Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes

by Tayell, Frank

  “There’s evidence here!” Mitchell snapped. “And you’re trampling it into the dust. Don’t you know how to secure a crime scene?”

  Weaver threw him a glare. “Corporal,” she said, addressing a Marine, “secure the area.” She turned back to Mitchell. “Standage escaped. Riley is getting someone to bandage her head.”

  “What?” Mitchell exclaimed.

  “Standage and her husband,” Weaver repeated, “escaped as the constable was escorting them – on her own, I might add – through the city. They hit her over the head, left her unconscious, and got away.”

  “And the child?”

  “Gone with them. Riley said that you thought the child was being held hostage to secure Standage’s compliance. I think you are wrong. She is the one at the heart of this. We need to find her. I’ll tear the city apart if I need to. I take it the body in the alleyway over the road is your work.”

  “It’s mine,” Ruth said.

  “Yours?” Now it was Weaver’s turn to sound shocked. “Are you all right?”

  Ruth shrugged.

  “I’ll need a statement from both of you,” Weaver said. “But I’ll start with the cadet, then she can get home.”

  Ruth gave an account of what had happened. She wasn’t sure what she should say, or when she should lie, so she kept to the truth. It didn’t take long before she was finished.

  “I’m going to have someone take you to the hospital,” Weaver said.

  “I’m fine,” Ruth said.

  “No, you’re not,” Weaver replied.

  “I’ll take her,” Mitchell said.

  “No, you won’t. You have to explain what happened here, and why precisely you’re here in the first place.”

  Ruth thought she was in the hospital for hours. After the doctor had given her a reluctant all clear, she looked at her watch and saw it was only six p.m.

  “It’s broken,” a familiar voice said.

  She looked up and saw Mitchell.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Close to ten. I’m going to take you home.”

  She was too tired to do anything but follow him outside. There was a carriage waiting, pulled by two horses. The driver looked familiar, but it wasn’t until they were at The Acre she realised it was Isaac’s man, Gregory. She was too tired to ask about that, either.

  “Where have you—” Maggie began, running out of the door. “Ruth, what happened? Henry?”

  “It’s a long story,” Ruth said. “I’ll tell you after I’ve changed.”

  She went inside, and upstairs. She sat down on the edge of her bed and then fell into it. Her last thought before she went into a deep sleep filled with nothing but dead faces asking unanswered questions, was that Maggie had called the sergeant by his first name.

  Chapter 9

  Strike A Match

  20th September

  “You shouldn’t go in,” Maggie said. “Stay at home.”

  “No,” Ruth said. She’d considered it and thought of little else since she woke up. “If I stay here today then I won’t go back at all. I don’t know if… after last night, I…” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know if this is something I want to do, just that I haven’t had a chance to find out if I’m any good at it.”

  “You’ll be entitled to a few days off, at least,” Maggie said.

  “Maybe, but not today. There will be questions to answer, and I’d rather get them over with. Anyway, if I stayed at home, you’d only do the same, and you’ve children waiting to be taught.”

  Ruth began the day by giving another, and far more formal, statement. The presence of the representative of the Home Secretary told her it was linked to the death of the man she’d killed. That interview was over quickly. The ordeal wasn’t. On leaving, she was given instructions to go to the commissioner’s office. He was waiting for her, and again, she had to go through the events of the night before.

  “I wish you’d come to me,” Commissioner Wallace said.

  “There wasn’t time,” she said. “I mean… I’m sorry, sir, but there really wasn’t. After I gave you that first message I was sitting by a window watching the Mint, and then we followed the woman, and it all… sort of… happened.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. We need a better communication system. We really do. Phone boxes in the street if nothing else. However, it’s done now. Some of the criminals have escaped, but they will be caught. More importantly, there is no way that this operation can start up again.”

  “There isn’t? What about Clipton?” she asked.

  “He is irrelevant. It’s the two Standages who were behind this.”

  “They were?”

  “She had access to designs, ink, and paper,” he said. “The husband knew how to lay electrical cable. Emmitt was the man who knew how to build the printers. Yes, he could build them again, but without the Standages, he will get no further. I am worried about their son, of course, but let us be grateful no other innocents have been caught up in this affair. As for you, you’ll have to see the psychiatrist, and you’ll be on light duties until you’ve been signed off. Unfortunately, Serious Crimes counts as light duties. Next time…” He shook his head. “Let’s just hope there isn’t a next time.”

  “How was the commissioner?” Mitchell asked.

  “Not happy,” Ruth said. “But he said it was over. We’ve stopped the counterfeiters.”

  “Well, yes. Perhaps,” Mitchell said. “No, leave your coat on, we’re going out.”

  “Where to?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Ruth followed Mitchell outside, and out of Police House. The streets seemed strange to her that morning. She felt somehow separated from the people as if their lives were unconnected to hers.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Nowhere in particular,” Mitchell said. “Sometimes it’s good to get out and see that the world still goes on.”

  It did. They took a shortcut down Religion Road, the narrow street where churches, chapels, and temples, the mosque, and the synagogue each occupied a different semi-detached house. They ambled through sprawling suburbs that ringed the trading and administrative heart of the city. Gardens were well tended. Communal pigs rolled around in their stys. An occasional engineer could be seen marking out where cables could be hung. Truant children laughed as they spied the police officers and ran away. Yes, life went on.

  “What did they print in the newspaper?” Ruth asked.

  “About last night? Nothing,” Mitchell said.

  “But three people died.”

  “And that will be reported. Eventually. I think they’re waiting until after the trade deal to run the story.”

  “Are the editors happy with that?” Ruth asked. “I mean, isn’t the newspaper meant to print the news?”

  “Sure, but the advantage with only having one national paper is that whatever they print is the news and it’s new whenever they print it. Delaying the story works out well for them. The ceremony and the radio broadcast, and people’s reaction to it, will fill the editorials for the next few weeks. Maybe even longer. Then they can print this story, and it should keep them busy until the election.”

  “That’s not how it should work,” she said.

  “That’s life.”

  Ruth kicked at a pebble. She hated that answer. It was one that Maggie gave her too often. “And life goes on,” she said.

  “Precisely. It is what it is.”

  “But the case isn’t over?” she asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “Emmitt and Clipton weren’t in the warehouse. They weren’t, were they?”

  “No. Not when we got there,” Mitchell said.

  “And why did you go there? Inside, I mean. When Riley left me she said she was going to get you.”

  “We were heading back towards you when we heard a child’s scream. We went inside. A few seconds later it was all over.”

  “Oh.” It seemed entirely too brief an explanation.
“Do you know the name of the man I killed?”

  “No. Not yet. We’ll find out, but it’s Turnbull I’m more concerned about. Rather, I want to know who killed him, because I’m certain it wasn’t suicide.”

  “Does the commissioner know that?” Ruth asked.

  “I told him. I’m not sure if he believes me, or if it’s that he doesn’t want to believe me. He’s very proud of what he’s done with the police. I suppose it did need to be more organised,” he added grudgingly. “You know he was a politician?”

  “Yes. You said. So did he.”

  “He led an opposition faction in the last round of elections,” Mitchell said. “Didn’t win, of course, and in the end he lost his seat, but he did have a lot of supporters. The Prime Minister gave him the big chair in Police House in the hope of keeping the isolationists quiet. It worked. I… it’s no secret I wasn’t happy with that at the time, but the job seems to have mellowed him. He was a monarchist when he started. An imperialist as well, at least as far as an isolationist can also support empire building. But he’s going to get the PM’s seat when she steps down, and that’s going to be soon.”

  “He told me,” Ruth said.

  They passed a field where turnips were being hoisted onto a cart. From the way the farmhands were cheering on the team working the row she guessed it was the last of that crop to be harvested.

  “Was that why you left the police?” Ruth asked. “Because of his appointment?”

  “What? No. No, it was… it was something else.”

  “What?”

  He looked at her. “I suppose you deserve an honest answer to an honest question. It was to give Riley some space.”

  “Really?”

  “Pretty much,” Mitchell said. “I found her when she was ten, and she’d lived with me ever since. All of a sudden she was the age I’d been when The Blackout occurred, and she’d become a copper like I had. I missed out on having a life because we were too busy staying alive. I didn’t want her to do the same, so I gave her the house, and I left. Sort of the reverse of how things were done in the old world.”

  “That’s it?”

  “More or less.”

  “It wasn’t to bring justice to the parts of the world without it?”

  He gave a short laugh. “No, though that’s what I ended up doing. There weren’t that many punishments in the early days. There was execution of course, but that was reserved for the worst cases. For the most part, people were exiled. That was as good as a death sentence, but some people survived it. After a decade or more of brooding on their fate, there were some pretty embittered psychopaths out there.”

  “Oh.” She wasn’t sure what to say. “How long did you do it for?”

  “Just a few years. I would come back, periodically, and there were a few trips overseas.”

  “Really?” she asked with sudden curiosity. “Where?”

  “It wasn’t as glamorous as you might think, travel rarely is, and at the end of it, I’m back where I started. There’s a lesson in there, though one I personally don’t plan to learn from.”

  Ruth mulled that over. She was curious as to where he’d gone and what he’d seen, but there was something else far more pressing she wanted to ask. “Do you…”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember the first person you killed?”

  “Rarely does a day go by when I don’t,” Mitchell said. “It was during The Blackout. I did it to save Isaac. Knowing what I do now, I still don’t know if that was the correct decision.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No, that’s a history lesson for another day, but what you did last night was very much the right thing, and you should never doubt it. It was self-defence, nothing more.”

  “And…” She hesitated again, but couldn’t see the harm in asking, though she wasn’t sure what help the answer would be. “How many people have you killed?”

  “I don’t know. You’d think I would. Certainly I remember a lot of them, but that’s the problem. There have been so many, directly and indirectly, for whose deaths I am responsible.”

  “Indirectly? Do you mean immediately after The Blackout?” she asked.

  “In a way. There was a time, you see, a moment, a second when I stood between the people and the mob. Do you know what the mob is? No, when I was your age, I didn’t understand it either. It was just a word they used in the news and history books. Like revolution and terror. I knew the meaning, but I didn’t understand it because I hadn’t experienced it. I learned quickly enough when I stood in front of a crowd of hundreds that was representative of thousands in the camp behind. When I looked at these people, some of whom I knew, scared, hungry, desperate, that’s when I understood. The mob is what people become when decency is subsumed by our worst instincts. When the individual collectively loses its belief in anything bigger than the self. All it took was a spark, and we had murder, cannibalism, and the survival of the savage. I stopped it. Not me alone, but I was there. It was a brutal time of brutal law, and this democracy is the end result. The alternative…” He sighed. “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  The road grew rougher. Mud had spread from the ditches and gates, covering the asphalt. It was only by the absence of ploughed furrows that Ruth could tell where the road had been and the fields now began. They reached a broken stile. Mitchell climbed over.

  “I never knew England when it wasn’t like this,” he said, as he led her up a slight rise towards the corner of a field. “I think I would have liked to. I didn’t see any of this until about a week after The Blackout, and then it was a nightmare landscape of smoke, fire, and screams. And we were the lucky ones.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Ruth asked.

  “Isaac, me, thousands of others,” Mitchell said. “The ones who took shelter in the London Underground. On our way from that city to the coast we gathered more. There were at least a hundred thousand of us by the time we saw the sea. Not everyone who emerged from a basement or bunker wanted to join us. Some thought we were crazy, and many more ran at the sight of our ragged column staggering south. Maybe we were crazy, placing our lives in the hope that the message Isaac had received was true, and there would be cargo ships waiting on the coast. But they were there. You’ve heard the stories, and I bet no two versions are the same, but that’s how people remember it. There were the cargo ships and the cruise ships with their mostly American passengers, and then there was us, making our long walk. Then the stories jump to how we learned to dig and plant and plough and sow.”

  Mitchell stopped, halfway up the shallow slope, and turned to look back at the fug of smoke and smog hovering over the city.

  “Billions died across the world. Millions died here. Not in The Blackout, but in the aftermath. It’s a terrible thing, radiation sickness. If it’s a low dose you might get better. But you can get a lethal dose, get sick, and seem to recover, only to fall ill again a few days later. That’s what happened. When we arrived, footsore, thirsty, and far beyond weary, many people were dead and more were dying. Each passing day, the number of sick grew and all we could offer them was the comfort of companionship in their final hours. We almost gave up. Those days, those weeks, it seemed as if everyone would die. Then it was over. You know when ‘over’ was?” He started walking up the slope again. “It was when the number of dead was less than the number of graves we could dig each day. We used up the last of the fuel doing that. But we had food. We thought it was going to be okay. And then the other sicknesses came. Cholera. Typhoid. Flu. Then something else that no one could identify. People started dying again, and this time we didn’t offer them comfort. We just hoped that we would be spared. All that death, it changed us. Some found religion. Others lost it. Some lost all sense of what it meant to be human, but a few of us decided we couldn’t give up. We carved a society out of this small corner of England. Then we took back Scotland and Wales, and then we went to sea, searching for others who’d not been as fortunate as us. We hoped to find some basti
on of civilisation that had held on to more than we had. People who could reach down and offer us a helping hand back up. We didn’t find one. We were it. Call it Britain if you want, and if you think that matters, but most of us don’t. If I had to call myself anything, it’s lucky. Lucky to be on a stretch of coast rich in fish, with good soil, on an island linked by railways, and where preserving steam trains was a hobby. We had food thanks to… well, thanks to those cargo ships. Luck. Coincidence. Geography. Call it what you want, we have a duty to those not so fortunate, but we also have a duty to ourselves.”

  He stopped underneath a spreading apple tree.

  “This isn’t Utopia,” he said. “We call them Marines and say we have no army. We say we’re a democracy, but we’ve had the same leader for the past twenty years. We say we’ve got a free press, but we’ve only one newspaper. There will always be crime, misery, pain, and suffering. No, this isn’t Utopia, but it’s what we’ve got, and it’s down to each and every one of us to try to make it the best it can be. We do that by each of us being the best person we can be.” He picked up an apple. “Here.”

  She took it uncertainly, and her confusion must have shown.

  “It is a nice day, Ruth,” he said. “But there will be dark times to come, there always are. There will be days when it would be easier to turn our faces to the wall than face the enormity of what lies ahead. We don’t, in the hope that others won’t either. There’s an old saying, something Isaac told me a long time ago; strike a match and sear the flame into your memory so that when you are surrounded by darkness, you can remember the light.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded plastic carrier bag. “I’m often grateful for the waste of the old world,” he said. “Here. For the apples. This will be the last of them until next year. Let’s pick some and enjoy the fresh air, so when the wind howls and the snow falls, it’s this moment you remember, not last night, nor whatever tomorrow might bring.”

  She took the bag and started collecting apples. It was strange to see someone like Mitchell doing something so human as gathering windfalls. For some odd reason she found it comforting.