Strike a Match 2

by Frank Tayell

  The headline ‘What Faces Now?’ stood at the top of a debate the editor, Diane Goldstein, was having with herself over who should replace that long dead monarch on the new banknotes. Ruth turned to the next page and the next, but they were filled with the usual good-news-on-bad-days stories. When she reached the back page, and its mixture of sporting defeats, she looked up. Mitchell was watching her.

  “There’s no mention of the assassination attempt,” she said.

  “No. That’s being held for the end of the week. You see the line, second paragraph from the end on the front page.”

  Ruth looked for it. “Some details have been withheld for operational reasons, but are expected to be released over the coming days,” she read aloud. “That’s the assassination?”

  “And Wallace’s part in it,” Mitchell said. “It was Hunter’s idea.”

  “He’s the journalist? He didn’t mention you, or Serious Crimes.”

  “Because I told him not to. He has rooms in the same pub I lodge in. I more or less dictated the story to him.”

  “You mean you came up with that gun battle?” she asked.

  “That,” he said, “is an almost entirely accurate account of an incident in Guildford that Riley and I got into a few years back.”

  “And the bit with the collapsing skylight?”

  “It actually happened.”

  “Oh.” Ruth quickly skimmed through the account again and decided she didn’t believe him. “But you gave Weaver all the credit.”

  “Sure. As an assistant commissioner, her rank makes her a public figure. The rest of us need to be able to lurk in the shadows. As for the assassination attempt, Hunter thinks it’s best we lead up to it. Goldstein, the editor, thinks there’s only one front page per issue, and doesn’t want to waste a headline like ‘Assassination’ somewhere inside.”

  “That doesn’t seem right. People should know the truth. All of it.”

  “Even if it’s printed in the paper, it doesn’t mean they’ll read it. Even if they read it, it doesn’t mean people will believe it, let alone know it. But I take your point. However, this is the compromise we have to accept.”

  “The job ad’s a nice touch,” Ruth said. “It makes it seem like things can’t be too bad.”

  “We play down the danger our civilisation faces and thus is normality maintained. When people aren’t discussing the gunfight, they’ll talk about who should appear on the banknotes. The paper is going to announce a public competition to make the final decision.”

  “They are? How did you get The Mint to agree to that?”

  “By not asking them. The Mint will have to go along with it. After all, it’ll have been printed in the paper.”

  Half an hour later, the train began to slow.

  “Is there a problem?” Ruth asked.

  “No,” Mitchell said. “We’re taking on water. Stay on the train.”

  Ruth felt increasingly useless as the Marines took up positions by the doors and windows. Again she wondered why Mitchell had brought her. It clearly wasn’t to help guard their prisoner – who was currently staring fixedly at her. Ruth returned the stare. Fairmont didn’t look away. Frustrated, Ruth pulled out her notepad.

  “What are you writing?” Mitchell asked, returning as the train began moving once more.

  “A list of questions we want Fairmont to answer,” she said. “Like when he first met Emmitt, who he saw at those houses, and what he heard them talk about. We need to work out what they’re waiting for. If it is a robbery, maybe he heard something that will tell us what they’re planning to steal, and maybe that will confirm whether it’s going to take place on the fifth.”

  Mitchell placed a yellow slip of telegram paper on the table between them. “Read it,” he said.

  “Searched House. Empty. AR.,” she read. “Is that from Riley?”

  “Yes. You understand what it means?”

  “Emmitt’s already moved the people out of the house in Greychurch Street,” Ruth said. “We shouldn’t be wasting time going to Scotland and back.”

  “We’re not,” Mitchell said. “You’re not coming back to Twynham.”

  “I’m not?”

  He tapped her notepad. “As you deduced, someone needs to interview Fairmont, and it has to be someone who knows the case. That’s you, me, Riley, and Weaver. You’re the only choice. Sorry, cadet. That’s seniority for you.”

  “Oh.” She looked from the notepad, to the prisoner, and then to Mitchell. “But that’s not the only reason it’s me?”

  “No. I promised Maggie I’d keep you safe. I haven’t done a very good job so far. You’ve been through a lot more than most people do in a career, let alone a few weeks. You need a break from it.”

  “I… oh. But what if there’s some kind of connection between all of this, and me?”

  “You mean that coin? If there is, and if it isn’t that near-mythical beast some call coincidence, then the connection isn’t with you but with your parents. Perhaps they knew Emmitt. Maybe there was some old-world cabal that found a new lease of life after the Blackout. Or perhaps it’s something else, but what could it mean now? That your parents are alive? If they are, they never looked for you and that tells you all you need to know. Forget the coin. Forget any connection. Ruminating on it won’t do you any good.”

  “There’s no point arguing, is there?” Ruth said.

  “We’re already on the train, aren’t we?” Mitchell replied.

  “I suppose, in a way, this is what I wanted,” Ruth said. “I mean, I only joined the police because I thought it would get me out of Twynham.”

  “That’s the spirit. Always look on the bright side, even if the far north is a pretty dark place this time of year.”

  Mitchell closed his eyes and gave every appearance of having gone to sleep. Ruth tried pacing up and down the carriage, but found Fairmont watched her every move. In search of somewhere to think, she retreated to the back of the rearmost carriage, and watched the scenery disappear behind them.

  The sun rose higher. The landscape changed. Neat fields became a patchwork of new-growth forest, and that was replaced by wide grassland broken only by occasional ruins. After they’d crossed the Thames, the train depots grew larger, and their walls grew higher.

  By half-past two, as Ruth was realising that one ruined house looked pretty much the same as any other, the brakes squealed, and the train came to a screeching halt. Ruth peered around, but there were no tilled fields suggesting that a depot was just ahead.

  “Watch for movement!” Corporal Lin barked, running down the aisle. “Get those doors open, but hold your fire!”

  After the Marine had passed, Ruth edged down the aisle and back into the first carriage. She saw Mitchell jump out of the open door, and run along the train in the direction of the locomotive. She followed. As she passed the tender, she looked around. They truly were in the middle of nowhere. Other than the train and the tracks, the only sign of humanity was a few felled trees, dragged into the undergrowth so they wouldn’t be blown onto the tracks during a storm.

  “Why did you stop?” she heard Mitchell ask the driver as she reached the locomotive’s cab.

  “That’s Leicester,” the driver said. “We’ve got to go through it.”

  Ruth looked ahead. Perhaps it was the shadows cast by a sun heading toward the horizon, but the hulking mass of the city looked ominously forbidding.

  “Can’t we go around?” she asked.

  “Nope,” Higgins, the driver, said. “Birmingham’s to the west and that place is more dangerous than London. If we don’t go forward, we’d have to go south, then cut east into Wales, or head back toward Bedford and across to Cambridge before we’d reach some tracks that would take us north. There’s a coastal route that leads from the Wash toward Hull, but it’s rarely used. We’d not be able to travel faster than eight miles an hour in case the rails were blocked. If you want to reach Scotland quickly, then you have to go through Leicester. It should be safe enough.
We use this route to bring medicine to the tribes in the area. If they block the tracks, then they’ll cut off their own supply. They won’t do that, particularly not now these talks are being held. No, this is about a safe a time as any to travel through the city.”

  “Then why did you stop the train?” Ruth asked.

  “Just because it’s safer than any other time, doesn’t actually make it safe,” Higgins said.

  Corporal Lin came running up. “Sir, the lieutenant wants to know what’s going on,” she said in a tone that suggested she was the one asking the question.

  “We’re going through Leicester. Pass the word, we’re expecting trouble,” Mitchell said.

  “Yes, sir,” Lin said, and ran back to the train.

  “Might as well get moving, then,” Mitchell said, climbing into the cab. Ruth followed. The driver muttered something under his breath about people getting in the way.

  “Who are these tribes?” Ruth asked as the train set off once more.

  “For one thing, it’s tribe, singular,” Mitchell said. “And that’s where the problems start. They call themselves Albion. It was a sprawling mess of competing gangs that coalesced around a single leader, and in animosity toward the common enemy. Us.”

  “Why?”

  “Sadly, because it’s easier to maintain control of a populace if someone else can be blamed for all that goes wrong.”

  “Are there many of them?”

  “Not really,” Mitchell said “Somewhere between five and twenty thousand. That’s counting infants and the old. Most of them are hunters and farmers of one sort or another. I doubt there’s more than a hundred dedicated fighters in the group.”

  “Why don’t we send the Marines in?” she asked.

  “Because dead is dead, whether it’s from an arrow or a bullet,” Mitchell said. “Besides, if you kill their fighters, there would still be thousands of them left. People whose friends, spouses, siblings, and parents you’ve just killed. The children would grow up in hatred and there’d be an uprising a generation from now. Instead we send in negotiators, and hold talks between us and their king.”

  “King?” she asked.

  “Yes, they have a king. That’s the current sticking point. Since Britain is still a monarchy absent of any head on which to hang a crown, and Albion has a king in search of a realm, he has gracefully offered his services.”

  “Will we let him?”

  “Of course not,” Mitchell said. “But when we say no to that, it’s harder to say no to something else, like ownership of Birmingham for instance. The upshot of all of this is that they’ve been known to delay trains and sometimes ambush them to take hostages.”

  “How does that help their cause?” she asked.

  “Because the king isn’t the one to kidnap them. It’s always some unknown group of bandits. The king promises to send his people to effect the rescue, and in return we’ll show our gratitude by giving in to one of his terms. Of course, we know he’s the one who organised the kidnapping, and he knows we know, but since we can’t prove it, what can we do?”

  “That sounds… complicated.”

  “It’s politics,” Mitchell said, “but it’s better than the alternative. Keep your eyes ahead.”

  The city was approaching fast. Somehow it looked different from the ruins on the English south coast with which Ruth was familiar. There were the same skeletal frames where stubby towers had burned down or been partially collapsed. Nearby were houses with fractured roofs, and others that seemed intact. Those were familiar sights, but it was the absence of smoke that was different. The smog bank from the coal power station, the factories, the railways, the hundreds of workshops and thousands of homes, was so ever-present in Twynham that’s she’d grown to ignore it. The other noticeable difference was the rubbish littering the side of the railroad. There was no path running alongside the tracks. Behind and sometimes in the midst of the wall of vegetation were the rusting remains of old motor vehicles of every size and model.

  “It’s like a junkyard,” she said.

  “They did that,” Higgins yelled over the now-roaring engine.

  “What?”

  “Walled off the tracks and blocked every siding,” Higgins said. “We can only travel the route they want us to. It keeps us away from their homes. We’re going to have to slow. The tracks curve too tight for us to risk more than twelve miles an hour. Watch out, they might try to jump on.”

  The buildings grew closer together. Weeds and small trees had taken root in walls and roofs. Most looked like they would collapse in a strong storm, and the increasingly frequent piles of rubble suggested that many had. Ahead, Ruth saw something. She stuck her head outside the cab, trying to get a better view.

  “There’s a light,” she yelled. “No. It’s a fire. On that five-storey ruin. The top floor. It’s… oh. It’s gone out.”

  “It’s a signal,” Mitchell yelled.

  “For what?” Ruth asked.

  “Nothing good,” Mitchell said.

  The detached houses turned into a compact terrace of buckled roofs and broken windows.

  “A face. There. Did you see it?” she called.

  “Speak up,” the driver yelled over the hissing, roaring engine.

  “I saw someone!”

  “Of course,” Higgins said. “From now on, only interrupt if you’ve something important to say.”

  The driver slowed the train again. The terrace was replaced by a swamp. A half-submerged climbing frame suggested it had once been a park. Higgins growled as the wheels lost traction on the wet rails. Ruth wondered whether the people of Albion had flooded the land deliberately. She didn’t ask.

  “Bridge coming up,” the stoker yelled, stowing his shovel. He grabbed a shotgun from the rack and moved to a window. Mitchell drew his own weapon and took station by the other.

  “What do I do?” Ruth asked.

  “Watch out for flames,” Higgins yelled.

  “Flames?”

  The driver didn’t reply.

  The bridge grew nearer. It wasn’t wide, with room for only two lanes of traffic, but she could see movement on it. Figures scurried from west to east, occasionally ducking down out of sight.

  The driver pulled on the whistle. A loud screech cut through the air. Ruth was nearly deafened, but at least it drowned out the sound of her pounding heart. The wide plough at the front of the locomotive reached the shadow cast by the bridge. Ruth held her breath. A moment later the plough was under the bridge itself. Something rattled against the locomotive. Then again. And again.

  “They’re throwing rocks!” Ruth said, though everyone surely realised.

  Mitchell and the stoker pulled themselves back inside as rubble rained down on the engine. Almost as soon as it had begun, and before Ruth could ask why they didn’t shoot back, the engine was through to the other side. Ruth turned around. A few rocks fell on the tender and the carriages, but either they’d used up their missiles, or they’d realised they weren’t going to do any damage. As to who they were, Ruth saw them standing on the bridge, watching the train head away.

  “Why didn’t you fire?” Ruth asked, watching the figures on the bridge.

  “To what end?” Mitchell replied.

  “In the old days,” the stoker said, stowing the shotgun, “they used the bridges to jump onto the trains. I thought they might try it. That was just a demonstration of—”

  “Ahead,” The driver yelled.

  They all turned to look. In the sky in front, Ruth could make out the bright red canopy of a balloon. She couldn’t see the depot underneath, and it wasn’t what the driver had been calling to their attention. The tracks were blocked with an improvised barricade.

  “Don’t stop,” Mitchell said.

  “You want me to ram it?”

  “Do it!” Mitchell yelled.

  “We’ll derail!” The driver replied.

  “You won’t,” Mitchell said. “Trust me.”

  The driver shook his head, but the tr
ain began to accelerate. Ruth kept her eyes fixed on the barricade. Wood. Metal. Brick. It looked crudely made, but it was approaching fast and with each passing second it seemed to grow larger and increasingly sturdy.

  “Hold on!” Mitchell bellowed.

  Ruth gripped a handrail and closed her eyes. There was a jolt. She was thrown back, and almost lost her footing as the train rose from the tracks and then slammed back down. Rubble and debris sprayed from the barricade as they drove through it. A metal bar spun upward, slamming into the reinforced window of the cab. The glass fractured, but didn’t break. The engine rocked. For a moment Ruth thought it would topple. It didn’t.

  “You can let go now,” Mitchell said. “We’re through.”

  Ruth looked around. The captain was right. The tracks ahead were clear.

  “That was stupid,” Higgins said. “You didn’t know what was in that barricade.”

  “I knew that they’d only had thirty-four minutes to put it into place,” Mitchell said. “Remember the Mail train ahead of us? The barricade had to be made of what could be easily and quickly carried.”

  “It was still a gamble,” the driver said.

  “And I won,” Mitchell said. “You see the smoke? The balloon? That’s the next depot, less than five miles away.”

  Chapter 7

  The Real World

  “Welcome to the real world,” Mitchell said, as Ruth jumped down to the platform. The rough-hewn planks creaked in protest. “No mains water,” Mitchell continued. “No electricity. What people in Twynham call bandits, here they call neighbours. A lot of scavengers call this place home. Or, to be more accurate, they call it the place they send their children to school as they scour through the ruins of Birmingham and beyond. The rest make their living from trapping, hunting, and farming, and selling the excess to us in the south. We don’t need the food or furs, but they need the money to buy medicines, and the tax receipts to send their children to school. There, they’re taught about the wonders of the old-world, and how they can have it all again, if only they grow up to pay those taxes themselves.”