Strike a Match 3

by Frank Tayell

  “A few weeks if he was happy with it. Longer if he decided he didn’t like the shape of a cloud. Artists,” she added.

  “Was he acting differently of late?” Ruth asked. “Did anything happen that could have caused an abrupt change in his mood?”

  “Other than his trip to Hastings? No.”

  “Did he talk about what he found there?”

  “Not to me,” Mrs Illyakov said.

  Ruth had already interviewed most of the other employees and found they had less to tell her than Mr Wilson’s boss.

  “What about the detectives he hired to find his family, did he ever talk about them?” Ruth asked.

  “He hasn’t used any for a year,” Mrs Illyakov said. “He was a sad man who led a sad life, which, sadly, has come to a premature end.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Thank you for your time.”

  “If you find anything, do please let us know,” Mrs Illyakov said. “I’ll have Mr Watanabe show you out.” She pressed a button on her desk. A bell jangled above the door. “Don’t worry,” Mrs Illyakov added. “It’s entirely mechanical. The button is attached to a wire, which, in turn, connects to the bell. The only technology we have here is that which is licensed by the government.”

  Ruth gave a smile that didn’t stretch further than her mouth.

  “I do not think he killed himself,” Mr Watanabe said, as he walked Ruth back through the maze of shelves.

  “No?” Ruth asked. “Why not?”

  “He and I were the same,” Mr Watanabe said. “Stranded here without our families. We talked of them often. He would never have given up his search.”

  “You were stranded here?” Ruth asked.

  “I was stranded in England,” Mr Watanabe said. “Ten thousand miles from my home in Shimoda. Mr Wilson was stranded in time, and with each day, only got further from his destination. No, he would not have killed himself.”

  “Do you know what he was working on when he died?” Ruth asked.

  “The pump mechanism for an industrial pressure hose they use in the dockyard. The Navy’s approach has been to patch and mend, but after twenty years, the pump is more patch than mechanism. He had to strip it down to its constituent parts and then rebuild it.”

  “Sorry, I meant do you know what he was painting?” Ruth said.

  “Ah, he told me that it was Julius Caesar’s arrival in Britain,” Mr Watanabe said. “It wasn’t intended to be a historically accurate piece, but representative of how we, as a species, had arrived in a new country though without ever having moved in space.”

  “Oh, that’s fascinating,” Ruth said, though she wasn’t entirely sure she understood what Mr Watanabe meant.

  “I truly thought he was on the road to recovery,” Mr Watanabe said.

  “Do you know where he was getting his inspiration?”

  “It was a section of cliffs to the west of the city,” Mr Watanabe said. “Somewhere not too far from the main road, though I’m not sure precisely where. It was one of his favourite spots. It’s where he painted the picture for me.”

  “He painted your portrait?” Ruth asked.

  “Oh no, he didn’t do faces. I meant he painted a picture he gave to me for my birthday. Fishermen from my home country, landing on a beach. He put in a cherry tree in full blossom despite it being too close to the salt-laden sea. He liked beaches. He said that picture was his masterwork. I took it to the castle. They have an art historian there who cares for the exhibits. She offered me a year’s salary for the picture.”

  “Really?”

  “I wouldn’t sell it,” Mr Watanabe said. “I certainly won’t now.”

  Ruth paused by a bank of floor-to-ceiling shelves. According to the neatly stencilled labels, they contained nuts, bolts, and washers.

  “Mr Wilson painted those, as well,” Watanabe said. “The labels. Each is hand-painted, but each is as identical as if it were printed.”

  Ruth glanced at them, then back at Watanabe. “Weren’t you a co-owner of this business?”

  Mr Watanabe smiled. “Originally. But it is a long way to Japan. You see, I might have been stranded in England, but I always planned to return. I used this business to buy the goodwill of sailors and their captains. Goodwill can only get you so far. I sold my half of the business to Mrs Illyakov so that I could purchase passage on the first ship that went to Japan.”

  “You went home?”

  “Home? I don’t know if I would call it that. When a swallow flies south in the winter, does it say it is returning home, or leaving it? I returned to Japan. My old home was gone. My family were dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “Were there any survivors?”

  “Oh, yes. Some, but no one that I knew.” He gave a thin smile. “I returned to a place I once called home, but having returned, I wished I hadn’t. Each culture on this planet had a myth that recounted the dangers of that very act. I should have heeded them.”

  Ruth thought of her own recent trip to the refugee camp. “And what is it that you do here? I thought you repaired pots and pans.”

  “Ah, no. Well, yes, we do. We perform repairs for the Navy. We make barrels for breweries. We craft tools for the farmers and fisher-folk. Most of all, we give people time.” He gestured at the odd assortment of household items on the workbenches against the exterior wall of the room. A children’s pushchair with a broken wheel was on the nearest. On the one behind was a pedal-powered sewing machine. The bench by the window had the more familiar workings of a clock.

  “Time?” she asked.

  “They called them labour-saving devices. Truly, they saved people time wasted on grinding chores so they could spend it with those they loved. Yes, that is what we do. We repair what is brought in. If it can’t be repaired, we will fashion a replacement within twenty-four hours. Even with Mr Wilson’s death, we must hold ourselves to that. Our word is our bond. It is important above all else.”

  “I know what you mean,” Ruth said.

  “Then you’ll find who killed Mr Wilson?” he asked. “You give me your word?”

  Ruth had spoken automatically, but she couldn’t say no. “Of course,” she said, and instantly regretted it.

  As she walked down Castle Street, Ruth regretted it even more. Before she’d met with Mrs Illyakov, she’d spoken to the other staff. They’d all seemed upset at the loss of Mr Wilson. It was possible that they were just very good actors and there was some petty motive of revenge at the heart of this sad story, but Ruth didn’t think so. Mr Wilson was the proverbial golden egg. Unless she’d completely misunderstood, he’d given away his paintings to anyone who asked for them and for however much they felt like paying. From what Mr Watanabe had said, those paintings were genuinely valuable. If money was the motivation, then someone would have kidnapped Mr Wilson, secreted him in a remote house with paints and canvas, and promises that the best detectives in the country were being hired to search for his family. Killing him meant no more pictures, and no more rainy-day funds for his co-workers.

  No, aside from the fact that they all appeared to have liked Mr Wilson, his co-workers only had a motive to keep him alive. If Mrs Illyakov was correct, Mr Wilson hadn’t hired a tracker in the last year. Thus, it was unlikely that a so-called detective was behind the murder. In short, she’d exhausted the list of obvious suspects.

  She paused by a window to the National Store. Large posters announced the arrival of cinnamon, mace, vanilla, nutmeg, and cloves. Like the Satz! brand of powdered tea, they were manufactured at the chemical works in Twynham. Like the tea, they were available off-ration this Christmas. The newspaper had carried a vivid debate in the letters column about the health impact of these ‘unnatural’ spices. Ruth hadn’t followed the debate, and was reasonably certain that the letter writers hadn’t either. She was simply happy that, though her diet might remain as unvaried as ever, there would be a little more variety in the flavour.

  In the plate glass, she caught the reflection of a figure. Male, bearded,
head bowed, back bent, at least middle aged, possibly older. His clothes were well-mended, fourth-hand, and black except where they were coated in the earthy tones of mud. Only his boots looked relatively new and recently cleaned. His hands were deep in his pockets and his coat was wrapped tight around his throat. She’d seen him before, that morning, near the police station. She’d dismissed him as a tramp who’d come to the city looking for work and a warm bed for the winter. Now she wondered if he was following her.

  Without looking around, she set off, heading down the street until she reached a butcher’s. Pretending to read the sign extolling customers to order their Christmas chicken before it was too late, she looked for the tramp in the shop’s window. The man was gone.

  “No gunshot residue on his hands, and the trajectory is wrong. No, he didn’t shoot himself,” Dr Long said.

  The coroner’s laboratory was in the grounds of the castle, though not in the fortress itself. The small Naval hospital had once been a museum. After the Blackout, during the chaos of those early days when the world was crumbling, the castle had become a focal point for local and ship-borne survivors. Most had required medical care beyond that which the under-supplied, over-worked doctors and nurses could provide. The museum had been used as a morgue until graves could be dug. Now the castle had become the Royal Navy’s command centre for all operations in the pirate-infested European waters. A few small rooms were given over to the city’s civilian administration, with the coroner given an office beneath the hospital.

  “But the gunshot killed him?” Ruth asked.

  “Absolutely,” the doctor said. “I’ve sketches over there for your file. The angle was wrong for it to be self-inflicted. The gun was held about three feet from the man’s head, and fired almost level. The trajectory took the bullet through the left temporal bone, exiting through the parietal bone on the right-hand-side of his head. I’m recording this as a murder.”

  Mr Wilson’s body was covered with a sheet, and for that Ruth was glad. She’d seen more dead people than she could easily remember in the last three months.

  “Was there anything else?” Ruth asked.

  “Not especially,” Dr Long said. “The victim was malnourished, but clean. There were no restraint marks around his wrists or ankles, and no signs of a struggle. Of course, if the killer had a gun, that’s not surprising. Did he paint the pictures that were in his room?”

  “Yes, he was an artist,” Ruth said.

  “A good one,” the coroner said. “I think I’ve heard of him. There was talk of a man who could paint the sea so vividly you could almost smell the salt.”

  “Talk? What kind of talk?” Ruth asked.

  “In the officer’s mess, usually whenever discussion of how a sailor might spend their pay came up.”

  “And you think it was Mr Wilson?” Ruth asked.

  “Ah, I’m giving the wrong impression. It wasn’t a great secret, I was just never that interested. I can ask around to confirm it.”

  “That would be helpful, thank you,” Ruth said.

  “The murder wasn’t done by a sailor, though,” the coroner added.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because if a sailor wanted to stage a suicide, they wouldn’t do it on dry land.”

  There was a welcome chill to the air, an icy breeze that helped clear the laboratory’s chemical smell from Ruth’s mind. Mr Wilson had been murdered, but she’d already known that. She didn’t suspect any of his co-workers, and that left the list of suspects frustratingly blank.

  There were two obvious leads. Hastings was one. The other was that the clue lay in the missing painting. If Mr Wilson had seen something, or someone, and added that to the picture, then it was possible that was why he was killed. It was a long shot, far less likely than Hastings, but a stroll along the cliffs would confirm it. If nothing else, it would clear her mind, and that would be preferable to spending the day patrolling the docks.

  There was a bakery on the other side of the road. Since she was going for a walk in the countryside, she decided that she might as well take her lunch with her. She stopped for a bicycle-powered cart to pass, tipped her hat to the driver, and, as she glanced around to see if there was any other traffic, saw the tramp who’d been following her. He stood in the narrow alleyway between a funeral home and a clockmaker’s. She darted across the street. Her hand dropped to the revolver at her belt.

  “Hoy!” a cyclist yelled. Ruth skipped out of the way. When she looked towards the alley, the figure was gone. Ruth ran into the alley’s mouth. There was no one there, but there was a fresh boot-print in the mud.

  Recent experience had caused her hand to drop to the revolver, training made her draw her truncheon. She eased down the dark alley, around the half-filled bins. There was a side door to the clockmaker’s. It was locked. She kept going to the end of the alley and into the road beyond. There was no sign of the tramp.

  That settled it. Someone was following her, and she’d rather they followed her out into the open country where there would be fewer places for them to hide.

  Chapter 6 - The White Cliffs

  Dover

  “I think I know why you came here to paint,” Ruth said.

  She’d reached the end of the road, or at least the point where the old A20 stopped following the coast and turned inland. Smoke hung above Dover a mile and a half to the northeast. To the southwest lay the ruins of Folkestone. There was nothing in the town but a garrison of Marines guarding the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. Even the chain gangs on rubble-clearance had been evacuated following the attack on Calais. To the south, at the base of the chalk-white cliffs, lay the sea.

  Ruth stood on a battered stretch of concrete that had once been either a lookout point or a small car park. There was such a thick carpet of struggling grass, straggly heather, and scrubby gorse it was impossible to tell which. The overgrowth stretched along the chalky cliffs eastward. To the west was a precipitous drop where the cliffs fell down to a sandy beach dotted with chalk-white stone. She’d inspected two sets of ruins and three lonely lookout points on her short walk from the city, but the smudges of paint at her feet confirmed that this was where Mr Wilson had come.

  Ruth took out her tablet, swiped at the screen, and found the photographs of the crime scene. The chalk-white cliffs might have been the charcoal drawings in his sketchbook, and the drops of green-blue paint on the gravel might match the smears on the pallet. It was hard to be certain.

  “But what are the odds two people were painting at this spot?”

  She took a photograph of the paint, and another of the cliffs. She would compare those with the original evidence when she returned to the station. Then she put the tablet away, and took in the view.

  The gate-captain had confirmed that Mr Wilson left the city every morning for the past two weeks except for the day he spent in Hastings. The names of those coming and going from the city weren’t usually recorded, but Mr Wilson was always waiting for the gates to be opened. Because of that, the gate-captain remembered the victim. He’d even tried striking up a conversation, but Mr Wilson had only mumbled monosyllabic replies while staring at the ground.

  “But if Mr Wilson finished work after midnight, and was at the gate before dawn, he can’t have slept for more than four hours.”

  That told her something about her victim, but not about the murderer.

  A steel-hulled sailing ship, flying Britain’s flag, was a quarter mile out to sea. A dozen fishing boats were trawling in its wake. She didn’t think it was a sight like that which had got Mr Wilson killed. The beach at the base of the cliffs to the west was shallow enough for a craft to make landfall. She imagined raiding pirates coming ashore, and Mr Wilson sketching them. She pictured the raiders looking up, seeing the artist with his easel, and then chasing him back to the city. Except Mr Wilson would have warned the gate-captain. Even if he hadn’t, while no record was kept of those coming in and out of the city during the day, a sentry would have noticed a pirate
war band coming into Dover, and pirates wouldn’t have stopped with only one murder. Besides, the steep cliffs would be nearly impossible to climb. No, the killer wasn’t someone who’d spotted Mr Wilson from down on the beach.

  “But who was it?”

  She took a few more photographs, then glanced through the pictures she’d taken, pausing when she reached the family portrait.

  “You didn’t paint faces,” she said. “Either you couldn’t, or you chose not to. So even if you did see someone doing… doing something, you wouldn’t have been able to paint a picture that identified them. That’s why the sketchbook was left behind. Not because you kicked it under the bed, but because the killer tossed it aside after confirming you hadn’t recorded anything incriminating. Not that it mattered. By then, it was too late. The murderer was in your… your room.” She hesitated in calling it a home.

  That left the question of why Mr Wilson’s work-in-progress had been taken. As a trophy? Because the killer liked art? If the answer was in Dover rather than Hastings, it wouldn’t be found on the cliffs. She turned to face the road. The road, the same road that Mr Wilson had walked up and down for thirteen days out of the last fourteen. The easel would have marked Mr Wilson as an artist. To a stranger, it was a reasonable assumption that such a person could faithfully draw someone’s face.

  “Why would the killer care?”

  That was another unanswerable question to add to an increasingly long list. She left the cliffs, and headed back to the road.

  Closer to the city, the fields were grazed by the beef and dairy herds that supplied the Royal Navy with fresh beef and hard cheese. The livestock was owned by the Navy, and was brought into the city every night. The drovers were on salary, paid a monthly wage to tend them. Ten years ago, the first civilian mayor of the city, as her first act in office, had claimed every scrap of land within walking distance of the city that the Navy and Railway Company hadn’t. She’d had orchards planted, filling the abandoned fields with apples, pears, quinces, damsons, and any other fruiting tree that would grow in the slightly toxic soil. As the orchards didn’t require constant maintenance, no farmers had to spend their days over a mile from the safety of the city’s walls, and so no Marines were needed to protect them except during a few hectic weeks of a late summer harvest. In other words, there was no obvious reason for someone to come down this road so late in the year. Technically it linked Dover to Folkestone, but the Channel Tunnel garrison were supplied by rail. When Ruth had gone searching for the refugee camp in which Maggie had found her, she’d taken the train the ridiculously short distance to Folkestone, then walked from there. The Navy had a training run, but that took them in a gruelling loop to the north of the city.