Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes

by Tayell, Frank

17th September

  Police Cadet Ruth Deering stared at the handwritten sign on the door to the small cabin. Serious Crimes. She looked at the slip of paper in her hand. There it was, in slightly smudged black and white, Serious Crimes. It was her first assignment as a police officer, and it would be where she worked for at least the next three months. She couldn’t say this was the last thing she’d wanted because she’d never heard of the Serious Crimes Unit until yesterday. As much as she’d wanted anything, it had been a placement somewhere outside of Twynham. Instead, as most of her class had hurried off to catch the trains that would take them to the far-flung corners of Britain, Ruth had gone home. She’d pressed her new uniform and tried to convince herself that it could have been worse. Looking at the building, with its chipped paint, rotten felt roof, and rusting metal ramp, she wasn’t sure how.

  The cabin was hidden behind what was now the stable, but which had been a swimming pool in the days when Police House was a school. The cabin wasn’t even a proper bricks-and-mortar building, but one of those temporary structures about the size of a shipping container and with just as much charm. Ruth reread her assignment one last time, but wishing wasn’t going to change the handwritten words. She straightened her cap, smoothed down her jacket, made sure the belt with its truncheon, revolver, and handcuffs, was square, and raised a hand to knock. She stopped. It had been her idea to join the police. For good or bad, it was what she’d wanted, and now, as her adoptive mother said, she had to own the decision. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  “This isn’t a storeroom anymore,” a man said. “You’ll have to dump your records somewhere else.” He spoke without lowering the newspaper from in front of his face, nor his feet from the one square foot of desk that wasn’t covered in a mountainous stack of folders. His accent was American. Different to Ruth’s mother’s East Coast twang, but similarly tempered from decades of living in Britain. From the stripes on the uniform jacket hanging on the back of his chair, she guessed he was the Sergeant Mitchell to whom her papers told her to report.

  “Cadet Ruth Deering reporting for duty, sir,” she said, snapping to attention.

  “Cadet?” the sergeant growled, dropping a corner of the newspaper just enough for a bloodshot eye to glare at her. “Reporting? What do you mean?”

  “Sir… to Serious Crimes,” she stammered. The eye continued its unwavering stare. Not sure what else to say, she thrust her orders out towards the man. The newspaper was lowered another inch, and now there were two baleful eyes giving her the most searching look she’d ever known. The sergeant folded the paper, slowly running his finger down each crease in turn, before gently placing it on top of a precariously balanced box. In one surprisingly swift movement, his feet came off the desk and his hand came out grabbing her orders.

  “Let me see that,” he said.

  No longer hidden behind the newspaper, and his attention no longer on her, Ruth was finally able to get a proper look at her new commanding officer. He had grey-flecked hair and a frost-pocked face, with a slight paunch around his waist that wasn’t helped by a shirt that looked a size too small. He was around forty, she guessed, and going by the bloodshot eyes and stained uniform, he was still living the lifestyle of a much younger man.

  “Well, that’s Commissioner Wallace’s signature,” the sergeant said. “So, they’ve really sent a cadet to Serious Crimes?”

  Ruth heard the inflection, but wasn’t sure what the actual question was. She was saved having to guess by a voice from behind her.

  “What did you do?” a woman asked.

  Ruth jumped in surprise and received a soft mocking laugh in return. She turned around to see a woman of around thirty, wearing the uniform of a detective constable, standing in the doorway.

  “Do?” Ruth asked. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “The fact you’re here means that you’ve done something wrong,” the sergeant interrupted. “Or you failed to do something wrong when asked. Which is it?”

  “I… I…” Ruth stammered, completely at a loss.

  “Did you cheat on your exams?” the constable asked. “I bet that’s it, but your parents are too important for you to be kicked out.”

  “What? No. I didn’t—” Ruth stopped, remembered who she was, where she was, and to whom she was speaking. “I didn’t cheat,” she said, “and I resent the insinuation.”

  “You do, eh?” the sergeant said. “Then maybe there’s hope for you. I’m DS Mitchell, that’s Detective Constable Riley.” He glanced down at Ruth’s orders once more before handing them back. “Welcome to Serious Crimes.”

  Ruth took the slip of paper and waited for the sergeant to continue. She realised he’d finished.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. There were no lights on in the small cabin though that wasn’t uncommon. There were no candles either, but since most of the room was full of boxes overflowing with paper, that was probably a blessing. Other than a few desks and chairs, and a row of cupboards against the far wall, the room was empty. There was no crime board, no sketches of suspects, no indication of any police work at all. If anything, the cabin looked like a dumping ground for forgotten files. “What is it that… I mean, what does Serious Crimes… um…” The sergeant gave her another look, shook his head, and picked up his paper. Ruth guessed that she’d failed some unknown test.

  “You want to know what Serious Crimes does?” he asked. “Well, so do we.” With a flourish the paper was unfurled, and his face disappeared from view.

  There was a long, awkward silence broken by Riley. “We were set up a week ago,” the detective constable said, her tone clipped. “Technically we’re to deal with inter-jurisdictional overlap.”

  “I’m sorry, what’s that?” Ruth asked.

  “You know how the police is structured?” Mitchell growled. “Each city and town has its own police force. Three officers in a market town, more in a city, too many in Twynham. There’s the Secret Intelligence Service, who are misnamed for many reasons, but who are charged with investigating crimes against the state. The railways have their guards, the mines their provosts, the docks and border towns have the Marines, yes?”

  “Yes,” Ruth agreed.

  “Right, so if you’ve been paying attention you’ll have realised there is no overlap. This is a dead-end unit, cadet. Welcome to Purgatory. The eleventh circle to which Riley and I have been sent because we refuse to go away. If you insist on asking more questions, I’d suggest you start by asking yourself who you crossed to end up here.”

  Ruth opened her mouth. She closed it again.

  “If we’re keeping her,” Riley said, “can I use her for witness statements?”

  “Knock yourself out,” the sergeant mumbled. “Just do it quietly.”

  “Do you know how to write a report?” Riley asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ruth said.

  “I’m not ma’am,” Riley said. “You call me detective when we’re in front of civilians, Riley when we’re not. You can have this desk.” She lifted a pile of files off a rickety chair and dumped them on an equally large pile on the desk.

  “Yesterday evening there was a fight at the docks,” Riley said. “Fifty-three sailors were involved. Go through the statements and find out who started it.”

  Ruth searched around for an intelligent question. The best she could come up with was, “If this was at the docks, and they were all sailors, doesn’t that make it the Navy’s jurisdiction?”

  “It should do,” Mitchell said. “Tell her why we got landed with the paperwork, Riley.”

  “Because,” the constable said, in a singsong sigh as if she was parroting something repeated to her many times, “a good police officer knows to pass off the paperwork any time they can.”

  “Yes,” Mitchell said, “but tell her why it got passed on to us.”

  Riley threw Mitchell a venomous look which, due to the newspaper, the sergeant completely failed to notice. “Because,” Riley said, this time as if the words were bein
g dragged out of her. “I went to help the Marines break up the fight. It was at that point the captain of the SS Nile reported a cargo of oranges was being unloaded when the fight began. He claimed four crates had been lost over the side of the wharf.”

  “It’s the next part that’s most significant,” Mitchell said. It sounded like he was smiling. “Go on, tell her what you did.”

  “What anyone would do,” Riley said. “I jumped in to retrieve the crates.”

  “She jumped in,” Mitchell repeated. “Cadet, why did she do that?”

  The unexpected question caught Ruth stumbling for a reply. She thought quickly. “Um… because the laws of salvage mean those oranges would have been hers?”

  “See,” Riley said. “She gets it. Just like any normal person would.”

  “A normal person would think twice before jumping into the sea,” Mitchell said. “Tell the cadet what you found.”

  “Nothing,” Riley admitted. “There were no crates.”

  “Then the fight was a way of covering up the theft?” Ruth guessed.

  “Precisely,” Mitchell said. “And what does that tell us, cadet?”

  “Um… That sailors can’t be trusted?” Ruth said.

  “Not quite, and a good copper avoids such bald generalisations,” Mitchell said. “It tells us that the Marines were not complicit in the crime. If they’d been bribed, there would have been no need for the diversion. Honesty is a rare treasure, to be prized when it is found. That there are some trustworthy guards at the dock is a piece of information worth the cost of a uniform and a week’s worth of paperwork. Have you ever eaten an orange, cadet?”

  “No, sir,” Ruth said.

  “Nor have I, not for the last twenty years. As you go through those reports, carefully reading line after line, imagine the orange sitting on that desk. That’s your motivation. Now, find me someone I can charge.”

  Ruth opened the first report and didn’t look up until she’d finished. Mitchell was looking at his newspaper though Ruth didn’t think he was actually reading it. Riley was sitting at her own desk, a battered novel in her hands. Neither were paying her any attention. In fact, they both seemed to have forgotten she was there. For the moment that was how she liked it. She turned back to the report.

  Ignoring the four-letter invective, there were scant few details. All the participants in the brawl came from the same ship, the SS Nile, which had been on a survey mission to Gibraltar. The oranges had been collected from a wild grove on the Spanish coast. According to what she’d read, the fight had begun when Lemuel Evans, a stoker, had hit Donald McCormack, the purser’s mate, with a boat hook. She reread it to make sure, but it seemed cut and dry. Suspecting it couldn’t have been as simple as that, she turned to the next report. It gave a completely different account. Franny Winters, the ship’s carpenter, had instigated the brawl by hitting Jimmy Lim, a sailor second-class, with an uppercut that had broken two teeth. She read on, statement after statement, and found that each participant blamed a different mariner for starting the fight.

  As she turned to the tenth account, and was silently cursing Constable Riley for jumping into the sea, the door to the cabin opened. A man in rolled-up shirtsleeves but still wearing the green hat of a railway messenger entered.

  “Is this Special Crimes?” he asked.

  “It is,” Mitchell said. “Who are you?”

  “Taylor, messenger.” He held out a slip of paper. The man’s face was grim. When Mitchell read the piece of paper, his own dropped to match it.

  “Have you ever seen a dead body, cadet?” Mitchell asked.

  “In the morgue, sir. During autopsy class.”

  “You’re about to see one in the wild. There’s a train waiting for us?” he asked of the messenger.

  “There is,” Taylor said. “But they can only hold it until half past.”

  “That’s barely ten minutes from now,” Riley snapped, as she took the message from Mitchell. “Tell them to wait for us, or they’ll rue it.”

  The hapless messenger backed out of the door.

  “Rue it?” Mitchell remarked as he pulled his jacket on. “Did you get that from your novel?”

  Riley shrugged. “You said I needed to be more loquacious.”

  She didn’t treat Mitchell like her superior, Ruth thought, more like a brother or a—

  “Cadet, there’s a crime-kit over there,” Mitchell’s voice cut in on her thoughts and his hand waved towards the back of the cabin. Ruth took the hint and hurried over to the kit. The box wasn’t made of laminated pine like the modern ones she’d used in the academy but of faded old-world plastic and was twice the size. Fortunately, it was on a trolley. Again it was unlike the newer ones she remembered from training. This was all angular aluminium tubes and almost-perished rubber straps.

  “There are evidence bags in that box on the counter. Ten should do,” Mitchell said.

  “And don’t forget the sign,” Riley added. “You need the sign. You know why?”

  Ruth picked up the wooden sign with the word ‘Police’ painted in white on a blue background. “By law all crime scenes must be marked with them,” she said.

  “But why?” Mitchell asked.

  She thought quickly. “Because interfering with a crime scene carries an automatic five-month light labour sentence. Coming within ten feet of the sign counts as interfering. In the academy they said it’s an easy way of making someone commit a crime so you have leverage over them.”

  “They taught you that, did they?” Mitchell asked. Again, Ruth felt she’d failed another unknown test.

  She grabbed ten paper evidence bags from the box, stuck them in the crime-kit, balanced the sign on top, and hauled the trolley to the door. It clattered into a desk and then the wall as she hurried outside. Mitchell and Riley were waiting patiently at the foot of the cabin’s ramp. The sergeant gave her a long, thoughtful stare.

  “Let’s go,” he said, setting a brisk pace as they left Police House and headed towards the train station. “Riley, what do we know?”

  “The note informs us that a body’s been found two miles north of Ringwood Junction,” Riley said. “It was spotted just after dawn by a guard on a goods train heading north. Word was telegraphed back when the train reached its next stop, and then passed along, up, and around, until it reached us.”

  Riley finished at about the same time as one of the trolley’s small wheels got caught in an old steel grating. Ruth heaved it back onto the road and then had to run a few paces to catch up.

  “Any thoughts, cadet?” Mitchell asked.

  “I suppose the obvious one is why are we involved. Is this something Serious Crimes is meant to handle?”

  “I told you before, Serious Crimes isn’t meant to handle anything,” Mitchell said. “We’re to sit in our cabin, file paperwork, and neither be seen nor heard.”

  “Then why are we going?” she asked.

  “Good question. Who signed the note, Riley?”

  “R.C.,” Riley said.

  “You know who that is?” Mitchell asked.

  “No, sir,” Ruth said.

  “That’s Rebecca Cavendish. Or the Railway Company as she likes to think of herself. She’s one of the original drivers who brought the engines down from the museums during the first few weeks after The Blackout. You know that story?”

  Ruth shook her head.

  “What did they teach you?” Mitchell muttered. “The old power stations were destroyed during The Blackout. What little oil there is in Britain was too deep for us to drill. The few solar panels and wind turbines that still worked were too large to be moved. But there’s coal. Rebecca, and people like her, kept old steam engines running for fun. If you can maintain a century-old locomotive, you can build a new one. They became the blueprints for our new engines, and for the coal-fired power stations. But the coal is in the north, in Wales, Scotland, and Northern England, and the food was here in the south. The roads were made impassable by millions of stalled cars, so the railway
s became our lifeline. We’d all be dead if it wasn’t for her, and some of us honour our debts. When she asks, we do, because there’s probably a reason why she sent for us.”

  “Oh.” Ruth tried to think of a polite way to frame her next question, but there really wasn’t one. “What I meant,” she said, “was why aren’t the railway police dealing with the crime.”

  “Probably because Rebecca thought Mister Mitchell could do with some fresh air,” Riley said.

  Mitchell gave a grunt halfway between agreement and annoyance as he nimbly sidestepped a delivery cart. Ruth managed to haul the trolley out of the way just before the horse lashed out with an angry hoof. The working day had long since begun, but the roads were far from empty. There were carts delivering to the market, messengers taking mail and telegrams to the homes and businesses in the centre of town, and labourers hurrying to construction sites.

  A woman wrestled a squeaking old-world pushchair out of the door of a greengrocer’s and threw the police officers a glare when they didn’t stop to help. Next to it was a bookstore with a sign out front reading ‘New stock from Hay now in.’ Beyond that was a clockmaker, the window full of mostly new timepieces, all of which told her that…

  “Sir, it’s been nine minutes. Shouldn’t we run?” Ruth asked.

  “They’ll hold the train,” Mitchell said.

  “They will?” Ruth was genuinely surprised. The railway timetable was considered as reliable as the winter sugar ration was scarce.

  “Rebecca wouldn’t have sent us the note if she wasn’t prepared to keep the train waiting for us,” Mitchell said.

  Ruth doubted anyone was that powerful but, when they arrived at the station seven minutes after it should have left, the train was still waiting for them. The driver saw them, raised a hand, and stepped into the cab of a highly polished engine. There was a whistle, a burst of steam, and the sixteen old-world carriages started to move.

  “Passenger cabin’s the third car from the end,” Mitchell said, and he finally broke into a run. Riley bounded after him, easily keeping pace. Ruth gripped the handle of the trolley and hauled it along in their wake. She kept her eyes fixed on the guard standing in the open doorway. Mitchell stepped on board. Riley jumped in after him. The train began to accelerate.