Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes (23 page)

“He refused it,” Clementine said. “He wouldn’t work for them.”

“But he was working for them now?” Mitchell asked.

“Not really,” Richard said. “Technically he was a professor at the university conducting research who just happened to have a lab in the factory. That’s the arrangement they settled on. First he was an undergrad, then he was studying for a PhD, and then he was a professor. It was a conceit, really, and it amounted to the same thing, but he refused to work for anyone. It was… it’s complicated. Life wasn’t easy during those early years. You kicked a lot of people out of Twynham. Exile you called it. Where do you think they went? And here was us, a bunch of teenagers with a lot of food.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Mitchell said.

“It wasn’t your fault, was it?” Richard said. “And we got help in the end. It all got sorted out. But now this.” He shook his head.

“Do you know what he was working on?” Mitchell asked.

“Increasing yields,” Clementine said. “That was what he was always working on. He got three tractors working this summer. On biodiesel. He doesn’t like coal. Too dangerous for the miners, and the health… risks… didn’t…” She stumbled to a halt.

“He said if we really wanted to feed the world we’d need hydro and aquaponics,” Richard said. “Of course, we’d need a lot more electricity.”

Mitchell glanced up at the bulb hanging from the ceiling. “I would have thought this was too far away from the power station to be on the grid.”

“We’ve turbines, and a water mill,” Richard said. “And we’d plans for a biogas plant. Or Rahman did.”

“And we still will,” Clementine said firmly. “His work won’t stop.”

“But was there anything else, anything he was doing at the chemical works he might have talked about?”

“Why do you ask?” Richard said.

Mitchell looked from one farmer to the other. “Rahman was murdered,” he said.

Clementine took a sharp breath.

“Why?” Richard asked.

“I don’t know. Did he have any enemies? Anyone you’ve sacked or—”

“No. Absolutely not,” Richard said. “Some people do leave here. Not many. Most like the place too much to leave. They can see what we’re trying to do and want to be a part of it. There are a few who just don’t fit, but they probably wouldn’t have ever met Rahman.”

Mitchell nodded. “One last thing. Do you know what these keys open?”

“That’s the gun safe,” Richard said, pointing to one. “And that’s the ignition for a tractor. I don’t know about the other three.”

Mitchell peeled off the key to the safe and the other to the tractor and laid them on the table. “We’ll let you know when you can collect his other possessions,” he said.

“Do you think you’ll catch whoever did this?” Richard asked. “Honestly?”

“I will try,” Mitchell said. “I can’t promise you more than that.”

Mitchell quietly fumed until they were at the end of the mansion’s long drive.

“We have done all that is expected of us. We have informed the family. We have been to Dr Gupta’s place of employment. We have established that there is a link between him and the counterfeiting by way of the ink. It’s a tenuous one, but what can we expect from someone who thought I wouldn’t notice that crime scene was staged? We have done what is expected of us, now it is time to do the unexpected.”

“You said, earlier, that we are going to see Isaac,” Ruth said. “How can he help? From what you said, he’s just another criminal.”

“Quite. He told me he would have news on Anderson today. But as to the rest you will have to wait until we get there.”

Chapter 13

Footage

When they boarded the train, Ruth thought they would head back into town and to the old church where she’d first met Isaac. They didn’t. After about twenty minutes, Mitchell grabbed her arm just as there was a clunking thump of one carriage hitting another.

“We’re getting off here,” he said as he pulled open the door to the slowing train. “Wait.”

Saplings sprouting out of untamed undergrowth rushed by at what seemed an impossible speed.

“Wait, until after the bridge,” Mitchell said. The train slowed, but not enough for Ruth’s comfort. There was a whistle. “Now!”

She jumped, rolled as she landed, and slipped on a rotting stump, grazing her palm on a jagged road sign half buried in a patch of nettles. Silently cursing the sergeant, the train, and, belatedly, the killer responsible for them being out in the middle of nowhere, she stood. As the train disappeared into the distance, the sound of its engine and rattling wheels was replaced by the living symphony of the forest surrounding her.

“Did we have to jump?” she asked.

“The alternative is telling anyone who might be following us precisely where we’re going.”

“And where’s that? For that matter, where are we?”

“Let’s see,” Mitchell said, brushing at his knees. “The farm is about fifteen miles to the north, maybe a mile or two to the west. That crashed plane where we found Anderson’s body is about twelve miles to the east. Twynham, or the centre of it, is another fifteen miles down those tracks. Maybe a little further, so we want to go about a mile west.” He looked up, down, and then along the impenetrable thicket blocking their way. “This isn’t quite where I told the driver we’d get off.” He looked north, and then south.

“You told the driver?”

“He wouldn’t have slowed the train if I hadn’t. But this is definitely not where I wanted to be.”

“You’re lost?” Ruth asked.

“Of course not,” Mitchell said. Ruth wasn’t sure she believed him. “This way,” he said and started walking along the tracks. After a hundred yards, he pointed to an animal track that cut through the undergrowth. Ruth tried to guess which creature had made it because it was something far larger than a fox.

“Are there wild animals out here?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“I mean dangerous ones.”

“Possibly. But they’re mostly nocturnal.”

The brief flash of relief vanished when she saw the sergeant’s shadow and realised how low the sun was on the horizon. But her trepidation was almost as quickly replaced with a sudden awareness of how hungry she was. They’d grabbed a baked potato from a stall at the station on their way out to the farm, but it had been a long time since breakfast.

They reached the end of the track and joined an old road, crammed with abandoned cars. They were a familiar sight, but she’d never before seen so many in one place. She leaned forward, wiped her sleeve over a mud-encrusted windscreen, and jumped back. There were bodies inside, two in the front, two smaller ones in the back. Their mouths lolled open and receding skin exposed yellowing teeth set in mummified heads.

She spun around as a hand touched her arm. It was Mitchell.

“Come on,” he said.

“Who are they? Where were they going?” she asked.

“They were trying to get away.”

“Away from what?” she asked. “Why did they stay in the car?”

As he led her away, she saw inside other cars where the windows had been broken, allowing insects to turn corpses to skeletons.

“I don’t know,” Mitchell said. “It wasn’t radiation. At least I don’t think it was. These weren’t driverless cars. It looks more like a convoy. There were some missiles that were tipped with chemical weapons. As I understand it, the AIs used those when they wanted to kill the people but leave the electronics intact. It might have been that. Or maybe it was mass suicide.”

“I thought the AIs didn’t care about people,” Ruth said.

“They didn’t, in the same way that people don’t care about ants until they find them running across the kitchen table. They were busy at their own war, but that didn’t mean people didn’t try to stop them. There were kill switches in power plants that could be turned off, server farms that could be blown up, and fibre optic cables that could be cut. When people tried, they started killing us.”

“Don’t you worry about them coming back?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“But they’re bringing back radio, aren’t they? For this transatlantic broadcast.”

Mitchell sighed as he pointed at a side road leading to the south. “This way. Look, don’t think of them as technology. Think of them as people. Dead people. You can’t bring them back. New ones might be created, but maybe this time we’ve learned our lesson. Enough people worry about the mistakes of the past that they won’t be repeated. You just have to hope that the new mistakes we make aren’t quite so catastrophic. Here it is.”

The track ended at a junkyard where cars were piled one on top of another. Behind it was the ruin of a four-storey concrete block of an odd design Ruth had never seen before. She kicked away the weeds growing up around a scorched sign and saw it identified the place as a leisure centre and swimming pool.

It wasn’t a junkyard, she thought as she followed Mitchell towards the block. It was a graveyard for the vehicles. Had someone towed them here? Or driven them? There were none of the usual signs that the building was inhabited. No smoke from a cooking fire, no patch of earth filled with lovingly tended vegetables, no squawk of chickens or snuffle of a pig. It was a place completely devoid of life. Then she saw Gregory step out of the shadows, a sawn-off shotgun nestled in his massive paw. He waved in what could have been a warning or a greeting before gesturing towards the shattered glass door behind him.

“I guess we go inside,” Mitchell said.

The old lobby had a viewing window from which the pool, empty of water but half full of rubble from the broken roof, was visible. Standing on the lowermost diving board was Isaac. He raised an arm in a lazy salute.

Ruth followed Mitchell down a long flight of stairs, through a dank, dark changing room, and out into the pool. She saw Riley first, sitting on a bench next to a young boy of around six. A man sat next to the child, and next to him was…

“That’s Mrs Standage. They caught her!” Ruth exclaimed.

“Caught? She isn’t a prisoner,” Isaac called back, his voice echoing around the empty chamber. “Didn’t you tell her, Henry?”

Ruth realised that Standage wasn’t in handcuffs, and Riley seemed indifferent to her presence.

Ruth turned to Mitchell. “What didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“I couldn’t risk her facing the same fate as Turnbull,” Mitchell said. “We staged the escape.”

“I took her to Isaac before I went for backup,” Riley said. “I pulled the stitches out from where I’d cut my head when I fell off that horse. The blood did most of the work.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ruth asked.

“You didn’t need to know,” Mitchell said. “But things have changed.”

“Did you go to Dr Gupta’s farm?” Isaac asked.

“We did,” Mitchell said.

“He was a good man,” Isaac said. “One of the best. I tried to recruit him. He wasn’t interested.”

“Good for him,” Mitchell said.

“Seeing as he’s now dead, I wouldn’t say that,” Isaac replied. “But he was the most thoroughly honest of men. A truly decent man who cared about others over himself. The world needs people like him, and far fewer of the kind who killed him.”

Ruth glanced over at Riley. The constable looked bored, and that was the only reassurance she had in the cavernous chamber.

“Do you know why Dr Gupta was killed?” Ruth asked.

“Yes,” Isaac said. “I believe it was so that you would waste your time asking that question.”

“That’s no answer at all,” Ruth said. “Why did they do it? Why did they copy the banknotes but not spend them? Why?”

Isaac smiled, or at least his mouth opened exposing perfectly white teeth, but there was no humour in the expression.

“Power,” Mitchell said. “It’s what it all comes down to. It’s what it always comes down to.”

“Power?” Isaac echoed, as he took a step along the diving board. “That is like saying the motive of a robbery is to get rich. Some people prize pain and misery above all else.” He took another step and was at the edge of the diving board. “Fortunately, there are more people who value love, friendship, and…” He waved a hand at Mitchell. “Even justice. But in this case the answer is control.” He bounced back on his heels. “Control of Britain?” He bent his knees and jumped, twisting in the air so he landed with only his toes on the board, his heels over the rubble-filled pool. “Or control of the world? That is the real question.”

“Cut the theatrics,” Mitchell said. “Tell us what you know.”

“Mrs Standage?” Isaac said. “You’re up.”

The woman stood, nervously. “Um… my son?”

“Of course. Mr Standage, please take your boy outside. Watch the sunset. We’ll be leaving soon.”

The man looked at his wife before gathering their son and heading out the door.

“Mrs Standage?” Mitchell prompted.

“It was as I was telling your colleague,” she said. “I had no choice. They threatened my son. They came to my house in the middle of the night and said they’d kill him. At first they only wanted to know when the new notes were going to come into circulation.”

“Who was this?” Mitchell asked.

“There were three of them. The two that you killed in that shop when you rescued us, and the other… I don’t know his name. He was older, with a scarred face.”

“Emmitt. When was it?” Mitchell asked.

“March.”

“And these new banknotes they were interested in weren’t the twenty-pound notes they forged?” Mitchell asked.

“No, it’s the ones they were planning to bring in next year,” Standage said.

“Go on, what happened after you told them?” Mitchell asked.

“Well, before I could do that, I had to find out the answer. Not many people in the Mint knew the date the new notes were being introduced. It wasn’t something that was openly discussed though everyone knew they were coming. Mr Grammick had even asked my opinions on the design. There’s no monarch on the back, you see. He didn’t like that, but he was overruled by someone in government.”

“You gave them the information? How?” Mitchell cut in. “Was it in person? A letter?”

“They said they’d find me, and they did. I was picking Luke up from school. One of them, Carl he said his name was, started walking beside me. I told him that the new notes would enter circulation at the end of January with the announcement made at Christmas. He said thank you and disappeared. I thought it was over, but a week later they broke into the house again, this time while we were having dinner. They didn’t want me. They took my husband away. I thought they’d kill him, but he came back three days later. They wanted an electric cable laid between a factory and a house. He works for the Electric Company, you see.”

“It’s the same house we found the printer in,” Riley said.

“He didn’t know which factory, or where the house was,” Mrs Standage said.

“And after that?” Mitchell asked.

“It was about another week, and they wanted a copy of the design for the note. I would have told someone. I would. Except this time, they took David and Luke away. They said they’d be released when I brought them the copy.”

“And that’s what you did?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. But I gave them the wrong serial numbers. That way I’d be able to see if the notes were used.”

“These designs were on a computer?” Mitchell asked.

“An un-networked machine, yes.”

“How many other people had access?”

“Mr Grammick, a few technicians. I didn’t. Not really. I had to break in when Mr Grammick was at a meeting.”

“After you stole the design and gave it to them, was your husband released?”

“The very next day.”

“Tell them why you didn’t report it,” Riley said.

“They had police on their payroll. They said they controlled the entire police force.”

“And you believed them?” Mitchell asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. I did at the time. David didn’t know where this house was and I couldn’t offer much description of the people. We talked about it, about what information we could tell anyone and then, well, we didn’t forget about it, but they didn’t come back.”

“Until they did,” Mitchell said.

“Yes. One day I got home, and found it empty except for that man, Carl.”

“What did they want this time?” Mitchell asked.

“I… I don’t know. Maybe they wanted David so they could set up a new place to print the money from. They would ask me about the investigation, but I think it was out of curiosity more than anything else. I had to go to that old shop after work, you see. David and Luke weren’t there, not until the night you came… and…” She finally broke down, and sobbed.