Perfect Match

by D. B. Thorne

  ‘I need you to do something else for me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but—’

  ‘Wasn’t a question,’ said Arnold. ‘It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t a please-Solomon-Mullan-help-me deal. I need you to do something for me. Now, nod.’

  Solomon didn’t nod.

  ‘Nod, or this, what we’re doing here, this is finished and I move on to your sister.’

  Solomon took a deep, audible breath and said, ‘Okay.’

  ‘So okay, now we’re communicating,’ said Arnold. ‘I have a lot of money that I can’t fucking get rid of. I’m talking bags, man, bags. You’re going to help me.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘How much can you deal with?’ said Arnold. ‘Shit, how many times have I got to ask the same fucking question?’

  ‘A hundred thousand, tops.’

  ‘No way,’ said Arnold. ‘You can do better than that.’

  ‘It’s too risky.’

  ‘Can’t have this money lying around,’ said Arnold. ‘I need you to take more.’

  Solomon blinked behind his Ray-Bans, squeezed his eyes tight, then said, ‘Five hundred.’

  ‘Thousand?’

  ‘And that is it. Seriously. We’ll have forensics all over us if we go any higher. That’s the limit.’

  ‘Half a million?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how much do I get back?’

  ‘That depends on the markets,’ said Solomon. ‘And the risk.

  High-risk investments yield more.’

  ‘How much?’

  Solomon shrugged. ‘Nine per cent.’

  ‘So how much do I get back?’

  ‘The five hundred, plus forty-five.’

  ‘Thousand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Arnold laughed. ‘In seven days?’

  ‘It will take longer,’ said Solomon, then wondered why he even cared, why it even mattered. If his plan worked, he’d never have anything to do with the money. ‘Ten days, maybe.’

  Arnold laughed again. ‘So now we’re doing business.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Okay.’ Arnold stood up and came round the desk. Solomon stood too, his head lowered, away from Arnold, as if the man carried a bad smell about him. Arnold walked past him and out of his office, and Solomon grabbed his empty bag and followed him. Arnold was waiting for him in the arch where the car-wash workers were hosing down the floor with power washers, the space filled with the hiss of the machinery, the air damp with a fine mist.

  ‘You better not be fucking with me,’ said Arnold. ‘You won’t be the first person I’ve hosed off this floor. You get me?’

  Solomon nodded, his view of Arnold thankfully obscured by the film of moisture on his Ray-Bans. ‘I get you.’

  ‘So I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll call you, tell you where to meet. Yes?’

  ‘Okay.’

  Arnold turned and walked away and Solomon headed towards the light at the entrance of the arch, which looked, through the mist of his sunglasses, like some heavenly promise of redemption and safety.

  It was gone eleven when his door buzzer sounded. He lifted the intercom’s handset and heard Kay’s voice on the other end.

  ‘Sorry, no man with a dog. You’ll need to let me in.’

  He buzzed her in and left his apartment door ajar, before fleeing to the bathroom and locking himself in, going through the make-up procedure that was getting easier, becoming a familiar ritual.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’ll be out in a minute,’ said Solomon, his heart beating faster, his hand becoming more unsteady at the sound of her voice. He finished, looked at himself, put on his eye patch and unlocked the bathroom door, hesitated, then opened it and walked through.

  Kay had found the Scotch and was in the living room, pouring it into two glasses. She smiled when she saw Solomon and held up a glass for him.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Don’t you sleep?’ he said.

  ‘Lab hours,’ she said. ‘It’s open all night, and there was something I had to check on. A result,’ she said, saying result as if it might have earth-changing potential.

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘A disaster,’ said Kay, frowning exaggeratedly. ‘Oh well, what the hey,’ she added, smiling suddenly and taking a healthy drink of Scotch. ‘There’s still an outside chance that what I’m trying to do isn’t impossible, biologically speaking. And the good news is, if it is possible, which I very much doubt, but if it is, not only do I get more funding, I probably win the Nobel Prize.’

  ‘Well,’ said Solomon. ‘That would make it worthwhile.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it?’ Kay sat down, and looked up at Solomon. ‘But that’s not why I’m here. I think, in fact I’m about ninety-seven per cent sure, that I’ve found our man.’

  thirty-three

  ‘THAT DOES SOUND STRANGE.’

  ‘Strange? It’s him. It’s got to be.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Weird glasses, curly hair, nice smile. Here.’ Kay passed her phone to Solomon. The shot was of a man, maybe thirty, smiling at the camera, mousy curly hair and glasses that he recognized. He would. They were Ray-Bans, Clubmasters, black-framed at the top, metal below, sixties throwbacks.

  ‘What’s he calling himself?’

  ‘Demmy.’

  Solomon thought. ‘I can’t think of who that might relate to.’

  ‘Okay, but look at the language.’

  Kay handed Solomon her phone and he read the message exchange again.

  Want to go out?

  Sure. When?

  Friday?

  Cool. Got somewhere in mind?

  Some secret hole.

  Hole?

  Watering hole.

  Obvs. Anywhere specific?

  Do you know Mr Todlq’s?

  No. Sounds … weird.

  I mean Mr Toad’s. Which also sounds … weird. But it’s pretty cool. All drinks freshly distilled.

  What time?

  At dead time of the night.

  Sorry?

  Any time. I meant any time.

  Verily! How about 9? Hello?

  See you at 9.

  Solomon had read Romeo and Juliet and so he knew every word. He tried to pick the references for this exchange, the key words, where they were found in the text, but nothing stood out. He looked at Kay, who raised an enigmatic eyebrow at him.

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Juliet’s speech, when she dies,’ said Kay. ‘It fits. Listen.’ She read off Solomon’s laptop. ‘Or, if I live, is it not very like the horrible conceit of death and night, together with the terror of the place – as in a vault.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it fits. Death and night, together. Dead time of the night. Night, death. The connection’s there.’

  ‘It’s not perfect. It doesn’t fit perfectly.’

  ‘Your sister’s exchange wasn’t a perfect match either.’ Kay sloshed more Scotch into her glass and waggled the bottle enquiringly at Solomon, who shook his head. ‘He wrote convent, but the play used the word nunnery, remember? And here, he writes secret hole, and the text says vault. But it’s the same thing.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Solomon didn’t like ambiguity. He preferred the scientific method, trusted it. The method that painstakingly erased ambiguity, until only certainty remained.

  ‘There’s more,’ said Kay. ‘All drinks freshly distilled. That’s got to be a reference to Friar Laurence.’

  ‘And this distilled liquor drink thou off,’ said Solomon, quoting from memory, the scene where Friar Laurence gives Juliet her sleeping draught. ‘Yes, I buy that.’

  ‘And this place? Mr Toad’s? It’s some kind of stupid hipster artisan gin distillery or something.’

  ‘Some say the lark and loathed toad change eyes,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s in Romeo and Juliet,’ said Solomon. ‘Juliet in denial that morning is coming. The loathed toad.’

  �
��All the references are here,’ said Kay. ‘It’s him, Sol. It’s him.’

  Solomon should have felt excitement, but instead he felt the opposite, a dull and culpable dread that he had ever conceived this hideous plan that would put Kay within touching distance of Rebecca Harrington’s killer, his sister’s attacker, a man who could force women to eat hot coals. What was he thinking?

  ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  Kay tilted her head slightly, frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘This. I don’t like it. I was wrong, and now I would like to stop it.’

  ‘You want to stop it?’ said Kay.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Yes. Kay, it’s—’

  ‘It’s not your decision? You’re damn right it isn’t, Mr I’ve-got-a-God-complex. What, you think that because it was your sister who was attacked, you’re running the show? You’re the moral arbiter of this little escapade?’ Kay paused for breath, then said, ‘These are real women who are being attacked, killed, mutilated, and no one in authority gives a shit. But guess what? I do. I do, I really do. So no, Solomon, no, the decision is not yours and yours alone to make. Understand?’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t. You just suddenly thought, when confronted with actual real life instead of the theoretical kind that you prefer, you suddenly realized that this might actually be a teeny bit dangerous.’

  Solomon had no response to that statement, could find nothing inaccurate in it to object to. Instead he said, his head bowed, ‘I don’t want you to get hurt.’ Kay didn’t reply, and so he added, ‘You mean a lot to me.’

  ‘I do?’

  Solomon nodded at his carpet.

  ‘Sol?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Look at me?’

  Solomon looked up slowly, feeling his face flush in embarrassment, further embarrassment on top of the customary shame he felt for looking the way he did.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kay. ‘But this is something I choose to do. You do understand that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And anyway, you’re bringing your very own rent-a-cop, aren’t you?’

  Solomon thought of the elaborate choreography he still needed to pull off, delivering Thomas Arnold to Fox before she’d commit to providing protection for Kay, and of course getting Thomas Arnold into Fox’s hands without Arnold murdering Solomon for basically trying to sell him down the river. ‘Yes,’ he said, with as much certainty as he could.

  ‘Okay then,’ said Kay, raising her glass. ‘This is exciting. Sol? This is really, really exciting. Plus, it’s got a hell of a better chance of coming off than any experiments I’ve got going on in the lab.’

  Kay called a cab and Solomon didn’t ask her not to, didn’t suggest that she stayed. After she left, he washed her glass and stood for a time at the sink in the kitchen, trying to justify to himself what he was doing. He thought of Tiffany, still lying in hospital, and of the other women who were at risk or who had already been victims of his sister’s attacker. Kay was right. This was bigger than him, bigger than any qualms he might have. But still. It was too messy, too incoherent, there were too many variables involved for him to feel confident. He just could not be sure, about anything.

  His phone rang and he went to the living room and answered.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Arnold here. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ Tomorrow was Wednesday. Kay’s date was on Friday. The timings worked, just.

  ‘I’ll have the money. You got a car?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then get a taxi. I’ll be at Thurrock services. M25.’

  ‘I can do that.’

  ‘I know you can. I’ll be there at three, north corner of the car park. Silver Golf, licence ends YHW.’

  ‘Yankee Hotel Whisky,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Arnold. ‘Tell the taxi to park somewhere nowhere fucking near me, and walk. Understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ll be alone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we’re golden,’ said Arnold. ‘Three tomorrow. Silver Golf. North side. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Solomon, again.

  ‘Yeah, and Solomon?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t be fucking late.’

  Solomon held his dead phone to his ear for a moment, then dropped it on the sofa. As a child, he’d been taken to a theme park, and he and Luke had gone on a roller coaster. He remembered being hauled up a steep metal track, remembered the clanking, complaining sound of the chain as it winched them up and up and up, his whole body pressed back into his hard plastic seat as they were lifted almost vertical. But most of all he remembered a feeling of things being out of control, of events taking on a momentum he no longer had a say over. He had closed his eyes and spoken quietly to himself as he had been flung around the track, his brother hooting and swearing with delight next to him, and he had promised himself that he would never, ever put himself in such a situation again. Yet here he was.

  Still, though, he did have a quasi-ally in this. He looked at his watch. Almost one in the morning. It was too late to call Fox, but he couldn’t wait until morning, wouldn’t be able to sleep. If things were in motion, if there was a momentum he couldn’t change, then she needed to be caught up in it too. He picked his mobile back up and called her number.

  ‘Christ’s sake, know what time it is?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Solomon. Fox didn’t sound as if she’d just been woken up. She sounded awake and alert and as displeased as usual to be hearing from him.

  ‘So? What is it that can’t wait?’

  ‘I’ve got a meeting with Thomas Arnold tomorrow at three p.m.’

  There was the briefest of pauses. Solomon imagined her reaching over to her bedside table for her notepad, then she said, ‘Where?’

  ‘Thurrock services.’

  ‘Three p.m.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much money is he bringing?’

  Solomon hadn’t asked, but he figured that the higher the amount, the more committed Fox would be. ‘Between four and five hundred. Thousand.’

  ‘Okay. What’s the plan?’

  ‘He’s parking in the north corner. Silver Golf, licence ends in YHW.’

  ‘Yankee Hotel Whisky,’ said Fox.

  Solomon closed his eyes and made a mental note to stop quoting the NATO alphabet. He was clearly in bad company. ‘That’s right,’ he said.

  ‘You’re supposed to be alone?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘Okay. I’m going to need you to wear a mike. We can sort that out tomorrow. Do you own a jacket? Actually, scratch that, a hooded top’ll do, so wear that. I’m going to prepare you a script. Only when you’ve delivered what we need are we going to step in. Understand? You don’t get him to say what we want, we won’t be getting involved.’

  ‘That wasn’t something we discussed.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Fox. ‘We’re discussing it now, aren’t we? This is a fluid situation.’

  ‘I’m taking all the risks here.’

  ‘Mr Mullan, you’re accepting half a million pounds from a notoriously violent criminal. Do you need me to remind you that this was your idea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll be there. But we’re not going to expose ourselves to a man like him unless we know, know beyond doubt, that we’ve got him nailed to a cross. I hope a man of your intelligence can understand that.’

  Solomon could, although he didn’t like it. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay. So. It’s gone one, tomorrow’s a big day. I want you to go to bed, and be in my office at nine. Think you can do that?’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Okay. Good. Then I’ll see you tomorrow. And Solomon?’

  He was surprised to hear Fox use his Christian name. This was a first. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Try to get some sleep.’

  thirty-four

 
‘WE WON’T BE GIVING YOU A TWO-WAY,’ SAID THE MALE OFFICER who was threading a cable through the front of the hooded top Solomon had just taken off, sharing space with the drawstring. ‘The boss says we only need to hear. A two-way’s bulkier, needs to be close to your mouth. Too obvious. This, we can just keep it all in here.’

  ‘What’s the range?’

  ‘Two hundred metres you get perfect sound,’ the officer said. He was about fifty and his glasses were so thick Solomon wondered how he’d been allowed onto the force in the first place. ‘Three hundred’s your maximum.’

  ‘Lithium?’

  ‘That’s right. Know your stuff, do you?’

  ‘I read something somewhere,’ said Solomon. ‘It can’t have a long life.’

  ‘Half an hour if you’re lucky.’ The officer was sitting at a desk and he looked up at Solomon and said, ‘You won’t need that long.’

  ‘I hope not,’ Solomon said.

  ‘Easy,’ the officer said. ‘In and out.’

  Solomon was in a room somewhere on the ground floor in the back of the police station. It was lined with metal shelves and on the shelves were large translucent plastic boxes full of equipment, shabby paper labels glued to them, marked with words like Receivers, Close #1, Range. One was marked Spares/repairs, and filled with a tangle of various-coloured wires, which didn’t reassure Solomon. Nothing in the room suggested that he was amongst cutting-edge surveillance practitioners. More enthusiastic amateurs with limited funds, and probably limited experience to go with it.

  ‘Right, you’re done,’ the officer said. ‘It’s activated remotely, so you just forget it’s there.’ He picked Solomon’s top up and handed it to him. ‘I’ll take you back upstairs.’

  Solomon had arrived at nine, and Fox had been waiting for him at the station’s reception, which was another first. She hadn’t seemed exactly pleased to see him, but she had managed a smile. Which was more than his brother had earlier, when he’d called him. Luke hadn’t had much to smile about when Solomon had told him his plan. He had, conversely, done a whole lot of swearing.

  ‘No fucking way.’

  ‘I have to,’ Solomon said.

  ‘You want to do over Thomas Arnold? Are you insane?’

  ‘It’ll get him off our backs.’

  ‘If it works. If you don’t get killed. If he doesn’t put a price on your head, which, Solly, he probably will, even if your plan comes off. You’re out of your mind.’