime in Mexico, and so he refined his search to the UK. It gave him a slight reduction in results, but not much. It had been three years since
he’d last dated, and he felt out of touch, disconnected from this online ocean of available singletons. He pictured a vast network, millions of connections firing like synapses, every nanosecond, all across the world. He felt diminished by it, disorientated by this new neural dating system, his sister suddenly reduced to collateral damage of twenty-first-century romance. Was that all this was? The inevitable fallout from too many random hook-ups?

  More from a lack of ideas than anything else, Solomon typed in the search terms that best matched his sister’s attack. Online date. Drowning. Canal. Barbiturates. East London. But before he could look at the results, a notification appeared at the top of his screen. From Kay. A question:

  Can we talk?

  Solomon paused for a second, then replied:

  Of course.

  I’m sorry about yesterday.

  It’s fine. Don’t worry.

  I do worry. I enjoy speaking to you.

  He looked at the two sentences like they might be a trap, dangerous, a beautifully wrapped parcel that made a ticking sound. He typed:

  You can still do that.

  You’re sure?

  Of course.

  Another notification appeared: Incoming call. He chose Answer without video, almost a reflex reaction, and Kay appeared on his screen looking like she was still at work judging by the background, white desks, monitors and swivel chairs. She was wearing a lab coat and glasses, her blonde hair pinned up. Solomon had never seen her in glasses or with her hair pinned up before and it gave him an irrational jolt of surprise, as if he’d always known her for one role, and here she was, cast in an exciting yet incomprehensible new one.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Kay. You didn’t have to call.’

  ‘I wanted to. Am I interrupting?’

  ‘No.’ There isn’t a great deal to interrupt, thought Solomon.

  ‘I didn’t sleep. I kept thinking what an idiot I was. Well, what an idiot I am. I say stupid things, so it’s not just with you, I do it all the time. People say I talk too much, that I should just learn when to shut up, but …’ She ran out of words. ‘See? I’m doing it now.’

  Solomon smiled, though he knew it wouldn’t reach her. ‘It’s fine,’ he said.

  ‘And I haven’t even asked about your sister, so now it looks like I’m just thinking of myself, which makes it worse, right?’

  ‘She’s the same.’

  ‘Oh good. I mean, not good. But you know what I mean.’ She paused. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’

  ‘Yes.’ Solomon had never spoken to her outside of the Brain Pool, where getting a word in past Phil and Fran counted as an achievement. This was a side of Kay that he’d never seen. Or heard.

  ‘So,’ she said, then stopped. Solomon tried to think of something to say to help her out. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to—’

  ‘What do you know about online dating?’ said Solomon.

  ‘Sorry?’ Kay looked surprised, flustered, and Solomon thought with a sudden panic that she’d misinterpreted his question as some kind of come-on.

  ‘I mean, my sister, she’d been on one. A date. Before she was found, in the coma. An online date.’ You idiot, Solomon thought. A more mangled sentence you’d be hard pushed to invent if you had a week.

  ‘Oh. Well, yes, I’ve been on some. One or two, I mean, not lots. Not my thing really, swipe if you think I’m pretty, like some kind of beauty contest.’ She stopped, winced, eyes squeezed tight in mortification, then remembered she was on camera. ‘Oh God,’ she said.

  At this Solomon could not help but laugh, a genuine laugh at Kay’s heartfelt discomfort. It wasn’t often he laughed. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘You think this date, it has something to do with what happened to her?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. The police are trying to treat it as an accident, avoid an investigation. They found high levels of pentobarbital.’

  ‘Is that like her?’

  He thought of his sister, her laugh, the toss of her hair, her reckless, defiant spirit. When she was out of reach of Robbie White’s gravitational pull, at least. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all. Plus, they can’t match her date’s photo, or find his name.’

  ‘Plenty of impostors out there,’ said Kay.

  ‘He asked her what time to meet. He said, “What hour now?”’

  ‘Strange phrasing.’

  ‘I know. I can’t get past it. It just sounds …’

  On the screen a man came into view, handed something to Kay, a folder, papers. She looked up, then back to Solomon. ‘Listen, sorry. Got to go. I’ll message you.’

  She hung up and Solomon watched the Call ended screen for a couple of moments before closing it. Beneath were the results of his search, online date drowning canal barbiturates east london. He scanned down the results, and stopped at the fifth:

  WOMAN FOUND DEAD HOURS AFTER ONLINE DATE

  He followed the link to a story in a local north London paper:

  A woman, named as Rebecca Harrington, was discovered dead in the Grand Union Canal in the early hours of the morning of 15 July. Traces of barbiturates were found in her blood, but police are keeping the investigation open. ‘We are aware that she had arranged to meet a man online,’ a police source told us. ‘We are hoping to speak to him.’

  Solomon knew enough about norms of distribution, standard deviations from the mean, outliers and various other statistical models to have little time for coincidence. And what he’d just read had too many similarities to his sister’s case to seem merely chance. The online date, the canal, the barbiturates. And the time-line, only three weeks apart. At the very least, it should force Fox to do some proper investigating. He took out the card the inspector had given him and started to dial her number, then stopped. He thought of her indifference, her hostility, and ended the call. Instead he looked up the address details for all the Harringtons he could find in Islington, and started making calls himself.

  seven

  KAY MOST LIKED THE IDEA OF KNOCKING DOWN DOORS AND taking down names because it gave her something different from the lab, which involved, generally: watch thing grow, enmesh thing, introduce electrical current to thing, watch thing die, start growing thing again. Okay, it was more complex than that, but since there were, as far as she knew, only three (possibly four) people in the world she could have a conversation about it with, it wasn’t something she often talked about. But this, this was different. This was the real world, not theoretical, and real results could happen here within days and minutes, rather than months and years. Basically, it was exciting, and there wasn’t a lot of excitement in her life unless you counted her bi-weekly Brain Pool meetings, which she frankly didn’t.

  Rebecca Harrington’s parents lived in a third-floor council flat on a red-brick estate in Archway, just off the Holloway Road. Kay called the flat number on the intercom at ground level and waited to be buzzed up, climbing three outside flights of stairs and walking along a balcony that fronted the building until she got to their door. It opened before she had time to ring.

  ‘You’re Kay?’

  The man who stood in the doorway was large and balding and holding a can of cider even though it was only just gone eleven in the morning.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can come in, but I warn you we haven’t cleaned.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  The man stood to one side. ‘Walk past the kitchen and head to the end,’ he said. ‘Jean’s there.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The day was bright outside, and inside the flat it was dark and gloomy. Kay felt as much as walked her way down the corridor and got to a room at the end, the door open, the curtains inside closed. To begin with she couldn’t make a lot out and wondered if she’d found a storeroom instead of the living room, it seemed so chaotic. But soon the chaos reconciled itself into a stack of boxes, and past them two armchairs and a sofa, an indistinct woman sitting on one of the chairs. />
  ‘Just be careful of those,’ said the woman, Jean, not getting up. ‘It’s Rebecca’s things. We were having a sort-through, but …’ She stopped and Kay could hear her breathing. ‘Well. We haven’t finished.’

  Kay edged past the boxes and found herself standing over Jean sitting in the armchair, the space was so cramped.

  ‘Please,’ Jean said. ‘Go on. Sit down.’

  Kay sat down, and only now, her eyes accustomed to the light, could she see that Jean was crying, gently weeping, a handkerchief crushed in her left hand. For the first time since she’d set off from home that morning, she wondered just what she thought she was doing.

  *

  It had been Solomon who’d called Kay back the day before. She’d been surprised but not in a bad way. She seemed to have this way of always saying the wrong thing to Solomon, making herself sound thoughtless and clumsy. Hell, she had that way with everyone, what was she thinking? Maybe it was just because she liked him, even though she hardly knew him. He was quiet and considered where she was loud and, well, not. Not usually, even though she tried. She did.

  ‘Solomon.’

  ‘Hello, Kay. Am I interrupting?’

  ‘No.’ He wasn’t. She was reading a peer-reviewed paper on artificial neural networks, which was almost exactly as interesting as it sounded.

  ‘I wondered …’ Solomon paused. ‘I wondered if I could ask you something. To do something for me.’

  ‘Course,’ said Kay. She’d be glad to, happy to do something that might score a point, make a contribution to the credit side of their account. ‘What do you need?’

  Solomon had been uncertain on his theory, the similarities between his sister’s case and that of Rebecca Harrington. But Kay liked a theory, had no problem with them, however outlandish. Weren’t unlikely theories what she traded on pretty much every week in the laboratory? Maybe this will work. Nope. Maybe this. Nope. This? Uh-uh. Etc.

  ‘And they won’t talk about it over the phone?’

  ‘No. And if I go …’ He paused again. ‘It’s usually better if somebody else does the face-to-face.’