Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes (5 page)

“Could it be a coincidence?” Mitchell said, as Ruth cleared the last of the smoke from her lungs. “Such things do exist, though they’re not as common as most people think.”

“Is this where…?” Riley asked.

“It is,” Mitchell said.

Ruth followed their gaze. Both officers were staring at the twisted wreckage of an aeroplane. To her eyes, it looked no different from any of the dozens that littered the landscape near the city. No, she realised, they were looking past the plane at the forest beyond.

“Sir?” Ruth asked, unsure how to frame the obvious question.

“I remember this spot, cadet,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been here before.” He walked over the stained asphalt and crossed onto the tracks, peering at one tie, and then the next. “They all look the same now,” he said. “But it could be this one. Perhaps not.” He straightened. “I helped lay this railway line, many years ago. The old tracks run through the New Forest, and that was controlled by bandits. That’s what we called them. Slavers would be closer to the truth. Cannibals wouldn’t be far wrong. We lost a lot of cargo, and two locomotives, before the Prime Minister decided that it would be too costly trying to dislodge them. Instead we built a new line, here along this old road.” He stepped off the tracks and back onto the asphalt. “I wasn’t the only one to disagree with her, but we were, and are, a democracy. In the end she was proved wrong. We had to go in and clear the forest, and then we came back to bury the bodies that had been on the plane. What was left of them.” He shook his head as if ridding it of an unpleasant memory.

“Of course,” he continued, slightly more loudly than necessary, “these roads weren’t built for the constant weight of all these goods trains. The tracks have to be constantly re-levelled. Take that as a reminder that the path that seems easiest usually isn’t.” He paced another step along the tracks, bent to look at another rail, and then stood and faced her. “Now, cadet,” he said, “the first lesson is gloves. The second is to take stock of where you are.”

Ruth pulled the kidskin gloves from her belt and put them on.

“There’s blood here,” Riley said, kneeling eight feet further down the road. “Not much. A few drops. Direction suggests he came from the tracks.”

“Any sign of a fight?” Mitchell asked.

“Not on the road. I think he was on a train and got off here. But speaking of signs,” Riley added, “where do you want to put that one up, cadet?”

Ruth picked up the blue and white police sign and looked for a suitable spot to place it. Then she understood. They were in the middle of nowhere.

“If you put it by the tracks you could arrest anyone on a passing train,” Riley said.

Ruth blushed and put the sign back on the trolley. Trying to cover her embarrassment, she looked along the train tracks, at the road running alongside them, and finally at the fields on either side. The only sign of life, or at least of human life, was the disappearing plume of smoke from the train. There were no farms, no houses. The fields had grown wild and were choked with weeds, long grass, and occasional saplings. It wasn’t quite the middle of nowhere, but it was close. She looked at the two sets of tracks leading down the embankment. Both the slightly curving path taken by the railway guard and the other, more erratic route, ended at the body of a man. He wore a dark suit and lay on his back with his eyes open. It was almost as if he was looking up at the sky.

“It was at night,” Ruth said.

“What was?” Mitchell asked.

“That he died,” Ruth said. “If the driver of the first train this morning saw the body, and if it was here before dusk, then surely someone would have seen it yesterday evening.”

“Good. Keep your eyes on the ground,” he said, and headed down the embankment, towards the corpse.

Ruth tried to follow his instruction, but as she drew nearer, and the smell grew more pronounced, she found her eyes drawn to the body. She’d seen corpses in the autopsy lectures, but those had been more about anatomy than forensic pathology, and the smell had overwhelmingly been one of disinfectant. Before that, the only bodies she’d seen, or that she remembered having seen, were two withered skeletons found in the basement of a house a mile from her home. The building had been destroyed during The Blackout, and the couple had been found as the rubble was finally being removed. That had been just before nightfall, so the bodies were left there, to be taken away for burial the next day. That evening, curiosity had got the better of sense, and Ruth had snuck back to the ruined house. It was the scratch marks carved in the cellar wall she remembered most clearly. Some were thin lines, others deep gouges from where the couple had tried to dig their way out, first with scraps of metal, and then their own fingernails. Those bodies had been almost mummified, the skin a papery leather, the odour dark but not as pronounced as the copper and earth smell coming from this victim.

“Male,” Mitchell said as he reached the body and waved at the flies hovering around the corpse’s slightly open mouth. “Twenty-four. Twenty-six. Not much older, nor younger.” He picked up a hand. “Blood on the palm, from where he held the bandage in place. From the pattern of callouses, he wielded a shovel or axe, but not in the last few months. No bruises on the knuckles or on the face. Cadet, tweezers. Cadet? The tweezers; they’re in the box.”

Ruth was grateful for the excuse to turn her back on the body. She opened the crime-kit. There were some instruments she recognised, but a lot she didn’t. They all must have some purpose, but as a whole it looked like a collection of junk. She found the tweezers and passed them to the sergeant.

“It’s not a bandage,” Mitchell said, pulling a red-stained swatch of cloth from the man’s side. “It’s a handkerchief. Bag?”

Ruth pulled a paper evidence bag from the kit and held it open as the sergeant dropped the handkerchief in it.

“Doesn’t look like a knife wound,” Riley said, peering over the body.

“No,” Mitchell said. “It’s a bullet wound. Small calibre. Perhaps a revolver.”

“You don’t think…?” Riley began and again stopped with the question half asked.

“Possibly,” Mitchell said. “Cadet, have you seen a bullet wound before? Step closer.”

She did, glancing at the wound, but found her gaze drawn to the man’s face. With his eyes open, his expression was oddly serene. “He must have died looking at the stars,” she said.

“And there are worse things to have as your last sight on Earth,” Mitchell said, turning to look at her. “But he could have had another forty years looking up at the night sky. We have to find out why those were taken away from him. Remember the face, but don’t dwell on it. Look at the wound, the body, find the evidence that will lead us to his killer.”

“There’s something else there,” Riley said. “Under his shirt. A belt?”

“Let’s see… yes, a belt. Of a sort. A money belt, I think, and well concealed.” He gently peeled the shirt back, revealing a stained belt with a blood-clogged zip. Mitchell tugged the zip until the pocket opened. He reached inside and pulled out…

“Banknotes,” he said. “They all seem to be twenty-pound notes.” He passed them to Riley. Mitchell ran a hand along the man’s waist before rolling the body onto its side. “No exit wound,” he muttered. “A bullet will tell us the calibre, and we can run it against the guns. Perhaps it’s a match.” More loudly he added, “Cadet, hold him.”

Swallowing, she reached down.

“Not his arm, his side. Here,” Mitchell said, pointing. Ruth adjusted her grip. The body felt disconcertingly warm and soft. She told herself that was because of the sun, but found herself once more looking at those lifeless eyes. The victim wasn’t that much older than her though, being born before The Blackout, he would have had a very different childhood. Perhaps he remembered the old world. He would certainly have remembered the years after. The hunger and suffering, the fear and despair that Maggie had told her about. A wave of sorrow washed over her, lasting until a bluebottle fly landed on the man’s eye, when it was replaced with an equally strong wave of nausea.

“There,” Mitchell said. “Got it.” He unclasped the money belt and pulled it free. “Six pouches in total,” he said, pulling open another zip. “Twenty-pound notes in this one, too. And… and if you’re going to throw up, cadet, don’t do it on the body! Let him go. Take a step back.”

Gratefully, she did, turning her back on the corpse as she sucked in huge mouthfuls of air.

“Twenty-pound notes in each one,” Mitchell said.

“There’s about ninety in this stack,” Riley said.

“That means there’s over ten thousand pounds here,” Mitchell said. “That’s an absurd amount of money. Nearly five years’ salary.”

It was more than five years of Ruth’s salary. As a cadet, she would be paid one hundred pounds a month. In three months, at the earliest, she might qualify as a probationary constable, and it would rise to a hundred and thirty. A detective like Riley was on two hundred. Mitchell earned around two hundred and fifty.

“The belt looks handmade, and very crudely done,” Mitchell said. “White canvas. Probably hemp. Each pouch is just large enough for the stack of notes. Or, to put it another way, each pouch is full of as many notes as it will hold. Cadet, what do you make of his clothes?”

“The clothes, yes, right.” Ruth took one last deep breath, and turned around, this time forcing herself not to look at the man’s face. “They’re old-world make,” she said. “The shirt’s been mended a couple of times, but it was in good condition. The collar isn’t frayed. The jacket’s a little short, and the trousers are a little long, but it’s good quality clothing. Only a couple of moth holes in the jacket.”

“Hmm,” Mitchell grunted. “Always start with the boots. You can tell a lot about someone from the shoes they wear, and this man’s boots were made to measure. Look at the soles near the heel. You can still see where the leather was scored. I’d say these have had about three months of wear. Probably cost him twenty pounds. Maybe thirty. He has money now, and he had money a few months ago, but not enough to buy clothes that fit. That is interesting. It’s possible that his death is unrelated to the money, but that would be one coincidence too many for my tastes. No, I think it’s the reason he died. Perhaps he’s a thief, or a courier, or a gambler who had a stroke of monumental good luck before one ultimate piece of bad. Either way, he wasn’t shot here. Nor was he shot on the train, or the killer would have followed him off. That suggests he boarded the train to escape. Exactly from whom or what can be added to our list.” He bent down and began searching the man’s pockets.

“Twenty years ago,” he said, “we’d look for a driver’s licence and call up the DMV, or what did you call it over here? The DVLA? There would be a phone with the contact details of parents, the photographs of friends, and the address of where he worked. We’d have a record of every text conversation and email he’d recently sent. It would take a few minutes and we’d know as much about him as he knew about himself. There would be GPS data that would tell us exactly where he was last night. We could see what other phones were in the same area and use those to track our killer. We’d run a trace analysis on his clothing. We’d collect every skin tag and foreign fibre. But this is now. We have no phone, no driver’s licence, and while there may be DNA, what use is it without a database? So, what do we do? We fall back on our eyes. String,” he said, passing it up to her. She placed it in an evidence bag. “Matches. A slip of paper with… nothing on it. A clasp knife. A stub of a pencil. Not exactly enlightening. No ration book, no keys.”

Ruth watched as the sergeant began to search the body again, this time more slowly.

“Are you looking for something?” Ruth asked.

“I don’t know,” Mitchell said, “but it’s not here. Get me the thermometer,” he added, before she could ask what he meant.

She rooted around in the crime-kit until she found it.

“What’s the formula?” Mitchell asked as she handed it to him.

“I… um… what formula?” she asked.

He gave that increasingly familiar disappointed sigh. “A body loses around one and a half degrees Centigrade every hour after death until it…” He bent over the corpse. “Until it reaches ambient temperature. We have to make an assumption that his body temperature prior to death was thirty seven and a half degrees and this…” There was another pause. “Yes, and this tells us that he died around midnight. Unfortunately, that’s a very rough estimate. It could be three or four hours either way. In short, it confirms what the lack of rigor mortis and your observation about the train guard already told us. Namely, he died late last night or early this morning. You see,” he said, standing up, “that’s the problem with the academy. It’s nothing but an overgrown high school, there to make sure you can read and write, and tell left from right, if not right from wrong. Police work, real police work, is something else entirely. It’s about asking questions until there are so many that some turn into answers. Who was he? Why was he killed? Where did the money come from? Where was he going? We’ll begin with those.”

“Do you think he alighted from the train because of the plane?” Ruth asked, more to show willing than because she thought the answer would be yes.

“I doubt it,” Mitchell said, “but there’s no harm checking. Why don’t you go and see if there’s any sign anyone has been there recently. Look for tracks through the grass.”

“Yes, sir,” Ruth said, glad she had something that would take her away from the corpse.