Strike a Match 3

by Frank Tayell

  Mitchell held the cartridge up to the light, then walked over to the window. “Do you remember me telling you about why I gave Riley the cottage?”

  “You said it was to give Riley some space.”

  “It was,” Mitchell said. “She needed room to become her own person since, in early adulthood, she was becoming too close a facsimile of myself. That was the reason, not the motivation. It’s difficult being a father of a police officer. As a parent you want to keep your child safe. At the same time, you can’t ask a copper not to go into danger. That doesn’t mean you want to watch it. No, giving Riley some space was the right thing to do, but the reason I then left Twynham, the reason I then went to the continent, that was because I couldn’t bear sitting in my room a few miles from her, not knowing if she’d made it home. There were more than a few nights when I’d take a midnight stroll just to check whether the lights were on in the cottage. Of course, who leaves the lights on when they’ve gone to bed? I couldn’t knock on the door and check, since that would strip away the independence I wanted her to have. So, after the third night in a row when I’d waited from midnight to dawn to confirm she was safe, I went away. I had to accept there are some things I can’t keep her safe from. Yes, it’s difficult being the parent of a copper, though I dare say it’s worse if your child is a soldier. Did you find anything else?”

  “Um. No, not really,” Ruth said. She wasn’t sure whether he meant the story as an apology, or whether he expected her to apologise to him. She decided to focus on the investigation. “There was a handwritten ledger. It’s got a lot of names and dates, then a list of numbers. Always one to ten, never anything higher. It was hidden behind the bookshelf. Some of the names appear quite often, others only once. I wondered if it might be gambling debts or something. Other than that, there’s a weighted walking stick by the door, but there are no other weapons unless you count a clasp knife.”

  “What do you make of our victim?” Mitchell asked.

  “My first impression? That he was living well beyond the means of a barman. These are nicer rooms than the apartment above the police station in Dover. Um, he read a lot. Mostly fiction, though he had some history books as well. All are about war. British wars, too. Mostly paperbacks, and mostly well read. There are no electronics. No tablets or computers. No secret hiding places, other than that false bottom to the wardrobe. Not that I’ve found yet, anyway.”

  “What about money?” Mitchell asked.

  Ruth pointed to another evidence bag. “About fifty pounds.”

  “That’s a lot, but not an unreasonable amount. Nothing that would tie him to any other part of the wider crime?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm. Weaver interviewed him after your abduction. It was only a preliminary conversation. When you were found, our focus shifted to Longfield, and then to Emmitt. Grenville Makepeace was thirty-three years old, according to the information he gave Weaver. Orphaned by the Blackout, he drifted from place to place, doing the best he could. The mines, the railways, he even did a bit of fishing until he got the job in the pub five years ago. He was an assistant manager and worked there as often or as little as was needed. That’s what he told Weaver. The question is how much of it we should believe. What she was able to confirm is that the pub is owned by the brewery, and that they only care about receipts. They have a regional manager for the entirety of Twynham, but otherwise Makepeace was left to run the pub in peace.”

  “He was thirteen during the Blackout,” Ruth said. “Then he wasn’t in the military, so how did he learn to shoot?”

  “My money is on Emmitt,” Mitchell said. “I know what he said, that if he’d known a sniper he wouldn’t have shot the prime minister himself, but I don’t believe him. Someone like Emmitt would want all the glory of that crime for themselves.” He held the round up to the light. “Unless Emmitt no longer trusted him.”

  “It’s always more questions, isn’t it?” Ruth said.

  “Always,” Mitchell said. “But we’re getting to the point where they turn into answers.” He put the cartridge back into the rifle-case, and closed the lid. “I showed the photograph of his face to Mrs Foster. She confirmed that he was Mr Squires. Riley took the picture to the telegraph office and spoke to the clerk who’d seen the limping man loitering around. He remembered the small scar above his eye, the one that runs through his eyebrow. More importantly, another clerk recognised the photo as being the same man who sent the message to the warder last night. It’s not exactly the official way to get a positive I.D., and it wouldn’t stand up in court. By all accounts, the clerk almost had a heart attack when he saw the tablet. At any other time, we might get in trouble for that, but not today. No, not today.”

  “Has something else happened?” Ruth asked.

  “A little after one o’clock this morning,” Mitchell said, “the pirates in Calais launched an assault on our garrison. They were repulsed, but heavy casualties were taken on our side. You know how I feel about coincidences, and this doesn’t feel like one of those. The fire-chief went into the courthouse. She was only able to give the briefest inspection. The fire wasn’t completely out, and the lower levels are filled with smoke, but she confirmed that there was a body in Emmitt’s cell. More importantly, the other cells were empty.”

  “You mean Adamovitch escaped?” Ruth asked.

  “And an hour later, there was an attack in France. A few hours after that, Makepeace was murdered. There are many possible theories we can derive from that as to their future plans, but what seems clear is that the fire and the escape were timed to take place just as we were forced to commit more of our resources to holding the line in France. This had to have been planned long in advance. In fact, I’d say this attack was what Emmitt was waiting for. Perhaps he even planned the fire so that he could escape under its cover.”

  “But, instead, Adamovitch killed him,” Ruth said. “This is why Yanuck was shot. Adamovitch wanted to be put in a cell opposite Emmitt just so he could make sure the man died.”

  “And then Adamovitch escaped, and did so after we had to commit even more of our finite resources to holding back the pirate onslaught. We will hold them back, and we will defeat them, but Calais will take priority over searching for a murderer.”

  Ruth frowned. “Makepeace shot Yanuck. That means he and Adamovitch were working together. I guess it was Adamovitch who killed Makepeace. That still leaves the question of who sent that cryptic telegram from Dover warning that Adamovitch was on the train.”

  “And we’ll find out who sent it when we get to Dover,” Mitchell said. “I asked Rebecca Cavendish to keep a train ready for us. At the same time, are we really likely to find this person still there?”

  “True. Um… so Makepeace died because he was another loose end? At this rate, Adamovitch won’t have many friends left.” She looked around the room. “It really is a nice flat. I mean, really nice. I suppose he paid for it by being a killer for hire. In which case, why was he working in that pub if it wasn’t for the money? It can’t simply have been on the off-chance that they could set up the abduction of a police officer.”

  Mitchell’s frown slid into a smile. “A very good point. Let’s got and take a look at The White Hart.”

  The pub was shuttered. The doors were padlocked. A note pinned to the front said that the licence had been revoked and that a hearing would be held on the 9th January where evidence could be given in appeal.

  “I didn’t know they closed the pub,” Ruth said.

  “It was after the abduction,” Mitchell said. “Weaver conducted the interviews, and spoke to everyone who worked here. She spoke to a few of the regulars, too. There was nothing obviously illegal going on, but I think she wanted a little retribution of her own.” He pushed at the doors. “Seems secure.” He fished in his pockets until he found a small bundle of keys.

  “You have a key for this padlock?” Ruth asked.

  “The government had them made in bulk, all to fit the same key. About six years ago
, before we standardised the locks, we were locked out of one of the grain silos. You should ask Weaver about it.”

  “You mean she lost the key?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Mitchell said. He frowned. “The key doesn’t fit. Odd. Must be one of Weaver’s. I suppose that makes sense, it wasn’t as if we trusted our colleagues after your abduction.” He put the key ring away and took out a small leather case of an identical style to that which Isaac had used when breaking into the barman’s home. Five seconds later, the lock was open.

  Inside, the air was stale, acrid with a sour tang. Mitchell pulled a compact flashlight out of his pocket and turned it on. Dust danced in the beam, and reflected off the grimy mirror behind the bar. Ruth’s own torch was still in Dover. Instead, she took out the tablet, and turned on the light.

  Mitchell raised an eyebrow. She shrugged. “It’s the most useful thing on it,” she said. “Makes for a great reading light.”

  An echo of a smile traced across his lips. “We can afford an hour looking here before we catch our train. Where would you start?”

  “It’s hard to say, isn’t it?” Ruth said. “I mean, what are we actually looking for? Why would an assassin work in a pub?”

  Mitchell shone the light at the door, then the walls. “The obvious reason is that he was using it to meet clients, but if he was a hitman, where are the bodies? The last few months aside, murder isn’t so common we have a stack of cold cases waiting to be solved.”

  “There are casks behind the bar,” Ruth said. “Eight wooden barrels and three square wooden boxes. It says Old Victory on this label. There’s a hatch at the side. Ah, there’s a metal barrel inside, stamped with the Eden Brewery.”

  “That’s in Kent, near the border with Sussex,” Mitchell said. “It’s at the junction where the railway branches. One line heads to Hastings, another continues to Dover. There’s not much there except the brewery, a few farms, and a repair yard for the Railway Company.”

  Ruth tapped the barrel. “It’s still full. Okay, so what if Makepeace was a hitman, and the bodies were destroyed, or hidden in an old house somewhere?”

  “He was a sniper,” Mitchell said, as he lifted the dartboard from its nail. “The modus operandi is to kill people from such a distance that you can vanish before pursuit reaches you. If he aimed to hide the bodies, and thus the crime, he wouldn’t shoot his victims. He’d trick them into coming to a secluded spot close to where he planned to hide the body. Why would someone hire a sniper to do that?”

  “But just because he shot Yanuck doesn’t mean that he always used a rifle,” Ruth said.

  “True, but we have to extrapolate from the evidence we have,” Mitchell said, as he turned his attention to the chairs and tables.

  “There’s a few bottles behind the bar, and a few gaps in the dust,” Ruth said. “I think someone helped themselves. Maybe that’s why Weaver changed the padlock.”

  “Maybe. Any fingerprints?”

  “Just smears,” Ruth said.

  “Well, whoever it was, they didn’t sweep the floor,” Mitchell said. “Check the register.”

  It was one of the new wooden tills with a cash-drawer. “It’s unlocked, but there’s money in it.” She leafed through the notes and stamps. “Nearly forty pounds. Whoever took the bottles left the money. Or some of it. That’s odd.”

  “Maybe a supplier who’d not been paid and saw taking the bottles as repossession. Most likely, whoever took the bottles was someone who didn’t need the cash.”

  “Like Makepeace? So why did he come back here, because it can’t just have been to get a free drink.”

  Mitchell crossed to the fireplace and peered up the chimney. “Nothing here. Anything under the bar? Behind the mugs? Any account books, order forms, anything like that?”

  “A receipt book, a few delivery notices,” Ruth said. “Nothing here that doesn’t seem to belong, but it’s hard to tell if anything’s missing. Emmitt chose this pub for a reason, didn’t he?”

  “Did he?” Mitchell said, reaching up into the chimney. He pulled the lever that would close the hatch, sealing the flue. Soot cascaded down as he leapt backwards.

  “Everything that happened was done for a purpose,” Ruth said. “Or maybe it’s better to say that Emmitt planned for everything to go wrong. Like, we were meant to find those counterfeiters, though perhaps not quite as soon as he thought. Commissioner Wallace was meant to be caught, but not in his house by us.”

  “And probably not alive,” Mitchell said. “Go on.”

  “We were meant to find Ned Ludd. We weren’t meant to capture Emmitt himself, but he’d already worked out his appeals in case we did. He had plans and backup plans and reasons for everything, so there had to be a reason that he chose this pub for that public meeting.”

  “Perhaps,” Mitchell said, shining the light on the ceiling. “The meeting may have served another purpose, but it was primarily so that a police officer could be lured to a trap and abducted. Rupert Pine, the MP, was the one who told Riley about the meeting because Longfield was blackmailing him. In which case, yes, this pub was chosen as the location for a reason, and I wonder if it was because of Makepeace. Adamovitch wasn’t important to Longfield. Remember how Emmitt described the butler?”

  “A man who listened at keyholes.”

  “Exactly. Expendable, and perhaps Makepeace was the same, Emmitt no longer needed or trusted him. Perhaps Adamovitch learned of this by listening at one of Longfield’s doors, and so he went to recruit Makepeace. They both knew that they would be discarded, arrested, or killed like so many of the other pawns in Emmitt’s game. That is why they decided to act.”

  “If the plan was to abduct a police officer, Emmitt had to have known that, afterwards, you would tear down the city to look for… well, for me.”

  “And I was halfway through that job when I got word that Isaac had rescued you,” Mitchell said. “We would have torn this pub apart. As it was, the investigation shifted. You led us to Simon Longfield, that led us to his mother, and that took us to the New Forest and to Emmitt. If we’d searched Makepeace’s home, we’d have realised that he was up to something. But we didn’t because the investigation had moved on.”

  “So Emmitt wanted us to arrest Makepeace?” Ruth asked.

  “He had to,” Mitchell said. “That public meeting could have been held anywhere. Well, I think we’ve found our motivation as to why Makepeace would work with Adamovitch to ensure that Emmitt died. We’ve got about forty minutes, let’s try the kitchen.”

  Ruth followed him through the door and into the back room.

  “I wouldn’t want to eat anything cooked in here,” she said. “The walls are practically shining with grease, except those that are covered in soot. I don’t think they ever cleaned the saucepans.” She opened a cupboard and quickly closed it again. “And they didn’t even wash the bowls. Not properly.”

  Mitchell had his light fixed on the encrusted stove. “Why did Emmitt want us to search this place? What is it we’re meant to find?”

  Ruth shone the tablet’s light around the kitchen, but nothing unusual jumped out at her. “The cellar, then?” she asked. “I mean, if I was hiding something, I wouldn’t want it to be somewhere that a customer might stumble across it. On the other hand, someone came back to the pub after it was closed. How much do you want to bet that was Makepeace, and he was taking away whatever it is we’re looking for?”

  Mitchell checked his watch. “We’ll check the cellar, and if we find nothing, we’ll send for Weaver. She can get the cadets to take this place apart brick by brick while we go to Dover. Whatever it is, it might prove Makepeace was guilty of a crime, but it won’t help us find Adamovitch.”

  Access to the cellar was through a hatch in the corridor between the kitchen and the bar. It led to steep stairs at the side of which were a pair of rails down which barrels could be rolled.

  “There’s a few inches of water at the bottom,” Mitchell said, when he reached the bottom of the st
eps. “I say water. The smell tells me we’re dealing with stale beer. That’s the problem with these old pubs, there’s no pump to drain the sump.”

  Ruth followed him down. The cellar extended beyond the front of the pub, to run for three feet under the pavement. Underneath the street was another hatch that was bolted from the inside. Like the stairs they’d just descended, there was a set of rails down which barrels could be rolled.

  “That’s odd,” Ruth said. “Why do they need two ways to get barrels in and out? Why don’t they just bring them in through the bar?”

  Mitchell followed her light. “Why indeed,” he said. He walked over to the hatch, and abruptly stopped underneath the pavement hatch.

  “Don’t move,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just don’t move,” he said. Slowly he lowered the light to shine on his feet. There were three inches of mostly-water around his feet. Added to the angle from where Ruth stood near the stairs, she couldn’t see what the light shone on.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “What are you standing on?” he asked.

  “Concrete, I suppose.”

  “Look down and check.”

  She shone the tablet’s light at the murky water covering her feet. “It’s hard to tell,” she said.

  “Then feel around with your hands,” he said. “Do it carefully. Cautiously.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said slowly and calmly, “I just stood on a metal plate. When I did, it clicked. Attached to the plate are two wires that run along the wall to somewhere over to the left. About twelve hours ago, someone burned down the courthouse with an incendiary. Now, what are you standing on?”

  “Concrete,” she said after a brief examination. “Just concrete.”

  “Okay. I want you to step back onto the stairs. Don’t touch anything or step on anything that you didn’t when coming down here, understand? Go upstairs. Go outside. Flag down a passer-by, and send them to get Weaver. Then clear the street. When she comes, send for… I don’t know, but there has to be someone in the Navy or Marines who knows about explosives.” Slowly, he fished out his tablet. “Damn, no answer. Are you still there?”