Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes

by Tayell, Frank

  Serious Crimes

  Strike A Match Book 1

  Frank Tayell

  Dedicated to my family

  Published by Frank Tayell

  Copyright 2015

  All rights reserved

  All people, places, and (especially) events are fictional.

  Other titles:

  Strike A Match

  1. Serious Crimes

  Work. Rest. Repeat.

  A Post-Apocalyptic Detective Novel

  Surviving The Evacuation

  Book 0.5: Zombies vs The Living Dead

  Book 1: London

  Book 2: Wasteland

  Book 3: Family

  Book 4: Unsafe Haven

  Book 5: Reunion

  Book 6: Harvest

  Book 7: Home

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  Synopsis

  Even after the apocalypse, crimes must be solved.

  Strike A Match

  They called them Artificial Intelligences. Sentient viruses were closer to the truth. They spread throughout the world until every networked circuit was infected. Then they went to war. Millions died in the nuclear holocaust that brought an abrupt end to the AI’s brief reign of terror. Billions more succumbed to radiation, starvation, and disease. But millions survived, and they rebuilt.

  Serious Crimes

  Twenty years later, a ceremony is being held to mark the first transatlantic broadcast since The Blackout. The Prime Minister of Britain and two of the Presidents of the United States will speak to an audience of nearly ten million people. Not all are celebrating. Crime is on the rise, and power is once again a prize worth murdering for.

  Ruth Deering, a new graduate from the police academy, doesn’t care about ancient history or current affairs. She only joined the force to escape the smog-infested city. Those hopes are dashed when she is assigned to the Serious Crimes Unit, commanded by the disgraced Sergeant Mitchell. Her first case seems like a simple murder, but the investigation uncovers a counterfeiting ring and a conspiracy that threatens to destroy their fragile democracy.

  Serious Crimes is a transatlantic thriller set in a world of rationing and ruins, democracy and despotism, steam trains and smart phones. This is not the story of how the apocalypse is survived, but of what happens next.

  Contents

  Prologue - Progress

  Chapter 1 - A New Cadet

  Chapter 2 - Happy Birthday

  Chapter 3 - Counterfeit

  Chapter 4 - Boots

  Chapter 5 - Andy & Charles

  Chapter 6 - Isaac

  Chapter 7 - The Mint

  Chapter 8 - Self-defence

  Chapter 9 - Strike A Match

  Chapter 10 - Homicide

  Chapter 11 - The Ruins of Southampton

  Chapter 12 - Grief

  Chapter 13 - Footage

  Chapter 14 - The Informant

  Chapter 15 - Unmasked

  Chapter 16 - The Broadcast

  Epilogue - TRUTH

  Prologue: Progress

  16th September 2039

  “Roll on winter,” Detective Sergeant Henry Mitchell grumbled as he ran a finger around his sweat-drenched collar. He hated being back in uniform, and not just because the woollen coat was completely impractical in the unseasonably blazing heat. When he’d left the police, his uniform had been whatever blue clothes he could find. All that had mattered was the badge. He’d come back to find it wasn’t only the clothing that had changed. Everything had become rigid, from the rules to the ranks.

  “Just like the old world. Progress, ha!” he muttered. He’d returned to Twynham intending to stay in the force long enough to see if the legendary beast they called a pension was real or a myth. Now he was almost certain he would resign in three months.

  “Three months, assuming she passes.” But of course she would pass. As her new commanding officer, Mitchell could be certain of that. She wasn’t the reason he’d returned. Not entirely. It was duty that had drawn him back to southern England. And it was duty that had caused him to say the right thing at the wrong time, and so get demoted to sergeant.

  He shrugged his shoulders and plucked at cloth, trying to dislodge the pool of sweat slowly turning into a reservoir beneath the straps of his bulletproof vest. That wasn’t part of the uniform but, after what he’d been through in the last twenty years, he knew that particular discomfort was better than the alternative.

  A mocking giggle came from behind him. He turned around and saw two children pointing and laughing at the muttering, squirming policeman. He threw them a glare. It had no effect, so he turned it into a pointed stare at the small cart the children had been pulling through the street. They followed his gaze until all three were staring at the small cargo of coal half filling the cart. Suddenly, the older child’s eyes opened wide in understanding. With one hand the boy grabbed the cart, with the other he grabbed the girl’s arm. They took off, the cart rattling behind them. A lump of coal bounced out to land in the street. The girl darted back and half bent to pick it up. She looked at Mitchell, changed her mind, and ran.

  For the first time that week, Mitchell found a smile sneaking across his lips. Technically, coal that fell from a steam engine’s tender still belonged to the Railway Company so collecting it from the side of the tracks was theft. Technically. No one from his generation cared. They remembered the freezing winters after The Blackout too well to begrudge the meagre warmth a few lumps of coal would bring. And, the current heat notwithstanding, if the newspaper was to be believed, this winter was going to be one of the coldest in a decade.

  The smile stayed on Mitchell’s lips as he remembered his own, so very different, childhood in Montana. It truly was a lifetime ago. Then he looked up and saw the nearly complete radio antenna towering above the rooftops to the south. The smile vanished. There were some technophobes who claimed it was the harbinger of a second, final apocalypse. Most people saw it as a promise that things were returning to ‘normal’, whatever that was. That morning, the newspaper’s front page had led with an artist’s sketch of the antenna underneath the single word ‘Progress!’ Mitchell bit down on another scoffing retort. As he got closer to where they were building the outdoor stage, the roads were getting busier. Being thought an eccentric, muttering policeman by children was one thing. Amongst the adults tending their vegetable patches, heading out to the pub, or home for dinner, it was something else entirely.

  The metropolis of Twynham was nothing like the cities that Mitchell remembered from his American youth. It was a sprawling suburb of towns and villages, hamlets and homes, factories and farms, created out of the buildings and land that hadn’t been destroyed during The Blackout. Excluding the cratered remains of Bournemouth, it stretched from the New Forest in the east to Poole in the west, and for a dozen miles in land.

  Close to a quarter of a million people now lived along the southern English coast. A million more worked the farms in Devon, Dorset, and Hampshire, and in the great orchards of Kent. Middle England was a wasteland. Its only inhabitants were loners and solitary kings who ruled over insects and birds from tower blocks they called their castles. Beyond that devastated expanse were the mobile mining cities of Wales and the factory towns of northern Scotland. They said farmers had to sleep with one eye open to watch for bandits raiding from the wasteland. Each year there were fewer raids, and fewer bandits to commit them. Each summer, more train
tracks were laid, and more land was returned to the plough. It was piracy that was getting worse, particularly off the coast of Kent. But that was a matter for the Navy, not the police, and certainly not for Henry Mitchell.

  He was close enough to the stage to make out the stick-like figures moving up and down the scaffolding. They were taking full advantage of the last hour of daylight in their scramble to get the antenna finished before the broadcast. Was it really progress? If you were to believe the newspaper it was one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Mitchell rarely believed anything he read in that rag. Not even the weather report. He gave a surreptitious shrug, trying to dislodge the sweat-drenched shirt from where it had stuck to his shoulders. The jacket was part of the uniform, and he couldn’t take that off, not yet. Three months, and then he’d take it off for good.

  To the north, the smog bank over the power station slowly crept towards the coast. That was progress. He’d helped build the coal-fired plant on the site of the old airport. Everyone had helped during those chaotic years when anarchy and lawlessness were as ever-present a threat as starvation. All because of The Blackout, a brief seventy-two hours when the world had changed.

  Everyone knew the story. Mankind had created the artificial intelligences. That’s what they called them now, but they’d acted more like viruses, spreading throughout the connected world. When almost every machine and circuit was under the control of one AI or another, they’d gone to war. Cars, trucks, planes, power stations, dams, refineries, even phones and homes, they’d all become weapons in the AIs attempts to destroy one another. In the end, they’d succeeded. The blasts from nuclear warheads wiped out every power station on the planet. The electromagnetic pulse destroyed every infected circuit. That was the story everyone knew. Mitchell knew it was almost completely wrong.

  Humanity had been a bystander, the very definition of collateral damage in that brief war. When the survivors had crept out of their underground holes, the world they’d known was gone. Some, like Mitchell, had known to go south. Others followed, not knowing what they might find except that it had to be better than the devastation that surrounded them. Dehydrated, starving, desperate, they’d reached the sea and discovered hundreds of ships had run aground; bulk carriers packed with grain, cargo ships filled with canned food, and cruise ships carrying mostly American tourists. Some called it a miracle. Others dismissed it as luck. A few said it was an ill omen. Again, Mitchell knew they were wrong.

  He’d been there when the laws were written, and he’d been there during the dark days when they’d barely kept anarchy and chaos at bay. He’d stood with his back literally to the wall as they’d faced off pirates, bandits, marauders, and worse. His hand went to the decades old scar on his arm, but brushed against the three stripes sewn on the too-thick woollen coat. Self-consciously, his hand fell back to his side. And this was how he was rewarded, demoted to sergeant and assigned to a unit with no duties and fewer responsibilities.

  A stray gust carried the sound of sawing and hammering from the coast. It was an ever-present noise, as ubiquitous as that of a train’s whistle or a bicycle’s bell. It wasn’t possible to walk down more than three streets in a row without coming across a neglected house being torn down, or a new workshop being put up. This was different. His feet moving of their own volition, Mitchell set off once more, towards the sound of progress.

  As he got closer he saw that there were two distinct groups; the engineers constructing the antenna on the roof of a cliff-top apartment building, and the carpenters building a stage on the grassy common next to it.

  “We’ll be testing it tomorrow, I hope,” an engineer said, coming over to speak to Mitchell.

  The woman’s face was familiar, but it took a moment for the sergeant to place her. “Joyce Hynes. How are you?” Mitchell asked. Four years before, the woman’s fifteen-year-old son had disappeared. Mitchell had assumed the lad had been murdered until he was found using an obviously fake ration book at a boarding house near Caerphilly. The boy had been lured away by the prospect of the high wages offered in a nearby coalmine.

  “Busy,” Hynes said.

  “And your son?”

  “Still in mining, though he’s moved to Scotland. He’s at a deep pit now, working as a loader. He’s got the record for the most coal mined in a day,” the engineer said with more than a touch of pride in her voice.

  “Good for him. You say you’re testing the antenna tomorrow?” Mitchell asked. “I thought the ceremony was being advertised as the first transatlantic radio broadcast for two decades.”

  “Oh, it’s hardly that,” Hynes said. “We had to make sure the relay stations were operational. It wouldn’t do for the broadcast to cut out halfway through the Prime Minister’s speech. Valentia Island has been receiving signals from Heart’s Content in Newfoundland for over a year now. And we’ve spent the last month making sure that the floating relay stations are all in place. It would have been so much easier if we could have broadcast the ceremony at night, but they wanted people to listen. It’s infuriating,” she added, “but I do often find people get in the way of technology.”

  “Careful,” Mitchell said. “If a technophobe were to hear you say that, they’d accuse you of wanting to bring back the AIs.”

  “Oh, there aren’t any of those people working on this project,” Hynes said. “No, and we’re almost ready. Pinebreak Ferry in Maine and Southbourne here in Twynham are the last two pieces to the puzzle. It helps that the survey ships were in contact by radio over the last decade, but the signing ceremony will be the first official broadcast. It’s the one that counts, the one that will be recorded as the symbol that we’ve recovered.”

  “Recovered?” Mitchell scoffed. “It’s taken us twenty years to get back to the stage of what, an eight-minute broadcast?”

  “Thirty-two minutes and forty seconds. That’s counting the introduction, the musical interlude, and the speeches from two of their Presidents that they’re broadcasting from their side of the Atlantic. But,” she added, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “those have been recorded in case there’s a problem with the weather. Still, this is something that could be heard by two million people in Britain, and nearly fifteen million in North America.”

  “That might be the total population alive,” Mitchell said, “but you can’t expect every babe in arms to listen.”

  “Well, no, and I suppose there are places outside of the broadcast’s range,” she grudgingly admitted. She lowered her voice. “And even if they work night and day they’ll almost certainly have to use the recordings to broadcast the address in Juneau. But that, at least, is not my problem. Yes,” she added, speaking more normally again, “I do think most people will try to tune in.”

  “Assuming they can get a radio to work,” Mitchell retorted, but he was arguing for the sake of it. There was a roaring clandestine trade among engineers from the Electric Company to which Mitchell and the rest of the police had been told to turn a blind eye. They were making a fortune selling adaptors so old-world radios could be plugged straight into the light socket that was the only working electrical fixture most houses had. The landlord of the pub in which Mitchell rented a room had gone one stage further. He’d hired a scavenger to find a set of working speakers and rigged up the pub as a ‘listening room’. An entire evening of entertainment was planned and the tickets had already sold out. His landlord had even given Mitchell a free ticket along with two new candles. The unexpected gift had come with the warning that there would be no electric lighting in his room that night so as the pub didn’t exceed its carefully metered allowance of electricity.

  “However many tune in,” Mitchell said, “they won’t be listening to hear what the Prime Minister or one of the Presidents has to say. They’ll listen because it’s a new form of entertainment in a life that’s work, sleep, and little else.”

  “Oh, I think you’re wrong there as well,” Hynes said. “They’ll want to know what Britain’s getting out of this trad
e deal. We’ve been shipping them canned food for the last decade, so it’s about time we got something out of the… I mean,” she stammered, as if she’d only just registered Mitchell’s accent. Changing tack, she said, “You know what I heard? It’s petrol. I’ve got a two-pound bet on it.”

  “Whatever Britain’s getting, it won’t be gasoline,” Mitchell said. “If they’ve enough resources to re-open the wells and build a new refinery, how are they going to bring it over here?”

  “In barrels, I suppose,” Hynes said.

  “But if they can make barrels for oil, they’d be able to make cans for food, so what would be the point of us shipping it across the Atlantic? Besides the only cars we’ve got are rusting by the roadside or have long since been scrapped.”

  “Yes… well,” the engineer muttered, clearly having had enough of the detective’s cynicism, “we’ll find out at the end of the week, won’t we? Excuse me. I’ve got to go and… check the placements.”

  The woman stalked off towards an apprentice who got a tongue-lashing for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mitchell watched the carpenters and engineers at their work for a few minutes more, but found his gaze drifting towards the sea, and the rusting hulks beached along the coast.

  He was one of the few people who knew how the ships really had come aground on the shore, and one of even fewer who cared. But they were the real reason Britain had recovered faster than anywhere else. The food had kept them alive as they’d dug the mass graves, learned to plough by hand, laid the railway lines, subdued the criminals who dreamed of becoming tyrants, mined the coal, and turned pleasure yachts into fishing boats. It had sustained them until they brought their first harvest in, and it was a good harvest, more than they could eat. They’d built the power plant, and then the factory to recycle rusting steel into cans. Then came the canneries and food processing plants. It wasn’t easy. Death was their constant companion during those early years, but the stockpile had grown. Finally, fishing boats could be spared to discover what had become of the rest of the planet. Communication was slowly re-established with coastal communities around the world, and the sailors went, bearing gifts. As sail was replaced by steam – tinged with hopes of diesel – the shipments had grown until they’d become a highly divisive issue. It wasn’t simply the inconvenience of rationing, but some people were questioning whether the mines, power plants, factories, and farms, only existed so that food could be sent overseas.