Strike a Match 3

by Frank Tayell

  Ruth paused by the rusting ruin of a wrecked lorry. The road did run from Dover to Folkestone. Her mind again turned to a raiding party. There were plenty of ruined buildings along the road, and far more inland. Any of those might be a useful lair in which to hide, but why, then, would someone come onto the road, and do it so often they were worried about Mr Wilson recognising them? It didn’t add up, and that, she realised, was why Sergeant Kettering had gone to Hastings.

  A robin landed on the twisted remains of the lorry’s cab. Ruth watched the bird, but her eyes travelled to the vehicle. Something about it stirred an ancient memory. Inside the cab, grass sprouted in the footwell. Moss occupied the seats. Metal gleamed on the skeletal steering wheel where generations of birds had sharpened their beaks. The wing-mirror was still intact, though covered in a thick patina of dirt. Ruth wiped her finger across it. In the reflection, she saw the tramp who’d been following her in the city. He was two hundred yards down the road. She only caught a fleeting glimpse before he ducked behind a battered sign, but Ruth was sure it was him.

  Nonchalantly, she turned around. Whistling an off-key tune, she made a show of inspecting the truck, then the road, and then the sea. She looked at everything but the sign behind which the tramp had hidden. She sauntered along the road until she was level with the lorry’s rotting rear tyres. She released the button on her holster. She didn’t draw her weapon, but kept her hand close to it as she took step after slow step. A hundred yards. Fifty. Thirty. She saw the sign’s shadow on the grassy scrub, and how it appeared to have two extra, lumpy, supporting struts. Beyond the sign was nothing but grass and gorse. There was nowhere for the tramp to run. She drew her weapon.

  “Police! Come out! Step out into the road, hands raised!” she barked. Slowly, the shadow moved. The tramp stepped out from behind the sign. He was smiling.

  “Hello, Ruth,” Captain Henry Mitchell said.

  Chapter 7 - The Tramp

  Dover

  “Mister Mitchell?” Ruth asked.

  “The one and the same,” Mitchell said. “Would you mind lowering your weapon?”

  “What happened to you?” Ruth asked, holstering her revolver. “I mean, why are you dressed like… like… like that?”

  “Haven’t you seen the paper? It’s the latest fashion.”

  “You’re undercover? Your disguise is… well, it’s good. But why are you here?”

  “That’s a very long story,” Mitchell said. “But unless I’ve missed my guess, the answer is the same one that’s brought you out here.”

  “You mean Mr Wilson’s suicide?” Ruth asked.

  “Who’s Mr Wilson? No, let’s find somewhere with a little more cover. We don’t want to be spotted.”

  Ruth followed the captain up a narrow rabbit-track and through thick gorse until they came to a hillock of tangled brambles. On second glance, Ruth realised they were growing out of the remains of an ancient automobile.

  “That’s a Rolls-Royce,” Mitchell said. “Used to be a famous brand. World-famous. Even I’d heard of them, and my interest in cars was always more in keeping my old lemon on the road. But this will do. Hunker down and keep your eyes on the west. I’ll watch the east.”

  “Who for?” Ruth asked. She sat, but then immediately stood and moved upwind of the captain. “Sorry, sir,” she added. “You’re a tad ripe.”

  “There’s not much chance to wash out on the road. You have to make do with streams and water troughs, and a good farmer keeps too close an eye on their cattle for the latter to be a regular option. I did manage a bath after I saw Atherton last week.”

  “You saw the prime minister?”

  “I did.” Mitchell stretched out his leg, opened his jacket, and took out a flask. “Coffee? Not the real thing, I’m afraid. Just the ersatz kind, and it’s cold.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, easing a few more inches away from him.

  “Then you begin with your tale,” he said. “Why are you out here? Who’s Mr Wilson?”

  “An artist whose body was found in his lodgings yesterday. He worked at a repair shop in the town, but didn’t show up for his shift. He was shot. It was staged to look like a suicide, but done by someone who didn’t know he was right-handed. A painting was missing from his easel, and he was drawing his inspiration from a spot on the cliffs a little way up the road. That’s why I came here, to see if the place would give me a hint as to what he might have seen. The only other real clue we’ve got is that he went to Hastings last week, looking for his family. He lost them in the Blackout, but he refused to accept they’re dead. Sergeant Kettering went to Hastings, I came here. I’ve got some photographs.” She handed her tablet to Mitchell.

  “Ah, another one of Isaac’s tablets. He missed his calling, that man. Should have been in product design. And if he had…” Mitchell trailed off as he swiped through the photographs.

  “Why are you here if it’s not about Mr Wilson?” Ruth asked.

  “It might be,” Mitchell said. “You know how I feel about coincidences, but this is the last place I’d thought I’d be. Literally. As to how I’ve ended up here, I’ve been tracking the associates of Longfield and Emmitt.”

  “Because of Jameson’s murder?” Ruth asked.

  “You heard of that?”

  “It was in the papers,” she said. “I mean, the man who helped Emmitt attempt to assassinate the PM died in custody. That had to be reported. They didn’t say how it happened, though,” she added.

  “He was shot through the bars of his cell with a silenced revolver. The killer was a man named Pollock, a civil service clerk with responsibility for the police personnel files. He held a theoretical rank of captain so that he couldn’t be browbeaten by line officers into revealing the secrets of their colleagues. He used that rank to gain access to the cells. I caught him up near Edinburgh on the fifth. That’s what I’ve been doing these last few weeks. I’ve been hunting down the last members of the conspiracy. All those who helped Longfield, Emmitt, and Wallace. The kind of people who, now that there is a vacuum at the top of our nation’s criminal pyramid, might attempt to fill it. And I’m almost done.”

  “I could have helped you,” Ruth said.

  Mitchell shrugged. “It’s easier when you know any footsteps following you belong to unfriendly feet. Besides, a forty-year-old man wandering the countryside is a common enough sight in Britain. Eyes will fall off me as easily as apples from an overloaded cart. A young woman, though, would only get the wrong kind of attention.” He relented. “Fine, yes, I wanted to do this alone. Riley was shot. You were abducted and tortured. I needed to do this alone. And I needed to make sure it was done, that they were all caught or dead.”

  Ruth let it go. “But why are you here? You’re tracking someone?”

  “A conspirator,” Mitchell said. “He’s the last serious threat to our society. He arranged for Jameson’s murder and is the last surviving member of that group who might be able to rebuild Longfield’s organisation.”

  “Who is it?” Ruth asked.

  “Ivan Adamovitch.”

  “Adama— Wait, you mean Adams, the under-butler at Longfield Hall?”

  “The very same,” Mitchell said. “He and about ten other members of Longfield’s personal staff disappeared before we could arrest them. There was a pursuit. We, ah…” His hand went to a slight tear in his jacket’s sleeve. “We got nine of them. Adamovitch escaped. Pollock, the man who killed Jameson, confirmed that the murder was committed on Adamovitch’s orders.”

  “There wasn’t anything about that in the newspaper,” Ruth said.

  “No, we’ve been keeping it quiet. I wanted Adamovitch to think he was safe, but I was on verge of putting his picture in the newspaper before I learned that he might be near here. As I said, this really was the last place I expected him to be. You see, some jewellery went missing from Longfield’s mansion. Necklaces and earrings that once belonged to Jackie Kennedy.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “She was the
wife of a U.S. president about eighty years ago,” Mitchell said. “The jewellery was to be returned to America after they’ve held their reunification election. In terms of cash value on the streets of Twynham, they’d buy you a night in a relatively clean room. In America, sold to the right person, they’d buy an entirely new identity. Their absence made me think that’s where Adamovitch was intending to go. The trail I found seemed to confirm it. Adamovitch planned to make use of Longfield’s American contacts to start a new life across the Atlantic. Emmitt’s arrest was printed in the newspaper, along with his sentence. Everyone knows that he’s awaiting execution. It’s no great leap to assume that he might share some names in order to save his neck. A paranoid butler might take that Emmitt’s not been executed yet as proof he has shared something. Other than a few military-reinforced enclaves along the European and African coasts, there’s nowhere to flee other than America.”

  “But you think Adamovitch came to Dover instead? Why?” Ruth asked. “This is on the wrong side of Britain. The only big ships in the harbour belong to the Royal Navy. With the blockade of Calais, not even fishing boats are venturing far without an escort.”

  “Precisely,” Mitchell said. “Like I said, I didn’t think he’d come here. Not originally, but it seems he left a false trail.”

  “Wait, hang on,” Ruth said, as the penny finally dropped. “Do you mean that sending me to Dover was your idea? It was your way of keeping me out of danger?”

  “More or less,” Mitchell said. “I won’t apologise. It was either this or sending you to live with Isaac, but that would have meant you’d have to leave the police force.”

  Ruth turned her eyes to the road. A month ago, she’d have replied immediately, accusing Mitchell of… she wasn’t sure, but she’d learned better since. “Dover is basically one large barracks,” she said instead. “You can’t throw a stick without hitting the military police. Why would he come here?”

  “Presumably because Europe is his real destination,” Mitchell said. “There hasn’t been much about the siege of Calais in the press, so it’s possible that he wasn’t aware that no ships were leaving. As to why Europe, well, the answer to that lies in how much he knows. To be more precise, in how much Longfield knew. Some of her companies supplied the Royal Navy. She had a stake in the munitions business. It’s possible that she’d gathered information on our ships, their weaknesses, and their disposition. That kind of information would be invaluable to the warlords and bandits of the European heartland.”

  “Like those in Calais?” Ruth asked.

  “Exactly,” Mitchell said. “From the reports I’ve read, this information wouldn’t buy Adamovitch a new life. He’d be thrown in a cell and tortured until every last drop of knowledge had been bled from him. Those are evil people in Calais, but maybe he doesn’t know that, or maybe he thinks that a dance with the devil is better than the hangman’s jig.”

  “And that necklace, that was just a way of throwing you off the scent?”

  “Either that or a way of proving that he is who he says he is.”

  “How do you know he came to Dover?” Ruth asked.

  “Mostly thanks to Rebecca Cavendish,” Mitchell said. “She’s had people listening for rumours, and there have been a lot of those of late. Do you know what time of day Mr Wilson was killed?”

  “Mr— Oh, well, he was one of the first to leave the city in the morning. The gate-captain remembered him waiting for the gates to be opened. He returned around midday, and started his shift at two. He was never late.”

  “And he was painting in the same spot each day?”

  “I think so,” Ruth said. “For the last two weeks.”

  “Then he was killed because he saw someone.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Ruth said. “Do you think it was Adamovitch? He saw Mr Wilson as a painter who could perfectly re-create his face. You said you were keeping his picture out of the paper, but it would have been printed soon, right? Adamovitch would have thought so, and he would have worried that a painter would be the kind of person who’d remember having seen it.”

  “That sounds plausible,” Mitchell said. He rubbed his legs, but kept his eyes on the road. “The question we must ask ourselves is why was Adamovitch on this road? Was he going into Dover? Why? For food, or to make contact with someone, and is that someone connected to Calais? We won’t know the answer until we’ve found him.”

  “You waited until after you saw the prime minister before you had a bath?” Ruth asked.

  “I didn’t want to have to wash twice,” Mitchell said. “Now, tell me more about Mr Wilson.”

  She filled him in on the crime scene, and on Sprocket and Sprung. He told her about Pollock and the criminals he’d arrested. Minutes became an hour, and then two, but there was no sign of anyone on the road.

  “Do you have any food on you?” Mitchell asked.

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Then it’s time to go looking for him,” Mitchell said. “I make it five minutes past two, yes? If someone was coming down this road everyday at the same time, they didn’t do it today. I expect that the murder of Mr Wilson changed their plans. They must be in some abandoned house somewhere, though within walking distance of Dover. Is your gun loaded?”

  “Always,” Ruth said. Even so, she double-checked.

  Chapter 8 - Smoke, Wood and Gun

  Dover

  “How’s Sergeant Kettering?” Mitchell asked as they followed the road away from Dover.

  “Fine,” Ruth said, scanning the muddy puddles for footprints. “Do you know her?”

  “I know a lot of people,” Mitchell said. “How’s her family?”

  “Well, I suppose,” Ruth said.

  “You’re enjoying Dover?” he asked, and then gave a loud sniff.

  “It’s been a lot quieter than Twynham,” she said. “At least it was up until yesterday. The Navy deal with most of the crimes. There’s a lot more paperwork, though. That seems to be about ninety percent of what I do.”

  “And that’s another problem that needs to be solved,” he said.

  “The paperwork?”

  “No, the Navy. And the railroad, the telegraph people, the chemical works. We’re a collection of petty fiefdoms gathered under the umbrella of an ancient democracy, but we are not democratic, not yet. We call our representatives members of parliament, but there’s still no viable opposition. It makes me almost wish for the old days of political parties.” He sniffed again.

  “Do you have a cold?”

  “Wood smoke,” Mitchell said. “At this time of year, no one is going to spend their days hiding in a cabin without a fire.” He sniffed. “Nothing.”

  They continued following the old road, passing a panel van that was more red rust than white paint.

  “You don’t think we’re democratic?” she asked.

  “Not really, not in the way people mean when they use that word. I thought we were heading in the right direction, but after the last couple of months, I’m not so sure. Each time I think the crisis is over, a new one rears its head. I suppose a quick glance at a history book would tell you that’s always been the way, but there’s little comfort in that.”

  “You mean the trouble in Calais?” she asked. “When the wind’s coming from the east, you can hear the artillery, but there’s not much about it in the papers. I had to ask the military police what’s going on. I’m not sure how much to believe, or how much they know, but even if a tenth is true then it sounds worse than anything I could imagine.”

  “That sounds about right,” Mitchell said. “The last time I traversed the wilds of Europe was just before we opened the Serious Crimes Unit. There were bandits and barbarians, of course, but they were a nuisance, not an army. There were small towns and growing villages, and they all wanted to know what crops would be most valuable to trade with Britain. There was hope. There were even a few refugees who left the safety of Britain to return to their old home. To put it in perspective, I’m talking about thousa
nds of people where once there were millions, but for the first time in twenty years, I thought that maybe the world was putting itself back together. Then these pirates appeared.”

  “Do you know much about them?” she asked.

  “A little. There were three groups; one came from the north, one from the south, one from the east. Their ideologies are so utterly conflicting that, when they met, they should have butchered each other. They didn’t. Instead, they headed straight for Calais and the entrance to the Channel Tunnel.”

  “They were trying to invade?” Ruth asked.

  “Possibly, I don’t know,” Mitchell said. “The Marine garrison in France held them back until reinforcements could arrive, but the majority of the Marines and Navy are now engaged on that front. A year ago, there was hope. Now? Now, I’m not so sure. Be glad you’re a copper, though war will make bloody work for us all. Smoke. Do you smell it?”

  Ruth sniffed. There was a faintly acrid tang to the air, though she couldn’t see any smoke rising above the bare-branched fruit trees or the occasional lush conifer. She turned her gaze downward. The road was covered in a thin layer of rotting mulch with occasional tendrils bursting through the cracks close to the drainage ditch on the eastern edge of the road. It was there, in a patch of flooded dirt, that she saw it.