Strike a Match 2

by Frank Tayell

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “We were in the academy together. He’s a friend.”

  “But he’s one of the Longfields?” Mitchell asked, again for the dozenth time.

  “Yes, sir. He’s their only son. Like I told you,” she added.

  The newspaper described Simon’s parents as captains of industry. Ruth thought ‘generals’ would be a better fit. Their wealth came from having owned a small dairy herd and powdered milk business before the Blackout. During the chaotic years afterwards, they’d grown the herd by rescuing animals from farms where the owners had died or fled. When the power plant was built, the milk-processing plant was re-opened and quickly expanded. From dairy, they’d moved into beef, and then into canned and processed meats. As the economy was rebuilt, and money issued once more, they’d bought the canneries. Now they were a major producer of the food-aid being shipped overseas.

  “So why did he join the police?” Mitchell asked.

  “I… I’m not sure,” Ruth said. “It’s something to do with his parents wanting him to know how the real world works. They don’t want him to inherit the business without working for it.”

  “I heard that hesitation in your voice,” Mitchell said. “What’s the ‘but’?”

  “Um… well… this is between us?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think it’s because he’s not cut out for business,” Ruth said.

  Because of his parents’ connections, Simon had been given a relatively safe position in Police House. Ruth’s assignment to Serious Crimes had also been due to nepotism, though she’d not known it at the time. Maggie, her adoptive mother, had known Henry Mitchell during the Blackout. When Ruth had insisted on applying to join the police, Maggie had asked Mitchell to watch out for her. By the time Ruth had finished her year in the academy, Mitchell had been demoted and sent to the backwater Serious Crimes Unit, and so it was to there that Ruth was assigned. During her first two weeks, she’d seen a suspect shot, been shot at herself, killed a man – though in self-defence – almost been killed by Commissioner Wallace, and personally prevented the assassination of the Prime Minister. If that was Henry Mitchell looking out for her, Ruth dreaded to think what could have happened if he’d been trying to sabotage her career.

  “You mean he’s stupid?” Mitchell asked.

  “No, not that. I don’t think he’s cut out for business. He’s… well, he’s too nice, and he daydreams a lot.”

  “Ah, then he’s probably not suited for this line of work. They should have found him a job at the university. Still, if you trust him, that’s good enough for me.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. Mitchell had said that exact same thing a dozen times before, and experience told her he’d ask again at least once before the sun set.

  They continued on in silence. A lingering Indian summer had been replaced by a week of storms. The skies were now clear, but so were the branches of every deciduous tree. They passed a smallholding made up of back gardens where the fences had been removed. The people toiling inside barely spared them a glance as they cleared the tilled earth of fallen leaves. Life went on. But it shouldn’t. Ruth didn’t think it was right that the newspaper had yet to print anything about the assassination or the counterfeiting. Not that there was anyone to whom she could complain. The paper would cover it, eventually, she’d been told. That was wrong, too. The truth was important. Truth. That word echoed in her mind. It had taken on a particularly personal significance over the last week.

  “You seem pre-occupied,” Mitchell said.

  “Do I? I was thinking about the body,” Ruth lied.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Mitchell said. “Riley and I should have the case closed before nightfall. I think, if you cut through this avenue, you should be in the woods in twenty minutes.”

  “What? Oh, no. You’re not serious? Not today. This is a murder.”

  “And I can handle the investigation well enough on my own. Go on. Don’t keep Isaac waiting.”

  There was no point arguing. Ruth mounted her bike and cycled north.

  Every day for the last week she’d gone to the woods west of Christchurch to be taught how to shoot. Mitchell hadn’t needed to explain why it was necessary. She’d been standing twenty feet away from Emmitt when she’d shot at him. She’d aimed at his chest, but only hit his arm. He’d escaped. That she’d probably broken his arm was little consolation.

  Mitchell had asked Isaac to train her. The strange, secretive man had been there in the woods every day, but it was Kelly who was conducting the lessons. She was a willowy, patient woman who never failed to miss a target. Always hulking in the background was Gregory, a sullen, mountainous man with arms as thick as Ruth’s waist. Isaac usually perched on a tree-stump, offering a sardonic commentary.

  Isaac, Kelly, Gregory. None of them had surnames, at least as far as Ruth knew. In fact, she knew very little about them at all. Why did they all wear clothing of that same shade of dirty grey? Where did they get the spare ammunition? Where did they go when they weren’t loitering around the woodland clearing? She’d tried asking, subtly at first, and then out-right. Even so, she’d learned little beyond that Isaac was a strange man, probably in his forties, and that those who followed him did so with an almost absolute devotion.

  Most of what she knew about the man came from Mitchell. During the Blackout, Isaac had received a message stating that there would be food on the British south coast. It was on the strength of that message that Isaac, Mitchell, and thousands of other survivors had left the ruins of London and headed south. They’d found the grain ships, and the cargo carriers and cruise ships. That was the seed that had grown into Twynham. As to who had sent Isaac the message, that remained a mystery.

  Ruth reached a point where the old road met the new train line. A narrow track ran between the railroad and the regimented row of poles that carried the telegraph from Twynham down to the more rural areas in the southwest.

  Frequent traffic had cut a muddy track through the fallen leaves. The railroad, and hence the path next to it, curved around the woodland’s edge. Following it would mean a longer journey but an easier one than trying to drag the bicycle through the wild undergrowth. She steered onto the track next to the railroad, cycling as fast as she could without spraying mud and rotting leaves over her uniform.

  If she had one word to sum up her brief time as a police officer, it would be ‘questions’. There always seemed to be far more of them than there were answers. As much as she was curious about Isaac and the Blackout, if there was one thing she wanted answered above all else, it was to do with her own past.

  After Wallace had died, she’d searched his study. At the back of a drawer in his desk she’d found a coin. On it was a stylised backward ‘L’, surrounded by an inscription that read THE TRUTH LIES IN THE PAST, with each word separated by five stars. When Maggie had found her in the refugee camp, the only word Ruth had known was ‘five’. Her only possession was a toy bear. Around its neck was a scorched ribbon, with one embroidered word still legible. RUTH. That had become her name, yet now she was almost certain that the word was TRUTH, and that the T, and the rest of the inscription, had been burned away. That meant that there was a connection between her and Wallace, or between him and her parents. As Wallace was dead, there was little chance she’d… she’d…

  There was a small group on the railroad tracks around four hundred yards ahead of her. Two men and two women, wearing shapeless baggy trousers and ill-fitting tunics. She brought the bike to a halt, dismounted, and moved to the cover of a spreading pine. They could be workers going from one farm to another. Or hunters? No. One carried a ladder. Whoever they were, there was something wrong about them.

  They’d stopped and were huddled in conference. The wind carried a few syllables toward Ruth, but not enough that she could make out the words. The group seemed to reach a decision. A man, dressed more shabbily than the rest, took the ladder and leaned it against a telegraph pole. That decided it. Whoever they were,
they didn’t work for the telegraph company.

  Ruth walked toward them. Pushing her bicycle, she kept her pace slow and casual, acting as if there was nothing unusual about the tableaux. Hoping they would run and worrying what she’d do if they didn’t, her hand dropped to her belt. She checked her truncheon, and then her revolver. Doubt flashed across her mind. Had she remembered to load it? There was no time to check.

  She was a hundred yards from the group before one of the women spotted her, turned, and ran. The other woman quickly followed, as did the man holding the bottom of the ladder. Ruth mounted her bike and pedalled furiously toward them. The man halfway up the ladder did something strange. He didn’t try to escape. He continued climbing. Reaching the top, he grabbed for the lowermost of the metal rungs embedded in the pole itself. He couldn’t reach it.

  Ruth sped up.

  The man stretched. He jumped. He grabbed the metal rung with his right hand, but his feet knocked the ladder over. For a moment he hung there, one-handed, his left hand trying to find purchase on the smooth wooden pole. He fell, picked himself up, and finally began to run.

  Ruth was fifty feet away. Forty. Thirty. The man wasn’t moving very quickly. Had he twisted his ankle in the fall? Twenty. Ten. Five. Two. She let go of the handlebars, leaped from the bike, and knocked the man to the ground.

  “Stop!” she hissed. “You’re… under…” But the man was struggling too hard for her to waste breath on words. She pushed a knee into his back and twisted his arm around until he was pinned. “Stop!” she said again, struggling to get the handcuffs out. Even when cuffed, he kept squirming.

  “Stop it! You’re under arrest!” she screamed. The words sank in, and the man subsided.

  “What were you trying to do?” Ruth asked, realising that she wasn’t entirely sure what crime he’d committed.

  “Righteous work,” the man hissed.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  The man didn’t reply. Ruth waited to see if he would try to run even with his hands behind his back. He didn’t. She looked over at the fallen ladder. Next to it was a pair of very crude wooden-handled shears.

  “Were you trying to cut the telegraph wires?” she asked.

  “I was doing my duty,” he replied, which was no more illuminating than his earlier comment.

  The shears were an oddly crude tool, but looked newly made. That was as baffling as his answers since old-world wire-cutters were sold in every hardware shop. Then she saw fresh splinters on the telegraph pole where something had been carved into it. An ‘N’ and… she stepped around the pole so she could see the carving properly. Her heart froze.

  The man, or one of his comrades, had carved a name onto the pole, ‘Ned Ludd’, except that the ‘L’ had been written backward, just like on the coin she’d found in Commissioner Wallace’s drawer.

  “Who’s Ned Ludd?” she asked.

  “I am,” he replied.

  “What were you doing?”

  “The duty of the righteous,” he replied.

  Ruth gave up. There was no point trying to question him here. She looked toward the city. That was the direction the man’s comrades had gone. If she tried to walk the man back to Twynham, and if those others had stopped, they might try to rescue him. She wasn’t sure how that confrontation would end, but it was too much of a risk. Hoping to spot a plume of smoke from an approaching train, she looked behind. The skies were frustratingly clear. She couldn’t wait. The other three might return. Then she remembered Isaac. The clearing wasn’t far. Leaving her bike next to the ladder, she hauled the man to his feet, and saw the reason he’d been unable to run very fast. He wore backless, wooden clogs.

  “Did you make those yourself?” Ruth asked as she pushed the man off the road, and into the forest.

  “You should reject the old world, if you want to bring about a truly new one,” he replied.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “Understanding only comes to those who—” the man’s words were caught short as he stumbled on a rotting branch.

  “Get up,” Ruth said, grabbing his arm. The clothing was as roughly made as the clogs and just as impractical. It was too baggy to be warm and had a greasy feel that suggested it had never been washed. From his odour, she doubted the man had either. She stepped back, concern about fleas replacing that of the man being rescued by his comrades, but without her pushing, pulling, and occasionally prodding, he stopped moving.

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing the man’s arm after he’d fallen for the tenth time. “Get—”

  She heard a branch break somewhere to her left. She spun around, drawing her revolver. It was Kelly. In each of the woman’s hands was one half of a broken stick.

  “You make a lot of noise,” Kelly said. “Who’s he?”

  “One of a group of four. I think they were attempting to cut the telegraph,” Ruth said. “I wanted to borrow Gregory’s cart to take him back to Twynham.”

  “Then you’re going the wrong way,” Kelly said, gesturing over her shoulder. Ruth, occasionally prodding the still-stumbling prisoner, followed her.

  “Ah, Ruth! And you’ve brought a friend,” Isaac said with his usual bombastic effusiveness.

  “I think he was trying to cut the telegraph wires,” Ruth said. “And he carved something into the pole. A name.”

  “My name,” the man said. “I am Ned Ludd.”

  “Then either someone has invented time travel, or you’re delusional,” Isaac said. “Where did you find him?”

  “About two miles that way,” Ruth said gesturing over her shoulder.

  “It’s more like a mile and a half over there,” Kelly said, pointing about thirty degrees to the east of where Ruth had indicated.

  “There were three more of them,” Ruth said. “They ran along the railroad in the direction of Twynham. I need to take this man back to Police House, and then I’ll come back to search for them.”

  “Gregory? Please give Ruth a ride. As to the others, Kelly and I will find them.”

  “This is a police matter,” Ruth said.

  “Of course it is,” Isaac said.

  “I mean that looking for them is something the police should do.”

  “But you’ll be busy taking the suspect into custody,” Isaac said with exaggerated patience. “And though we are mere civilians, do we not have a civic responsibility to maintain law and order?”

  She could tell him not to, Ruth thought, but he would still go looking for them.

  “You aren’t to hurt them,” Ruth said.

  “And when have you ever seen me hurt anyone?” Isaac replied.

  That wasn’t much of an answer to anything, but Ruth let it go. She pushed the prisoner into the back of the carriage, and climbed up onto the cab.

  Ned Ludd, written with a backward ‘L’? There was no way it was a coincidence. As Gregory drove the carriage toward the city, she tried to decipher what it meant.

  Chapter 1

  Ned Ludd

  “Sir, we need to talk,” Ruth said.

  “It’s never good when a woman says those particular words to a man,” Mitchell said. He was at his desk in the cabin in the yard of Police House, peering at an old-world map covered in pencil and ink annotations. He looked up and saw her face. “It’s serious? It’ll have to wait. Five telegraph lines into the city have been cut. No telegrams are getting in or out of Twynham.”

  “None? This is connected,” Ruth said. “On the way to meet Isaac I came across a group of four people. They had a ladder. When they saw me, three ran, the fourth tried to climb the telegraph pole. I caught him.”

  “You did? Well done. Where is he?”

  “Being processed. But that’s not all. On the telegraph pole they’d carved a name, Ned Ludd, except the ‘L’ was written backward. Let me show you.” She picked up a pen and drew a sketch of the carving.

  Mitchell reached into a drawer on his desk and pulled out a small silver coin. He placed it next to the sketch.
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  “Where did you get that?” Ruth whispered.

  “You remember the American ambassador’s assistant, Lucas Fairmont?”

  “You apprehended him on the beach,” Ruth said. “He was selling information on the owners of oilfields in the U.S. That half-eared man, Jameson, was with him. The one who was Emmitt’s lookout during the assassination attempt.”

  “Right, and there was a third man. Donal, the one I shot,” Mitchell said. “This coin was in his pocket. What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Not a ghost,” Ruth said. “But I’ve seen that coin before. Wallace had one.”

  “He did?” Now it was Mitchell’s turn to sound surprised.

  “With the same inscription,” Ruth said. “I found it just before you… well, before you passed out. I… I sort of kept it.”

  “Why didn’t you hand it in?” Mitchell asked.

  “I was going to,” she said. “It’s…”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s hard to… okay. When Maggie found me the only word of English I knew was ‘five’, and you see how there are five stars between each word of the inscription?” As she said the words aloud she realised how flimsy a connection that was. “And,” she hurriedly continued, “I had a bear. A toy one, you know? Around its neck was a ribbon. Most of it was burned, except for the letters R, U, T, H. That’s how I got my name, except I think it was the beginning of that inscription.”

  “On a ribbon around the neck of a toy bear?”

  “I know it doesn’t sound like much,” Ruth said. “It’s… I…” She trailed into silence.

  “That coin has to be entered into evidence,” Mitchell said. “Bring it to me and I’ll deal with it. As to any personal connection between it and you, we’ll discuss that some other time.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry,” Ruth said.

  “But you arrested a saboteur. That is a good day’s work. There are two coins? Interesting. It suggests there is a good deal of organisation behind these crimes. Unfortunately, it also suggests there are more conspirators than we first thought. No one would go to the trouble of only making two, and no other suspects had one on their person. But the coin will have to wait. The telegraph is critical. Tell me about this suspect. Did he say anything?”