Lost River (22 page)

‘You noticed?’

‘There are a lot of small signs.’

‘It’s the incident earlier this week that he just mentioned. The death of the little girl he tried to rescue from drowning.’

Murchison nodded.

‘There should be early intervention after a traumatic incident like that. It can prevent acute stress reaction from developing into full-blown PTSD. What was the level of your critical incident stress management?’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there.’

Murchison shook her head. ‘Someone should have taken responsibility. Isn’t this officer part of your team?’

Fry looked across the cemetery at Cooper.

‘Do I still have a team?’ she said.

When Fry was released by the Major Incident Unit, she took Cooper back to her hotel. He looked as though he needed a cup of coffee or two, maybe some food.

‘Ben,’ she said, as they parked their cars in the Brindleyplace multi-storey, ‘how much do you remember of your childhood?’

Cooper turned to her in surprise as he keyed the locks on his Toyota. ‘I remember lots of things.’

‘I mean, what are your earliest memories? How old were you at the time?’

‘Oh, well. There’s a vague memory of crossing a street somewhere in town, with Mum and Matt. It must have been during the summer, because Matt had a wasp land on his hand. I have this picture of him standing there, with his finger out as if he was pointing at something. And he was screaming. He was terrified of getting stung by wasps as a child. I think it’s probably the sound of him screaming that impressed the memory on me.’

‘Matt was a child? But he’s five years older than you, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you must have been…?’

‘Well, Mum was standing behind me. I was in a pushchair.’

‘You weren’t even walking? That means you were, what…two or three years old?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘My God.’

Cooper stopped in the exit to the car park and looked up at the office blocks in Brindleyplace.

‘Why are you asking something like that, Diane?’

‘Well, I realized a strange thing. I don’t have any early memories at all. Nothing as early as you. I don’t even remember my first day at school. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’

He shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. I think you remember things
that were particularly traumatic or especially enjoyable. I don’t remember my first day at school either. But I remember the second day – I didn’t want to go, and I kicked up a real fuss at home that morning. But Mum tricked me into walking past the gates so we could look at all the other children who were having to go in, and then she pushed me into the arms of a teacher. I cried then. That was a real trauma, I can tell you. But I can’t actually remember why I didn’t want to go in the first place.’

‘I can’t picture you crying because you didn’t want to go to school.’

‘I bet you can’t picture me in my school shorts and cap either.’

‘I’d rather not, thanks.’

Cooper gestured at the hotel. ‘Is this where you’re staying?’

‘Oh. Yes. Come on in.’

‘So what brought this on suddenly, Diane? Has your Birmingham visit turned into a trip down Memory Lane?’

‘Sort of. I just keep noticing that other people seem to remember far more than I do. Their memories are clear, right down to the smallest details. I don’t know how they do that. For me, anything that happened more than ten years ago is just a blur. I’ve always taken the view that your memory can only hold a certain amount of information, so it gradually ditches all the old stuff that you don’t need any more.’

‘But there must be some things you remember.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Fry hesitated. ‘Yes, of course there are. A few things.’

‘No happy childhood memories? Well, maybe I shouldn’t ask…’

‘Considering the sort of childhood that I had? No. Well, I suppose you have happy memories of long summer holidays playing in the garden with your pet dog.’

‘Playing on the farm among the cows. But, otherwise, yes.’

When they were seated in the hotel lounge, Cooper looked around to see who was within earshot, reminding Fry too closely of Andy Kewley, whose body now lay in the mortuary.

‘Anyway, I’ve got some news,’ he said. ‘An old friend came up trumps and passed on some information.’

‘Yes?’

But Cooper jumped as someone walked up to their table. Fry looked up and saw Angie.

‘Well, look who it is,’ said Angie. ‘What a surprise.’

Diane couldn’t bear the smile on her sister’s face when she saw Cooper. Angie pulled up another chair and joined them at the table. She looked as though she might start questioning Cooper, or making some joke that only she would find funny. She had to prevent that.

‘Ben was just telling me that he had some information.’

‘Right.’

Cooper looked at her with one eyebrow raised, and she nodded. Angie had to be allowed in.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, apparently, the cold case team put all the evidence samples from your assault through the lab again for fresh DNA tests.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘And, as a result, it seems they got a new hit – a familial DNA match.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Angie.

‘They widened the search criteria on the national database. Although they didn’t find a direct match to the person who left the scene of crime sample, they identified a family member.’

‘Wait a minute. That means a close relative who was already on the database.’

‘Yes. Probably someone who’d been arrested at some time. A CJ sample taken from a buccal swab. They didn’t even necessarily have to be charged, let alone convicted. They would still be on the database.’

‘It could be an innocent person, then.’

‘Well, maybe.’

Fry knew the DNA database had its own internal algorithms for identifying immediate relatives on the basis of
similar profiles. A one-off speculative search approach was used for conducting familial searches, which could throw up parents, siblings, or offspring. This type of search could be used to pursue two lines of enquiry – the identity of an individual who could be a sibling of the offender, or the identity of the offender’s parent or child.

Some time in the not too distant future, she expected that a DNA profile of someone arrested could be statistically linked to more and more relatives like uncles, aunts, cousins, many of whom would not have been arrested.

‘So who was traced by the familial match?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper.

‘Was it Shepherd, or Barnes?’

‘It doesn’t seem to have been either of them.’

‘What? It must have been one or the other. A familial match means either Shepherd or Barnes has a father or brother on the database – that’s what happened, surely?’

‘It seems not, Diane.’

‘But theirs was the only DNA recovered from the scene. Unless…’

Cooper nodded. ‘Yes. The new series of tests produced a third DNA profile. Techniques have improved a lot over the last few years. Analysis is much more sensitive now.’

‘A third person at the scene,’ said Fry. ‘A third person.’

Her mind re-ran that confused memory – a figure crouching over her, with a different feel and smell. There was no other way she could disentangle that one recollection from the rest, because it was caught up in the overwhelming flood of sensations – the pain and shock, and fear, the vicious sharpness of the gravel, the bite of the barbed-wire fence, the suffocating darkness.

She had always known there were other figures in the background. She had seen their shadows in the streetlights, heard their voices in the dark. But a third taking part in the attack? Well, there could have been. A third member of the gang,
drawn into the assault, urged on by the others. A third person leaving his DNA.

‘A familial match could still mean they linked the third person to Shepherd or Barnes.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘It could have been that. Those are all the details I’ve got so far on the DNA evidence. I’m sorry it isn’t more, Diane.’

‘No, that’s great. You’ve done really well, Ben.’

Angie looked sideways at Cooper before turning to her sister. ‘Did you leave that file in your room, Di? Is it safe?’

‘I left a “Do not disturb” sign on the door.’

‘By the way, I have these, too,’ said Cooper.

He produced the PNC print-outs for Marcus Shepherd and Darren Barnes, with all their details – addresses, dates of birth, ethnicity codes, criminal records. There was also a photograph of Tanya Spiers, obtained from the police computer system. She was the witness who claimed to have known both the suspects, and heard them boasting at a club.

‘Why was she on the PNC?’ asked Fry.

‘She was arrested at some time for soliciting, and outraging public decency,’ he said. ‘Actually, I feel sorry for her.’

‘Why?’

‘She looks as if she’s gone through a lot of tragedy in her life. It’s her eyes – they’re very sad.’

Angie laughed. ‘No, Ben. It’s too much crack and vodka that makes your eyes look this way.’

Cooper lowered his head, as if embarrassed by Angie’s laughter.

‘So what’s next?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ agreed Angie. ‘That’s a good question. What’s next?’

Diane gazed out of the hotel windows at the fountains splashing in the square, and the office workers moving backwards and forwards in front of 3 Brindleyplace.

‘Andy Kewley was killed because he knew something, and was about to give it away,’ she said. ‘And, if Andy was right, there’s one person central to all this. His name is William Leeson.’

It had begun to rain by the time they got to Digbeth. Warm, summer rain – but heavy enough to make pedestrians run for cover.

The entrance to the sprawling Custard Factory arts complex was hidden away opposite the Peugeot dealer on the Bull Ring Trading Estate. An ancient half-timbered pub stood by the traffic lights on the corner of Heath Mill Lane – the Old Crown, its fourteenth-century origins written on the back wall. Fry noticed a martial arts academy in a yard under one of the railway viaducts, close to the campanile of Father Lopes’ Chapel.

The buildings of the Custard Factory were painted in pastel colours. Blue, green, pink. A metallic dragon guarded a small lake. A giant living tree statue of a green man loomed over Pagan Place, with empty eye sockets and rain water dripping from his mouth.

Some entrepreneur had taken a massive punt on this project. Scattered around the area now were trendy venues and exhibition spaces. Barfly, Vivid, the Medicine Bar. All tucked in among the old factories, like wild flowers blooming in a desert.

‘Louise Jones was leaving the publisher’s offices in the Custard Factory,’ she said. ‘They’d been holding some kind of public event – a book launch party, or something like that.
People had been drinking until quite late. Miss Jones probably stayed behind to help clear up.’

‘And to chuck out the drunks, from what I hear about publishing.’

‘Maybe.’

‘And as she came out to get her car, she looked down the street, and she saw two males running away from the patch of wasteland.’

‘That’s it. One black male and one white.’

‘Marcus Shepherd and Darren Barnes.’

Fry looked around. ‘That means they must have been on the other side of the river, though.’

As they went up the steps into Heath Mill Lane, the paving under the walkway was treacherously slippery after the fresh rain.

‘What was the piece of wasteland?’

‘I don’t know. Some old disused factory yard, or a demolition site.’

The Connemara wasn’t the only pub in this area. She noticed the Floodgate Tavern standing on the corner of Floodgate Street and Little Ann Street.

‘So, if the DNA results are correct, there must have been a third person.’

‘I do have a vague recollection, but it’s too confused for me to be certain.’

The entrance to the car park on Heath Mill Lane was bordered by a twenty-five-foot wall made of compacted cars – crushed engine mountings, ripped tyres, even the old carpets from footwells, still full of the debris left by their drivers. Another symbolic statement of some kind?

In the nearby streets, taxis were parked by the kerbside waiting for repair. A small engineering workshop stood under the arch of the railway viaduct, now hung with weeds and saplings re-colonizing the brickwork. Every yard and alley was protected by steel security fencing.

‘I’m not sure this is going to help,’ said Fry.

‘Memories emerge gradually. The more reminders you get, the better.’

Fry stood on the brick steps leading down to the river, watching the oily flow, touching the tall stems of the wild plants that she knew would burst into purple flowers later in the summer. She turned the page of her
A to
Z, trying to trace the river’s route. It wasn’t an easy task – the line on the map was narrow, and broken in places, weaving between a network of roads and canals.

She found the Lickey Hills to the south of Birmingham. It was from here that the Rea came into the city, meandered its way through Canon Hill Park, skirted Edgbaston cricket ground, and crossed Belgrave Middleway, before being swallowed up by the industrial belt. From there, it was pretty much a forgotten river – visible only from derelict factories, or glimpsed from the car park of Maini’s cash and carry. Even train passengers might fail to notice it as they crossed the viaduct over Floodgate Street. Boaters on the Grand Union Canal might be aware of the dirty brown river flowing beneath their aqueduct at Warwick Bar. But within a few metres it had disappeared again under the freightliner terminal in Montague Street.

Somewhere north of Washwood Heath, the Rea finally merged with the Tame under the shadow of Spaghetti Junction. Along the way, the river had picked up a tide of industrial debris, sucking the grime out of miles of crumbling brickwork and nineteenth-century foundations.

The purple flowers were rosebay willowherb, she recalled – a weed that had been the bane of life for her foster parents, who’d run a plant nursery in Halesowen, a bit too close to a railway embankment that had been allowed to run wild. All of those clumps of weed were an unwelcome intrusion from the countryside. Their seeds must drift in on the wind from the Lickeys, or cling to the feathers of birds roosting in the
parks. Maybe they even floated in on the rivers too, swept past Longridge and under the factories of Digbeth on the muddy surface of the Rea. Left to itself, she supposed willowherb would re-colonize the city, cover the whole of Birmingham in purple flowers and clouds of white seed-heads.

Thank goodness for the parks department with their backpacks full of weed killer, spraying a barrier of poison against the forces of nature.

Fry looked round for Cooper. Angie had backed out of coming with her on this visit, claiming that she had other things to do.

‘Does that mean I have to do this on my own?’ Diane had said.

But Cooper had stepped forward. ‘I’ll come with you.’

And that had been that. Fry hadn’t commented on her sister’s attitude, but Cooper couldn’t resist.

‘I would have thought that Angie could be with you,’ he said. ‘Now, of all times.’

Fry had shrugged then.

‘You know, Ben,’ she said, ‘I don’t care any more.’

Fry gestured at the water as Cooper came alongside her.

‘There you go,’ she said. ‘That’s the River Rea. Birmingham’s forgotten treasure.’

Cooper was startled by the change in her. This wasn’t the Diane Fry he knew. The look she gave him when she said ‘I don’t care any more’ was almost a challenge, as if she wanted him to provoke her, to push her too far. She was turning into a different person in front of his eyes, and he wasn’t sure that he liked it. Perhaps he hadn’t really got to know her very well in these past few years. This side of her had been pretty well hidden, anyway.

Now, standing in Digbeth, he looked down at the dirty brown water, trying to see it as a treasure. But the River Dove was still in his mind, clear and cold, flowing down from the hills.

‘People associate London with the Thames, Liverpool with the Mersey, and Newcastle with the Tyne. But to generations of Brummies, the River Rea is a mystery. Most of them don’t even know their city possesses a river. They think they just have canals.’

‘To be honest, it’s not very impressive,’ said Cooper.

‘Maybe not,’ admitted Fry. ‘But it’s not the river itself that’s important, is it? It’s what’s on the banks of the river that matters.’

Fry’s phone rang. She could see from the caller display who it was.

‘Do I want to talk to her?’ she said out loud.

‘Who?’ asked Cooper.

‘My sister.’

‘Perhaps you’d better.’

Cooper walked away a few yards, to give her some privacy. Perhaps he thought they were going to have a row. If so, he was disappointed.

‘You need a bloke called Eddie Doyle,’ said Angie.

‘Who’s he?’

‘William Leeson’s partner. Or ex partner, at least.’

‘How did you find that out?’

‘I looked him up on Facebook.’

‘What?’

‘Well, ask a stupid question…’

Fry turned impatiently, scowled at Cooper as if it was his fault.

‘What was that name again?’

‘Eddie Doyle. They say you might find him at the Irish Club, if the bar’s open.’

‘Thanks, Angie.’

‘You didn’t sound all that pleased to hear from me, Di. Were you expecting someone else?’

‘I was hoping for a call from Vince. He hasn’t been in touch
yet about getting me within arm’s length of Shepherd and Barnes. He agreed to do it, but I suppose he’s got cold feet.’

‘Vince? I wouldn’t rely on him. He was never the toughest kid on the block.’

‘No.’

Fry finished the call and gestured to Cooper. He ambled over, too slowly for her liking. She felt like telling him he was in the city now. People here moved at a pace that was a bit faster than a ruminating sheep.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘To a little bit of Ireland.’

The Irish Club stood in a prominent position on Deritend High Street. Here, the River Rea formed the dividing line between Digbeth and Deritend. At Deritend Bridge was the very spot where Birmingham had first developed. Someone once told her that the early settlers had just called this stretch of water ‘the river’, and nothing more – ‘rea’ was a word meaning river in Anglo Saxon. That was good Brum, calling a spade a spade.

Drum and accordion music drifted from an open fire door at the Chapel House Street entrance of the club. There was a dance going on in the main hall. Fry glimpsed middle-aged couples swinging each other around the floor.

In the lobby, old Gaelic Athletics Association posters were framed on the walls. Carroll’s GAA Allstars of 1974. A bit of nostalgia there, definitely. Posters in the windows advertised wrestling matches and concerts by two singers called Sean Nenrye and Mick Flavin. In their publicity photos they looked so similar they could have been twins. The same Irish twinkle, the same hazel eyes.

‘Want me to go in and ask?’ said Cooper.

‘What? Do you think you’ll pass as Irish?’

‘Better than you will,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you might want to keep an eye out front here, in case he legs it.’

‘Legs it? Like he’s a suspect?’

‘Well, I’m just thinking – nobody else seems to want to talk to you at the moment, Diane. Mr Doyle might be no different.’

Fry nodded. ‘Okay. Let’s do that.’

Standing at front of the club, near the pedestrian crossing, Fry looked towards the city centre. The clean light after the spell of rain lit a panorama of contrasting buildings – the blue sheen of the Beetham Tower, the Paradise Circus multi-storey car park, the spire of St Martin’s in the Bullring, the Rotunda, the shimmering aluminium curve of Self ridges.

Cooper came out a few minutes later.

‘They know Eddie Doyle pretty well, but he’s not here at the moment. They suggested trying a pub called the Connemara.’

Well, the Connemara wouldn’t feature very highly in the tourist guides to Birmingham. It stood a few hundred yards too far east to be part of the gay scene, and it hadn’t quite made enough effort on its food or decor to attract the cultural crowd from the Custard Factory. And from what she’d heard, all the really beautiful people went to the Rainbow in Deritend High Street anyway. So the Connemara was left with the flotsam and jetsam, the type of hardened drinkers who still gravitated to old-fashioned back-street pubs, no doubt for their own good reasons.

When Fry worked in the West Midlands, there had been a thousand pubs like the Connemara, magnets for petty criminals and prostitutes, the scenes of regular Saturday-night brawls, and the occasional all-night lock-in. But there weren’t many of these places left now, even in Birmingham. Times had changed, and people wanted more than a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps and a pint of Double Diamond on a damp beer mat. Customers expected food and cocktails, and a bit of an ambience. If they didn’t adapt to changing demands, these back-street pubs were doomed. During the past few years, they’d been closing down faster than teashops in a street full of Starbuck’s.

There was a reason she hadn’t remembered this pub at first. It had changed its name a few times. Leaded windows and ornate Victorian brickwork, red and white, with a top storey like a half-timbered Elizabethan addition. Spotlights. Above the hanging baskets, a CCTV camera enclosed in a steel cage to protect it against vandalism.

‘Let’s do it the other way round this time,’ she said.

Cooper shrugged. ‘Whatever you like.’

‘Give me five minutes. If I don’t come out, you can follow me in.’

‘Sure.’

Fry walked through the door, and the atmosphere hit her immediately. Stale beer and body odour, no longer masked by cigarette smoke. Or was it?

My God. It was the second decade of the twenty-first century, and she still felt uncomfortable going into a pub on her own. Well, going into the Connemara she did. It was probably something to do with the distance she’d put between herself and civilization the moment she walked through the door. She caught the powerful odour of spilt beer, sour as if it had been spilled last week and no one had bothered to wipe it up. And wasn’t that cigarette smoke she could see hanging in the air in front of the dartboard? Maybe she should just pretend it was a trick of the light.

She asked at the bar, and a man sitting on his own in the corner was pointed out to her.

‘Eddie Doyle?’

He jumped as if he’d been shot.

‘Jesus and Mary! Who the Hell are you?’

Fry sat down across the table from him.

‘A bit jumpy, sir?’

He wiped a splash of whisky off his shirt.

‘You don’t creep up on people like that around here. Jesus.’

Eddie Doyle was small and flabby, and had grown a brown moustache in an attempt to make his face look more interesting.
It wasn’t working. The sly look in his eye was more reminiscent of a salesman, calculating the odds, weighing up his chances of closing a deal.

He reminded Fry of a part-time college lecturer she’d dealt with once. He was some kind of expert on the history of the industrial revolution. He’d spent a lot of his time poking around in the back streets of Digbeth, admiring the contour of a factory wall, excited by a line of brickwork on a railway viaduct.

The lecturer had been a heavy drinker, too. He’d run an elderly woman over in his car on a pedestrian crossing, his blood test showing that he was nearly three times the drink-drive limit. He’d got a custodial sentence for causing death by dangerous driving. He might still be in Winson Green now.

Doyle peered at her through watery eyes.

‘No, I don’t know you. Are you on the game? You don’t look like a tart.’