Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01]

by The Worm in The Bud (txt)

  ‘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.

  Chapter Four

  ‘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.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you about Eddie Barham.’ Mariner said.

  Sizing up Mariner’s damaged nose, Moloney broke into a broad nicotine-stained grin. ‘Oh yes. What’s he done now?’

  ‘He was found dead at his home last night,’ said Mariner. ‘He appears to have committed suicide.’

  That took the wind out of Moloney’s sails. In fact, judging from the blanching effect on his face, it had scuttled the whole boat. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he wheezed, taking a long drag on his cigarette. ‘Are you sure?’

  Mariner nodded. ‘That’s certainly how it looks.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Moloney repeated. ‘I knew things had taken a turn for Ed, but I didn’t know things were that bad.’

  ‘You must have known him pretty well then.’

  ‘We weren’t what you’d call bosom buddies, but he’d been around the block a few times, you know? He must be—have been—one of our longest-serving reporters. A lot of kids see us as just a stepping-stone to the nationals, but Eddie started as a cub years ago and stuck with us. Poor bastard.’

  ‘What did you mean; “things had taken a turn”?’

  Mariner probed.

  ‘A few years back, Eddie was right there at the top,’ Moloney explained. ‘You could send him anywhere, anytime and you’d be sure to get a cracking copy from him.

  His talent was for the slow-burn investigative stuff. You could always rely on something good from him.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Eddie had a strong sense of social injustice. Once he got hold of something he wouldn’t let it go. He could be very persuasive and was very good at getting people to talk to him. People seemed to trust him, you know? And he was patient. He’d just bide his time and eventually get out of them what he wanted.’

  Praise indeed, and no doubt justifiable. Mariner thought back to the scene in the Chamberlain Hotel, when the brunette had capitulated. ‘So if he was so good at his job, what went wrong? Drugs?’ he hazarded.

  But Moloney seemed genuinely appalled at the suggestion.

  ‘No. Eddie wouldn’t be the sort to do drugs. He was a very down-to-earth guy.’ He sounded absolutely certain.

  ‘Nothing went wrong, as such. He just chose to take a step down. He took a demotion, about three years ago, back on to the local desk; writing fillers for the main pages.’

  ‘Things were getting too much for him?’

  ‘In a way, but not at work. He had a forced change of circumstances. He lost both his parents very suddenly some time back, and there’s this brother, he’s mentally handicapped or something…’

  Mariner touched his nose. ‘Jamie. We’ve met.’

  Moloney smirked. ‘Oh, I see. Yeah, well, he’s been here once or twice. Bloody liability. Anyway, he needs a lot of looking after, someone there all the time. He goes to some day-care place and in the early days Eddie had some arrangement with the neighbours, too, but suddenly all that changed. He struggled on for as long a he could but eventually he asked for a move to nine till five. I tried to negotiate something, but whatever Eddie takes on he throws himself into one hundred per cent. It was like that with the boy. For the big stories, we need someone who can go where the action is any hour of the day or night, and Eddie said he wasn’t prepared to do that any more.’

  ‘So it was his decision?’

  ‘Eddie knew the score.’

  ‘And did he seem unhappy about it?’

  ‘He was more philosophical. I think he felt that there wasn’t a choice. There is a sister around somewhere, but there didn’t seem to be any question that Eddie would take on the kid brother. Sure, he must have found the change frustrating, but he was never the sort of guy to whinge on about things. Ironically, although he was working regular hours then, we saw less and less of him. He did his job then went home. Either way, he still made his deadlines, so it didn’t bother me. He never stopped being reliable.’ The original Steady Eddie.

  ‘And would you have known if things were getting too much for him?’

  It took
Moloney several seconds to meet Mariner’s eye.

  ‘The man was a pro. He wouldn’t have found it acceptable to have his home life interfere with his work.’

  Mariner let him off the hook. ‘Who were Eddie’s close friends?’

  ‘I’m not sure that he had any what you’d call close friends. Eddie got along okay with most people, but he was a bit of a loner. Not much choice given his domestic setup.’

  ‘Did he have a girlfriend?’ Mariner asked.

  Moloney shook his head. ‘I never got the impression that there was anyone because of the boy, but I suppose there could have been.’

  ‘Do you know a girl called Sally, possibly Sally-Ann?’

  ‘No, can’t say I do.’

  ‘When was the last time anyone here would have seen Eddie?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘Friday, he was in for work as usual, as far as I know.

  He’d have been working with Darren Smith, one of our photographers. They’d got to be quite a team. They worked together on a regular basis.’

  ‘I’ll need to speak to Darren. And I may want to look at Eddie’s workspace and check the files on his computer.’

  ‘Sure.’

  The interview had run its course. ‘Well, thanks for your time Mr Moloney,’ Mariner said.

  ‘No problem. Anything we can do.’

  Mariner stood up and even though it was only a few paces, Moloney walked him to the door. Something was still bothering him. ‘We can run this as a story?’ he asked at last. So that was it.

  ‘It’s news, isn’t it?’ said Mariner, drily.

  ‘So what can we print?’

  ‘Let’s go for novelty. How about the facts?’

  His sarcasm went unremarked. ‘Which are?’

  ‘That Eddie Barham was discovered dead at his home late last night. Police are not currently looking for anyone else in connection with his death, but would like to speak to a woman who may have been at the scene, and who made the emergency call.’