Strike a Match 3

by Frank Tayell

  It wasn’t as comfortable as her bed in Dover. With Maggie snoring almost loud enough to make the windows rattle, it certainly wasn’t quieter. The room was warm, though.

  Ruth lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, running through the events of the day, trying to find a pattern in the chaos.

  “It’s me,” a familiar voice said.

  Ruth opened her eyes, and sat up. The voice came from the hallway. And then came another.

  “You should have rung the doorbell,” Riley said.

  “I didn’t want to wake up the entire house.” Now she was more awake, she recognised the voice of Captain Mitchell.

  Ruth pushed herself to her feet and went out into the hall. Riley sat in her wheelchair, a sawn-off shotgun in her lap. Mitchell stood by the open door, a tired smile on his face.

  “What’s going on?” Ruth asked.

  “I heard someone trying to break in,” Riley said.

  “I wasn’t breaking in,” Mitchell said as he closed the door. “I lost my keys when I fell in a bog in the Midlands. I was trying not to wake Riley because—”

  “Henry?” Maggie asked, coming down the stairs. “What’s going on? Anna, why are you holding that gun?”

  “There’s been another murder,” Mitchell said. “Five of them, to be exact. I came for Ruth.”

  “Five murders? Who?” Ruth and Riley asked at the same time.

  “Do you remember Ned Ludd?” Mitchell asked.

  “The mad saboteur that Ruth caught,” Riley said. “The telegraph was cut in five places. She stopped Ludd from cutting it in a sixth.”

  “Is he dead?” Ruth asked.

  “No, he’s fine,” Mitchell said. “But you remember that house we found, the one that he and his group were using prior to the sabotage? There was evidence suggesting that, with Ludd, five others were there. They’re the ones who are dead.”

  “It happened this evening?” Riley asked.

  “No. About twenty-four hours ago,” Mitchell said. “The bodies were discovered at around ten in the morning. The police were called. Weaver took charge of the case, but didn’t draw the line between them and Ned Ludd until after she heard of Yanuck’s assassination. She checked through the fingerprints you took from the house, Ruth, and then she called me. Now I’m here.”

  “And why are you here?” Maggie asked.

  “Ruth collected evidence from the original crime scene,” Mitchell said. “I need her to come and take a look.”

  “I’ll come, too,” Riley said.

  “You won’t,” Maggie said.

  “Actually,” Mitchell said quickly. “It’s a farm cottage about a mile outside the city. There’s too much mud for that wheelchair. I’m sorry, Anna.”

  Riley stared at Mitchell for a long moment. “Fine. Then I’m going to the telegraph office. Ruth said that a message was sent from Dover.”

  “I’ve got Sergeant Kettering looking into it,” Mitchell said.

  “In Dover, so I’ll look into it here. Either I’m a copper, or I’m not,” Riley said. “And if I’m not, then why am I still here in Twynham?”

  Ruth sensed she was witnessing the tail end of some long-running argument.

  “All right,” Mitchell said.

  “I better get dressed,” Maggie said.

  “Why?”

  “You’re not going alone, Anna,” Maggie said.

  Chapter 12 - Five Bodies

  13th November, Twynham

  The crime scene was only a mile outside the city, but it took them half an hour to reach it. A thick frost had fallen during the night, turning the poorly repaired tarmac into a rink-slick road. Mitchell and Ruth stopped their bicycles next to a pair of police cadets. Ruth vaguely remembered them from the academy, but couldn’t recall their names. Judging by their baleful glares, they clearly remembered her. Ruth was confused by the unwelcoming stares until she remembered that she was a constable, and they wouldn’t reach that rank until December at the earliest.

  “Watch our bikes,” Mitchell said, leaning them against the hedge.

  Ruth followed him under the rope, and into the crime scene.

  The cottage was at the very edge of a working farm, built on a plot that had once been part of a field. Ringing the cottage was a lush hedge far younger than that which separated the field from the road. Entry to the cottage was through a three-foot-high wooden gate, and that was being guarded by a puce-faced cadet whose name Ruth did remember. Grace Harding, a quiet young woman who’d passed out during two consecutive anatomy classes.

  “Why are there so many cadets?” she asked the captain. “Where are the police officers?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Mitchell said. “After Commissioner Wallace, then Longfield, then Pollock, a lot have been dismissed or sent to one of the new, and very isolated, radio-repeater stations. We don’t know whom we can trust. The cadets are being rushed through their training because the alternative is relying solely on the military and railway police.”

  That shone a very different light on Mitchell’s one-man mission to hunt down the last of the conspirators. It hadn’t been out of pride, or a sense of his own brilliance, but because he no longer trusted anyone to help. But that light added a shadow to her being sent to the relatively quiet posting in Dover. Despite the murder of Wilson and capture of Adamovitch, that had been an indulgence the country couldn’t afford.

  “Hi, Grace,” Ruth said, as they drew near the cadet. “Is it bad?”

  The cadet nodded, swallowed, shook her head, and stepped aside.

  Assistant Commissioner Weaver stood on the path that led from the road to the house.

  “Mitchell, Deering,” Weaver said by way of greeting. Dawn was barely breaking, but even by its sepulchral light, the assistant commissioner looked tired. “Have you been briefed?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ruth said, though it had been brief. “Inside the cottage are the murdered bodies of the five saboteurs who worked with Ned Ludd.”

  “That’s my current theory,” Weaver said. “Take a look, I want to know if you recognise anything or anyone. Mitchell, a word?”

  As the captain went to speak to the assistant commissioner, Ruth walked up the path towards the house.

  The cottage was a two-storey dwelling. The walls were covered in flaking milk-brown paint, but with red brick around the narrow windows and narrower door. The frames and door were painted a vivid green. Recently, too, judging by the sheen. As she stepped closer, she realised that the paint on the walls wasn’t flaking but had been peeled back as if someone was preparing it to be re-plastered. The windows were clean, the gutters were clear, and the path had been swept from the gate all the way up to the front door, which was held open by the foot of the first corpse.

  Ruth took out her notepad, using the act of writing as a lens with which to obscure the violence of the scene.

  “The victim’s female, twenty years old or thereabouts,” she murmured as she scrawled a brief note in her pad. “Dressed in a rough-cut tunic and tubular trousers. Similar to the clothes Ned Ludd made for himself, though these are of a better cut. Rope sandals on her feet, not clogs like Ludd wore.” She took another look at the body. “She was shot twice. Once in the stomach, once in the chest. The wounds are about six inches apart.”

  “I’d say the stomach wound was first,” Mitchell said.

  Ruth jumped. She hadn’t realised the captain was behind her.

  “From the way she’s fallen,” Mitchell continued, “the shooter was standing roughly where you are. The victim opened the door. The shots were fired from the hip. No casings, the killer must have picked them up, but I would guess at it being a handgun rather than a rifle. Do you recognise her?”

  “No,” Ruth said.

  “Me neither,” Mitchell said. “There are four others.”

  Ruth nodded, and carefully stepped over the dead woman. The front door led to an uncarpeted hall with three doors off it and a staircase leading up. The door to the left was open. Another body lay on the
floor just inside the room.

  “He was shot in the back,” Ruth said, stepping over the corpse. “Two shots— no, three, I think. All close together. He’s dressed like the first victim, in coarse but tailored cloth.”

  “They were limited by materials more than they were by their own skill,” Mitchell said. “That looks like hemp. It’s cheap and common enough, used in sailcloth and rope. We could get one of the labs at the university to do a fibre analysis. We might be able to trace it back to the store that sold it, but that would take weeks, and I’m not sure how it would help.”

  “He was shot in the back, so he heard the first woman being murdered,” Ruth said. “Maybe he saw the killer. He started running, but didn’t get far.” She bent down and carefully moved some of the long, lank hair from the victim’s face. “No, I don’t know him.”

  The room had another door. It led to a dining room and two more victims. One lay slumped over the table, a bowl of spilled gruel underneath his fallen head. The other lay on the floor, her arm outstretched, almost as if she was reaching for something. The fifth and final victim had fallen in a heap by the back door.

  “She almost made it outside,” Ruth said.

  “Weaver said the back door had been sealed. Wedges have been rammed into the frame,” Mitchell said. “The killer did that before he knocked at the front door. He made sure they couldn’t get out before he began. Hmm.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. He turned around, taking in the small kitchen. “It’s something on the edge of thought. Give me a moment, I want to look upstairs.”

  Ruth opened the cupboard under the sink, then the one above the counter by the window, but her gaze kept returning to the body by the back door.

  “Why were you here?”

  The victim didn’t answer. The cupboards gave no clue, either. There were bowls and cups, though no two of the same design. There was a sack of flour, another of oats, and a third containing potatoes. The pantry’s shelves were filled with wizened carrots, radishes, and a few onions. There was no sweetener, no powdered tea or coffee, no canned food, or anything else that had come from or passed through a factory. There was nothing except that which grew out of the ground.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs. Mitchell came back into the kitchen.

  “You don’t recognise any of the victims?” he asked.

  “No, sir. This happened while they were eating breakfast. That means the back door was sealed during the night, but the killer waited until they were all awake.”

  “Awake and likely to all be downstairs,” Mitchell said. “I suppose, at night, there would be the risk of someone jumping out a window and escaping into the darkness. This way, he knew he’d get them all.”

  “Or her,” Ruth said, remembering the woman who’d tortured her.

  “No, I think it was him,” Mitchell said. “Mrs Foster said the rent was paid by a man.”

  “Who’s Mrs Foster?” she asked.

  “The woman who runs the farm this cottage is built on. She discovered the bodies. So, they were killed at breakfast time. There are a couple of candles upstairs, but no electricity to the property.”

  “You wouldn’t expect there to be, not if these five were anything like Ned Ludd.”

  “And you don’t recognise any of them?”

  “I only got a brief glimpse of three of them before they ran away and I arrested Ned Ludd,” she said. “It could be any of them, or none.”

  “Hmm. Ned Ludd and three others were cutting a telegraph line in the woods. That spot was chosen because Simon Longfield knew you went along that track every day. You were meant to discover them sabotaging the telegraph. We don’t know if you were meant to catch them, but when we found their lair, there was evidence of six people having lived there for a few nights.”

  “And it was far worse than this place,” Ruth said. “I mean, this cottage is somewhere I’d want to live in. That place, I’d only want to run away from it. And that was key, wasn’t it? I mean, that they ran away but Ned Ludd couldn’t because he was wearing those wooden clogs he’d made for himself. They were students and employees of the university, weren’t they?”

  “Some people went missing from the university,” Mitchell said. “We can ask someone from the vice-chancellor’s office to try to identify these people, but no one there’s been able to identify Ned Ludd. You stopped Ludd cutting that section of telegraph, but the line was cut in five other places and almost simultaneously. Up until now I’ve assumed that the other lines were cut by those followers of Emmitt who died during the confrontation in the New Forest. What I’m wondering is whether we’re going to find five more houses like this one, each filled with the bodies of misguided saboteurs. Did you find anything else?”

  “There’s some vegetables in the cupboards, flour and oats, but no tea or sweetener or anything else that came from the chemical works.”

  “Interesting, but I’m more interested in the lights, or the lack thereof. At this time of year, it gets dark around four p.m., and with so few candles, they would have gone to bed early. That means they would have been up long before first light. No candles have burned down to the stub, so unless our killer blew them out, the murder took place around dawn, but the door was blocked in the middle of the night. To put that another way, the murder happened before we left Dover.”

  “Then you think this is connected? I mean, of course it’s connected, but do you think this was the same person who shot Yanuck?”

  “I hope so,” Mitchell said. “Otherwise we have two assassins on the loose. Of course, it means that the warning message to the killer wasn’t sent from Dover just before our train left, but the night before, a few hours after we’d arrested Adamovitch and the smuggler. Go and keep Weaver occupied. I want a moment to think.”

  Ruth found the assistant commissioner in conversation with a middle-aged woman. By her rubber boots, waxed hat, and much-repaired dungarees stained with every shade of mud, Ruth took her to be a farmer.

  “Ah, Constable Deering,” Weaver said. “This is Mrs Foster, the owner of this cottage, and the farm and fields either side.”

  “Ma’am,” Ruth said.

  “It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Mrs Foster said. “Do you know who did it?”

  “Investigations are continuing,” Weaver said. “The constable has some questions for you. Excuse me.”

  Weaver headed for the house, and Ruth had no way to stop her. Deciding that Weaver’s feud with Mitchell wasn’t her business, but that the murders were, she turned to the farmer.

  “This must be a very trying time for you, ma’am,” Ruth said, “but there are a few questions, and the answers will help us catch whoever did this.”

  “Of course. I’ll help any way I can. They were such nice boys and girls. That’s all they were really, children. Their whole lives were ahead of them. It’s so cruel, so wicked.”

  Ruth nodded. “What time did you discover the bodies?”

  “Yesterday morning. Around ten,” Mrs Foster said. “That’s when I brought them their milk. I did that everyday. It was included in the rent. Milk every day, bread and vegetables every other day, a sack of oats, wheat, and potatoes once every week. They were good tenants. Very good. I should have paid them for all the work they did.”

  “What kind of work?” Ruth asked.

  “They cut back the brambles, cleared the lawn, repaired the roof, repainted the doors, and were about to start on the walls. The cottage was a tumbledown shell when they moved in. I wouldn’t have rented it out except we were that desperate for money. It was a bad harvest. If it weren’t for the fixed prices the government pays for the supplies they send out as food-aid, we’d have gone under.”

  “And how long have they been renting the cottage?” Ruth asked.

  “They’ve been living here for about a month,” Mrs Foster said. “But I’ve been renting it to Mr Squires since late September. The twentieth, I think. No, it was the twenty-first. I
remember because that was the day I got a letter from Terry. My son, he’s gone to the mines, you see.”

  “And who is Mr Squires?” Ruth asked.

  “As I told the commissioner, I’m not too sure,” Mrs Foster said. “He said he worked at the university. He paid in cash, up front, for six months.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Oh, he was medium height. Five-ten, give or take. Maybe six foot. White. English, I think. About forty, maybe. Or maybe younger. Or… older, I suppose, although he wasn’t old. He had a thick black beard, but I thought it looked dyed, though I don’t know where he would get the dye from.” Her hand went to her own greying hair. “He had a limp, I remember that. Not that it stopped him from walking. He walked to the farm, and left on foot. No horse, no bicycle. I thought that was odd. Then again, it was odd that he wanted to rent the cottage.”

  “What did he say he wanted it for?” Ruth asked.

  “He said that his nephew was going to take the cottage for the winter. Him and some friends. They were hermits, Mr Squires said. He said they wanted to eschew the fripperies of modern life. He said let them see what a winter without electric light was like, and then they’d change their ways. I… well, he paid cash, and we needed the money. No one turned up for a month, and then, one day, I saw that they were here.”

  “And you began bringing them milk and bread?”

  “Mr Squires came by that evening. He asked me to make sure they didn’t starve. He said he’d check up on them. Mayhap he did, but I never saw him again.”

  “Do you have an address for Mr Squires?” Ruth asked. “Any way of contacting him?”

  “No,” Mrs Foster said. “I didn’t think to ask. I’m ashamed of that, I really am. I should have asked, but he paid in cash and, as I say, we were desperate.” She wrung her hands together in obvious distress. Ruth took her arm and led her along the path to the gate, and back out onto the road where the bodies weren’t visible.

  “Do you know which of the victims was his nephew,” she asked.

  “I don’t, I’m sorry. They were polite when I brought them the food, but they took it at the gate. The only times we talked were when they’d ask for tools or paint. I offered them work in the farm. I mean, look at this place. You didn’t see what it was like before, but they knew what hard work was, and they didn’t mind. They didn’t ask for payment, or even thanks.”