Perfect Match

by D. B. Thorne

  Jasmine looked at him and he seemed to wobble, slip out of focus and then back in, and she smiled and attempted to tell him that that would be awesome, but she fell asleep before she got the chance.

  The next time Jasmine woke up, she felt better in that she knew a lot about who she was and how she had got to be here. But she also felt terrified, terrified and cold and confused and amazed, astonished that she was alive and that she hadn’t been killed by that man who was worse than anyone she had ever imagined anyone could be. And since she’d woken up she hadn’t stopped crying, and the doctors had wanted to give her sedatives, but apparently, from what she’d heard, she wasn’t allowed them because the police had urgent questions and they needed answers, like, pronto.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ said a doctor, a woman in her forties with a face that was trying its best to look compassionate but really just looked stressed and harassed and unhappy.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Sure? The police want to speak to you. Do you think that’s something you can do?’

  Jasmine nodded, raising her head from her pillow. ‘I think so.’

  ‘You can stop at any time. My name’s Dr Joseph. You just ask for me, and I can stop it. Understand?’

  Jasmine nodded again, didn’t say anything, and the doctor nodded back and stood up straight and left, left quickly, like she had lives to save or something.

  ‘Jasmine?’

  She hadn’t seen him but he’d been in the room all along, in the corner, waiting to get at her. Gary. She remembered him clearly. Remembered everything clearly, and wished that she could drift away back to her previous state, where everything had been vague and muffled and a whole lot more manageable.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘We found your belongings,’ he said, pulling a chair up next to her bed. ‘Your bag. So we’ve got your address now.’

  ‘Lewisham. Clare Street.’

  ‘You’ve remembered?’

  ‘I remember everything.’ Jasmine shut her eyes tight to stop tears escaping, so that Gary wouldn’t feel sorry for her. Maybe, she thought, if I keep my head back on the pillow, my eyes will reabsorb them and he’ll never know how weak I was, and how easily I was beaten by that monster, how easily he got me. That fucken monster. But it didn’t work and she began to cry, and cry for a long time, and to give him his due, Jasmine thought, Gary kept quiet until she was done, and that wasn’t the kind of thing most men she’d ever met managed.

  ‘So,’ he said, gently, when she’d finished. ‘You’re from Australia.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ve spoken to your parents. They’re on their way over. Not sure if that’s good news or not.’ He said it with a smile in his voice and Jasmine looked at the polystyrene tiles of her hospital room and tried to smile with him, but couldn’t.

  ‘It’ll be all right.’

  ‘Good. So.’ Gary paused, then said, ‘Let’s take this slowly, okay? You went on a date.’

  Jasmine blinked hard before she answered. Fucken tears, she thought. Stop already.

  ‘Liked his profile picture, thought he looked sweet,’ she said. ‘How wrong did that turn out to be?’

  ‘We’ve got your phone,’ said Gary. ‘Got any messages from him?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can you share them?’

  Jasmine didn’t feel like she could handle sitting up, as that would imply a wish to engage with the world, so instead she said, ‘Nineteen ninety-four, that’s the code. Year I was born. Then go to messages.’

  She waited, looked back up at the ceiling while Gary got to grips with her mobile. Tried to remember the exchanges they’d had. She remembered thinking that his messages had been a bit odd, but in an interesting way, a quirky way. A British way. Sweet. The hour of nine. Jesus, Jasmine, you waste of bloody oxygen. What were you actually thinking?

  ‘Okay,’ Gary said. ‘What is he calling himself?’

  ‘Laurence.’

  Silence, then, ‘Laurence F?’

  ‘That’s him.’ The name sounded so neutral, so safe, so un-threatening. Laurence. She turned her head, felt her cheek touch the pillow, closed her eyes, listened to Gary read the message exchange.

  Drink?

  When?

  Can u do Saturday?

  I can … Where?

  The Crypt. Finest distilled liquor.

  Liquor??

  Website says from Russia argentina pehu I mean peru.

  Peru!

  Interesting … What time?

  The hour of nine.

  C u then.

  She’d arrived at the Crypt, seen the queue and immediately wished that she was somewhere else in the world, anywhere, even back in Perth, anywhere rather than having to queue up in some losers’ bar in Shoreditch along with the other losers. She did hip. She didn’t do out-of-towners’ hang-outs, even if she was an out-of-towner herself. She had standards. She had long legs and a whole heap of very cool and expensive tattoos, and she was young, and she was pretty, and no. No no no. She wasn’t doing the Crypt, wasn’t queuing, however quirky and sweet Laurence was. Even if the place served liquor from Peru.

  ‘Hey. Hey! Jasmine!’

  She’d turned and there he was, with all his crazy curls, which were the only reason she’d swiped on him in the first place.

  So, what made you go for him?

  His crazy curls, and his quirky way of writing.

  That sounded almost like a romantic story, right? Right? Maybe, but what she’d then turned and said was:

  ‘Is this for real?’

  ‘No,’ Laurence said, pushing his crazy curls away from his eyes. ‘It’s a big, big mistake.’ He laughed and looked away from her, like he was shy, only he was older than she was so, like, maybe he wanted to grow up a bit? Anyway, he said, ‘Look, I know somewhere else. A lot quieter, and a lot cooler. If you’re still up for it.’

  Jasmine had looked at him, his curls, his cuteness, even though he was older than her. There’d been something about him, something vulnerable, that had made her relent.

  ‘Okay. But it had better be close, yeah?’

  She remembered getting into a taxi, and remembered Laurence offering her something to drink and her drinking it, because she was a fucken idiot, and then she didn’t remember anything else until she was sitting on something uncomfortable in a place where every breath she took felt like age and stone and cold. And she remembered Laurence, only he wasn’t Laurence any more. He was now a cold person full of anger and muscle and concentration who had shed a skin and assumed another persona, who had become somebody else. Somebody Jasmine would have crossed a street to avoid, so much hate did he emanate, like if she put out a finger his force field might shock her.

  ‘Presently,’ he said, ‘through your veins, a cold and drowsy humour will run.’

  ‘What?’ It was dark, where they were, and quiet, Laurence’s voice echoing slightly, even though he wasn’t talking loudly, was in fact talking quietly and precisely.

  ‘No warmth or breath will suggest you’re even alive,’ he said. ‘Like death.’

  ‘You’re going to kill me?’

  Laurence paused, then said, ‘Like death, stiff and stark and cold.’

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘To free you.’

  ‘Free me?’

  ‘From your current shame.’

  Jasmine said nothing, felt her heart beat, so hard that in the silence she believed that she could hear it. She didn’t understand, none of it, couldn’t make it out, could barely make Laurence out, sitting next to her. Laurence reached for her arm and held it, and she felt a sharp prick but he was so strong that she couldn’t jerk her arm away.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Hold,’ said Laurence. ‘In forty-eight hours, you will awake, as from a pleasant sleep.’

  And that was everything that Jasmine could remember.

  ‘How long?’ she asked Gary.

  ‘How long
what?’

  ‘How long was I there? In that church?’

  Gary lifted his shoulders slightly. ‘It’s hard to say. You were found on a Friday. From what we can work out, you could have been there for two days.’

  Forty-eight hours, thought Jasmine. A pleasant sleep. ‘Two days? In church, without anyone finding me?’

  ‘The congregation’s small,’ said Gary. ‘Somebody comes in on a Wednesday, and the priest comes over on a Friday, for the service. So yes, it could have been that long. You’d been given a lot of …’ Jasmine heard Gary go through his notebook. ‘Propofol. It’s used for keeping people under.’

  ‘But … why?’ said Jasmine. That’s what she couldn’t understand. ‘Why?’

  ‘That,’ said Gary, ‘is why we need to speak to him. So, Jasmine, if you feel up to it, could you tell me exactly what he looked like?’

  seventeen

  TIFFANY’S ROOM AT THE HOSPITAL WAS ON THE SEVENTH FLOOR, but Solomon always took the stairs, because biomechanics dictated that when people walked upwards on staircases they naturally looked at the steps, rather than up at the other people passing on the way down. A lift, now, that was a different prospect. That was bounded by simple problems of physical dimension. In a lift there was nowhere to hide, unless you faced the wall, and a man in a hooded top and sunglasses facing the wall in a lift one metre by one metre by one and a half metres, 1.5 cubic metres, wasn’t something that was likely to go unnoticed. So Solomon hiked it up to the seventh floor each time he visited his sister, reasoning that at least he was getting some exercise, something he didn’t get a lot of, seeing as he’d barely left his apartment in two years.

  It had been five days now since Tiffany had been put into an induced coma, and Solomon had done his research. Five days in a coma was a long time, too long, unless there was a good reason for it. He sat next to her bed and watched her chest rise and fall, holding her limp hand and squeezing it, hoping for a squeeze back despite knowing that it wasn’t going to happen, because, you idiot, Solomon thought, she’s been placed in a coma. He’d spoken to the nurse but she’d told him that he needed to speak to Dr Mistry, and after waiting for two hours he’d asked a different nurse who had told him that Dr Mistry had already left for the day. So instead he just sat and watched his sister in her hospital bed, and wondered who, if anyone, was out there looking for whoever had put her here.

  The afternoon passed, Solomon reading and thinking and listening to his sister’s vital signs, until visiting hours ended and he headed home. He walked the three miles to Wapping, not in any kind of mood to deal with the stares of strangers. Or, if he was honest, in any hurry to get to the coming evening, with all the uncertainty and unmanageable outcomes that it promised. Because at nine o’clock he was expected at Thomas Arnold’s office, to act as his brother’s proxy and get down to some hard bargaining with a notoriously unpredictable criminal he had never met and could not properly imagine. He didn’t want to do it, wasn’t even sure that he could do it.

  The rush-hour traffic crawled past him as he walked, surrounding him with the heat of bus exhaust and the smell of petrol and hot tarmac, the sun still strong even though it was gone six. The reality of it all, the cars and people and sounds and smells of London, seemed at odds with what he was expected to do later. It didn’t feel real and he supposed that he was still in denial of some kind, unable to fully believe that he was going to turn up at Arnold’s office, walk in, sit down and open negotiations. He might as well be asked to walk into a cage of lions and tame them, so outside of his capabilities it all was. So rather than think about it, he counted paving stones, estimating how many he would cross before he reached his apartment, and feeling some infinitesimal measure of satisfaction at being within a hundred of his original estimate when he turned the key in his building’s front door.

  Inside, he opened his laptop and saw with a feeling of mild dismay that he’d missed several calls from the Brain Pool, which he only now remembered was meeting that evening. He thought of Kay and considered giving it a miss, something he had never done before. He wondered how it would be, with her. He hadn’t spoken to her since she’d asked him out on a … what was it? A date, that’s what it was, that’s what she’d asked him out on. God. But instead he checked that his webcam was disabled, and made the connection.

  ‘Solomon, you’re with us,’ said Fran. They were all there, Phil, Fran, Kay and Masoud, Phil taking a healthy gulp of lager and swallowing it before adding, ‘Welcome.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Solomon. Masoud raised a hand, but Kay did nothing except glance at the camera of whoever’s laptop was being used, then look quickly away.

  ‘So, now that we are all here,’ said Fran, ‘shall we begin? Solomon, since you were last, you can be in the chair.’

  Which meant, you can try to answer the questions we’ve prepared. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Phil.

  ‘This show is intended to be challenging,’ said Fran.

  ‘Even so.’ What Phil meant, Solomon knew, was that just because he might be able to answer the questions wasn’t necessarily a reliable indicator that anybody else would. He didn’t get put in the chair often. It was Kay or Masoud, usually.

  ‘How is your Chinese history?’ said Masoud.

  ‘Reasonable,’ said Solomon. He liked Chinese history, its order and regularity, imagining it as a rather ornate bar chart, every bar of a different colour, each corresponding to one of the various dynasties. He much preferred Chinese history to European, which he could not help but picture in his mind as an overrun marketplace, goods and belongings spilt everywhere, plenty of slashing and screaming, with somebody in the middle being burnt alive. ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘Can you tell us when—’

  ‘Which calendar are we using?’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Phil, to nobody in particular. ‘Is he for real?’

  ‘The Gregorian one will do,’ said Fran.

  ‘Okay,’ said Solomon. It suited him. He had no idea how the traditional Chinese calendar worked, only that it had fewer days each month. And the years were 355 days long, or at least he thought so. No, that was right. They were. Good.

  ‘So,’ said Phil. ‘Can you tell us when the Zhou Dynasty ended?’

  ‘No,’ said Solomon.

  ‘To the nearest century,’ said Masoud.

  Solomon thought. ‘Eighth,’ he said. ‘bc.’

  ‘The Han Dynasty?’

  ‘Ended?’ said Solomon.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Third,’ he said. ‘ad. Two hundred and twenty.’

  Phil took a slug of lager, then shook his head. ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Tang?’

  ‘Tenth. Nine hundred and seven, ad.’ He watched the group, Masoud and Fran smiling at him via the webcam, Phil sitting back in his chair, apparently disgusted by Solomon’s freakish knowledge, and Kay playing with her glass in front of her, not looking.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Fran. ‘Already I’m thinking this is too easy.’

  Solomon shrugged, even though nobody was with him to see. ‘I don’t think so. About right.’

  ‘Solomon’s easy is another man’s bloody impossible,’ said Phil.

  ‘Phil.’ Fran spoke to him like she was warning a misbehaving dog.

  ‘Just saying.’

  ‘Kay?’

  Kay didn’t answer immediately, then said, not looking up, ‘I don’t know. Solomon is …’ She stopped, then said again, ‘I don’t know.’

  Fran looked at her but didn’t say anything. ‘Masoud?’

  ‘What I think,’ Masoud said, ‘is that you, Solomon, are a quite extraordinary person.’

  ‘Hear hear,’ said Fran, and Solomon didn’t know what to say in response, so instead he just watched Kay, who sat silently for a few moments and then picked up her rucksack, stood, and left without saying a word.

  Thomas Arnold’s office was in Bethnal Green, which meant that Solomon had to take the Tube to get there, something he hated doing, even th
ough London Underground etiquette was to sit down and not talk to anyone and, if possible, not look at anyone either. Solomon sat with his elbows on his knees, his hood up, head down, Ray-Bans on even though it was gloomy this far underneath the city, hoping that he wouldn’t have to stand up and surrender his seat to anyone old or pregnant, which of course he would do, that also being Tube etiquette, along with being the right thing to do.

  He got out and walked up Cambridge Heath Road, through the warm evening, the sun almost set but the streets still full of people. The address he’d been given was underneath a railway arch that advertised car washing on an A-board on the street outside, a drive-through operation where you turned in to the arch, men jet-washed your car, and you came out the other side cleaner and £20 lighter. It was still open even though most businesses on the street had closed, and he waited at the entrance until a short man in a plastic apron turned and said, ‘Yes, boss?’

  ‘I’m here for Mr Arnold.’

  ‘He know you?’

  ‘He is expecting me, yes.’

  The man looked Solomon up and down and didn’t give the impression that he liked what he saw. ‘What you called?’

  ‘I’m called … I’m Mullan. Please, just tell him Mr Mullan’s here.’

  The man nodded, something sceptical in it, like he’d be personally surprised if Solomon got any nearer to Thomas Arnold than he was now, and disappeared into the gloom, the brightness of the setting sun casting the arch into near blackness. People walked past Solomon on the pavement as he waited, young couples out for the evening, a pair of drunks urgently discussing where they’d get their next drink from, a woman on a phone telling the person on the other end that there was no way he was seeing his daughter, no way, he couldn’t just call the night before and expect to see her, who the fuck did he think he was?

  ‘Mr Mullan?’ The man was back, scepticism replaced by an apologetic servility. ‘Mr Arnold says to come with me.’

  Solomon followed the man, the gloom and his Ray-Bans plunging him into near darkness. The man stopped and opened a door and light from behind it spilt out into the dark railway arch. He didn’t go in, just gestured with his hand, a brushing motion as if to hurry Solomon up, don’t keep Mr Arnold waiting.