From a drawer in the table in the middle of the sunken bunker he withdrew a stack of pix. He spread them on the cushion beside him and sipped his brandy.
On arriving on Earth almost fourteen years ago, Calcutta had struck him as a hellish congestion of humanity, traffic and constant noise. He had literally stopped in his tracks on stepping from the spaceport at midnight. He had never before seen so many people. They flowed down the streets in never-ending waves, thousands of people of all types: Indians in strange clothes, more familiar Europeans in suits and dresses, tall jet-black Africans in robes and djellabas. He’d thought that perhaps this area was so congested for being so close to the spaceport, but when he caught a taxi to the city centre he’d stared out in horror: the entire city was a madhouse of crowds and deafening traffic and strobing lights and vast nightmarish screens that hovered over everything and exhorted the populace to buy. He had booked a room in a hotel and did not venture out for two days.
Then, the urgency of his mission spurring him on, he’d emerged on to the crowded streets. The city was a curious mixture of the ultra-modern and the old, with the soaring polycarbon structures of the city centre overlooking a sea of slums patched together from scavenged carbon-fibre scraps and polythene, the rich commingling with the poor. His first experience of beggars, their tenacity some measure of their desperation, had shocked him profoundly. He’d wondered how a rich citizen of the city could exist without being tortured by guilt and shame.
Klien had located the headquarters of the Mackendrick Foundation, and Mackendrick’s private residence to the west of the city, and considered how he might go about obtaining the softscreen. To his surprise he’d discovered, over a period of days of surreptitious surveillance, that Mackendrick’s mansion was not only inadequately guarded, but lacked security cameras. He’d considered the possibility of breaking in and locating the softscreen by chance, but dismissed the idea. He would stand a better chance of finding the softscreen if he could by some means gain legitimate admittance. He’d been considering this when he heard on a news report that the house had indeed been broken into. A safe was robbed and Mackendrick’s daughter had been kidnapped.
Klien saw his opportunity and had moved quickly to set up his own security and investigative company. He sent com-messages to Mackendrick’s business headquarters and private mansion, detailing his spurious expertise in the field of security and private investigations.
About ten days later he’d received a summons to an exclusive city centre restaurant, not to meet Charles Mackendrick, as he’d expected, but his Indian wife, Naheed. She had explained that Mackendrick’s own security firm was handling the investigation into the theft and the kidnapping of their daughter, and that Mackendrick did not want outside concerns working on the case. Naheed had argued that surely two sets of people working on the same case would be an advantage, but Mackendrick had been adamant. Therefore, for the sake of her daughter, Naheed was willing to pay him a considerable sum to track down the kidnappers and return Sita. He’d asked if he might be able to visit the mansion at some point, but Naheed Mackendrick had been unsure.
“Is it absolutely necessary? I mean, if my husband found out…”
“It would help in my investigations, madam,” he’d said.
“What do you need to know? I have pictures of Sita’—she’d given him half a dozen pix of a shy-looking girl in a blue knee-length dress—‘and if you need to know what was stolen…”
Klien had frowned, wondering how he might gain admittance to the mansion. “It might help.”
“All that was in the safe at the time was a small sum of money, and something belonging to my husband—an old softscreen entertainment.”
Klien remembered feeling the bottom drop from his stomach. He’d looked up at Naheed to see if she had noticed his reaction.
“A softscreen entertainment?” he’d said. “What exactly… ?”
Naheed Mackendrick had waved dismissively. “Oh, it was some old screen thing that Charles brought back from one of the colonies. He seemed to think it was valuable.”
“What did the… the screen show? What kind of entertainment?”
“I only glanced at the thing. It was some adventure story, set on a mountainous planet. Three explorers were looking for alien artefacts or some such.”
“I see,” he’d said, at first elated that he had made the breakthrough, and then immediately daunted at the prospect of having to find the kidnappers and the soft-screen in a city as populous as Calcutta.
“Do you think you’ll be able to find my daughter, Mr Klien?”
He had reached across the table and touched her hand. “You have my word that I will do my very best.”
From that day he had devoted his time to finding Sita Mackendrick. If he could locate the girl, and find out from her the identity of her kidnappers, then he would be that much closer to finding the softscreen. If, of course, she was still alive. For the first few weeks he had told Naheed Mackendrick to expect a ransom demand, but when no demand was made and Naheed came to him distraught at the thought that her daughter was dead, he had comforted her with the idea that perhaps she might have escaped.
“In that case, why hasn’t she returned home?” she’d asked him.
He had wondered how to phrase it diplomatically. “Was your daughter happy at home?”
Her silence, her avoidance of his gaze, had told Klien more than enough.
Klien had taken to the streets then, making enquiries, talking to people who had contact with street-kids, befriending the kids himself. At the same time he had scoured second-hand electrical stores and auction houses. In itself, the screen was not that valuable; perhaps the kidnappers had sold the softscreen, or even discarded it. All the while he had kept himself alert for news that an exploration company was heading for a hitherto uncharted planet out on the Rim, prompted by the discovery of an intriguing softscreen recording. No news had been forthcoming, and as the months progressed he convinced himself that the screen had been discarded or lost.
A year after the kidnapping of her daughter, Naheed Mackendrick had succumbed to leukaemia, so Klien’s monthly stipend was curtailed. To earn a living and to keep abreast of developments in space, he had applied for a job as a security guard at the spaceport. His rise since then had been, as they say, meteoric. He had even accustomed himself to the squalor and poverty of Calcutta. He had become, without really realising it, one of the rich who deigned not to notice the poor.
But all the time, down all those years, he had not relented in his search for Sita Mackendrick. It had occurred to him, as he considered the many possibilities that surrounded the case, that she had not been kidnapped at all. He knew it was a wish-fulfilment fantasy, but what if it had been Sita Mackendrick herself who had stolen the contents of her father’s safe and run away from home? What if she had the screen in her possession, after all these years?
He stared at the pix of the pretty young woman, wondering where she was now, wondering if the truth might ever be known.
He realised that his search had become an obsession, and he wondered what his reaction might be when, if, he finally did locate the girl. If she did indeed possess the screen, or knew of its whereabouts, and his search came to an end, then perhaps he would be unable to stop himself, and he would kill her as he had killed all his other victims over the years.