by Frank Tayell
Chapter 8
Away From Home
5th October
For the first time since she’d moved to The Acre, Ruth woke in an unfamiliar bed. She’d had a restless night on a mattress that managed simultaneously to be both too hard and too soft. She was glad to get up, dress, and get out of the room. It was dark outside the cobwebbed windows, and even worse in the narrow corridors above the inn. Initially, she tried walking quietly so as not to wake any of the other guests, but after she’d stubbed her toe for the eighth time she stopped caring.
The train had brought her and Mitchell to Northallerton, forty miles from the site of the ambush. Corporal Lin and the Marines had insisted on staying with their fallen comrades. The guards from the train had been left with them. Almost as soon as they’d arrived in Northallerton, Mitchell had returned with a second train, taking a detachment of the town’s guards with him. He’d insisted Ruth stay behind, and she’d not protested too hard. She’d sat in the backroom of the pub for a few hours as a bowl of stew congealed on the table next to her. Whispered rumours had buzzed behind her. She’d ignored them, and the inn’s customers had had the grace to leave her alone.
The inn was now empty. The landlord sat in the kitchen, reading a newspaper by the light from a roaring range-fire over which a dozen massive pots hung.
“Hot water for washing’ll be ready in five minutes,” he said, not looking up.
It was last week’s paper, Ruth saw. She stood in the doorway, idly wondering whether the man was only just getting around to reading it. Did news really take that long to reach places like this?
“Did Captain Mitchell come back last night?” she asked.
The landlord looked up. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t realise it was you. Hang on.” He fished in his apron until he found a thin envelope.
The newspaper’s cheap ink left a smudgy fingerprint on the equally cheap envelope. The note was brief. Mitchell had gone to the railway office.
“Sleep well, I hope?” the landlord asked.
“Very well, thank you,” Ruth lied. She considered whether to ask the landlord to make some breakfast, or whether it would be better for her to make it herself. Looking around the grease-smeared kitchen, she decided no. She’d been through enough over the last twenty-four hours without adding dysentery to her problems.
“Excuse me.” She left the pub.
She wondered what time it was. Then she wondered where the railway office was. Near the train station, she guessed, though she couldn’t remember where that was, so she ambled randomly through the slowly waking town. Yawning figures trudged hither and thither, shrugging away sleep. Candlelight flickered from the windows of some houses, and under the doors of others, but not enough to do more than add shape to the muddy pavement that was as much gravel as it was old-world asphalt. In many ways it was no different from the suburbs around Twynham through which she cycled to work.
She stumbled across the railway tracks first, and into the platform second, and guessed the railway office was the building outside of which a small group was gathered.
“It’s ’cos there was no Mail train yesterday, and there won’t be any running today until those tracks are clear,” a worker in railway green was trying to explain.
“I’ve got three hundred eggs on that train,” a woman said.
“They’re not going to hatch, are they?” the railway worker replied. “What do you want me to do about it? No, don’t answer that. Look, you all heard what happened. The trains got ambushed. Until the line’s clear, no traffic’s coming in. We’re doing all we can, and complaining ain’t going to get it done faster.”
“What about my eggs?” the woman asked.
“If there’s no train, there’s no train,” the man said. “What do you want me to say?”
The group slowly began to disperse. Ruth waited in the shadows until they were gone before stepping forward.
“Good morning,” she said, “I’m—”
“Officer Deering. It’s a small town. We remember new faces. I’m Clive Akinweh. How can I help you?”
“I was looking for Captain Mitchell.”
“He’s down at the crash site. He said you should wait here.”
“I’d rather not,” Ruth said.
“There are plenty worse places to be.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean… I meant I want to help.”
“Ah, right. Well, there’s a train taking some lifting gear down at first light. You can catch a ride with that if you want.”
“Thank you.”
“If you wanted to wait in here, there’s a kettle and a fire.”
“Thank you,” Ruth said gratefully.
She dumped a few spoonfuls of powdered coffee into a mug, and went to stand by the door, watching as the town emerged with the arrival of dawn. It had the same layout as the one near Leicester, except for the walls. If anything, those seemed higher. But the shops, the goods being loaded onto the market stalls, the clothing, it was all the same.
“The gates are closed,” she said, as soon as there was enough light for her to realise.
“Of course,” Akinweh said.
“In all the depots we went through, they were open,” she said.
“At night?”
“Oh. I… I don’t know.”
“Around here, we keep them closed,” Akinweh said.
“Because of bandits?” she asked.
“Bears. But there are worse places to be. Believe me.”
“You’re not from around here?” Ruth asked.
“We were visiting family in Birmingham during the Blackout. Sort of got this far and no further. Stayed here ever since.”
“You don’t ever think of leaving?”
“To go where?”
Ruth had no answer.
This was travelling, then. A blacksmith’s forge, a train station, smoke from chimneys, and the same assortment of people working the same jobs as those hundreds of miles away. In the books she’d read, far away places were portrayed as exotic. Perhaps this wasn’t far enough.
The train arrived. It consisted of a crane and two empty cargo wagons. Ruth found a perch on the crane’s platform, and was grateful that the wind rushing through her ears meant that she didn’t have to talk to anyone. The early morning fug had begun to clear, and the enormity of all that had happened the previous day was slowly sinking in.
There were a dozen Marines by the ambush site, along with another two-dozen railway workers and six people in oddly familiar dark suits.
She found Mitchell sitting on his own, twenty yards from the stalled locomotive. He looked thoughtful and unrested.
“Undertakers,” he said.
She followed his gaze. “You mean the people in black?”
“There’s no one else to deal with the bodies,” he said. “There’s no coroner here, just a local physician who signs the death certificates. To bring up a forensics team from Twynham would take at least two days. We can’t leave the bodies on the train because the carriages need to be cleared from the tracks, and doing that will destroy any remaining evidence.”
“Do you think there is any?”
“I gathered what I could,” he said.
“You found something?”
“Not really.” He pulled out a slim plastic square.
“That’s a phone!” Ruth said, slightly scandalized.
“Yes. Keep an eye on the Marines. I don’t want anyone to know I’ve got one.”
“Why not?”
“Most people react a lot worse than you just did,” he said. “They view them with suspicion, if not outright distrust. Without a cellular network it’s not much more than a glorified paperweight, but it does have a camera. High fidelity photographs are most useful when no one knows that we can take them.” He slid the phone back into his pocket. “It was a gift from Isaac. He’s taken to collecting them.”
“Does it do anything else?” Ruth asked curiously.
“Not that will help us solve this mess.
But the photographs will help if I’ve missed something. Nor will it help us find Emmitt,” he added, standing up. “Clearly he’s abandoned his original plan. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m… actually I’m fine.” And she realised it was true. Her head was clear, and except for being stiff, she felt better than she had in days.
“There are no flashing lights before your eyes? No buzzing drone in your ears?”
“No. Why, is that a symptom of something?”
“I was hoping it might have been.” He sat down again and rubbed his forehead. “The Marines will help the undertakers collect the bodies. When they’re finished, they’ll use that crane to drag the locomotive and carriages off the tracks. Until then, I have to sit and watch. It seems like every time I move, I tear these damned stitches.”
“Maybe I should go and help,” she said.
“Definitely not. You’ll see enough grim death in your life that you don’t need to seek any more. Sit. Wait. Think.”
“Where’s Corporal Lin?”
“She set off at first light, following the tracks in the mud left by the truck.” Mitchell said. “Took some Marines from the town’s garrison with her, and she wasn’t short of volunteers.”
“Shouldn’t one of us have gone with her?” Ruth asked.
“They won’t catch them,” Mitchell said. “Not now. But they might be able to confirm in what direction the vehicle went, whether it was south toward Leicester, or around it to Twynham, or east to the coast. It was the ammunition train, I think.”
“What was?”
“That they were planning to ambush,” Mitchell said.
“But they had plenty of ammunition.”
“I don’t mean small arms,” Mitchell said. “I was speaking to some of the Railway Company signallers. It’s no secret that munitions transit through here. The high explosive shells used by the Navy come from Loch Creigh, and travel along this route.”
“You think that was what Emmitt was after?” she asked.
“Getting a truck to work, and finding the diesel for it, took a lot of effort. If they simply wanted to transport people, they could have used horses and saved themselves the effort of clearing hundreds of miles of road. No, the only reason you would use a truck is if you wanted to transport something heavy and get it away quickly. A hundred high explosive shells, for instance. We know they have ammunition for the rifles but few explosives, otherwise they would have used them during the ambush. Remember the fifth? If Parliament was his target, it isn’t now.”
There was a resounding crash as the ruined locomotive was toppled over.
“Frobisher thought that they were being employed for a robbery,” Ruth said.
“Right. But were they? Was the munitions train the robbery she was talking about? Or was it to be part of whatever Emmitt wanted the explosives for? The only thing I’m certain of is that those Luddites are a distraction.”
“It comes back to Fairmont,” Ruth said. “He must have known something truly important. Something that he wasn’t aware of, otherwise he’d have bragged about it when he was negotiating his deal.”
“Right. But whatever it is, we won’t discover it sitting here.”
There was another clattering rattle as a carriage was levered off the tracks.
Chapter 9
Probable Targets
6th October
“This is busy work, isn’t it?” Simon asked.
“I suppose,” Ruth agreed.
They stood in the lee of a door behind the new theatre as rain hammered on the cobbles of Twynham.
“Find the target,” Simon said, repeating Mitchell’s instructions to them. “It could be anything. Even if we found what Emmitt had planned to blow up, he’s not going to be able to now.”
“No.”
“I mean, how’s he going to capture a munitions train? He can’t, can he?” Simon asked.
“He can’t,” Ruth said. There had been a time, and it now seemed so long ago, that all she’d wanted was a job that would get her away from the city. Now she’d gone away and come back, she wasn’t sure what attraction the wider world held.
“Did you see him?” Simon asked. He’d asked that question enough times that she knew he meant Emmitt.
“I told you, no. I didn’t really see anything. Just some distant figures.” None of whom she could identify. As she and Mitchell had left the ambush site, Ruth had felt confident about the case. As the train took them south, and she’d gone over the events, that confidence evaporated. The faces of the dead Marines swam at the forefront of her mind. They’d been there when she’d slept and there when she woke. That morning, she’d run down to the coast and back, and the murdered Marines had been her companions for every single step.
No, she hadn’t seen anything, she didn’t know anything, and after her run she’d had to go through that with Assistant Commissioner Weaver. That interview had taken three hours and at the end of it, Ruth had felt like a child, sent away so as not to get in the adults’ way. Giving her the assignment in Scotland and then sending her and Simon to patrol the streets in search of Emmitt’s possible target, that was how Mitchell saw her, too.
The rain pulsed harder, drilling down onto streets swept clean of leaves and mud.
“But there were eight of them?” Simon asked.
“Between six and ten, probably eight,” Ruth said. That had been Mitchell’s final assessment of the woodland. The captain hadn’t even asked her how many she’d thought there were. No, he was the policeman and she was the favour to her mother.
“Maybe Emmitt was driving the truck,” Simon said. “Do you think you can do that with a broken arm?”
“Maybe.”
“And you don’t know who that Marine shot?”
Ruth bit down a reply. Simon was so far up her nerves she wanted to scream, but if their situation had been reversed, she’d have been curious, too.
“I have to give a statement to the Naval Office later,” she said, trying to think of some piece of news she’d not told him.
“You do? Why?”
“Because of the dead Marines,” she said.
“Do you know what they’re going to ask?”
“Probably the same questions as you. Do you know what answer I’ll give? I don’t know anything! None of us do. We’re grasping at straws, doing something so that we’re not just waiting for the next attack.”
No one involved in cutting the telegraph wires had been caught, and other than the ambush, no crimes had been committed. That bothered Ruth. She couldn’t see how cutting the telegraph had helped Emmitt ambush the train.
Mitchell had gone to search the house of the Mail train’s missing driver. Kowalski had gone back to the university with another barrage of questions. Davis was interviewing Ned Ludd, and Weaver had been called to Parliament to answer questions. Riley had gone to interview the MP, Rupert Pine. Reading between the lines of a stilted conversation between the sergeant and Mitchell, Ruth gathered that Riley had gone on a date with the politician at some point in the recent past. There was something that the man had said which made the sergeant suspicious. Ruth wasn’t sure if that counted as a lead, bitterness, or desperation.
“The rain’s slowing,” she said, and marched out from under the awning.
“Wait!” Simon called, running to keep up.
Ruth kept marching, away from the theatre, and down the next alley. The rain wasn’t refreshing. Like the air itself, it felt thick and cloying, almost oily. She’d been back in the city less than a day and wanted to leave again, yet knew there was nowhere to go.
“Stop,” Simon said, grabbing her arm. “At least until the rain stops.”
She shook him off, but the caustic retort died on her lips when she saw his face. He looked anxious, nervous, almost scared. She stepped into the doorway of a closed dressmaker’s.
“I think you need to—” Simon began, but Ruth cut him off.
“Captain Mitchell sent us out to find the potential targets,” she
said. “Maybe it is busywork, but we still have to do it.”
Simon’s eyes flickered as he wrestled with his own internal debate.
“Parliament?” he suggested. “If the attack is on the fifth of November, that’s the obvious target.”
“Right, and now it’s got extra protection. Besides, what would be the point? This is a democracy, right? Emmitt kills one politician and we’ll elect another.”
“But if they were all dead—”
“Nothing would change,” Ruth interrupted again. “People would still go to work, farmers would plough their fields, the trains would run, the water would flow, and the electricity would… do whatever it is that electricity does. At least for as long as it takes for us to elect more.”
“Then what about the power station?” he said.
“That was what I was thinking. Or the radio antenna? But those are all being guarded, too. So what’s left?”
“Ships?” Simon said. “The Mint?”
“No,” Ruth said. She raised a hand, testing the rain. It truly was easing now. She set off again, this time more slowly.
“Where are you going?” Simon asked.
“The grain silos,” Ruth said. “What’s money if it’s not a representation of food?”
“But…” Simon had to run a few steps to catch up. “But we’d just grow more.”
“Not overnight,” Ruth said, not slowing her pace. They were heading away from the centre of Twynham. The shops they passed were increasingly empty. Many had been converted into homes. Optimistic ‘For Let’ signs hung from boards outside of others. That was a new thing, Ruth thought. Rents and property prices were strictly controlled, but private ownership was increasing. Though, since the signs all bore one of five different names, ownership was increasing among a very small group.
“What’s the point of going to the grain silos,” Simon said. “We know where they are. Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of looking for the target, we should be trying to work out who benefits. I say it’s the Americans.”
“What?” And this time, Ruth did stop.