by Frank Tayell
“We could have provided him with a convict’s uniform,” Mitchell said.
“He was paid for the information he sold,” Clarke said. “And do you know what he spent the money on? Suits. I thought this was a fitting punishment.” She handed Mitchell the key to the manacles. “Safe journey.”
Mitchell prodded Fairmont up into the carriage.
“Easy!” Fairmont said.
“If you want it easy, give us the other addresses now,” Mitchell said.
“And have you go back on your word?” Fairmont replied. “Not likely.”
“Then get in,” Mitchell said, pushing the man into a seat. He drew his revolver and sat opposite. “Eyes on the road outside,” he said to Ruth, “But don’t sit too close to the window.”
It was a tense journey, made worse by a gnawing expectation of trouble, but after five minutes they arrived at the train station without incident.
Gregory brought the carriage to a halt outside the goods’ entrance.
“Take a look,” Mitchell said, grabbing Fairmont’s shoulder and moving him toward the window, before pushing him back into his seat. “We’re at the station. Now give me the address.”
“Not until I’m on the train,” Fairmont said.
“Understand this, you’re not in charge. Tell me the address or I’ll let you go here and now. How long do you think you’d last out on the streets, handcuffed, and wearing a suit like that? An hour? I doubt it would be anywhere near as long.”
“You do that, and you’ll never find the—” Fairmont began.
“You’re not the only lead we have,” Mitchell interrupted. “You’re expendable, Fairmont. What’s the address?”
Fairmont looked from Mitchell to Ruth. There was no fear in his eyes, just cold calculation.
“Greychurch Street,” Fairmont said. “Number fourteen. It’s a terrace.”
“What will we find there?”
“Six people, all armed. Pretty much the same as Windward Square. I take it that was as I said it would be?”
Mitchell ignored the question, scrawled the address on a piece of paper, and passed it to Gregory. “You know what to do with that?”
The huge man nodded. Mitchell pushed Fairmont out of the carriage. Ruth grabbed their bags and followed.
The station was virtually deserted. The few people present all wore the livery of the Railway Company, and formed a rough ring guarding a platform. Each held a thick metal pole or gleaming shovel, and it was a reassuring sight until Ruth remembered the automatic rifles they’d found in Windward Square.
Mitchell led Fairmont toward a small crowd waiting on the nearest platform. Here, the weapons were a mixture of shotguns among the railway workers, and automatic rifles carried by the Marines standing guard over the train.
A woman in a wheelchair rolled herself ahead of the armed group.
“Is this the terrorist, Henry?” she asked.
“It is.”
The woman gave Fairmont a scowl of absolute disgust. She made a show of wheeling her chair out of his line of sight. “And this is Officer Deering?” she asked.
“It is,” Mitchell said.
“Rebecca Cavendish,” the woman said, extending a hand. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“And you,” Ruth said, adding, “ma’am.” She wasn’t sure whether Cavendish had an official rank, but from the way that everyone in the cavernous station deferred to her, she was the one in charge.
“Lieutenant Lewis?” Mitchell said. “Take the prisoner on board.”
“Corporal Lin,” the young lieutenant barked. A woman stepped forward, barked her own orders at four Marines, and Fairmont was hustled onto the train.
“I’ve cleared the tracks,” Rebecca said, her voice low. Ruth turned back to face her. “There’s a Mail train ahead of you, and you’re to stay thirty-four minutes behind it until you’re past Leicester. If there’s trouble on the tracks, it’ll run into it first.”
“How would we know?” Ruth asked.
“From the telegraph. Each time a Mail train arrives at a depot, a message is sent back to confirm its arrival. We don’t do that for passenger services – they don’t want the line clogged. Thirty-four minutes, that’s your window. You’ve got Greg Higgins as a driver, and Hamish Boyd as your stoker. Good men, both. They have the schedule, and it’s fixed until you get to Scotland. There’s a bad storm being reported in the Highlands, so check the weather report when you get to the border. You may need to take the lowland route.”
“And banditry?” Mitchell asked.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Rebecca said. “There’s an assimilation deal being discussed with the tribes around Leicester, and docility was one of the pre-requisites for the talks to begin. Other than that, you’re going through mostly civilised areas where the bandits have become farmers or hunters, relying on the train for trade. Good luck, Henry, and to you, Miss Deering. Travel safe and return the same way.”
Ruth nodded politely and followed Mitchell toward the train. The lieutenant fell into step.
“Lieutenant Charles Lewis,” he said, introducing himself to Ruth, though she recognised him from the raid on the house in Windward Square. “I’m in charge of this detachment, and will take over command of the detail when we arrive. Corporal Helen Lin is my second in command.” There was a pause. “We, ah, we don’t know if she’ll still hold that position when we arrive.”
Ruth sensed there was a question hidden in that last remark, but wasn’t sure what it was. Before she could ask, Mitchell spoke.
“Lieutenant, you’re with me,” he said. “I want to check the train’s entry and exit points.”
“Yes, sir,” Lewis said, falling into step with Mitchell, leaving Ruth alone.
Realising that there was nothing she was supposed to do, she climbed aboard. The corporal was waiting inside, by the door.
“Corporal Helen Lin,” the woman said.
“Hi,” Ruth said.
“I don’t suppose you know where we’re going?”
“You mean you don’t?” Ruth asked.
“I was blissfully asleep in the barracks four hours ago,” Lin said. “Ten minutes later I was hustling this lot down here. I gather we’re going to Scotland?”
“I think so,” Ruth said.
“Corporal!” the lieutenant called. Lin rolled her eyes and hurried away.
The train consisted of two carriages, a tender, and a locomotive. From the outside it had looked like a normal service. Inside was much the same. The windows were scratched, and the seats were shabbily re-upholstered in every shade of faded red. Light came from electric lamps above the doors at either end. Another hung from a temporary fixture above Fairmont’s cell – the wire-and-bar cage usually reserved for transporting parcels and letters. He, Ruth was pleased to see, had no seat but instead lay on a thin mattress on the floor.
Ruth took the bags to a spot near the rear, but from where she could still see the prisoner. The Marines settled in around her. From the occasional overheard sentence, this assignment was a welcome relief from the monotony of their usual duties.
There was a jolt, a soft whistle, and the train began to move. As they pulled out of the lit station, the view beyond the window darkened. As they went by the homes owned by railway workers, there were occasional pinpricks of light. The train sped up. They entered the warehouse district where goods were stored before being shipped to the far-flung corners of Britain, and the lights disappeared.
Ruth tried to find a comfortable position, but the seats were too narrow to lie down on, and too far apart to set her feet on the seat opposite. She glanced at Fairmont. He seemed to be asleep.
There was a soft flick and then a flare behind her as a quintet of Marines lit candles and began a game of cards. Ruth was tempted to join them, but they were playing for money and she had none. Instead, she turned her eyes to the window, watching for the dawn.
It was another half an hour before Mitchell returned. He paused by Fairmont’s cage for
a long minute before continuing down, past Ruth, to the Marines. There was a conversation spoken too softly for Ruth to hear. Mitchell took the deck, shuffled it, and dealt a single card to each Marine. Corporal Lin threw hers down with disgust. The others laughed as the corporal went to take up a seat near Fairmont. Mitchell came to sit down opposite Ruth. His thoughtful expression was somewhat marred by the wind-swept, soot-smudged face of someone who’d been in the locomotive’s cab.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s all going exactly as planned.”
“That makes you worried?” Ruth asked.
Mitchell smiled. “No, it makes me realise that the best we’ll get out of Fairmont is the arrest of a few more hired thugs. There’s a saying: the criminal only has to get lucky once, but the copper has to be lucky thousands of times a day. Today I was unlucky. I was expecting Emmitt to try something as we moved the prisoner.”
“Try something? You mean try to kill Fairmont?”
“Like he did with Lyons and Turnbull. The embassy was the weak link. Emmitt must have known Fairmont was there. I bet he had someone watching the embassy. Or, since he had Fairmont working for him, why not someone else on the inside? Certainly, he must have realised who told us about Windward Square. It’s why I enlisted Isaac’s help, and used that carriage for transporting our prisoner. It’s heavily reinforced and far more secure than any police vehicle. Gregory wasn’t the only person I… ah, but it doesn’t matter now. I made an assumption and I was wrong. Emmitt didn’t attack, and that suggests whatever Fairmont might tell us no longer poses a risk to the man’s schemes. He probably spent his time destroying any evidence he thinks we might discover.”
“Then is there any point continuing with Fairmont’s deal?” Ruth asked.
“You tell me.”
Ruth considered it. “We don’t have any better leads,” she said. “And there’s the chance that Fairmont saw or heard about something that can’t be moved or destroyed. And Emmitt might still come after Fairmont.”
“No. Not now we’re on the train. We’re safe.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Trains have many faults, but they can only be run along tracks. Emmitt can chase us, but he can’t overtake us. He might be able to hijack a train, but he’d run out of water and coal, be diverted into a siding, or find the gates of a depot closed to him. No, he can’t catch us, and he doesn’t know where we’re going. Right now, we’re heading east, but we’ll soon turn north, cross the Thames near Oxford and head toward the ruins of Leicester. We’ll stop in Darlington for the night, possibly Cumbria if we make good time, and cross into Scotland tomorrow.”
“We won’t try to reach the lighthouse today?” Ruth asked.
“No. It’s not safe to drive through the wasteland unless you can see the tracks ahead are clear. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey. Didn’t you say you always wanted to travel?”
“Yes,” Ruth admitted. Outside the window, the distant clouds were slowly brightening. “I suppose I thought it would be more exciting than this.”
Mitchell smiled, and Ruth suddenly didn’t know what to say. He might be an old friend of her mother, but he was also her superior officer. Silence grew. Wanting to fill it with something other than awkwardness, she took out a small paper bag.
“Maggie spent all evening making these,” Ruth said. “And she said I should share them with you.”
“She did?”
“She kind of insisted,” Ruth said.
Mitchell peered inside the bag, cautiously selected the smallest bun, and took a reluctant bite. His eyes widened in surprise. “I stand corrected,” he said. “This is actually rather good.”
“Why do you sound so shocked?”
“When I first met your mother, she didn’t cook,” Mitchell said. “In fact, I don’t think she’d ever scrambled an egg before the Blackout.” He took another bite. “I remember…. let’s see, when was it? About a month after we left London, we were in a multi-storey parking complex on the edge of Bournemouth. There were twelve of us, syphoning gasoline from abandoned cars. It was a lot colder than it should have been for September, but the weather was erratic during those first years after the bombs fell. We started a fire to keep warm. Maggie was put on tea duty. I thought, since she was a scientist, that she’d understand the principles of boiling water. Well, she knew about fire and heat, but not about putting a lid on a saucepan. The water was full of ash and cinders, which didn’t stop her from making the tea. It tasted foul.” Mitchell smiled as his mind swam in years gone by.
“That’s a happy memory?” Ruth asked.
“It is,” Mitchell said. “It is. The walk from London…” His face dropped. “We only had what we could carry. For the most part we were carrying each other. We had few medical supplies, but it seemed like each house contained someone screaming for help. There was nothing we could do. No, that’s not true. There was one thing, but…” He trailed off. That brief spark of happiness was now entirely gone from his face.
“When we retreated into the tunnels, London was a living city,” he said. “When we pushed the rubble away and climbed back out into daylight, there was nothing but desolation. Fire, smoke, and a terrible, noxious stench, permeating air too thick to breathe. We staggered away from those tunnels, eyes streaming, gagging on those acrid fumes. We moved, and kept moving, just to get away from it. Only painful discomfort prevented us from giving into abject despair. We were surrounded by death. Mile after mile of ash, bone, and blood. Then came the screams. At first they were too inhuman to identify as that, belonging to those who were technically alive, but whose only wish was that they weren’t. There was a girl, perhaps eight years old, in the lobby of an apartment block. It looked like the skin had been boiled from her face. I picked her up, and carried her for seven long miles. I knew, with each incoherent bubbling breath she took, all she wanted was for the pain to stop. There was only one way her story would end, but I couldn’t give her that quick release.” He was silent for a moment.
“When she died,” he said, “there wasn’t time to bury her. I wrapped her in my coat and kept walking. Those seven miles changed me. Not in some sudden epiphanic moment, but step-by-step my beliefs were worn away. By the time I pulled my jacket over her sightless eyes, everything I knew and believed was gone. I saw the world as it truly was, with the veneer of polite civilisation torn down. I understood how much a life was truly worth. I—” He stopped. “Compared to that,” he said, taking another bun out of the bag, “the recollection of a cup of sour, sooty tea truly is a happy memory.” He turned to face the window. So did Ruth.
Dawn swept down from the horizon, bathing the fields with a brittle autumnal glow. The train slowed as it approached a set of points, giving her a view of a group of farmers trying to wrestle an obstreperous horse into the yoke of a plough.
“Life goes on,” she murmured.
“It almost didn’t,” Mitchell said. “But it did, and it still does. That’s worth remembering.” He took another bun.
“But you didn’t see much of Maggie recently,” Ruth said. “I mean, you never came around to the house.”
“I visited quite frequently when Riley was younger, and always for advice. With the sudden acquisition of a teenage daughter, I needed a lot of that. Then Maggie adopted you and moved into The Acre. There were some summer evenings when I would continue my walk along the coast, and head inland to visit. As the years went by, we both got busier, and found we had little to say to one another. We’d grown to know each other during a painful, tragic time that neither of us wished to remember. Perhaps we were trying to pretend the past never happened.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps knowing that the other was alive was all either of us needed. Either way, we have enough to worry about in the present without dwelling on the past. You won’t have seen today’s newspaper.”
“No.”
He reached into his bag and pulled out a copy. “This came straight from the press. Ha
ve a read.” He glanced over his shoulder at Fairmont, settled into his chair, and closed his eyes.
Ruth took the paper, and looked at it, unseeing. A dozen questions came to mind, about Mitchell and Maggie, and those early years after the Blackout. Ruth decided to keep them to herself. She could guess the shape of his answers, and somehow the specific details didn’t matter.
A beam of light curled through the clouds to land on the newspaper. She realised that she’d been staring at the headline without reading it. It was one word, ‘Counterfeit’. The article that followed described how a massive counterfeiting ring had been broken. Dozens of arrests had been made and… she skipped ahead a few paragraphs.
The old currency was being withdrawn. From that morning, twenty-pound notes would only be honoured at banks. To avoid disruption to normal business, banks would open on Sundays, with special counters set up. Customers would be allowed to exchange their currency on certain days, based on surname and address. There was going to be a cap on withdrawals and… and more details that she wasn’t interested in. A sidebar caught her attention. It was a recruitment ad dressed up as an article about how the banks were taking on additional staff in each branch.
She scanned the main article again. The details about the counterfeiting ring were mostly false. Weaver got all the credit for breaking it. There was no mention of Mitchell, Riley, herself, or Serious Crimes. The inside pages carried a thoroughly vivid and entirely fictitious account of a gun battle between unnamed police officers and the counterfeiters. Ruth had never heard of Ollie Hunter, the journalist who wrote it, but thought he would be better employed writing fiction than news. The lurid tale was illustrated with the sketches of Clipton and Emmitt that had graced previous editions. Under Clipton’s face was the word ‘Dead’. Under Emmitt’s was ‘Wanted’. She turned the page.
