Strike a Match 2

by Frank Tayell

  “The suspects are waiting. We don’t know what for, but they’ve been there for at least four weeks. We know of five other properties like this. There could be more. It’s fair to assume that as soon as we raid this house, they’ll bring their plans forward and mobilise the rest of their followers. We don’t want a siege. We need arrests, and we need evidence. Can you all see the map? This is a residential area. Hopefully most people are at work, but we can’t guarantee it. To avoid a siege, we’re going to get them to run. You’ll be deployed in the streets leading from the square. Your role will be to catch them as they escape. Arrest them,” he added. “Don’t kill them.”

  “Thank you, Captain Mitchell, I think you’ve made that point,” Weaver said. “Assuming the wind holds, in thirty minutes a hot-air balloon, currently tethered near Highcliffe, will come loose and drift over the city. It will crash in the allotments to the west of Windward Square. The pilot has been directed to fly as low as possible over the house. This should get the suspects into the rear garden. Mitchell, Riley, and Davis will make a loud and forceful entry through the front door. That should get them to run. From the rear garden, they have two possible routes. Here, along Fenwick Road toward…”

  Ruth tuned Weaver out and focused on finding a position where the bulletproof vest would be comfortable. She was coming to the slow realisation that there probably wasn’t one.

  It was two p.m., barely three hours since she and Mitchell had left the embassy. They’d returned to Police House to find Weaver had already mobilised half a regiment of Marines. When Mitchell had given her the address, Weaver had announced that they would storm the house immediately. Nevertheless, Ruth had thought the planning would take hours. Mitchell had disabused her of that by saying it was a decision between two bad choices. They could either contain the suspects in the house and storm it, or flush them out. The first carried the risk that they might have the supplies and weapons to withstand a long siege, the second that they might escape.

  “As soon as we move in,” Mitchell had said, “word will reach Emmitt. He could bring forward whatever this is all building toward. Having half the city’s police tied up in a protracted siege can only help his cause. If Emmitt has at least five other properties with people like that inside, what does it matter if a few of these thugs escape? We need information, and this is the only way we’re going to get it.” It had taken barely ten seconds of deliberation for Weaver to agree with him.

  Ruth looked at the faces of the sixty Marines in the hall. They seemed relaxed. Perhaps they didn’t think a mere eight civilians in a residential street bore much of a threat. As for herself, she wasn’t sure how she felt and knew it didn’t matter. She wasn’t part of the assault, but would be waiting with the rest of the Serious Crimes Unit in a pub to the east of the square. Only when the house was clear would she be allowed inside. That hadn’t stopped Mitchell insisting she wear the bulletproof vest.

  “Any questions?” Weaver asked, bringing the briefing to an end. “Then get to it, and make sure we catch them all.”

  “What are you doing?” Simon asked.

  “Trying to see,” Ruth said. She stood on a table in the pub’s garden, but it only gave her a view of the house opposite. She jumped down, her eyes on the roofs, watching for sight of the balloon. There was a cheer from inside. Ruth sighed.

  “We should be helping,” she said.

  “We’re police. Not soldiers,” Simon said.

  “Nor are we,” the corporal in charge of the platoon said. “We’re Marines.”

  There were eight of them in the pub garden. The moment the balloon was sighted, they would seal the road to stop any gawkers from heading into the square. Only after the all clear was given would Ruth and the rest of the unit be allowed inside the house. She peered up at the sky. The waiting was interminable, and the noise from inside the pub was only making her agitation worse.

  On being told that his establishment was being requisitioned, the landlord had been livid. When they were told that they couldn’t leave, the early afternoon customers had been on the verge of rioting before Constable Kingsley had opened a tab on the police’s behalf. That had quietened them down, at least initially. Now it sounded like they were on the brink of a very different type of riot.

  “I meant we’re not trained for this,” Simon said, speaking quietly so the Marines couldn’t hear. “We’re police. We’re not even that,” he amended. “We’re just two cadets.”

  Ruth waved that away. He was correct, but also very wrong. They were officers of the law. No matter how inexperienced they were, that meant something. Emmitt and his cronies wouldn’t care that they’d only recently graduated from the academy. She was formulating how best to express that idea when there was another yell, not from the pub, but from a few streets further away. The shouting drew nearer. There were occasional words, but it was the tone of bemused surprise that gave a clue as to the commotion’s cause. It was the balloon.

  Ruth had seen them before, hovering around the lighthouse on the coast, and again near Southampton. Those had been seen from a distance and hadn’t given her a true indication of the craft’s size. The balloon was bigger than a house, with the basket underneath almost as large as a horse-drawn carriage.

  A dangling rope brushed against the pub’s roof. Only the calm and calculating expression of the woman peering over the side gave the clue that the balloon’s excursion was no accident. All too quickly, it was over the pub and drifting in the direction of the square.

  “That’s our cue. Get to it!” the corporal of Marines barked at his troops. They grabbed the tables and ran out into the street, using the pub’s furniture to create a crude barricade. It was a strangely disquieting sight.

  “Get Kingsley,” Ruth said to Simon. “There should be police standing out in the street.” She followed the Marines out into the road.

  “Sorry, it’s for your own safety,” the corporal said, raising a hand to stop a pair of pedestrians from trying to get past. The civilians hesitated, shrugged, and turned around. Ruth didn’t know if they would continue about their day, or simply look for an unguarded street. It didn’t matter. She turned to look toward the disappearing balloon. The curve of the street hid Windward Square from sight, and she found herself walking away from the Marines in the hope of getting a better view. Occasional faces peered down from upper-storey windows but, by the time she’d reached the end of the street, no one had come outside.

  She edged around the corner of a pebble-dashed wall until she could see the square and the house with the red door. Mitchell and Riley were walking slowly toward it from the left. Davis was coming from the right. The curtains were closed. During daylight that was unusual, even in a house with electricity. No one pulled them back to see who was outside, not even when Riley opened the gate. The three officers ran up the path to the house. Riley pulled out a crowbar. There was a moment of quiet consultation before the sergeant stuck the crowbar between the lock and frame, and heaved. The lock splintered.

  Mitchell squared his shoulders and kicked the door inward. “Police!” the captain’s voice echoed across the square. “Police! Don’t—” A gunshot drowned out the rest of the sentence. There was another shot. Mitchell charged through the doorway. Riley and Davis followed, close on his heels. There was a flurry of small arms fire, and then a roar from something far louder.

  Ruth turned around, wanting to signal the corporal to bring his Marines to Mitchell’s aid, but they were hidden by the curvature of the road. Without thinking, she ran toward the house.

  When she was halfway across the square, there was another fusillade, this time accompanied by the sound of shattering glass as a first-storey window blew outwards. She reached the gate, and ran up the uneven drive, only remembering to draw her revolver when she was at the front porch. It was still pointing down when a man staggered out of the door. Surprised confusion was fixed on his face as he threw an arm out toward her. Ruth ducked, falling into a crouch as Riley had taught her, then sw
ept her leg out. The man’s own momentum did most of the work. He toppled down the steps, landing heavily on the drive. Ruth quickly cuffed the stunned man, and hoped that Simon, Kingsley, or someone would arrive before the man regained enough sense to stand and run away. She went inside.

  Smoke. Noise. Dust. From somewhere upstairs, she heard a shout halfway between a prayer and a promise, bellowed in a Welsh lilt. There were other shouts, some sounded like pleas, others like orders. Ruth struggled to make sense of it.

  Weird shadows coalesced into the shape of a woman holding a… Ruth ducked as the woman pulled the trigger. The rifle in the assailant’s hands didn’t fire. Ruth rolled to her feet, but whatever instinct had been driving her vanished. In front of her, the woman worked the mechanism of the gun, trying to clear some blockage. Ruth could feel the weight of the revolver in her own hand, yet she was frozen to the spot. The woman wasn’t. She dropped the rifle, fumbling for a pistol at her belt.

  Seemingly from nowhere, Riley appeared, swinging her truncheon in a massive overarm blow that ended at the woman’s head with a dull crunch. The woman crumpled to the floor. Before Ruth could think, let alone thank her, Riley disappeared through a doorway.

  Ruth swallowed, breathed, and bent to check whether the suspect was still alive. There was a shout from a room on the opposite side of the atrium.

  “Drop it!” she heard Mitchell call. Ruth ducked though she knew the command wasn’t directed at her. Captain Mitchell was on the ground with his back against an armchair, frantically reloading. Ruth couldn’t see either Davis or Riley. On the other side of the room, a man was loading a sawn-off shotgun.

  “I surrender,” the man yelled, closing the breach of his double-barrelled weapon. Before Ruth could warn him not to, Mitchell stood up, one hand holding his side, the other his gun, but it was pointing too far to the left.

  Time slowed, and everything went quiet.

  The man dived across the floor, bringing his shotgun to bear on Mitchell. The captain moved, twisting and crouching as he tried to bring his arm around. He was too slow, and the chair would offer little protection against the shotgun’s blast. Ruth’s arm was already up, her revolver pointed straight at the criminal. She pulled the trigger. Again. And again. The man dropped the gun and clutched at his legs. Ruth frowned. She’d been aiming at his chest. Sound returned, and only then did Ruth realise how silent everything had seemed. The man was crying in pain, his sobs interspersed with pleading and cursing. Ruth’s hands began to shake, but she couldn’t lower the wavering barrel. Almost as if it was coming through a thick fog, she heard footsteps behind her. The corporal of Marines pushed past, then another Marine, and another.

  Time sped up. Ruth’s arm dropped to her side. She slumped against the wall.

  “You all right?” Mitchell asked.

  “Yeah. I’m fine,” Ruth murmured.

  “Going to throw up?” he asked.

  “Probably not.”

  “Then get up.” He reached down, and she let him pull her to his feet. “You can put that away,” he added.

  “What? Oh. Yes.” She holstered the gun.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  “Really, I’m fine,” she said, more forcefully than she believed. “What happened,” she continued, wanting to move the subject away from herself. “What went wrong?”

  “They didn’t run. They didn’t even go into the garden. It says a lot that a balloon can scrape the rooftops and they stayed inside. They did move to the back of the house to watch it from the kitchen. That probably saved our lives.”

  “It did?”

  “The automatic weapons were all in the front room,” he said.

  “Automatic… the rifles?” She looked across the atrium to the woman Riley had knocked out. “She tried to shoot me. The gun wouldn’t fire.”

  Mitchell walked over to it, and picked it up. “Safety’s on,” he said. He ejected the magazine and removed the round in the chamber. “An SA80, the standard service weapon for the old British military, though this isn’t the modified L85A2 our Marines use.” He held up a cartridge. “5.56mm NATO rounds. Old-world weapon, old-world ammo. Interesting.”

  “I need some air,” Ruth said.

  As Mitchell bent down to check the pulse of the unconscious suspect, Ruth went outside. More Marines, some carrying stretchers, arrived along with the rest of the squad. She ignored them.

  She might have shot the man in the legs, but she’d been aiming at his chest. What did that mean? And she’d frozen when that woman had aimed the rifle at her. What did that mean?

  “Two dead,” Mitchell said, coming outside to join her. “Both theirs. We arrested six, and I don’t think any got away. Two of them, the two women, are people Riley discovered had gone missing from the Marquis.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “Thank you,” Mitchell said.

  “What for?”

  “For shooting that man. You saved my life.”

  “I… Yes. Right.” She wasn’t sure what else to say.

  “The man will live,” Mitchell said. “He’ll probably limp for the rest of his life, but he’ll be alive.”

  “Good. Great. So, where do we start?”

  “You sure you’re up for it?” he asked.

  “Yeah, no, I’m fine.”

  Mitchell gave her a look filled with scepticism and, Ruth was embarrassed to realise, concern. She squared her jaw, stiffened her shoulders, walked up to the door, and then had to step aside as Constable Kowalski escorted a handcuffed prisoner outside.

  “No sign of Emmitt,” Riley said. She was in the atrium, watching a pair of Marines load the unconscious woman onto the stretcher.

  “I suppose it was too much to hope we’d catch him here,” Mitchell said. He dropped his hand to his side, wincing. “I must have torn the stitches again. Riley, start upstairs. Deering, take the kitchen. I’ll see if anyone has a bandage to spare.”

  The kitchen was at the rear of the house, separated from the garden by a pair of sliding glass doors. They were locked. Ruth leaned her forehead against the door, revelling in the feel of cool glass against her hot skin. Her head was pounding as the last few minutes played over and over, though each time her imagination drew up an alternative, tragic ending. She took a step back, dug her nails into her palm, and spoke aloud in the hope of drowning out those nightmare visions.

  “The garden’s dug over,” she said. “But covered in leaves. Nothing would grow in it. The locked door… where’s the key?” It wasn’t in the lock. She opened the nearest drawer. Cutlery. The next contained kitchen knives and three can openers. The third contained a few pencils and nothing else.

  “No key. Were they locked in? Or just locked out of the garden?” It was a good question. Worried she might forget it, she reached for her notepad, but her hand was trembling too much to manage the button on the pocket.

  “Were they locked in?” she repeated to herself. She slowly turned a full circle and looked out on the garden once more.

  “Okay. What can you see?” she asked herself. “What can you see? Nothing but leafless trees and the walls of nearby houses. No overlooking windows. That makes sense. Neighbours would have noticed if no one had planted vegetables in a garden that size.”

  It was interesting, but it didn’t help. She turned back to the kitchen. “Fitted cupboards. A wood-burning stove with a chimney built into the wall.” She stared at it, knowing that her eyes were seeing something that her brain wasn’t processing.

  “Properly fitted,” she realised. “And so are the cupboards. There’s no discolouration on the walls from where old electric appliances once stood.”

  During the last twenty years, the kitchen had been properly converted. That would have been expensive, but then it was a large house near the centre of town. Property prices were strictly regulated, but this one would still have demanded a small fortune.

  “I wonder if it was paid in twenty-pound notes.”

  She tried a tap. Water came out
. She reached out to touch it. The sensation was marvellous. Suddenly, she realised she wasn’t wearing her gloves. As she reached for them, she found her hands had stopped shaking. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? Should she have recovered so quickly? And behind those questions, she could feel a hundred more queuing up to be asked.

  She threw open the cupboard under the sink. “No bucket. Just pipes,” she said, speaking loudly and quickly. “Some bleach. Dish soap. All neatly ordered.” The cutlery drawers were the same. Everything was in its place.

  “Twelve Plates. Fourteen cups. Eight bowls. Not matching,” she said, staring at the contents of the next cupboard. That wasn’t surprising. Matching crockery was expensive, but then so was running water. She tried the light switch. Nothing happened.

  “Canned beef. Pork. Fish. Carrots. Peas.” Was there a clue to be found in the selection? The next cupboard contained dry goods. “Pasta. Ersatz tea. Dehydrated potatoes.” Now she saw it. The food was the type given in food aid to those overseas communities still struggling to become self-sufficient. That was significant, she thought, though she wasn’t sure why. She found more dried food in the next cupboard, more cans in another. But what did that tell her? What did it mean?

  She realised that she’d been staring at a cupboard door for the last few seconds. On it was pinned a piece of paper divided into a grid with names written into each square. Along the top were chores, along the y-axis were days of the week.

  “Did you find anything,” Mitchell asked. She hadn’t noticed him approach.

  “There’s a rota.” She heard the disbelief in her own voice. “They actually had a rota for the chores.”

  “Let me see.” He peered at it. “Brilliant,” he said as he pulled out the pins. “Now we have their names. Or their first names, but that’s a start.”