Moloney nodded, sadly. ‘Eddie was a good bloke,’ he said. ‘A lot of people round here will miss him. And I think we’ll all feel bad that we didn’t see this coming.’ He sounded entirely sincere and for some reason Mariner was surprised. A press man with a conscience was a new phenomenon.
On the wall by the door to Moloney’s office Mariner’s attention was caught by one of several framed front pages: ‘LOCAL HOMELESS CHARITY EXPOSED’,
byline Edward Barham. Mariner scanned the page. ‘This was one of his?’
‘Yeah. Caused quite a furore at the time. Eddie won a couple of awards for it, too. I think his only regret was that Frank Crosby didn’t get put inside. Still, the publicity didn’t do the bastard much good.’
Frank Crosby. Although Mariner had never personally had dealings with the man, Crosby’s was the name you heard bandied around the station canteen with frightening regularity, in connection with just about anything criminal you could shake a stick at. Drugs, gambling, prostitution, Crosby was up to his ears in it. That was an interesting link.
Darren, Eddie Barham’s erstwhile coworker, it transpired, had called in sick, so interviewing him would have to keep until another day. If indeed that proved to be necessary.
For Mariner a clear picture was emerging of a man under pressure, and he still hoped that the path report would remove any remaining traces of doubt.
Returning to the office, Anna couldn’t help but remark on the contrast with her entrance earlier this morning, when the world had been a different place and she’d been in command of her life. Now, in a matter of hours, she felt as though chaos theory was being tested out at her expense. She tried not to dwell on it. If she was going to keep on top of things, she needed to focus on her job again.
Becky came in, full of concern. ‘It’s true?’ Anna nodded.
‘Oh, Anna, I’m so sorry. Are you okay?’
Anna smiled bravely. ‘I’m fine. It’s a shock of course, but we weren’t exactly close.’
‘Do you want us to re-schedule tonight?’ Becky asked.
Anna didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘Tonight?’
‘Robinson’s at da Paglia,’ Becky reminded her.
‘Oh shit.’ With all that had happened, the dinner engagement had flown completely out of her mind.
‘If you’re not feeling up to it, I’m sure Jonathan will understand.’
Anna didn’t share her friend’s optimism. The meeting with Robinson’s had been set up weeks ago and to cancel it now would be a PR disaster, both for Priory and for her personally. ‘It’s not that. Remember my younger brother, Jamie?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, with Eddie gone, I’m left with him.’
‘Oh God. What will you do?’
‘Try to find someone else to look after him I suppose.’
She’d have to. There was no alternative. A thought suddenly struck her. ‘Mark’s a GP. Would he know anyone who could help?’
‘He might. I can ask him.’
‘Tell him I’m desperate.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Becky had been gone less than a minute when a second knock preceded Jonathan, as suave as ever in a navy blue Paul Smith suit, his well-chosen tie providing a tasteful splash of colour. He closed the door behind him. ‘I heard the news, Anna. I’m so sorry.’ For a moment he looked as if he might hug her, but then, remembering that they were in full view of the outer office, he settled for taking Anna’s hand in both of his. It was one of those few occasions when it wasn’t enough. Anna wanted to sink into his arms and be held, close and tight. ‘You’ll need a few days off,’ he was saying. ‘Take as much time as you like.’
‘No, it’s okay, I’ll be all right.’
Jonathan allowed a respectable pause.
‘What about Robinson’s, tonight?’
‘It shouldn’t be a problem,’ Anna said, with far more conviction than she felt.
‘Are you sure? I mean, we can’t call it off at this late stage, but if you don’t feel up to it, I’m sure I could ask Melanie to stand in for you.’
‘No. I’ll be fine. Really.’ The offer of Melanie as substitute had come a little too quickly for Anna’s taste. Fine or not, she was damn sure she wasn’t going to let that little upstart muscle in on her deal. She was already beginning to play a more prominent role around here than Anna was happy with.
‘Good,’ Jonathan smiled. ‘I told Gillian it would be a very late night.’
Anna liked the sound of that. Now it was imperative that she find somewhere for Jamie. Alone once more, she turned her attention to her in-tray, firing off rapid responses to memos and e-mails where she could, sending faxes. After a whole morning out, there was a lot to catch up on if she was to be ready for Milan by next weekend. So much so, that when Becky put her head around the door to say she was going, Anna didn’t notice how empty the outer office had become. The phone rang and kept ringing, and glancing up irritably from her PC monitor, Anna suddenly realised it was dusk and everyone else had gone.
She picked up the handset. ‘Hello?’
‘Hi, this is Francine,’ said a friendly-sounding voice.
‘Francine?’ Anna didn’t know a Francine.
‘I’m Jamie’s key worker at the centre,’ the voice explained. ‘I was wondering when you were coming to collect him. All the other clients have gone home…’
Jamie! Anna had forgotten all about him. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ she said, already on her feet and stuffing papers into her briefcase.
When she got to the centre it was practically deserted, apart from the omnipresent cleaning staff. Jamie sat alone in the foyer, head bent, gently rocking.
‘Hi Jamie.’
He didn’t even look up. He wasn’t punishing her for being late. He just wasn’t interested.
A young mixed-race woman emerged from the office.
‘Hi, I’m Francine, you must be Anna?’
‘Yes. Look, I’m really sorry, I completely lost track of the time.’
‘That’s okay,’ Francine smiled generously. ‘I had some paperwork to do and Jamie didn’t seem to mind.’ She hesitated.
‘I’m so sorry about Eddie. I couldn’t believe it when Joyce told us. It must be hard for you.’
‘It’s bad timing,’ Anna agreed. She still had this evening’s little problem to solve. Taking advantage of Francine’s sympathetic smile, Anna tried a long shot.
‘Actually all this couldn’t have come at a worse time for me. Do you know if there’s anywhere that would be able to just look after Jamie for tonight?’ But, predictably, Francine didn’t.
In the early evening gloom, Tom Mariner also sat at his desk in a deserted office. His nose throbbed painfully and.
despite assurances that it wasn’t broken, every time he exhaled he emitted a low whistling sound. A bag of frozen peas sent up by some wag in the station canteen was generating a slow-spreading puddle on one corner of the desk, like the dull ache that was inching its way around his skull. He’d been through the files of local known prostitutes over and over now, hoping he’d missed her the last time and willing those brown eyes to gaze out at him. Once he even thought he saw her, but he was kidding himself.
Either she was new or she was careful, or she wasn’t what he thought.
Knox had finished for the night, stating his intentions to go and try to patch things up with ‘the wife’, but sounding more as if he was trying to convince himself than anything.
Mariner’s plans for this evening, which had at one time included the digital reworking of Hitchcock’s Rear Window playing at the MAC, had been comprehensively sabotaged: he was loath to squander the cinematographer’s talents on his intermittently blurring vision. The rain that had in the last hour begun beating relentlessly on the windows precluded a walk, even for him. So, other options closed, courtesy of Jamie Barham, Mariner was left flicking through the information gathered by the canvas of Eddie Barham’s neighbours.
/> Apart from what he’d already learned from Moira Warren, it didn’t amount to a fat lot, even though Eddie Barham had lived in Clarendon Avenue all his life.
Neighbours hardly seemed to know him and certainly nobody had heard or seen anything the previous night, or at any rate was admitting to it. Glimpses of Eddie or Jamie over the whole weekend were sparse. No one was prepared to get involved. The John Donne line kept coming back to him. ‘No man is an island, entire of itself.’ Maybe not in the seventeenth century, when Donne had first made the observation, but these days, despite mobile phones and e-mail, the gulfs between people seemed to be widening all the time. More people than ever were choosing to live alone and cars, personal computers and home entertainment systems all made it increasingly possible to exist without the need for social interaction of any kind. And there, at the extreme end of the scale was Jamie Barham, for whom even the simplest human exchange was meaningless.
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 prompt
ing, 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.
Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01] Page 6