Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01] (8 page)

Even Mariner had read about the growing so-called autism epidemic: evolution’s kick in the teeth for an era when communication had never been easier or more invasive.

Trawling through the paperwork now, there seemed little here to help or hinder the case either way, but maybe it wasn’t necessary. Mariner was already getting the sense of a man near enough to the edge to take his own life. Even in practical terms Eddie Barham couldn’t have had an easy time of it. Living with Jamie must have been a nightmare. Add to that the stifling of any career ambitions Eddie might have had, and an explosive cocktail was beginning to develop. But was it enough to make him throw in the towel without even letting their sister know first?

Eddie’s computer had been brought in to the IT department to see what could be salvaged, but the lads in that section were stretched and Mariner had been warned that it would be a couple of days at least before they could come up with any kind of result. The only other items to plough through were the pile of zip-lock wallets of paperwork harvested from Eddie Barham’s house. Mariner began with the least interesting first: the bank statements. There was a year’s worth folded into each other. Spreading them out over his desk Mariner started with the oldest, scanning the columns of figures in search of any anomalies. No competition for Grace Kelly, but they did turn out to be more interesting than expected.

The first obvious fact was that from last summer, Eddie Barham had been sailing pretty close to the wind with his finances, to the extent that, over time, significant debts were beginning to accumulate. By the end of every month Eddie was in the red, with a gathering overdraft. A closer look at his expenditure revealed that a large portion of his monthly salary was paid out to an organisation called Bright Care.

Mariner had seen that name before, and hunting through the other wallets he found that the amounts corresponded with invoices issued from Oakwood, the respite care home that Joyce Clarke had mentioned. The puzzle was that those payments only began to appear on the current account statements back in June, while Mariner had got the impression that Jamie had been attending Oakwood for years.

The answer to that query lay deeper in the wallet where Mariner came across a now redundant building society account book. The account dated back to 1983, when it had been opened with a substantial sum and some irregular deposits. From 1986 there were regular monthly standing orders to Bright Care along with the occasional additional payment. But though the outgoings were regular, from what Mariner could see there had been no cash paid into the account, and by June of last year it had dwindled to nothing. CLOSED was stamped in large forbidding letters over the remaining empty pages.

Helpfully, the timing of that closure corresponded with the sudden appearance of the debits to Bright Care on Eddie’s current account statements, which solved one mystery. Payment switched to another account. The debits were then recorded until in line with what Joyce had told them, suddenly ceasing two months previously when Jamie had left Oakwood: there were none in January or February and that alone left Eddie’s bank account looking altogether healthier. Mariner couldn’t help wondering to what extent these numbers had given added impetus to Eddie Barham’s death. Medication may have been one of the reasons Jamie left the respite provision, as Joyce Clarke had told them, but it looked to Mariner as if the monetary constraints were greater. Like any other human, Eddie would have needed some relief from the demands of caring for Jamie, but he simply couldn’t afford it. And he couldn’t put in the overtime to make more cash because there was no one to look after Jamie. Catch-22. This was building up to look like a classic case.

And Anna Barham’s doubts about suicide receded a step further into the background.

After a while, the figures on the paper began to jump around before Mariner’s eyes and his throbbing head felt ready to burst. Aside from the injury, he’d barely slept in forty-eight hours. It was time to go. But, as he started to gather up the statements, something else sprang out at him.

At the end of December, Eddie’s bank account had taken a sudden, unprecedented upward turn, thanks to a single deposit made by standing order from another unknown account. When Mariner checked, the same sum appeared again on the same day in January. On the day of his death; on Sunday, Eddie Barham had been a comparatively wealthy man as each of those payments was for five thousand pounds. Suddenly it turned everything he’d been thinking on its head, but right now Mariner hadn’t the stamina or the inclination to figure out the full implications.

The crux of it all would be the pathology report, which Mariner felt confident would be categorical enough to allow them to tie this thing up and move on, but so far this evening the telephone had remained mute.

Leaving a note instructing Knox to follow up the source accounts for those standing order deposits, which he felt sure would turn out to be cosmetic, Mariner retrieved his jacket from the hook on the back of the door, switching off the light as he left.

One more job to do before he went home: the bar of the Chamberlain was quieter than it had been on Sunday night, so she would have stood out as much as he did, drawing half-concealed stares from around the room. But one look around told Mariner that the brunette wasn’t working here tonight, unless she’d been in earlier and he’d missed her.

The same barman was restocking the bottles of deceptively colourful alcopops. In the absence of a photofit Mariner gave him as close a description as he could muster, but it was to no avail. If the girl was regular here she’d struck a deal with the barman to keep schtoom.

Eschewing the inflated prices charged for the exotic beverages of the Chamberlain, Mariner deferred having a drink himself until he was closer to home, and even then he wasn’t sure. Being the centre of attention was becoming wearisome. But some ten minutes later he pulled into the car park of the Boatman Inn. His vehicle brought the total number to five, mainly because most of the Boatman’s regulars were beyond the age when it was safe for them to drive. Lacking the dubious attractions of piped disco music, fruit machines or wide-screen satellite TV, the pub was on borrowed time, ripe to be snapped up by one of the larger brewery chains and turned into one of the ‘fun pubs’ that, in Mariner’s experience, were too much of an assault on the senses to be anything like fun. An old man’s pub, Greta had dubbed it, and not as a compliment.

Locking his car, Mariner decided to risk a pint, in the hope that the few customers knew him well enough by now to leave him alone. He’d be the first to admit that he wasn’t an attractive sight, but if anyone else asked where he’d been ‘sticking that’ he didn’t quite trust himself not to give them one to match.

The only sounds to greet his ears in the Boatman were the comforting clatter of dominoes that underpinned the gentle banter from four elderly gents playing fives-and threes up one end of the lounge bar. This was occasionally bolstered by the ebb and flow of the murmured conversation of a younger couple on one of the side benches. Irish landlady Beryl was on her own, gliding gracefully under the weight of her extravagantly bouffant hair, which, like the pub, belonged to a different age. Seeing Mariner and without prompting, she slid a straight pint glass under the Marston’s Pedigree tap. ‘You’ve been in the wars then,’ she commented blandly, as Mariner approached the bar, her gaze lingering just a little too long.

‘Walked into a door,’ said Mariner, stealing the line he’d been given in countless domestics over the years. He wasn’t sure whether Beryl caught the irony, but she certainly took the hint, allowing Mariner to retreat to a corner table to enjoy his beer without further interrogation.

‘I’ll leave the car,’ he told Beryl, twenty minutes later, replacing his second empty glass on the bar.

‘Right you are, darlin’.’

It was something Mariner did regularly, journeying the 100 or so yards back to his house on foot. The pub car park was as safe as anywhere to leave a car, overlooked as it was by the small, local Norton Road Police Station.

The rain had stopped and, though it was mild for February, a fresh breeze blew as Mariner wound his way along the sixties-built cul-de-sac that was to the one side of the pub, and into the small service road that few people even knew existed. Ominously, a silver Ford Focus was parked just down from his house, and walking up the path of the narrow, three-storey, Victorian red-brick, Mariner noticed the blue-tinged flickering of a cathode tube in the darkened window of his living room. He opened the front door and turned on the light.

‘Fancy a spring roll, boss?’ asked Knox, brightly. He’d made himself at home, slouching on the sofa with his feet up on the coffee table amid a clutter of greasy takeaway cartons, from which emanated the pervasive smell of egg fried rice. On screen the subjects in a reality TV show were arguing loudly.

Mariner felt his anxiety level crank up a notch. ‘I take it the peace negotiations didn’t go as planned,’ he said, closing the door.

Knox killed the sound on the TV. ‘Not exactly, although she did chuck me down some clothes, so at least I’ll be clean. Is it all right if I kip here tonight, sir?’ Although the reply seemed to have already been taken for granted.

‘I suppose so,’ said Mariner, doubting the decision already. Knox could have the second-floor room, the one that he’d been trying to rent out. ‘As long as you remember that we’re off-duty,’ Mariner reminded him. ‘You don’t have to call me sir here.’ Interestingly Knox had never bothered with the formality at the station, so it was puzzling that he should start now.

‘Right.’ Knox held up a glass of brown liquid. ‘And I helped myself. I hope you don’t mind,’

‘No,’ Mariner said, dubiously. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s all right,’ Knox was unenthusiastic. ‘Though I’m more of a lager man myself.’

Mariner was disappointed; he’d thought it was a good brew. To check it out for himself, he went and fetched a bottle.

‘You’ve got a nice place here,’ said Knox, when Mariner returned. ‘Very neat and cosy.’

‘Yes, well, I have my last girlfriend to thank for that,’ said Mariner. ‘She took an immediate dislike to the place and refused to set foot in it until it was liveable.’

Mariner could still remember the buzz he’d got from seeing the ‘For Sale’ sign on the property, the day he’d come across it. Right from when they’d first met, Greta had been nagging him to make the move from renting to owning a house that they could share, but unfortunately this wasn’t the sort of place she had in mind. Her dream was of a brand new house on a regimented estate of clones, not an ancient, rundown cottage in the middle of no-man’s-land. The writing was on the wall even then.

Having been owned for years by an elderly bachelor (Mariner liked the symmetry there), the property had been virtually derelict; something Greta seemed to interpret as a deliberately constructed obstacle to their cohabitation.

Nevertheless, under her close scrutiny, Mariner had, in the space of a few short months, sanded the wooden floors, slapped a coat of emulsion on the walls and had central heating connected to the wood-burning stove. Despite her initial reservations, Greta had helped out with the furnishings.

Not that there was much for her to do. The builder, clearly unfamiliar with the advantages of a spirit level, had compensated by covering every irregular nook and cranny with doors. The result was a hoarder’s heaven, the small, compact rooms resembling the cabins of a boat. Every square inch of space was utilised, with numerous tiny cupboards and hideaways, many ornately inlaid with varnished walnut and oak.

‘It looks liveable to me,’ said Knox looking around him.

‘It is.’

‘So where is she?’

‘It didn’t work out,’ said Mariner, making the understatement of the century.

Displaying unprecedented tact, Knox didn’t pursue it.

‘So if she didn’t even like the place, what was the big attraction?’

‘I’ll show you.’ Mariner got up and walked out of the snug living room and into the galley-like kitchen. Opening the kitchen door, a dank smell greeted their nostrils and as their eyes adjusted to the darkness, it was just possible to make out the oily black ribbon of the Worcester Canal, the trees on the opposite bank a wall of black silhouettes against the indigo sky and reflected dully on the water below.

‘I wanted to be by the water,’ said Mariner. ‘That was the attraction.’

‘Must be something to do with being a mariner,’ said Knox. ‘Must be the nearest you get to the sea around here.’

Mariner laughed. ‘Christ, do you know, I’d never even thought of that.’

Just outside the door, under the kitchen window, in the small garden that separated the cottage from the canal’s towpath, was a stone bench, sheltered by the overhanging eave. Mariner sat down on it and Knox joined him.

‘There’s canals everywhere round here,’ said Knox.

‘I’ve noticed that. But I didn’t know about this one.’

‘It’s part of the Worcester and Birmingham,’ said Mariner. ‘What with the Birmingham-Fazeley and the Grand Union we’ve got over a hundred miles of man-made waterways in and around the city. More canals than Venice, so they say, though I can’t imagine that Birmingham has the | same romantic appeal. Hard to picture a gondolier punting his way down past the Tysely incinerator waxing lyrical about love and romance. But all that’s changing.’ In recent years Mariner had walked for miles along the towpaths, watching whole sections transformed from decaying industrial wastelands to gleaming fashionable walkways with shops and restaurants to accommodate the growing tourist industry. Here though was far enough out of the city to have escaped the cycle of urban renewal and Mariner liked his shabby, unpretentious section of the waterway.

‘Not so much traffic here as in Venice either,’ surmised Knox.

‘There would have been once,’ Mariner said. ‘A hundred years ago, even at this time of night, this stretch would have been as packed as the M42,’ he said. ‘Constant flow of barges. Sometimes you can almost hear the boatmen shouting at each other…’ He broke off. Knox would think he was suffering from concussion.