Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01] (12 page)

‘You’d know more about that than me.’

‘The other curious thing is that the heroin used was of a particularly pure grade, although we’re not sure how important that is at this stage. And the preliminary analysis of the blood that was on Jamie’s shirt shows that although it’s consistent with the timing, the blood isn’t his or Eddie’s. Some of it’s mine—big surprise—but there was someone else in the flat, too. We have to conclude that it was Eddie’s killer. Or one of them.’

‘Is that why Jamie was in the cupboard?’

‘It’s possible Eddie put him there for his own protection.

But it’s more likely that Jamie was shut in there out of the way while Eddie was dealt with. It was an effective strategy.

Jamie could tell us nothing about what happened, even if he was able to.’ Only this morning Francine the care worker at Jamie’s day centre had rung to confirm it. Using a photograph of Eddie she’d tried to elicit something, anything, from Jamie, but had got nothing.

Anna frowned. ‘But what about the note?’ she asked, suddenly. ‘You found a note.’

‘Mm.’ Mariner felt the blush rising from his neck. It had been a pretty fundamental error, and so obvious in retrospect.

‘Half a note, actually. There was a postscript,’ he said. ‘We found it stuffed in the hedge outside. Fitted together again with the so-called “suicide note” it would have read:
“NO MORE MILK UNTIL THURSDAY THANKS, NO 34”
.’

‘Oh.’

It was one of the things that had jarred with Mariner; that a man who made a living from words would make his last message to the world so brief. ‘Eddie must have left it on the doorstep that evening,’ he said. ‘It was a gift to whoever killed him. It may even have influenced the way they set things up.’

Anna shivered as Mariner watched her efforts to digest what he had just told her. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, eventually.

‘I thought it would make me feel better to know that Eddie hadn’t taken his own life, but it doesn’t.’ Her eyes glazed over as she momentarily drifted off into her own thoughts, and Mariner could only guess at the images crowding her head. It was the stuff of nightmares. He began to wonder if he’d given her too much information too soon, but in a matter of minutes she seemed to come round again.

‘So what happens now?’ she asked, at last.

‘At the moment it’ll help if we can keep all this to ourselves,’ Mariner said. ‘If Eddie’s killer is still around, it suits us that he or she should think that we’re still treating the death as suicide. It’s good that you’re here, though.

You may be able to help. Tell us if you see anything else unusual, anything about the place that strikes you as odd.’

He wasn’t holding out much hope, especially in such austere surroundings, but it was always worth a shot.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she confessed, looking absently around her, at a home she must have once known intimately.

‘I’ve only been here once since my parents died.

And that time Eddie succeeded in making me feel so guilty that I just walked out again.’

‘Guilty?’ It seemed an odd choice of word.

‘Well look at it,’ she raised her arms. ‘This room is like a monastic cell.’

Mariner nodded, grimly. ‘And we thought it was all fashionably minimalist.’

‘Fashion doesn’t come into it. There are only so many times an insurance firm will pay out for “damage caused by autistic sibling”. Add into that Eddie’s own little fetish for order. We used to joke that he was on the spectrum too.’

‘Sorry?’ She’d lost him.

‘The autistic spectrum,’ she elaborated. ‘These days it’s pretty well accepted that autism is a continuum, with “normal” at one end and “severe” at the other. If you take it to the extreme, we’re all on it somewhere, with our own little routines and obsessions,’ she smiled suddenly. ‘I’m sure you must have some autistic traits.’

From the corner of his eye, Mariner saw Knox suppress a grin. Okay, so he kept his desk tidy. What was wrong with that? ‘I can live without Hula Hoops, if that’s what you mean,’ Mariner defended himself uneasily.

‘Either way, it all screamed “sacrifice!” at me,’ Anna said. ‘Which is exactly what Eddie wanted.’

‘Why?’ Mariner sensed a sudden reluctance. Maybe she didn’t expect him to understand. Maybe he wouldn’t. But he wanted to know.

‘Because after our parents died, Eddie was prepared to take Jamie on, and I wasn’t,’ she explained with great patience. ‘It shocked a lot of people. After all, I’m the woman, the nurturer. The fact that I had a husband and a home to run, as well as a successful career didn’t count for anything.’

There was an awkward silence, which Mariner wasn’t sure how to fill.

‘Families, eh?’ Knox chipped in, and the word hung in the air for several seconds, where Mariner was content to leave it, for now. After all, what did he know about families?

‘You wouldn’t know if Eddie had any enemies, then?’ he asked, moving on.

With the change of subject Anna perceptibly relaxed.

‘I’ve already told you. I had very little idea of what was going on in his life. But it’s hard to imagine that he would have. Eddie was such an easy-going guy. Except where I was concerned of course.’ She shot Mariner a wry look.

‘Does that confession make me a suspect?’

He managed a smile. ‘I don’t think so. Although it would help, for the record, if you could tell me where you were between the hours of nine and midnight on Sunday night.’

‘That’s easy. I was at home with my boyfriend. He’s “happily married”, so we don’t go out much.’ Something nipped at Mariner’s gut, but he couldn’t quite identify it as disapproval or disappointment.

‘Will he back that up?’ he asked.

‘As long as you don’t ask him to broadcast it on the six o’clock news it shouldn’t be a problem. What do you think happened?’

‘That’s what we’re here to try and find out. It’s not looking like a robbery. Nothing valuable seems to have been taken and Eddie’s wallet, when we found it, was still stuffed with cash. And there’s no sign of a forced entry. If Eddie went out leaving Jamie at home, would he have left the door on the latch?’

‘He might have.’ She was unsure.

‘If not, we have to conclude that it was someone who knew Eddie and wanted something from him.’

‘Eddie had made a will. He told the solicitor where it was in case anything happened to him.’

Mariner nodded. ‘If he was feeling under threat from someone, he might have started to make those kinds of preparations. And it might explain why he’d begun collecting Jamie from the day centre himself, too. He could have believed that someone would try to get at him through Jamie.’

‘But who? And why?’

Mariner was beginning to formulate some ideas about that, but he wasn’t ready to share them yet. ‘It was someone who was well organised. They had a purpose and they came prepared. They apparently weren’t keen to advertise that they were here, either. There were men working on the driveway next door all weekend, so they had to wait until a Sunday night after dark, when everyone had gone home. And what we haven’t got yet is any kind of motive.’ Though, if pressed, Mariner would have laid bets on a connection with those large payments of money into Eddie Barham’s bank account.

Knox had been researching those, but so far his investigations had drawn an intriguing blank. The account wasn’t from a UK bank and so far they hadn’t even managed to identify its country of origin, let alone any other details.

Mariner didn’t imagine Anna Barham having access to an offshore bank, but the question had to be asked. So he asked it. ‘Did Eddie ever talk to you about money?’

‘No. It wasn’t something we ever discussed.’

‘So you haven’t lent him any recently?’

‘I’d be the last person Eddie would come to for money,’ she said. ‘And anyway, he wouldn’t need to. He wasn’t rolling in it, but he was solvent. His solicitor said that he left quite a large sum.’

Mariner decided to spare her the details for now. ‘He did,’ he agreed. ‘We’re currently trying to identify the source of two large payments into Eddie’s bank account in December and January.’

‘How large?’

‘Five thousand pounds each. They were paid by standing order. Any idea about where they may have come from?’

Her response was in the negative, as he’d expected and as she seemed unfazed by the line of questioning Mariner was inclined to believe her.

‘We really could do with finding Sally-Ann,’ he said. ‘If that’s her name.’

‘You really think a woman might have done it?’

‘I saw Eddie with a woman earlier on Sunday evening, they drove off together. It may have been the same woman who later made the call to the emergency services. She has disappeared and so apparently has Sally-Ann. It’s quite a coincidence. Whether or not she’s implicated, she was one of the last people to see Eddie alive.’ Mariner braced himself for what could potentially be a sensitive area. ‘In Eddie’s wallet we found a page torn out of the local newspaper.

It was the list of ads for personal services, escort agencies, that kind of thing.’ Mariner hesitated. ‘It was well used. The woman I saw him with I’m pretty sure was in that line of work.’

‘What are you getting at?’ she demanded.

‘Do you know if Eddie had ever been in the habit of using the services of a prostitute?’ he asked.

He’d shocked her. ‘Absolutely not!’

‘It could have been connected with something he was working on, of course, but we have to check out all the possibilities,’ Mariner said, to cool things down again.

‘We’re trying to recover what remained of Eddie’s computer files, too.’

‘You think it could have happened because of something he was writing?’ It was easier to bear than the alternative.

Mariner shrugged. ‘Or something he’d written in the past. People bear grudges.’ Characters like Frank Crosby did it big time.

Knox’s mobile trilled. ‘I’ll take it outside, boss,’ he said, fumbling for it. In his haste to leave the room, he tripped over the two large volumes propping open the door, sending one of them sliding across the floor. Mariner got up to retrieve it, inspecting the spine as he did so. It was a fairly dated edition of Gray’s Anatomy.

‘Was Eddie’s reading always so light, or was he thinking of going into medicine?’ he asked, turning over the book in his hand.

As Anna took the weighty tome from him, a trace of recognition registered.

‘It’s one of Dad’s old medical books,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know Eddie had kept them.’

‘Your father was a doctor?’

With a brief smile, she shook her head. ‘A frustrated doctor. He taught chemistry and biology at St Mark’s Comp. But he had his own little research projects on the go all the time, too.’

‘His autistic trait?’

‘Something like that.’

‘What was he researching?’

‘What else? Bloody autism. The bane of our lives.’

‘Trying to do what? Find the cure?’

‘Cause or cure, he thought the one would lead to the other. But above all he wanted to prove to my mother that Jamie’s condition wasn’t her fault.’

‘Was that necessary?’

‘Oh yes. Twenty years ago when my parents were first told what was wrong with Jamie, everyone thought that autism was a result of the mother’s failure to bond with her child. They called them “refrigerator mothers”.’

‘That sounds like a lorry load of antiquated Freudian crap.’

‘It does now, but at the time nobody knew anything different. So, not only did my mother have this miserable, screaming, uncommunicative child, but she had to live with the experts telling her that “Oh, and by the way, it’s your fault that he’s like that.” Never mind that she’s already got two happy, healthy children.’

‘And your father didn’t believe it?’

‘Dad never took anything at face value. He was a scientist, so all the psychological stuff was just too airy-fairy for him. Then when people began to realise that there could be other, more tangible explanations for autism it was all the encouragement he needed. Now, of course, it’s pretty much accepted that there are a whole range of biological and genetic factors at play.’ She could tell that Mariner was impressed.

‘You know a lot about this, don’t you?’ he observed.

Despite herself, Anna laughed. ‘Something must have sunk in from the endless discussions we were dragged into over Sunday lunch. Dad was obsessed. It was his little one man campaign. Looking back, I think it was his way of dealing with Jamie. Our lives were like a roller coaster, each time some new theory or therapy or medication came out there was hope or there was guilt. We were a completely dysfunctional family. Dad shut away in his study for hours on end, Jamie taking all Mum’s time and energy…’

‘And not much time for you and Eddie.’

‘It’s probably why we hated each other so much. We took out our anger on each other.’

‘Did any of your father’s work get published?’

Another sardonic smile. ‘No.’ Then a pause as something stirred in her memory. ‘Although they did print some letter he wrote to an autism journal, expounding one of his theories.

I was living away from home by then, so Mum sent me a copy. She was so proud of him. She claimed it had created quite a stir. But I was sick to the back teeth with autism. I’d left home to get away from it, so I didn’t even bother reading it. It went straight in the bin. It’s one of those stupid things I really regretted, because only a few weeks later Mum and Dad were dead.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘Their car skidded off an icy road and went into the canal. They were both killed outright. Dad had learnt to drive fairly late in life and he was never a very confident driver. It was a shock, of course, but in some ways we weren’t that surprised.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Mariner said.

Anna shrugged, ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘How long?’ asked Mariner.

‘1985. It was a great year, 1985. My parents were killed and my marriage hit the rocks. Still, at least Mum and Dad weren’t around to say “told you so”.’ By Mariner’s calculation that would make it two years after the building society account was opened and a year before the outgoing standing orders.

Knox reappeared in the doorway, distracting them both from further morbid thoughts.