Strike a Match (Book 1): Serious Crimes Read Online Free PDF

treasure, to be prized when it is found. That there are some trustworthy guards at the dock is a piece of information worth the cost of a uniform and a week’s worth of paperwork. Have you ever eaten an orange, cadet?”
    “No, sir,” Ruth said.
    “Nor have I, not for the last twenty years. As you go through those reports, carefully reading line after line, imagine the orange sitting on that desk. That’s your motivation. Now, find me someone I can charge.”
    Ruth opened the first report and didn’t look up until she’d finished. Mitchell was looking at his newspaper though Ruth didn’t think he was actually reading it. Riley was sitting at her own desk, a battered novel in her hands. Neither were paying her any attention. In fact, they both seemed to have forgotten she was there. For the moment that was how she liked it. She turned back to the report.
    Ignoring the four-letter invective, there were scant few details. All the participants in the brawl came from the same ship, the SS Nile, which had been on a survey mission to Gibraltar. The oranges had been collected from a wild grove on the Spanish coast. According to what she’d read, the fight had begun when Lemuel Evans, a stoker, had hit Donald McCormack, the purser’s mate, with a boat hook. She reread it to make sure, but it seemed cut and dry. Suspecting it couldn’t have been as simple as that, she turned to the next report. It gave a completely different account. Franny Winters, the ship’s carpenter, had instigated the brawl by hitting Jimmy Lim, a sailor second-class, with an uppercut that had broken two teeth. She read on, statement after statement, and found that each participant blamed a different mariner for starting the fight.
    As she turned to the tenth account, and was silently cursing Constable Riley for jumping into the sea, the door to the cabin opened. A man in rolled-up shirtsleeves but still wearing the green hat of a railway messenger entered.
    “Is this Special Crimes?” he asked.
    “It is,” Mitchell said. “Who are you?”
    “Taylor, messenger.” He held out a slip of paper. The man’s face was grim. When Mitchell read the piece of paper, his own dropped to match it.
    “Have you ever seen a dead body, cadet?” Mitchell asked.
    “In the morgue, sir. During autopsy class.”
    “You’re about to see one in the wild. There’s a train waiting for us?” he asked of the messenger.
    “There is,” Taylor said. “But they can only hold it until half past.”
    “That’s barely ten minutes from now,” Riley snapped, as she took the message from Mitchell. “Tell them to wait for us, or they’ll rue it.”
    The hapless messenger backed out of the door.
    “Rue it?” Mitchell remarked as he pulled his jacket on. “Did you get that from your novel?”
    Riley shrugged. “You said I needed to be more loquacious.”
    She didn’t treat Mitchell like her superior, Ruth thought, more like a brother or a—
    “Cadet, there’s a crime-kit over there,” Mitchell’s voice cut in on her thoughts and his hand waved towards the back of the cabin. Ruth took the hint and hurried over to the kit. The box wasn’t made of laminated pine like the modern ones she’d used in the academy but of faded old-world plastic and was twice the size. Fortunately, it was on a trolley. Again it was unlike the newer ones she remembered from training. This was all angular aluminium tubes and almost-perished rubber straps.
    “There are evidence bags in that box on the counter. Ten should do,” Mitchell said.
    “And don’t forget the sign,” Riley added. “You need the sign. You know why?”
    Ruth picked up the wooden sign with the word ‘Police’ painted in white on a blue background. “By law all crime scenes must be marked with them,” she said.
    “But why?” Mitchell asked.
    She thought quickly. “Because interfering with a crime scene carries an automatic five-month light labour sentence. Coming within ten feet of the sign counts as