Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes

by Tayell, Frank

  “And if we don’t?”

  “We’ll worry about that then. What other choice do we have?” Mitchell asked. “Who can we trust? Whatever they are expecting, right now it isn’t this. Perhaps if we act quickly, with surprise on our side, we may catch them unawares.”

  “That’s a lot to hope for,” Riley said.

  It was after eight p.m. when Mitchell brought them to a halt at the head of a quiet street with a working lamppost at the northern end. The commuters and after-work-shoppers had long since gone home. Children were on their way to bed, and the roads were deserted. Flickering lights and the occasional snatch of happy laughter escaped from around curtained windows in a street that was a place of homes, not boarding houses.

  “It’s halfway down,” Mitchell said, waving vaguely at the eastern side of the street. “The allotments run behind the gardens.”

  Ruth told herself that it was too late to protest. The video was incontrovertible proof that Weaver knew Anderson. But what exactly did it mean?

  They crept along the edge of the allotment. Ruth alternated her gaze between the narrow path with a drainage ditch either side, and the guttering light of a night-time gardener in the far corner of the field.

  Mitchell slowed. Ruth did the same. When he stopped, she saw that Riley was no longer with them. Mitchell pointed a little ahead and over a wire fence to a woman weeding by the light of a candle-lit lamp. Dressed in faded red overalls, and wearing a blue and white bobbled hat against the evening’s slight chill, Ruth didn’t immediately recognise Captain Weaver.

  Mitchell raised a cautioning hand and then pointed at the ground. His mouth moved in a silent command, but it was too dark for Ruth to make out the words. She nodded anyway. Mitchell almost seemed to vanish as he moved stealthily towards the garden.

  Ruth stayed in place for a few seconds, turning her head this way and that, occasionally catching a glimpse of a shadow moving through the undergrowth. Then she inched closer to Weaver. Step by cautious step, with her eyes fixed on the captain. She couldn’t place what, but something was very wrong. She drew her revolver and took another step. And another. She was ten feet, the low wire fence, and a thin row of newly cut raspberry canes away from Weaver when something clinked against stone somewhere near the house. Weaver glanced over her shoulder and then returned her attention to the soil. Ruth didn’t dare move any further.

  There was another sound, of two hard surfaces scraping against one another. Weaver spun and rolled as Mitchell stepped out of the shadows. He had his pistol raised, but the captain had a gun, too, and it was pointing at the sergeant’s chest.

  “You!” she hissed.

  “Put it down,” Mitchell replied.

  “You first,” Weaver said.

  Ruth stepped over the wire fence, her revolver gripped in both hands, her doubt and uncertainty over their actions growing with each step.

  “You’ve got five seconds,” Weaver said.

  “I’ll give you three,” Mitchell replied.

  “Then you’re—”

  But Weaver stopped talking as Ruth pressed the barrel of her gun against the small of the captain’s back.

  “Please lower your gun,” Ruth said.

  Mitchell handcuffed Weaver to a chair in the kitchen and then sent Ruth to the front door. When she opened it, she found Riley waiting on the porch.

  “There’s no one outside,” the constable said, closing the door behind her. “No one’s watching.”

  “Check upstairs,” Mitchell said.

  The house was empty except for the still-silent Weaver.

  “From your lack of questions, you know what this is about,” Mitchell said, after Ruth and Riley had joined him in the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry to see that you’ve involved the cadet in this,” Weaver replied. “And I’m disappointed that you’ve chosen to stick by him, Riley, but I suppose that was the inevitable end to this miserable affair. I thought he was dead. I wished he was dead. But it’s too much to expect people like Isaac will simply crawl off and die. I have to admit that I hoped you would do the right thing when you learned he was behind it. Twenty years too late, certainly, but I did hope.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ruth asked.

  Weaver looked at her, and then at Mitchell. “Ah, so he hasn’t told you? I don’t know what he has told you, but—”

  “Stop,” Mitchell interrupted. “Just stop. All right. Why do you think we’re here?”

  “You’ve discovered that man you call Isaac is behind the murders. The counterfeiting was part of a plot so that he could use that ragtag cult of his to seize power. On learning this, you finally gave in and sided with him, as I knew you would.”

  “An interesting defence,” Mitchell said. “But no. Tell us about Charles Carmichael.”

  “You know his name? I’ll tell you about him if you tell me why he was killed.”

  “I don’t mean the son. I mean the father,” Mitchell said.

  “His father? What does his father have to do with this?” Weaver replied.

  “Maybe we should start again,” Riley said. “We are here because we have evidence that indicates you were the one supplying information to the conspiracy behind the counterfeiters.”

  “What?” Weaver sounded surprised. “Me?”

  They’d got it wrong, Ruth thought. As she looked around the small kitchen with its neat little stove, the woven red placemat on a table set for one, she realised they’d got it very wrong. The lid of the pot on the stove began to rattle. Ruth picked up a cloth and lifted the pot from the heat. She picked up the box of matches and lit the candle on the table. Then she realised the other three were watching her.

  “There’s no point arguing in the dark,” she said. “Captain, perhaps you should go first. You say Isaac is behind this?”

  “I take it you’ve met him?” she replied.

  “I have, but I think it would be quicker, and I would personally prefer it, if for once someone would give an answer that wasn’t a question.”

  “I suspected it from the beginning,” Weaver said. “This crime was committed by someone with access to computers, and by people for whom murder is simply a chore. What I lacked was any proof of his involvement. Until now.”

  Ruth picked up the candle and walked into the living room.

  “What are you looking for?” Mitchell asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said truthfully. The living room was as neat, clean, and homely as the kitchen. There were no old photographs. Those were something people either had a lot of or none at all, depending on whether they wanted to remember the world before. What Weaver had was books. They filled the shelves lining each wall. Even the two armchairs were positioned for reading; one by the window, the other by the fire, with a candlestick placed where a mirror would best reflect the light. It didn’t seem like the home of someone conspiring to bring down civilisation, nor was Weaver acting like one. As Ruth walked back into the kitchen she asked herself whether she trusted Mitchell. Maybe. Up to a point. Did she trust Isaac? Not really. As for Weaver, she wasn’t sure. She glanced at Riley. Yes, the constable was someone that Ruth trusted, though she couldn’t say why.

  “Well?” Mitchell prompted. Ruth realised they were all waiting for her.

  “What we think,” Ruth said, “is that you killed Turnbull, and that you were working with whoever is behind this conspiracy to ensure that the investigation didn’t discover them. We have footage of you from during The Blackout, helping Charles Carmichael escape from prison. You lived next door to the family. You knew the dead man.”

  Weaver blinked. Then she laughed. “Seriously, that’s your evidence? That’s why you think I’m somehow involved in all of this?”

  “You have another explanation?” Mitchell asked.

  “Carmichael was my informant,” Weaver said.

  “Which one, father or son?” Mitchell asked.

  “Both,” she said. “Before The Blackout, I worked for MI5. You know what that was?”
>
  Ruth shook her head.

  “The Intelligence Services. Charles Carmichael Senior was a member of a gang that controlled the flow of cocaine and heroin into southern Britain. We’d arrested most of them, and locked them up, but their gang continued running things from inside the prison. Carmichael was offered immunity and a new life for him and his family if he would turn on the gang and provide us with information. I was just an analyst, but I had the qualifications to work on a rehabilitation project inside the prison, so I became his handler. I moved close to the family to become part of the gang’s periphery. Then The Blackout occurred. I was in the prison when the rioting started. Carmichael saved my life. We got out of the prison, off the island, and back to the mainland, and then we got out of the south. Cue forward a couple of decades and Charles Junior came looking for me. I didn’t know he’d come south, but he’d fallen in with some bad people. He wanted out and offered to trade the information for a new life. He told me about the counterfeiting. He gave me descriptions of Emmitt, Clipton, and the others. What he didn’t tell me was their location. That was his bargaining chip. He disappeared for a while. When he reappeared he said that he’d give me all the proof I needed if I could get him a new life. The next I heard of him was when you found his body. I suspect the banknotes on his person were stolen as proof of what he was saying. It was unnecessary. He could have just told me the address.”

  “Can you prove any of that?” Riley asked.

  “Of course,” Weaver said. “In the living room, there is a shelf with nothing but Charles Dickens. Take the books off and take the back of the shelf out. There’s a safe there. The combination is 7. 19. 39. 12. 1.”

  Riley went into the living room. There was the sound of books being dumped onto the floor, a crack of wood being broken, and then a metallic clicking of a dial being turned.

  “It’s a handwritten transcript,” Riley said, coming back into the kitchen. “An account of a meeting between Weaver and Carmichael, signed at the bottom by both of them. It seems he was giving her information.”

  “It could be fake,” Mitchell said.

  “Oh, for the love of… of course it could be fake,” Weaver said. “But short of summoning Charles’s ghost here to this very room, how else will I prove it? There’s a grey folder with his new identity in it. He was going to work at the radio relay station in Newfoundland. Why else would I have that?”

  “As part of your escape plan for when the crime was complete,” Mitchell said.

  “You honestly think that if I wanted to escape, I’d go to what’s effectively a government facility in Canada?” Weaver snapped.

  “There’s an I.D.,” Riley said, placing a laminated card on the table. Though the unsmiling face was younger, it unmistakably belonged to Captain Weaver.

  “That’s from when I was in MI5. It’s how I got the job in the SIS,” Weaver said.

  “I believe her,” Riley said. She pulled out a key and uncuffed Weaver before Mitchell could object. “And it’s not Isaac,” she told the captain.

  “He is capable of counterfeiting,” Weaver said, rubbing her hands. “And of bringing down everything we’ve built.”

  “Yes,” Riley said. “But if he was behind it, there wouldn’t have been any clues left behind. Mister Mitchell, Captain Weaver, we were all wrong. Perhaps we should start again.”

  Ruth now saw what the commissioner had meant. Weaver was a captain in the SIS, the branch that dealt with these types of crimes, and she’d worked in a similar field before The Blackout. The captain had been investigating the counterfeiting right from the start, and doing it well. By comparison, Mitchell had blundered around, stumbling across clues and forcing them into a shape that proved to be wrong. But not completely wrong, she thought.

  “What about Turnbull?” she asked. “Who killed him?”

  “I have my suspicions,” Weaver said.

  “Which are?” Mitchell prompted.

  Weaver shrugged.

  “No,” Riley said. “Someone in the police is working with the counterfeiters. It isn’t us. It isn’t you. That means we have no choice but to trust each other.” She looked again between Mitchell and Weaver. “At least for tonight. Tomorrow, you two can go back to hating one another, but here and now, the investigation has to come first.”

  “Turnbull was killed by a cyanic compound,” Weaver said, her tone grudgingly reluctant. “A button had been pulled off his jacket and broken open. Inside was a cavity that corresponded to the shape of a pill. On his neck, however, was a small injection mark. When Charles first came to me, he told me that Clipton had bragged that there were members of the police involved. Prior to his death I’d found fifty officers whose expenditures didn’t match their incomes. Of the original fifty, thirty-five had access to the man before he died.”

  “Thirty five suspects? Like who?” Mitchell asked.

  “The officers who worked the cells,” Weaver said. “Or in prisoner transfer and processing, and five who went to interview other suspects. In addition there’s the legal representative from the Home Office, and the trustee who sweeps up. And it’s definitely not her.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “She’s in for assaulting her boyfriend,” Weaver said. “It was absolutely self-defence. We’d drop the charges, but she’s too scared to leave. No, it’s one of our colleagues, I’m certain of it, I just don’t know which one.”

  “And no senior officer had access?” Mitchell asked.

  “No.”

  “We’re looking for someone who knew that Serious Crimes was being assigned to investigate murders before I did,” Mitchell said. “Rumours spread fast, but you can’t plan a murder like Dr Gupta’s in a matter of hours. Whoever it is, has to be someone right at the top.”

  “They wanted the bodies to be found,” Ruth said. “They wanted the money to be found.”

  “What’s that?” Weaver asked.

  “They wanted them to be found,” Ruth said. “The crime scene was staged, you see, and the location was chosen so the killer could guarantee the bodies would be found and reported.” She remembered what Isaac had said. “And all so that we would spend our time trying to find a link between Dr Gupta and the counterfeiting, right? Except there isn’t one, is there?”

  “And?” Mitchell prompted.

  “The whole point of the counterfeiting was to bring down the government, right? And didn’t you say,” she added, speaking to Mitchell, “that Dr Gupta’s death was staged by someone who’d never seen a real murder?” She turned to Weaver. “And didn’t you say that there was someone from the Home Office in the cells?”

  “Turnbull’s court appointed legal representative,” Weaver said. “He came in, saw the man, and got a summary of the deal Mitchell offered him.”

  “And wasn’t it the Home Secretary who asked for Serious Crimes to be turned into a homicide unit?” Ruth asked. “She’s a politician, right?”

  “But she’s in the cabinet,” Mitchell said. “If the government loses the election, she’ll end up in opposition.”

  “When the PM stands down, the Deputy will take over,” Weaver said. “He’ll win the election because of the Prime Minister’s popularity. No one in the party would support a change of leadership unless the election was lost. Without the party losing, she can’t even mount a challenge. But if they do lose, the Home Secretary would be a contender.”

  “Then she’d have to wait five years before taking office,” Mitchell said.

  “If she can arrange all this, no doubt organising a vote of no confidence won’t be difficult,” Weaver said.

  “We’re missing something,” Riley said.

  “Yes, proof,” Weaver said.

  “So how do we find it?” Ruth asked. “Do we go and search her house?”

  “You really haven’t trained her very well,” Weaver said, addressing Mitchell. “No, you don’t hold a gun to someone’s head and ask them to confess, particularly not a cabinet minister. You have to get the Prime Minister’s per
mission first, and then you need to ensure that the people doing the searching are those that you can trust. In this case, the same Marines that I’ve been using ever since I suspected the police department had been infiltrated. What you don’t do, cadet, is rush in with your gun drawn. Mitchell, you and the cadet go and inform the commissioner. I will tell the PM. Riley will get the Marines.”

  “No, Riley will go with you,” Mitchell said.

  “Fine. It will take twice as long, but I’m not going to argue,” Weaver said.

  Chapter 15

  Unmasked

  Mitchell hammered a fist on the commissioner’s door. The wavering candlelight, distorted by the door’s ornate stained glass, moved slowly closer. The door opened.

  “Mitchell? Deering? What’s going on?” the commissioner demanded.

  “It’s a conspiracy, sir, one that strikes at the heart of government,” Mitchell said.

  “That’s a tad over dramatic for this time of the evening,” the commissioner said. He leaned forward and peered at Mitchell. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, you better come in,” he said. “You as well, cadet. Is it just the two of you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ruth said.

  “My wife’s away, and taken the staff with her, but there’s a fire in the study. We might as well be comfortable while you tell me whatever this is about.” He led them through the dark house, towards a doorway lit by a flickering orange glow. “I will say, cadet,” he added, “that when I asked you to keep me informed I wasn’t expecting this.”

  Ruth said nothing as the man ushered them into his study.

  “Let’s have some light,” Commissioner Wallace said, and pressed a button on a desk lamp. The shade began to glow, ever so softly. “An energy efficient bulb,” he said. “It’s nearly the last of the old world stock we found in a warehouse near Woking. It takes a while to warm up, but they don’t burn out as quickly as the ones they’re making these days. Now, please, sit down, and tell me what’s going on.”