Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes (6 page)

There were tracks through the overgrown grass, but all were too small to be human. They probably belonged to a fox, she thought. There were stories of ferocious beasts that had once been held captive in giant parks so people could see them up close. Why anyone had wanted to do that baffled Ruth as did much of the old world. Maggie had said it was because she lacked the context of having grown up in a time when those things were normal. It was the sort of non-answer that Maggie often gave.

There was a flash of movement in front of her. She jumped back just as she registered it was a squirrel that had been perched in the bramble-covered cowling of the plane’s engine. No, she told herself, the stories of those beasts were tales told to frighten a child. There were no hippos or tigers, not around here. But there were wild dogs, feral cats, and hogs living in the New Forest. She looked again at the narrow paths through the grass and told herself not to panic. It was the corpse that was making her nervous. It was a brutal sign that the peace of the classroom was finally over.

She picked up her pace, her brisk walk almost turning into a run by the time she reached the broken wing and clambered up. The door had been jammed open long enough for a whispery fern to take root in the hinges. She gently brushed it aside as she stepped through the dark portal. Light streamed through the broken cabin windows, adding a metallic gleam to the skeletal frames of the seats. The padding and material were all gone, as was the carpet, though she didn’t realise it at first. The floor under her feet was soft, but matted with a layer of dark green moss. It was that, she hoped, that gave the place its musty smell.

Behind her was a cargo space as empty as the passenger cabin in front. There was no obvious reason why anyone would choose to come to this old wreck unless it was as a reminder of something from the old world. The victim could have been a passenger, but it would take days to search the plane. Judging by the decay, any search would be a fruitless one. She raised a foot and, without intending to, found herself turning around and going back outside. The sergeant was right; she was unlikely to find anything on the plane. As she walked back along the wing, looking at the distant figures of the two detectives, she realised that the sergeant had known that. Mitchell and Riley were deep in animated conversation, but Ruth was too far away to hear what they were saying. She sighed. Mitchell had wanted to get rid of her so the two of them could talk in private. Presumably about that incident they’d half discussed back near the tracks.

A swatch of colour behind the engine caught her eye. She’d noticed the flowers as she’d climbed the wing but had dismissed them as another patch of weeds. From above, she saw they were roses, planted six feet apart. The nearest was entwined around a wooden cross. Now that she knew what to look for, she saw other crosses, and solitary posts where the horizontal bar had fallen away. It was a graveyard, presumably for the passengers. She looked back towards Mitchell. He’d said that they’d buried the bodies.
What was left of the them.
Digging the graves was one thing. Going to the trouble of planting the roses was something else.

Ruth knew the story of how the world had nearly been destroyed. Looking down at the graveyard brought new meaning to those words. People had created computers, each more powerful than the last, always with the intent that the next one would make life easier, better, safer. It never did. The computers became more powerful as successive generations of scientists searched for their holy grail. Like that old legend, it was one that never truly existed. Finally, someone created a computer that was so powerful it came alive. That was how Maggie had explained it to Ruth. In that creation, her mother had said, was the chance for people to become the best they could be, and that best would be better than anyone had ever imagined. But other scientists, jealous at not being the first, had rushed their own machines into existence. A few seconds after their first spark of life-giving electricity, those AIs had spread throughout the integrated networks of the world. They’d found each other, and like all children throughout history, they’d fought without considering the consequences of their actions. Maggie didn’t know who launched the missiles. It might have been the remnants of a government trying to destroy the AIs, or the machines themselves in a final suicidal end to that brief conflict. Twenty years on, it didn’t matter.

That was what Maggie had told her, but Ruth now saw the explanation for what it was: a story to be told to a child, like describing those people in the forest as bandits. They’d buried
what was left
of the bodies. Ruth knew what that meant and wished she didn’t.

She climbed down from the wing and headed back to the two officers. As she approached, Riley moved away, heading towards the railway tracks and an approaching train.

“It was night,” Ruth said, as she got nearer to Mitchell. “He wouldn’t have been able to see the plane.”

“Then why did he alight here?” Mitchell asked in reply.

Ruth shrugged.

“You remember how the train jolted just before we jumped off?” Mitchell asked.

“I thought that was the brakes,” she said.

“No, it was the uneven tracks. I expect the victim was half unconscious from blood loss, but that jolt woke him. It tells us that he was coming from somewhere to the south, exactly where we’ll know when we find the train he was on. And that,” Mitchell said, bending down over the corpse once more, “is a line of investigation we’ll have to leave to the Railway Company.” He pulled off one of the man’s boots, and then the other. “The autopsy will give us the bullet, the time of death, and perhaps some other details that will tell us more about the man. But for that, we have to wait for the coroner.” He placed the boots into a large evidence bag and then picked up the other bags. “We’ll take the money to the Mint, and they can confirm whether a sum this large has been withdrawn in recent days, or if there’s been some robbery.”

“Wouldn’t we have heard?” Ruth asked.

“I would hope so, but we should still check.”

“And the boots?” she asked.

“They will lead us to the shoemaker, and that will give us a name, and perhaps an address. At the very least we will learn when they were made. But,” he added, as Ruth walked over to the trolley, “you’ll have to wait here. Someone has to stay with the body until the coroner arrives.”

Ruth watched the sergeant walk up the embankment. The approaching train slowed, and he and the constable jumped on board. She kept watching as the train disappeared off into the distance.

Chapter 2

Happy Birthday

At first, Ruth stood by the body, waving her hands in an attempt to keep the flies away. After half-an-hour, the futility of the task, the smell that worsened as the day warmed, and irritation at her new colleagues made her give up. She stared at the blue and white police sign. Making her bring it all the way out here had been a joke and not a very good one. It wasn’t as if she’d known that the crime scene was in the middle of nowhere. Riley and Mitchell had. She carried the sign over to the shade of a young oak growing halfway up the embankment and sat down on it.

“Some birthday,” she muttered, shrugging off her woollen jacket. That it was her birthday was no secret. It was on her birth certificate and would have been in her personnel file, which, since he clearly hadn’t been expecting her that morning, the sergeant hadn’t read.

She brushed her hand through the thin carpet of dry leaves until she found a pebble.

In truth, it almost certainly wasn’t her birthday. The seventeenth of September was the date on which Maggie Deering had found her wandering alone and abandoned through the immigration camp. That wasn’t in Twynham, but in Kent, near the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. That camp was gone. The occupants had been wiped out during the SARS epidemic that Ruth assumed had killed her real parents. She wasn’t even sure that Ruth was her name, just that it had been embroidered on a singed ribbon around the neck of a toy bear she’d been clutching that fateful day. Ruth had become her name, the seventeenth her birthday, and Maggie had been her mother ever since.

She found another pebble and placed it next to the first.

Her memories of the camp were an indistinct nightmare of monstrous shapes and terrifying colours that swamped any true recollection of her early life. When Maggie had found her, the only word of English Ruth had known was ‘five’. Taken with her malnourished height, Maggie had decided that was probably her age. That had been eleven years ago. Ruth doubted she’d turned sixteen at some point today, but she almost certainly wasn’t eighteen, and that was the minimum age requirement of a police cadet. Lying about her age wasn’t an auspicious start to a career in law enforcement, but the lie had begun as a way to get into university.

“Not so I could end up here, like this,” she said. Her gaze fell on the corpse and she immediately regretted her petulance. She’d gambled and she’d lost, but it could be a lot worse.

The lie had been Ruth’s idea. Maggie was a teacher and Ruth had been an eager pupil, sucking up every morsel of knowledge she could. It was the lessons on probability that had been her undoing.

Unless you were bright enough for some professor to sponsor you for a scholarship, entry to university was by examination. Anyone who would be between seventeen and eighteen years old on the first day of term could sit those exams, but only once. They lasted a week, and everyone who got more than ninety-percent was entered into a lottery for one of the two hundred places at the university. After three months of study, the professors allocated each student to a course best suited to their aptitude.

Ruth knew that she could pass the exams, but the problem lay in the lottery. There had been a boom in the birth rate during the third and fourth years after The Blackout. But, because of a meningitis outbreak during the second year, there would be no more than a thousand applicants for the class that had begun just over a year ago. It came down to probability, a one-in-five chance of getting a place set against a one-in-fifty. All it required was lying about her date of birth. Maggie had been against it, and it had taken weeks for Ruth to persuade her.

Like most children, she had no official birth certificate. As Maggie had been her only teacher since the day she’d rescued her from the camp, there was no one to contradict the lie. Having sent in an application with her date of birth listed as the seventeenth of September 2021, she’d sat the exams and waited impatiently for the results. She’d passed, but she didn’t win the lottery. What made it worse was an announcement they’d made a week after she’d begun her training at the academy. The number of students being taken at the university was being increased for the year she should have applied.

“Just my luck,” she muttered, brushing the dirt off another pebble.

She’d been left with few choices. Professions like law, medicine, and teaching were filled with those who’d worked in that field before The Blackout. When a vacancy did occur it was taken by a miner or farmer too old to wield a pick or hoe. It was for that reason that Ruth couldn’t simply join Maggie in the classroom. Conversely, trades like tailoring and candle making were usually reserved for those who’d learned them from their parents. She could apply, but she’d be starting ten years behind everyone else. Of course, first she’d have to find a trade she wanted to learn. Then she’d have to wait another year, because she’d been so certain that she’d get a place at university, she’d missed the deadline for applications.

That left mining, farming, or factory work. They paid well, far better than policing, but it would be a job for life. She didn’t want to spend the rest of hers stuck to a workbench or coal seam. She wanted to see the world because she was sure there had to be more to it than she’d ever known. There were the Marines, of course. Thanks to widespread malnutrition, her entire generation suffered from stunted growth, so she didn’t think anyone would have questioned whether she was old enough to join the military. She herself had doubted that she’d make it through the physical training. That left the police. At first Maggie had been adamantly against it, more so than she’d been over lying about Ruth’s age. Then, a week before the deadline, she’d relented. Ruth had applied, and she’d got a place.

“And now look where I am.”

She counted out the pebbles. There were sixteen in a rough circle, with two more in the middle. “Happy birthday, Ruth, however old you are.”

There was a loud ‘caw’, as a raven landed in the field ten feet from the corpse.

“Shoo!” she shouted, picking up a pebble and throwing it at the bird. It hopped a few paces out of the way and cawed at her again. She sighed, and went to stand closer to, but upwind of, the body.

After half an hour, a second raven joined the first, and no matter what Ruth did, neither would move more than a dozen yards from the victim. When a train’s whistle pierced the early afternoon air, she couldn’t remember being more relieved.

Unlike the train that had brought them to the scene, this one came to a complete stop. It consisted of an engine, a tender, and a single carriage. A man and woman, both wearing off-white coats, jumped out. They grabbed a stretcher from the train and ran down the embankment towards her.

“The body’s over—” Ruth began.

“We can see it,” the woman snapped. Ruth stared at her for a moment, but decided that nothing she could say was worth the risk of having to walk back to the city. She grabbed the crime-kit, briefly considered leaving the sign where it was before she balanced it on top, and pulled the trolley up the embankment.

“Sorry,” a bearded man standing in the doorway to the carriage said, though from his tone he didn’t mean it. “Coroner’s only in this carriage. You’ll have to ride with the driver.”

Ruth nodded, more to herself than to the man, and headed to the front of the train. The driver helped her on board.

“You look hot. ‘ere, ‘ave some water,” he said, passing her a ceramic jug.

“Thanks,” she said, and took a swig.

“What was it?” the driver asked. “An ‘unting accident? I ‘eard it was a gunshot.”

“I’m not sure,” Ruth said. “I don’t think it was an accident, though.”

“Really?” the stoker asked. “A murder, then? Go on, give us some details.”

Ruth looked again at the distant haze that marked the city. It was definitely too far to walk.

“Well,” she began, and gave a highly expedited summary. She focused more on the blood and flies than on the bullet and made no mention of the money. It seemed to keep the two men entertained, at least until the orderlies had loaded the stretcher, and it was time for the train to leave. A whoosh of steam, a shriek from the whistle, a jolt, and the train shunted backwards towards Twynham.

“Four minutes, twenty seconds,” the stoker said, his voice rising to carry over the sound of pistons and steam.

“Until what?” Ruth called back.

“Until we ‘it the three-fifteen coming the other way,” the driver yelled, as the train picked up speed, reversing along the tracks.

He didn’t seem worried, so Ruth followed his example, and craned her head around the side of the train. There was a tap on her arm.

“You better hold onto your hat,” the stoker said. “This is going to get fast.”

And it did. Ruth let the wind whip through her hair as the train kept accelerating. As they hurtled back towards the junction, she couldn’t imagine even that wrecked plane ever moving at such a speed.

By the time the train pulled into a siding at Twynham Central, Ruth’s face and uniform were covered in soot, but her earlier gloom was gone.

“The coroner has the body, sir,” she said when she returned to the cabin in the yard behind Police House. The clock on the wall said it was four o’clock. She was surprised it wasn’t far later.

Mitchell raised his head from the map he’d been peering at and looked at the clock. “It’s unlikely they’ll start the autopsy before tomorrow morning, which means we won’t get the bullet until the evening.” He glanced over at her, and his lips curled in an attempt not to smile. “That’s an interesting look for you. Do you have a mirror?”

“No, sir,” she said, looking around the cabin in the hope of seeing one.

“If you’re going to ride in the cab of a steam train, you need a mirror.” He returned his gaze to the map.

Not sure what she should do, Ruth dragged the crime-kit back to where it had been at the beginning of the day.

“Should I take these to the evidence room?” she asked, picking up the evidence bags containing the victim’s meagre possessions.

“No, leave them with me for now,” Mitchell replied.

“And the tweezers? Shouldn’t they be washed?”

“I’ll deal with that.”

“Oh. Right. Um… were there any robberies of large sums of money last night?”

“Hmm? No. Not that have been reported. Or there weren’t an hour ago. You might as well go home. There’ll be more than enough work tomorrow.”

“Thank you, sir,” Ruth said. Her eyes caught sight of the desk, and the pile of statements she’d been wading through that morning. “I, um, I’ll finish these first.”

“The shift’s over, cadet, be grateful for it.”

“What I don’t do today,” she said, “I’ll have to do tomorrow.”

“Ah, the young,” Mitchell said. “When you get a bit older you’ll learn that what you put off today is someone else’s problem when you retire. And I can’t do that, even if it’s only for the night, until I’ve locked up. Go home, and then I can do the same.”

“Good night sir,” she said, and headed out the door.

She collected her bicycle from the rack on the other side of the stables and began the long ride home. The trains didn’t run to where Ruth lived. The Acre wasn’t a slum, not quite, and it was far larger than an acre. Situated on the site of an old refugee camp, it was next door to the newer immigration centre. Other than the name, Ruth couldn’t see any difference between the two. Nothing but a wide road separated the two old-world housing developments once occupied by retirees seeking the warmer weather of southern England. Nor was there much difference between the refugees with whom Ruth had shared Maggie’s classroom and the immigrants who filled it now. Some came from Ireland, but most had found a way of making the perilous crossing from continental Europe.

The Acre and the new centre next to it were very different from the camp in which Maggie had rescued Ruth. That was a place of tents, scant rations, and growing demand as every day brought a flood of new refugees through the Channel Tunnel. As Ruth understood it, after the great die-off, small groups had banded together throughout Europe. They’d lived off old-world stores of food as much as from farming. When ships began surveying the European coast, they’d made landfall to collect water. News of Britain’s recovery began to spread by word of mouth. After successive waves of disease cut through the barely coping communities, the survivors headed west. They took disease with them. SARS, Maggie had said it was called. Antibiotics had stopped it spreading throughout Britain. They’d been made in the laboratories built during the nearly catastrophic meningitis outbreak a few years before. But there hadn’t been enough doses, or there had been too many refugees in the camps around the Channel Tunnel’s entrance, or the medicine hadn’t been administered in time. Or perhaps it was all three. Ruth’s family had died, but she’d survived.

After that, the flood of refugees turned to a trickle, and not all made it as far as a camp. Increasingly, fishing vessels or the growing Navy picked up those who came by boat. Those refugees often found work, and a home, with them. As more farmland was reclaimed, there was employment in Kent for those who made the more treacherous land crossing through the pitch-black nightmare of the Channel Tunnel. Without an employer as a sponsor, no ration book was issued, no healthcare was provided, and no schooling was found for the children. Those refugees were relocated to The Acre. As the numbers had dropped, The Acre had become too big a site, and so the camp had been closed. The refugees were moved to a resettlement centre on the other side of the wide road. Maggie still taught, but she was paid based on how many pupils passed the pro-forma exams. As they often moved on after only a few months, her salary had shrunk.