Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes (24 page)

“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” Isaac said. “There are a few details that Mrs Standage has skipped over, but I think she’s covered the salient points. My dear,” he added, turning to the woman, “why don’t you go and join your son and husband. As soon as the sun sets, we’ll take you to a place as safe as anywhere can be on this planet.”

Ruth waited for Mitchell to object. He didn’t.

“That’s more or less what I got from her that night we rescued her,” Mitchell said after Mrs Standage had left. “So why did you keep her around?”

“I thought you might have some more questions for her,” Isaac said. Then he turned to Ruth. “You asked what this was about. Do you know the Prime Minister is stepping down? There are many people waiting to take her place. Why bother with a revolution when you simply need to win a parliamentary rebellion? That is what this is about. Who benefits from a colossal fortune in counterfeit money that is discovered before it can enter circulation? Only someone who wishes to disrupt the status quo. The trade deal, the election, the direction that society is moving; it doesn’t matter which because the cause is the same. At the root of this is the desire to be the one who controls the fate of the people.”

“A politician?” Ruth asked. “You’re saying an MP is behind this?”

“What else makes sense? Here is the ability to become the richest person in the country, yet the money was left unspent.”

“Get to the point,” Mitchell said. “Do you have anything useful for me?”

“How about the identity of a suspect?” Isaac replied. He walked over to the bench, picked up a metal case, and opened it.

“That’s a computer!” Ruth said.

“Indeed,” Isaac said. “Pixels are so much more reliable than ink, and far more dramatic, of course.”

He tapped at the keyboard until a window appeared. Ruth squinted at the image. There were cars, a lamppost, a building with a wire fence, and a person coming out of a gate.

“Where is it?” Mitchell asked.

“It’s a recording taken from a CCTV camera in the staff car park of a prison on the Isle of Wight,” Isaac said. “But the more pertinent question is when, and the answer is six days before The Blackout.”

“How did you get it?” Ruth asked.

“The feed was simultaneously sent to the surveillance room in the prison and to a secure archive which I gained control of some years ago,” Isaac said. “Leave the rest of your questions until later,” he added, and pressed another key. The image began to move. Ruth watched a woman walk from the gate to a car. The short clip stopped as she reached it.

“I can’t make out her face,” Mitchell said.

“There’s no need. For some reason, none of the AIs thought to fire a missile into the data centre for the DVLA. The register of car owners is just one of many databases I rescued from damp and decay. You see, I started with the address of Mr Anderson, which led me to the prison. The prison led me to a house on the same street on which Mr Anderson lived. That gave me the car, and that returned me to the prison, and to this footage.”

“The name,” Mitchell prompted.

“Let us start with Mr Anderson. His real name is Charles Carmichael, and he is named after his father, who, at the time of The Blackout, was imprisoned on the Isle of Wight.” He pointed at the screen. “At which prison, that woman ran a rehabilitation programme attended by Mr Carmichael Senior. About two months after she started working there, she moved into a house on Spring Close, six doors up from the Carmichael family. An odd thing to do, don’t you think?”

“I’d say it’s highly suspicious. What’s her name?” Mitchell asked.

“Patience. Watch.” He tapped at the keyboard. The image changed. Another clip began to play. This one showed the woman, and a man still wearing prisoner garb, run from the building as smoke billowed from a burning car at the edge of the frame. The clip stopped, with the two figures halfway across the car park.

“This was taken eight hours after The Blackout,” Isaac said. “It ends at the moment that power was cut to the island.”

“I know that woman,” Mitchell said. “Play it again.”

“If you want,” Isaac said. “Or I could tell you that it was Weaver.”

“Weaver?” Ruth asked. “You mean Captain Weaver?”

“The very same,” Isaac said. “And the man in that footage is Mr Charles Carmichael Senior.”

“It’s a coincidence,” Riley said.

“You’ve seen it?” Mitchell asked.

“And it doesn’t prove anything,” the constable said.

“She knew what Clipton and Emmitt looked like,” Ruth said. “And well enough to give a description for them to print drawings in the newspaper. How else do you explain it?”

“You don’t,” Mitchell said. “She knew what they looked like because she knew Anderson. Presumably she knows the others as well. She’s the insider in the police. She must have staged Clipton and Gupta’s murders, and she’d have had access to Turnbull. I thought she was quick getting to the house where the printer was, well, this explains how. She knew exactly where to go. It was clever of her to bring Marines rather than police to the crime scene, what better way to ensure that the evidence was trampled into the dirt?”

“It doesn’t explain why she did it,” Riley said.

“I suspect that she is working for someone else,” Isaac said.

“Who?” Ruth asked.

“Oh, I’ve no idea,” Isaac said. “Probably someone in the opposition, since exposure of the counterfeiting would bring down the government. Beyond that, any name I gave would be a guess.”

“And there’s no point speculating,” Mitchell said. “Let’s go and ask her.”

“Let me do that,” Isaac said. “Gregory doesn’t say much, but he’s rather good at getting answers.”

“This is a police matter,” Mitchell said.

“Oh, don’t start that self-righteous babbling,” Isaac snapped. “Where is your warrant? Where is your writ? Where is your right? You may carry a badge, but there’s no more authority in that than there is in my gun, and at least I don’t pretend otherwise.”

“There’s a line, Isaac, one that I won’t cross. It’s why I have the badge, and why you have this.” He waved his hand to take in the desolate decaying building.

“I see,” Isaac said, and all pretence at good humour was gone from his voice. “And will you be taking her with you?”

It took Ruth a moment to realise that Isaac meant her.

“She’s safer by my side. But if you want to help, go back to Southampton. Search that house in which we found Clipton’s body. See if there’re any bugs or other surveillance equipment.”

“That sounds like make-work, Henry.”

Mitchell shrugged and walked back towards the stairs.

Chapter 14

The Informant

There were a dozen freshly oiled bicycles in a rack behind the leisure centre. They took three and travelled back to the city as dusk settled around them.

“Sir, where are we going?” Ruth asked.

“Weaver’s house,” Mitchell said.

“And then what will we do?”

“We’ll get her to confess,” he said.

Ruth knew it wouldn’t be as simple as that. “How?” she asked. “I mean, are you going to torture her?”

Mitchell slowed, but didn’t stop. His answer was long in coming and short on detail. “No.”

“Then what
are
you going to do?” Ruth asked.

There was another agonisingly long pause. “Fine,” he said, though she wasn’t sure to what he was agreeing. “We’ll search her house. There will be some clue. I’m not sure what, but we’ll find something that will lead us to whoever is behind all this.”

“And if we don’t?”

“We’ll worry about that then. What other choice do we have?” Mitchell asked. “Who can we trust? Whatever they are expecting, right now it isn’t this. Perhaps if we act quickly, with surprise on our side, we may catch them unawares.”

“That’s a lot to hope for,” Riley said.

It was after eight p.m. when Mitchell brought them to a halt at the head of a quiet street with a working lamppost at the northern end. The commuters and after-work-shoppers had long since gone home. Children were on their way to bed, and the roads were deserted. Flickering lights and the occasional snatch of happy laughter escaped from around curtained windows in a street that was a place of homes, not boarding houses.

“It’s halfway down,” Mitchell said, waving vaguely at the eastern side of the street. “The allotments run behind the gardens.”

Ruth told herself that it was too late to protest. The video was incontrovertible proof that Weaver knew Anderson. But what exactly did it mean?

They crept along the edge of the allotment. Ruth alternated her gaze between the narrow path with a drainage ditch either side, and the guttering light of a night-time gardener in the far corner of the field.

Mitchell slowed. Ruth did the same. When he stopped, she saw that Riley was no longer with them. Mitchell pointed a little ahead and over a wire fence to a woman weeding by the light of a candle-lit lamp. Dressed in faded red overalls, and wearing a blue and white bobbled hat against the evening’s slight chill, Ruth didn’t immediately recognise Captain Weaver.

Mitchell raised a cautioning hand and then pointed at the ground. His mouth moved in a silent command, but it was too dark for Ruth to make out the words. She nodded anyway. Mitchell almost seemed to vanish as he moved stealthily towards the garden.

Ruth stayed in place for a few seconds, turning her head this way and that, occasionally catching a glimpse of a shadow moving through the undergrowth. Then she inched closer to Weaver. Step by cautious step, with her eyes fixed on the captain. She couldn’t place what, but something was very wrong. She drew her revolver and took another step. And another. She was ten feet, the low wire fence, and a thin row of newly cut raspberry canes away from Weaver when something clinked against stone somewhere near the house. Weaver glanced over her shoulder and then returned her attention to the soil. Ruth didn’t dare move any further.

There was another sound, of two hard surfaces scraping against one another. Weaver spun and rolled as Mitchell stepped out of the shadows. He had his pistol raised, but the captain had a gun, too, and it was pointing at the sergeant’s chest.

“You!” she hissed.

“Put it down,” Mitchell replied.

“You first,” Weaver said.

Ruth stepped over the wire fence, her revolver gripped in both hands, her doubt and uncertainty over their actions growing with each step.

“You’ve got five seconds,” Weaver said.

“I’ll give you three,” Mitchell replied.

“Then you’re—”

But Weaver stopped talking as Ruth pressed the barrel of her gun against the small of the captain’s back.

“Please lower your gun,” Ruth said.

Mitchell handcuffed Weaver to a chair in the kitchen and then sent Ruth to the front door. When she opened it, she found Riley waiting on the porch.

“There’s no one outside,” the constable said, closing the door behind her. “No one’s watching.”

“Check upstairs,” Mitchell said.

The house was empty except for the still-silent Weaver.

“From your lack of questions, you know what this is about,” Mitchell said, after Ruth and Riley had joined him in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry to see that you’ve involved the cadet in this,” Weaver replied. “And I’m disappointed that you’ve chosen to stick by him, Riley, but I suppose that was the inevitable end to this miserable affair. I thought he was dead. I
wished
he was dead. But it’s too much to expect people like Isaac will simply crawl off and die. I have to admit that I hoped you would do the right thing when you learned he was behind it. Twenty years too late, certainly, but I did hope.”

“What are you talking about?” Ruth asked.

Weaver looked at her, and then at Mitchell. “Ah, so he hasn’t told you? I don’t know what he
has
told you, but—”

“Stop,” Mitchell interrupted. “Just stop. All right. Why do you think we’re here?”

“You’ve discovered that man you call Isaac is behind the murders. The counterfeiting was part of a plot so that he could use that ragtag cult of his to seize power. On learning this, you finally gave in and sided with him, as I knew you would.”

“An interesting defence,” Mitchell said. “But no. Tell us about Charles Carmichael.”

“You know his name? I’ll tell you about him if you tell me why he was killed.”

“I don’t mean the son. I mean the father,” Mitchell said.

“His father? What does his father have to do with this?” Weaver replied.

“Maybe we should start again,” Riley said. “We are here because we have evidence that indicates you were the one supplying information to the conspiracy behind the counterfeiters.”

“What?” Weaver sounded surprised. “Me?”

They’d got it wrong, Ruth thought. As she looked around the small kitchen with its neat little stove, the woven red placemat on a table set for one, she realised they’d got it
very
wrong. The lid of the pot on the stove began to rattle. Ruth picked up a cloth and lifted the pot from the heat. She picked up the box of matches and lit the candle on the table. Then she realised the other three were watching her.

“There’s no point arguing in the dark,” she said. “Captain, perhaps you should go first. You say Isaac is behind this?”

“I take it you’ve met him?” she replied.

“I have, but I think it would be quicker, and I would personally prefer it, if for once someone would give an answer that wasn’t a question.”

“I suspected it from the beginning,” Weaver said. “This crime was committed by someone with access to computers, and by people for whom murder is simply a chore. What I lacked was any proof of his involvement. Until now.”

Ruth picked up the candle and walked into the living room.

“What are you looking for?” Mitchell asked.

“I don’t know,” she said truthfully. The living room was as neat, clean, and homely as the kitchen. There were no old photographs. Those were something people either had a lot of or none at all, depending on whether they wanted to remember the world before. What Weaver had was books. They filled the shelves lining each wall. Even the two armchairs were positioned for reading; one by the window, the other by the fire, with a candlestick placed where a mirror would best reflect the light. It didn’t seem like the home of someone conspiring to bring down civilisation, nor was Weaver acting like one. As Ruth walked back into the kitchen she asked herself whether she trusted Mitchell. Maybe. Up to a point. Did she trust Isaac? Not really. As for Weaver, she wasn’t sure. She glanced at Riley. Yes, the constable was someone that Ruth trusted, though she couldn’t say why.

“Well?” Mitchell prompted. Ruth realised they were all waiting for her.

“What we think,” Ruth said, “is that you killed Turnbull, and that you were working with whoever is behind this conspiracy to ensure that the investigation didn’t discover them. We have footage of you from during The Blackout, helping Charles Carmichael escape from prison. You lived next door to the family. You knew the dead man.”

Weaver blinked. Then she laughed. “Seriously, that’s your evidence? That’s why you think I’m somehow involved in all of this?”

“You have another explanation?” Mitchell asked.

“Carmichael was my informant,” Weaver said.

“Which one, father or son?” Mitchell asked.

“Both,” she said. “Before The Blackout, I worked for MI5. You know what that was?”

Ruth shook her head.

“The Intelligence Services. Charles Carmichael Senior was a member of a gang that controlled the flow of cocaine and heroin into southern Britain. We’d arrested most of them, and locked them up, but their gang continued running things from inside the prison. Carmichael was offered immunity and a new life for him and his family if he would turn on the gang and provide us with information. I was just an analyst, but I had the qualifications to work on a rehabilitation project inside the prison, so I became his handler. I moved close to the family to become part of the gang’s periphery. Then The Blackout occurred. I was in the prison when the rioting started. Carmichael saved my life. We got out of the prison, off the island, and back to the mainland, and then we got out of the south. Cue forward a couple of decades and Charles Junior came looking for me. I didn’t know he’d come south, but he’d fallen in with some bad people. He wanted out and offered to trade the information for a new life. He told me about the counterfeiting. He gave me descriptions of Emmitt, Clipton, and the others. What he didn’t tell me was their location. That was his bargaining chip. He disappeared for a while. When he reappeared he said that he’d give me all the proof I needed if I could get him a new life. The next I heard of him was when you found his body. I suspect the banknotes on his person were stolen as proof of what he was saying. It was unnecessary. He could have just told me the address.”

“Can you prove any of that?” Riley asked.

“Of course,” Weaver said. “In the living room, there is a shelf with nothing but Charles Dickens. Take the books off and take the back of the shelf out. There’s a safe there. The combination is 7. 19. 39. 12. 1.”

Riley went into the living room. There was the sound of books being dumped onto the floor, a crack of wood being broken, and then a metallic clicking of a dial being turned.

“It’s a handwritten transcript,” Riley said, coming back into the kitchen. “An account of a meeting between Weaver and Carmichael, signed at the bottom by both of them. It seems he was giving her information.”

“It could be fake,” Mitchell said.

“Oh, for the love of… of course it could be fake,” Weaver said. “But short of summoning Charles’s ghost here to this very room, how else will I prove it? There’s a grey folder with his new identity in it. He was going to work at the radio relay station in Newfoundland. Why else would I have that?”

“As part of your escape plan for when the crime was complete,” Mitchell said.

“You honestly think that if I wanted to escape, I’d go to what’s effectively a government facility in Canada?” Weaver snapped.

“There’s an I.D.,” Riley said, placing a laminated card on the table. Though the unsmiling face was younger, it unmistakably belonged to Captain Weaver.

“That’s from when I was in MI5. It’s how I got the job in the SIS,” Weaver said.

“I believe her,” Riley said. She pulled out a key and uncuffed Weaver before Mitchell could object. “And it’s not Isaac,” she told the captain.

“He
is
capable of counterfeiting,” Weaver said, rubbing her hands. “And of bringing down everything we’ve built.”

“Yes,” Riley said. “But if he was behind it, there wouldn’t have been any clues left behind. Mister Mitchell, Captain Weaver, we were all wrong. Perhaps we should start again.”

Ruth now saw what the commissioner had meant. Weaver was a captain in the SIS, the branch that dealt with these types of crimes, and she’d worked in a similar field before The Blackout. The captain had been investigating the counterfeiting right from the start, and doing it well. By comparison, Mitchell had blundered around, stumbling across clues and forcing them into a shape that proved to be wrong. But not completely wrong, she thought.

“What about Turnbull?” she asked. “Who killed him?”

“I have my suspicions,” Weaver said.

“Which are?” Mitchell prompted.

Weaver shrugged.

“No,” Riley said. “Someone in the police is working with the counterfeiters. It isn’t us. It isn’t you. That means we have no choice but to trust each other.” She looked again between Mitchell and Weaver. “At least for tonight. Tomorrow, you two can go back to hating one another, but here and now, the investigation has to come first.”