Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes (9 page)

“The twentieth of July,” Joyce said.

“There’s a lot of wear on these boots for two months,” Miranda said. “He must have worn them every day. Was it a bad end?”

“Good or bad, all ends are the same,” Riley said. “It’s the journey that offers variety. Thank you for your time.”

“Andy Anderson? That’s got to be fake, doesn’t it?” Ruth asked when they were outside.

“Maybe,” Riley said, “you never know. You did good in there, but next time ask fewer questions. Let people talk. That way they’ll answer questions you didn’t know to ask.”

Ruth filed that away as another second-hand lesson from Sergeant Mitchell.

“Do we go to Spring Close?” she asked.

“First, we go back to the yard and speak to Mister Mitchell. What would you do if you were the killer?”

“Me?” Ruth asked. It wasn’t the question she’d been expecting.

“You run a counterfeiting ring. You’ve shot someone who you caught stealing from you. Or maybe he was sent to deliver the money and never returned. Either way, what would you do now?”

“Move, I suppose.”

“Me too. It’s been over twenty-four hours, I don’t think we’re looking for the counterfeiters any more, but are looking for where they’ve been.”

Chapter 5

Andy & Charles

“Back already? Did you strike out?” Mitchell asked. He stood by the wall on which he’d pinned the map that Ruth had seen him peering over the night before.

“We got a name. Andy, or Anders, Anderson,” Riley said.

“That sounds fake,” he said. “Anything else.”

“The shoes were bought on the twentieth of July, with three twenty-pound notes. Anderson was wearing rags at the time. Slight Scottish accent. We’ve got an address,” Riley said. “Twenty-three Spring Close. He told them his family escaped from Iceland after The Blackout, but they thought he was making that up.”

“Spring Close? Let’s see.” Mitchell ran a finger across the map. It had the precise jagged lines of old-world printing, but with dozens of more recent pencil and pen annotations.

“Here.” Mitchell pointed at a spot two miles north of Ruth’s own home. “Can’t tell much more than it was a housing estate. There’s no water or electricity. It’s a mile from the railway line, but it’s another two miles to the nearest station. It’s not a likely place for someone to live, though people do make their homes in the most unlikely of places.” On the wall next to the map was a pin with a piece of red thread hanging from it. Mitchell took it down and placed the pin on the map.

“This is where his body was found,” he said. He took another pin from the wall, stuck it in the map a few inches further to the west, and tied the loose end of string to it. “According to Rebecca Cavendish,” he said, “as soon as they spotted the body they began searching the trains, mostly to make sure nothing had been stolen. A small pool of blood was found in the rear car of a tannery train. Due to the smell, the inspections on those trains can be best described as cursory, which is why they didn’t find the bloodstain until last night. So, we now know that at 23:01 on the night of the murder, the train departed from the tannery at Holton.” He pointed at the second pin. “About twenty miles west of here. Between 01:50 and 02:00 the train passed the spot where we found the body.” He stuck a third pin into the map at a point just before the train tracks crossed the River Stour. He stretched the string around the pin until it was bent almost at a right angle. “It travelled around twenty miles east, and then ten miles north.”

“It took three hours to travel thirty miles?” Ruth asked.

“The tannery train is a low priority service. It would have had to pull into sidings to let more time sensitive cargo, like milk, to overtake. Or to put it another way, except for the first few miles, it spent so much time slowing and stopping, that Mr Anderson could have boarded pretty much anywhere.”

“But not Spring Close,” Riley said. “That’s nearly three miles to the east of that route.”

“Yes, it was too much to hope he’d give the address of his hideout. Cadet, if you were the counterfeiters, what would you do?”

Ruth glanced at Riley. There was a shadow of a smile on her face.

“I’d move, sir,” Ruth said.

“Exactly. It’s possible that Anderson wasn’t shot at the same location the money was printed. Let’s assume he was. Who was he? A counterfeiter who was betrayed? Or was he a thief who was caught? We don’t know, but whichever it is, the killer is unlikely to have stayed in the area. Do you remember what I said about computers? They need electricity. Where along here would they be able to steal the power?” He leaned forward over the map, tracing a finger along the train line from the tannery to the spot past Ringwood Junction where the body had been found. “Somewhere remote,” he muttered, “where no one would notice people coming and going yet not heading to work. Somewhere the sound couldn’t be overheard. Not a village. Not a town. Not a factory, at least not a large one… No, I don’t think they would set it up inside a legitimate business. There would be too great a risk of the operation being discovered. Hmm. The printer is the key here.”

“Could it be somewhere like the newspaper offices?” Ruth asked.

“No. Though you could find the computer in almost every house, the printer is something else. The one they use to print the newspaper wouldn’t work at all. In fact, I would guess their printer was made from other machines, stripped down and adapted to the paper and ink that we have available. The ink… maybe… yes,” he murmured, stepping back. “Whoever could build the printer could probably run a cable from a nearby building, stealing the electricity from the grid. The Electric Company keeps an eye on usage like, well, like people whose profits depend on it. So we are looking for somewhere a few thousand watts an hour wouldn’t be missed.”

“Not on this stretch to the west of the city,” Riley said.

“Why not?” Mitchell asked.

“He got off the train because it jolted him awake,” Riley said. “At that point it was travelling north. After he was shot, he would have intended to go to a hospital. He got off when he realised the train was taking him away from the city.”

“A reasonable assumption. That leaves us with this section of line here.” He pointed at a spot that the map marked as the old Bournemouth airport. “There’s a house near this factory, just south of the power plant itself, another here near the warehouse for the National Store, and this one close to the aluminium recycling works. We’ll check all three.”

Riley nodded. It took Ruth a moment to understand what he’d said.

“Don’t we need a warrant?” she asked.

“For a walk in the countryside? There’s no point,” Mitchell said. “I spoke to the commissioner. He was quite emphatic about this being Weaver’s case, and she’s still busy with the coroner. No, we’ll go and take a look for ourselves. Someone has to, and it’ll beat sitting around here. First, though, we’ll go to Spring Close. Even if it’s a false address to go with the fake name, there is a reason Mr Anderson chose it.”

Her bicycle wobbling slightly due to the unbalanced weight of the crime-kit – though this time without the sign – Ruth followed the other two away from the centre of Twynham. The leaf litter carpeting the roads grew deeper until, by the time they were approaching Spring Close, it had turned into a thin loamy soil covered in weeds, moss, and occasional saplings.

The houses in this neighbourhood were mostly abandoned. A few had been boarded up. Others had been stripped even of their window frames. The area had become a builder’s yard, the properties dismantled to form repairs on those closer to the coast or railway, but it wasn’t completely deserted. Where there had once been a garden in front of a house, there was now a patch of dug-over earth dotted with canes and shreds of thin netting.

“I don’t know why people live in places like this,” Riley said.

“No taxes,” Ruth said. That had been the saving grace of The Acre, at least until Mr Foster took over.

“Spring Close,” Mitchell said pointing at a battered road sign pinned to a low wall. “Riley, you go around the back, the cadet and I will find the front.”

The constable leaned her bike against a wall, and disappeared through a ragged hole where a door had once stood, and was soon lost amidst the rubble and broken timbers.

“Watch the windows,” Mitchell said as they dismounted and leaned their bikes next to Riley’s. “Look for movement and shadows.” He slowly walked into the close, his head moving from side to side. “Anything that shines,” he continued, “might indicate where metal has been recently abraded. Look at the soil in the gutters to see where bicycles, hooves, or feet might have disturbed it. Has trash been recently dumped in the street? Is there fresh manure? Is there a puff of steam from a chimney indicating where a fire has been hastily put out?”

The answer to those questions was no. The windows to number twenty-three were as dark as the rest of the curving row of terraced houses. Mitchell knocked on the door. There was no sound from within.

“Police,” he called, though not loudly enough to carry more than a few dozen feet. He pushed the door. It swung open, and Ruth saw that the lock was broken. With his left hand, Mitchell pointed at the bright yellow splinters around the lock, while his right went to the revolver at his belt. “Go back out into the road. Watch the windows,” he hissed, and went inside.

Ruth backed slowly away, feeling a rush of gratitude that she didn’t have to enter that dark and suddenly forbidding house. That was followed by a wave of guilt at her instinctive cowardice. She watched Mitchell disappear into the gloom, and only then remembered the gun at her own belt. She drew it, keeping the barrel pointing down as she looked from window to window.

She tried to count the seconds as they passed, but her racing heartbeat made her lose track. Then, in a window on the second-storey, she saw something. As instinct raised the revolver to point at the shadows behind the glass, she heard a voice from inside.

“It’s clear,” Mitchell called.

“Clear,” Riley echoed a moment later and from a little further away.

Ruth holstered her weapon. Flexing her fingers in an attempt to stop them from shaking, she went into the house. The front door led onto a narrow hallway. There was a staircase on the left, with a door just before the first step and two more leading off to the right. At the end of the hall was a fourth doorway, in which Riley now stood.

“You smell that?” Mitchell asked as he came down the stairs.

“Damp?” Ruth asked.

“Mildew and rot,” Mitchell said, “with a hint of smoke. Cadet, you take the front room, Riley, the kitchen. There is a reason why Mr Anderson gave this house as an address. Find it.”

Judging by the sofa upturned against one wall, Ruth guessed it had been the living room. Whatever other furniture had once filled the space was gone along with the carpet and half of the floorboards. Those must have been removed in someone’s search for… something. As she bent down to see what, there was a voice from behind her.

“Anything?” Riley asked from the doorway.

“Scavengers,” Ruth said. “They must have taken the furniture and the carpet. Probably took the floorboards to burn, but they were after the pipes.” She pointed down to where a section of copper piping had been sawn through. The exposed under-floor was covered in a thick layer of cobwebs and dirt, and a thinner dusting of metal filings.

“Probably during the first year,” Riley said. “The furniture would have been burned, the pipes taken to make a still or repair some other house.”

“Then no one has lived here for years?” Ruth asked. “Maybe Mr Anderson made up an address, and it’s a coincidence that he picked one that actually exists.”

“It’s no coincidence,” Riley said. She held out her hand. In it was a soot-blackened photograph. “There was a photo album in the oven. Looks like someone searched the house for any clues as to who lived here, and burned them. I bet it was Anderson. It was an electric oven, a sealed box with no chimney. As soon as he closed the door, the oxygen supply was cut off. Not everything was destroyed. You know what that means?”

“He was in a hurry.” Ruth looked at the picture. It was a family portrait of a man and his four sons. “They all look a bit like him. The dead man, I mean. There’s a definite family resemblance.”

“Definitely. Mister Mitchell!” Riley called.

Mitchell came down the stairs, an evidence bag in his hand. “What did you find?” he asked.

Ruth handed him the photograph.

“Hard to say when it was taken,” he said. “Jeans and T-shirts. Can’t see anything in the background to give it a date, except… is that a world cup shirt? That would place it within a year of The Blackout. I’d say our Mr Anderson is one of the children.”

“He’s the youngest,” Riley said.

“You can’t really tell from the picture,” Mitchell said.

“And his name is Charles,” Riley added.

“You found something else?” Mitchell asked.

Riley grinned and led them into the kitchen. She opened the door to a floor-to-ceiling cupboard. The shelves were empty, but on the inside of the door, still faintly legible were a series of lines marking a height, each with a date and a name.

“Charles is five years younger than the next of his brothers,” Riley said, pointing at the dates. “He was born here, you see, and that’s the first one, on his first birthday. The body we found is certainly far younger than thirty. That means our victim is Charles.”

“So he’s twenty-five,” Ruth said, staring at the picture. The youngest child bore the least resemblance to the man they’d found.

“Any clue as to his surname?” Mitchell asked.

“None,” Riley said. “There are a few more photographs in which you can see one or two of the family. Nothing else.”

“I think it was Charles who burned them,” Mitchell said, holding up the evidence bag. “I found an empty can of tinned beef in the smallest bedroom, which now makes more sense. He came back here, stayed at least one night, and made an attempt at destroying any record of who he really was.”

“So when he went to the shoemakers, and they asked for an address, he gave the first that came to mind?” Ruth asked.

“Probably, and that would mean that Anders Anderson was the first
name
that came to mind,” Mitchell said. “Maybe Anderson was his surname, maybe it wasn’t, but the name meant something to him. Cadet, what should we do now?”

“We should see if there’s anyone called Anderson working in the Mint,” she said. “Or anywhere else where they would have access to these kind of computers. If he survived The Blackout, maybe his brothers did. Maybe his entire family are the counterfeiters. We should see if we can find them.”