Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01] (6 page)

‘I’m afraid it’s more serious than that,’ Mariner said, in an attempt to prepare her. ‘I’m afraid Eddie Barham is dead.’

Joyce just gaped at them. ‘When? How?’ she ventured when she finally found her voice.

‘Late last night,’ said Mariner. ‘We’re not sure of the exact circumstances just yet.’

‘Oh my goodness, poor Eddie, poor Jamie. What on earth will happen to him? Where will he go?’

Taking her cue, Anna put out a hand. ‘Hi, I’m Anna, Jamie’s sister,’ she said.

‘Oh. I had no idea…’ That he had a sister? As the women shook hands Mariner completed Joyce’s statement in his head. A pattern was beginning to develop.

‘I’m so sorry.’ Joyce was flustered now. ‘This is such a shock.’ She turned to Mariner. ‘You don’t know…’

‘It’s early days,’ he said. ‘But anything you can tell us might be helpful. For instance, when did you last see Eddie?’

‘Well as far as I remember, he came to collect Jamie from the centre on Friday afternoon as normal. Most of our clients travel on the centre transport, but for the last few weeks Eddie has been bringing Jamie in and fetching him himself.’

‘Why was that?’

‘I’m not really sure of the precise reason. I presumed that it fitted in more conveniently with Eddie’s working pattern. If he wasn’t home at the right time to receive Jamie…’

‘But I thought Jamie was going to Oakwood for the weekends to give Eddie some respite?’ said Anna. ‘That’s where he should have been.’

Joyce looked embarrassed. ‘Not any more. Eddie withdrew Jamie from the Oakwood about two months ago.’

‘Oh.’ Anna reddened. So she really was that out of touch. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘It was the medication, I think.’

‘Medication?’

‘They wanted to put Jamie on something to help his sleeping, but Eddie wasn’t keen. The next thing we knew, Jamie was back home at the weekends.’

‘How did Eddie seem on Friday?’ Mariner asked.

‘Oh, I didn’t speak to him myself. I only saw him briefly from a distance. You’d need to talk to Jamie’s key worker, Francine, although I’m afraid she’s tied up with supervising lunch at the moment. The last time I spoke to Eddie personally would have been a couple of weeks ago. We had been having some problems with Jamie’s behaviour, so he came in to discuss them.’

‘What sort of problems?’ Anna asked, warily.

As they talked, people had wandered past them in the corridor and, realising they were being overheard, Joyce ushered them towards her office. ‘It might be better to continue in here, where it’s a bit more private,’ she said.

‘And if you can wait a moment, I’ll just go and settle Jamie with his group.’ She walked over to Jamie. ‘Lunch, Jamie,’ she said, gently touching his arm. And without a murmur, Jamie turned and followed her down the corridor. Mariner went with Anna into the cluttered office where Joyce returned to join them a few minutes later.

‘You were going to tell us about Jamie’s behaviour,’ Anna prompted, before Mariner could say anything.

Joyce began cautiously. ‘Well, in recent months, it’s as if Jamie has suddenly developed some kind of sexual awareness,’ she told them. ‘Eddie had started having problems with Jamie exposing himself, masturbating publicly, that kind of thing. Only a week ago he walked up to a woman in the swimming baths and made a grab for her breasts. Eddie thought she was going to bring indecent assault charges.’

‘It must have been worrying for Eddie,’ said Mariner, seeing the alarm on Anna’s face and wanting to steer the conversation back round to Eddie.

‘It was,’ Joyce said. ‘We were all concerned. It’s not an uncommon situation with the young adults we work with here, a child’s mind inside an adult body and all that, but it doesn’t make it any easier. While it might be reasonable to ignore a three-year-old playing with his private parts in public, at twenty-nine it’s a different matter entirely. It’s vital for Jamie to learn about what is unacceptable social behaviour, so we discussed some strategies for managing it.

Eddie took it very seriously. He even went as far as installing a video camera at home so that we could monitor progress.’ The camera. That knocked Knox’s theory on the head.

‘Jamie’s other obsessions were worsening too,’ Joyce continued. ‘For some time now he’s had a fixation with mobile phones. He recognises all the brand names and for months he made Eddie drive past the same billboard on the way to the centre because it displayed an advert for One to One. When they changed the poster for something different, Jamie got very distressed.’

‘He was like that with pylons and radio transmission masts when he was little,’ said Anna. ‘Insisted on Dad driving past them every time we went out. He could spot them from miles away.’

‘Will Jamie be staying with you now?’ Joyce asked.

Anna’s face registered panic. ‘I’m not sure. It’s difficult,’ she stalled. ‘I feel as if I hardly know him,’ she said.

And after what we’ve just heard, thought Mariner.

‘Oh, I’m sure it won’t take long for you to get to know each other again,’ Joyce was cheerfully encouraging. ‘As I said, he likes to go swimming, and Eddie used to take him to McDonald’s a lot. He loves his Big Macs.’

But this was evidently not what Anna wanted to hear.

‘It’s not really as simple as that,’ she persisted. ‘I have commitments. Do you know if there’s anywhere that Jamie could stay, temporarily, while I get things sorted out?’

Joyce looked doubtful. ‘Nothing that could be accessed immediately. That was Eddie’s mistake. Residential places are like gold dust. There just aren’t enough places in the city. Other parents at the support group might be able to give you some ideas, though. You could try coming to their meeting on a Thursday evening. They often discuss issues around respite care.’

‘I’ll think about that,’ said Anna, though it didn’t look to Mariner as if it would occupy her thoughts for long.

‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘We tried to question Jamie about what happened last night, but we couldn’t get much out of him.’

Joyce nodded knowingly, ‘It would be difficult. Jamie has very little understanding of spoken language.’

‘Is there anyone here who could talk to him? Try to find out if he does know anything?’

‘Francine would be the best person, she knows him better than anyone. But to be honest, all you’re likely to get is the odd word. It may not mean much.’

‘Well, if she could give it a try and let me know the outcome.’ Mariner gave Joyce his card. ‘Someone Jamie did mention is Sally. Could be Sally-Ann. Have you any idea who she might be? Eddie’s girlfriend perhaps?’

Joyce looked blank. ‘I wasn’t aware that Eddie had a girlfriend. With Jamie to take care of, I’d be surprised if he had the time.’

Back at the car they roused Knox from a snooze.

‘Where can we drop you?’ Mariner asked.

Anna was decisive. ‘Back at the office; life has to go on.’

Or was that just wishful thinking? In those five short words Mariner could hear the desperate desire for her life to continue as it had done before they’d come along and so shockingly disrupted it, a need to step out of this surreal sequence of events and return to normality. It was a common enough feeling for anyone following traumatic news, and one with which he was all too familiar.

‘Hungry, boss?’ Knox asked hopefully. They were watching Anna Barham walk back into the Priory Management building, where a security guard let her in with a smile and a pleasantry. Food wasn’t at that moment featuring anywhere in Mariner’s thoughts but now that Knox raised the subject, he realised it was the middle of the afternoon and he’d eaten nothing all day. No wonder he felt light headed. Knox could be forgiven for feeling the same.

‘So what’s it to be? Drive-in McDonald’s?’

‘Something infinitely better.’ Mariner directed Knox back into the city centre, casting his eyes about as he had been all morning in the vain hope that a tall, elegant girl with long chestnut hair might suddenly emerge from around a street corner. If only he’d known at the time how important she was to become.

On the Ladypool Road, Knox waited in the car while Mariner went into Nazeem’s and picked up six assorted samosas and a couple of bottles of Evian. They parked up in a side street of brown Edwardian villas to eat.

Knox peered suspiciously into the brown paper bag.

‘This isn’t food,’ he grumbled.

‘Get it down you. It’s good stuff,’ said Mariner.

‘So, what do you think?’ Knox asked, through a mouthful of spicy vegetables, but he wasn’t talking about the samosa.

‘I think we can’t do much until we’ve had the postmortem findings. Best case scenario they’ll prove conclusively that Eddie Barham killed himself by self injecting an obscene amount of heroin. He was under stress so he took the easy way out. Case closed.’

‘It’ll take more than a coroner’s verdict to convince Anna Barham.’

Knox was right. She was the fly in the ointment all right.

From where they sat, the reason for Eddie Barham’s death looked obvious, so why should Anna Barham stay so convinced that her brother, whom by all accounts she hardly knew, hadn’t taken his own life?

‘The one person who should be able to clear this up is the brunette,’ said Mariner, in between swigs of water.

‘If we can find her,’ said Knox. ‘She’s hardly likely to just walk up and introduce herself, is she?’

‘Well, Eddie had been trawling the small ads so maybe that’s where we’ll find her too. We can start by going through his phone bills, too,’ he said. ‘See if any of the numbers match up.’

‘And I could try ringing round the agencies themselves,’ Knox added. ‘We’ve got a description and an approximation of a name, so with any luck the two belong to the same person. Somebody must know her. We should talk to Eddie’s workmates.’

‘I’ll do that,’ said Mariner. ‘Even if they can’t help identify the woman, it’ll help to know what Eddie’s been up to during the last few weeks. See if there’s anything else that might have pushed him over the edge.’ Although Mariner was already beginning to think that there didn’t need to be anything else. Jamie Barham alone was probably more than enough. Not having any siblings himself, Mariner found it impossible to imagine a situation in which he could be wholly responsible for another adult, let alone one who had turned into an obsessive willy-waver. Eddie Barham was sounding like a saint. And even saints had their limits.

‘Sounds all right to me,’ Knox agreed. As a straightforward suicide, since he’d made his statement about the discovery, Mariner should really have handed Eddie Barham over to uniform, in this instance Knox, to complete the formalities. But in the early hours of this morning they had agreed between them that having been at the scene, Mariner would be present to break the bad news to Anna Barham. Now he could reasonably bow out and leave the rest to the junior officer. Mariner though, for reasons that he couldn’t quite pinpoint, wasn’t ready to let go yet and Knox was apparently happy to keep him involved. ‘Aren’t we always being told what good practice it is for CID and uniform to work in collaboration?’ he said now, with more than a hint of irony.

‘Absolutely,’ said Mariner.

‘But that’s the last time you get the dinner,’ said Knox, screwing the empty brown paper bag into a ball in disgust.

‘That tasted like shite.’

Boasting the biggest circulation in the West Midlands, the Birmingham Echo was the Birmingham Post’s tarty younger sister, a tabloid that thrived on melodrama, running regular banner headlines and editorials decrying the police, amid dramatically soaring crime statistics: statistics that were always, naturally, isolated from context and hugely exaggerated.

But sensation sells, and had earned the Echo an impressive-looking imitation of New York’s cone-topped Chrysler building deep in the heart of Birmingham’s business quarter. This was the district that tried hard to ape its more sophisticated European equivalents and had, to a limited degree, succeeded. One of its triumphs was the complete lack of parking space, so it was fortunate for Mariner that today he had a chauffeur to drop him at the door. ‘See you back at the ranch, boss,’ said Knox as he dropped him off.

Inside a vast open-plan lobby, Mariner flashed his ID at one of a whole bank of receptionists who hardly gave it a glance. One day he’d stick a picture of Mickey Mouse over his photograph and see if that provoked any kind of reaction.

‘I’d like to talk to Ken Moloney,’ he said. Thanks to the extensive blood clots that had taken up residence in his nasal passages, Mariner made it sound like ‘baloney’, which by pure coincidence also summed up his opinion of the newspaper.

Mariner was directed to a glass-sided lift, which would transport him up to the eighteenth floor, a ride that afforded him a spectacular panoramic view over Birmingham’s sprawling urban skyline and gave him a sudden yearning for the craggy towers of the Rhinogs in North Wales. For most of the time, Mariner was a man at ease with the city along with all its noise, dirt and blissful anonymity. But now and again he felt the need to get away. He had some leave due. Maybe when this was cleared up he’d take a few days in Snowdonia.

Alerted to Mariner’s arrival, editor-in-chief Ken Moloney greeted him at the door to his office which, unlike the rest of the building, Mariner noted, was not a smoke free zone. Moloney stood swathed in a bluish haze like some science-fiction time lord, if at close range a pretty raddled one, a half-smoked Marlboro clamped between his knuckles. The effects of this forty-a-day habit, along with a lifetime of burning the midnight oil to meet spiralling deadlines, were imprinted in his coarse complexion. Add to that the folds of several chins and lank, thinning hair, and Moloney didn’t present a physically attractive role model for his profession.

Mariner declined offers of tea, coffee or mineral water.

Some kind of breathing apparatus would have been of benefit given his constricted airways, but that wasn’t presented as an option.

‘What can I do you for?’ Moloney asked drolly, when they had settled either side of an enormous mahogany desk that was as battered and scarred as Moloney himself, much of its surface covered with stacks of paper.