There was a pause at the other end of the line, while Mark considered. ‘No, I can’t say that I have Anna, but then there are thousands of drugs marketed every year. It’s impossible to keep on top of them all. I can look it up on the database for you though, if it’s important.’
‘It is Mark. That would be great.’
More helpful than Dr Payne had been, but then, he might not have a surgery full of people waiting. And there was a rider. ‘Okay, leave it with me, but I may not get back to you until later in the day, I’m just about to start my rounds.’
No problem. To while away some time, Anna sorted through her pile of urgent phone messages and e-mails. She responded to a few and wrote some memos, but by the middle of the afternoon she’d had enough. Today she wanted to do the grocery shopping before fetching Jamie.
The first thing Anna noticed as she and Jamie entered her flat was that the bin had moved. She was sure she hadn’t left it like that, standing away from the wall. It was a feeling, nothing more, that someone had been in there while she was out. Jamie was oblivious, making a beeline for the now dog-eared Ikea catalogue, squatting on his usual spot on the floor and flicking through the pages. But, after stowing the shopping, Anna found that she couldn’t relax. She checked her answer phone. No new messages.
For a while she paced, undecided, before eventually trying Mariner’s number. As she waited for someone at the other end of the line to locate Mariner, she had a tidy up. As usual, this entailed gathering up far too much, and Eddie’s package, balanced as it was precariously at the top of the pile, slid off with a crash, scattering the contents.
‘Bugger!’
‘Everything all right madam?’ asked the voice at the other end.
‘Yes, thanks. I just dropped something.’
‘I’m sorry, we can’t seem to track down Inspector Mariner. Would you like to leave a message?’
Yes, would you tell him that someone has broken into my flat and moved my bin? Suddenly Anna felt foolish.
‘No, it’s okay,’ she said out loud. ‘There’s no message.’
She hung up the phone, regretting the call already. She was being totally paranoid, and about what?
As Anna turned over the empty folder to replace the papers, she caught her finger on something raised just inside the flap. She looked more closely. Something had been taped to the underside. It was a small, slim envelope. She pulled it off. Inside the envelope was an even smaller, flat black plastic square; a floppy disk. Eddie had posted her his computer files. So what was all this about? Slamming Carol Vorderman into the VCR yet again, to keep Jamie occupied, Anna grabbed her laptop and plugged it in.
She loaded the disk into the drive. Double click.
Windows Explorer, 3.5 in Floppy. She double-clicked the icon and a dialogue box appeared inviting her to enter the password. Anna attempted to override it, but it wouldn’t let her through. She tried to cancel, but the screen returned to Explorer. Damn! This time Eddie had been a mite too clever. She took the disk out to examine it, but the label was blank, naturally. Not much point in having a secret password then advertising it all over the packaging. Okay, she’d have to think of the password. It should be simple.
Only fifty thousand words in the English language to choose from, and that was always supposing Eddie hadn’t strayed into French, German or Esperanto. She began with the obvious, family names: Eddie/Edward, Jamie/James, Anna, Malcolm, Susan, Mum, Dad. Nothing. Tried them in upper case and lower case, with and without initial capitals.
Zilch. The phone rang.
It was Mariner. ‘You wanted to speak to me?’
Anna felt foolish. Her feelings of anxiety had long gone, and she was convinced now that her imagination had just gone into overdrive. ‘It was nothing,’ she said. ‘I thought someone had been in my flat.’
‘Has anything been taken?’ He was treating it more seriously than was necessary.
‘No, I was being ridiculous. Just pure paranoia. I keep forgetting that Jamie’s here with me and he moves things.’
‘Oh, well, I’m glad you’re okay.’ He was signing off.
‘I’ve found something else that you might be interested in though,’ Anna said, quickly. ‘Eddie sent me a parcel. He must have posted it just before he died, but it got delayed and didn’t arrive until yesterday. At first I thought it just contained papers, information about medications. I didn’t think it was important.’
‘But?’
‘I’ve just found a floppy disk, too. It was taped to the inside of the envelope, out of sight.’
‘Eddie’s files?’ Mariner audibly perked up.
‘I don’t know yet. The bad news is that it’s password protected and of course I don’t have the password. I’m trying to get into it right now.’
There was a pause at the other end of the line. ‘Kerry helped us to compile some e-fits of the men who were in Eddie’s house that night. I’d like you and Jamie to have a look. How about if I bring them by?’
‘Okay.’
‘Now?’
‘Why not?’
Eager to have something to show him when he arrived, Anna took her efforts wider, trawling her brain for any minor detail about Eddie that might hold the key. She knew he had once supported Aston Villa, but did he have a favourite player? What was his favourite food, drink, colour, movie, book? She hadn’t a clue. This was the payback for hardly knowing your big brother. She typed in Post, Mail, Greencote, Countdown…
Anna became aware of Jamie hovering at her elbow.
‘Want a loops.’
‘In a minute,’ Anna said, distracted.
‘Want loops, get a loops,’ he repeated, tugging at her sleeve.
‘In a minute Jamie,’ she shrugged him off impatiently.
‘This is hopeless,’ Jamie mirrored her exasperation. ‘Loops!’ he insisted grabbing at her arm.
‘Oh! You and your bloody…!’ Anna banged on the keys irritably, ‘Hu-la-Ho-ops.’ And the screen unfurled in front of her.
‘Oh my God, Jamie, you’re a genius!’ Without thinking, she put out her arms to hug him. He backed away in alarm, fearful of the sudden contact, making Anna laugh. ‘You can have all the Hula Hoops you like.’
The intercom buzzer sounded, and Anna let in a worried looking Mariner. ‘Sure you’re all right?’ he asked.
For a moment, Anna didn’t know what he meant. Then she remembered the bin. ‘Oh, yes, I’m fine. Going a bit nuts, but fine.’
‘Good.’ He was examining the door. ‘How do you lock this when you go out?’
‘On the Yale.’
‘Maybe you should consider using the mortise, too.’
‘Yes, Inspector,’ Anna said meekly.
Mariner smiled. ‘Okay. Here ends the Mariner lecture for today. Call it compensation for the fact that our enquiries seem to have hit a brick wall. Frank Crosby has got a solid alibi for the night Eddie was killed. So unless there are some other unknown heavies doing his dirty work, it looks as if Kerry was telling the truth and Frank wasn’t involved. It leaves us pretty well back at square one.’
‘Not quite,’ Anna said.
‘What?’ ,
‘I’ve found the password to Eddie’s disk. Jamie s obsession with Hula Hoops finally paid off.’
Chapter Eighteen
‘I’m not even going to ask what you mean by that,’ Mariner said. ‘Have you found anything interesting?’
‘Not yet. You’re just in time to help me look.’ Mariner dragged a chair round to Anna’s side of the table so that they could both look at the screen. As he did so, his arm brushed against hers, making her skin tingle. Focus, Anna, focus, she told herself sternly. With a curiously wobbly hand, she opened up the disk. It contained a single document.
MS Access. Untitled.
‘Eddie and his databases,’ commented Mariner, shaking his head. ‘He had them for everything.’
Anna double-clicked the icon and rows of data unfurled on the screen before them.
‘
It’s the same document as we found,’ Mariner observed straight away.
‘Except that now we’ve got all the data as well,’ said Anna, hopefully, examining around thirty rows and five complete columns containing an assortment of numbers and letters.
‘If that makes a difference,’ he said, with obvious disappointment.
‘Unfortunately there are still no headings to any of the fields, so we don’t know what any of the numbers relate to.’ Without any indication of what the digits represented, the database told them nothing. ‘We’re no further on.’
But Anna was staring at one of the columns. ‘We might be,’ she said. ‘I think it’s got Jamie on it.’
‘Jamie?’
Jamie looked around momentarily from where he lay on the floor in the lounge.
‘Look,’ she pointed to one of the dates. ‘Seventeenth of March 1970. That’s Jamie’s date of birth. It didn’t mean anything when I saw this the first time, but since then I’ve had to memorise it.’
‘It’s just a date,’ Mariner was less sure. ‘That could just be a fluke.’
‘No, look at the initials.’ Anna traced a finger back along the row. ‘JB, Jamie Barham, and there in the first column, SB, Susan Barham, that’s my mum. That’s got to be more than chance, surely?’ Anna shuddered. This was creepy.
Mariner remained sceptical. ‘Anyone else you recognise?’ he asked, dubiously.
Anna studied the column of letters, her mind now moving along a completely different track. AR, DM, CJ, ET, she mulled over each set of initials, searching for a link. ‘It’s a long shot, but that could be Liz—Elizabeth Trueman. I hadn’t seen her for years, but she came to Eddie’s funeral. And that’s their son, Michael.’ She indicated the MT, further along the row. ‘They live in Sutton now but our families were close when we were kids, you know? We used to go and visit them. They had this massive copper beech tree in the garden that Jamie once fell out of.’
‘So what we have here are the initials of children and their mothers. That makes sense. The last initial of each pair seems to match up.’
‘It’s only one child: Eddie and I are not on here.’
‘The youngest child?’
‘No, Michael’s got a younger sister, Carol. But Michael’s autistic, like Jamie. It’s the autistic child.’
‘So this is about autistic people and their parents, and what?’
Anna thought for a moment. ‘Medication,’ she said picking up the envelope that came in the post. ‘This is what Eddie sent me. The rest of this stuff is about different kinds of medication. Those PSTIs I was telling you about. And when I met Liz Trueman, she was full of how well Michael is doing these days, mainly because of the new medication he’s on.’
‘But Jamie doesn’t take anything, does he?’
‘Not yet, but I think Eddie must have been considering it. I didn’t want to believe it at first, but given that he was having mega-problems with Jamie’s behaviour, and all the residential homes seem to want to have that option open to them, he must have been. The ones that don’t use medication routinely are incredibly expensive.’
‘And Eddie wasn’t exactly rolling in it.’
‘So he was being more or less forced into it, in the same way that I am. But Eddie being Eddie, he wouldn’t have taken that step without doing some thorough research. It’s what all this is about.’ She indicated the other rows of figures. ‘Maybe he wanted to compare Jamie’s data, whatever that may be, with others’ before making the decision.
‘
Mariner was unimpressed. ‘But if that’s the case then this is pretty harmless information. Who else would be even interested in it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Because no one would. If this was Eddie’s so called “drug story”, Darren was right. It was a wind-up. The drugs Eddie was talking about were these PSTIs. And the project was “personal” because it was for his own use.’
Anna wasn’t about to give up so easily. ‘But if that’s all it was, why would anyone need to wipe it off his computer?’
‘They could have been after anything,’ Mariner pointed out. ‘This database was one of the items that was left. They could have already successfully destroyed what they intended to.’
‘So that’s it?’ Anna was crushed. ‘All this stuff is irrelevant after all?’
‘Well it may be helpful to you. But I can’t see how it will help us find Eddie’s killer.’
‘I’m not really sure if it will be much good to me,’ Anna said, finally conceding defeat. ‘As you said, without titles for any of the fields, there’s no way of knowing what the remaining data could be. It’s impossible to tell what the units are for these numbers, let alone what they represent. I’m sorry. I seem to have wasted your time, too.’
Mariner smiled. ‘Not entirely. It means we’ve effectively ruled out another possibility.’
‘Would you like a coffee or something?’ Anna said, quickly, partly because she didn’t want him to leave yet.
‘Okay, thanks.’
Anna got up to put the kettle on. Mariner picked up the envelope. ‘This was all Eddie sent you?’
‘That’s it. Oh, unless you count a shoebox full of old letters he left with our solicitor. They went back years, and were addressed to my dad, not Eddie. I left them where they were.’
Mariner was staring thoughtfully at the computer screen.
‘If you’ve got Jamie, it shouldn’t be that difficult to work out what the rest of this means,’ he said.
Anna came back to the table with the coffee. ‘Is there any point?’
‘Eddie must have thought so.’
Anna shrugged. If he really wanted to, she’d let him get on with it.
‘Let’s start from what we do know. We’ve got your mother’s initials, Jamie’s initials, Jamie’s date of birth, then a number, 2.1. How old was Jamie when you found out he had autism?’
‘Older than that, much older, in fact not really until he went to school, even though Mum had been up at the doctor’s with him every other week for years. Everything was put down to colic or teething, or the terrible twos and, she was told he’d grow out of it. It wasn’t until he was about five or six that autism was even mentioned.’ She looked across the page. ‘In fact this next column is more likely to refer to that.’ The fourth column said simply March 1977. ‘It would make Jamie almost six. That was more like the time he was diagnosed.’
‘Okay, that’s good. It would account for the variation across the other kids, too. Presumably they were diagnosed at different ages. So what is this 2.1?’ Jamie’s rating appeared lower than many of the others, which were anything ranging between four and nine. What could it be measuring if not time? Quantity? But of what? Measurement?
Height? No, too small. Suddenly Mariner thought of Greta’s tadpole. ‘What about Jamie’s weight, when he was born?’
‘He was seriously underweight,’ said Anna. ‘Tiny. You should see the photographs.’
‘So it could be that.’
‘I suppose it’s possible.’ She sounded doubtful, but Mariner pressed on.
‘Let’s go with that for now. Okay, so we’ve got some names, dates of birth, birth weights, dates of diagnosis.’
‘So what? It still doesn’t tell us why all these people are on the database, except that all these people might be diagnosed autistic on those particular dates.’
‘Which still doesn’t tell us why it was important enough for Eddie to go to all this trouble.’ Mariner picked up the envelope. ‘You’ve been through this information?’
‘Yes, it’s about drugs, but the only common factor seems to be that none of them is particularly safe. The only one that doesn’t appear to have endless awful side effects listed is this one, Pinozalyan, but that’s because there’s hardly any information about it.’ Anna showed Mariner the short paragraph.
‘This is all there is?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I tried the Internet, but there was nothing. And when I went to ask Dr
Payne about it this morning, he’d never heard of it either. Mark, my friend’s partner, is a GP.
He said he’d look into it for me, but he hasn’t come back to me yet.’
‘Pinozalyan,’ Mariner read. ‘A relaxant. Prescribed for the treatment of insomnia. Acts as a depressant to hormone serotonin, which controls levels of arousal and anxiety. So that would be useful for treating someone like Jamie, wouldn’t it?’
‘You bet. Anything to calm him down and help him sleep more would be a miracle drug.’
‘And there’s no mention of side effects?’
‘That’s what makes it unique.’
‘But your doctor hadn’t heard of it?’
‘No, he was pretty dismissive actually. But then he did have a packed waiting room this morning.’
Mariner was saying the name over and over to himself, frowning as he did so.
‘You’re spending too much time with us,’ remarked Anna.
‘It just has a familiar ring to it, as if I’ve heard it somewhere before. Pinozalyan, Pinozalyan.’
‘No Sally-Ann,’ murmured Jamie, suddenly, from where he lay on the floor. Mariner and Anna stared at each other.
‘Oh my God,’ said Anna.
‘God,’ repeated Jamie.
Mariner tried it again. ‘Pinozalyan,’ he said.
‘Sally-Ann,’ the echo bounced back at him.
Mariner shuffled through the papers. Impramine,’ he said out loud. Nothing. ‘Ritalin.’ Silence. ‘Pinozalyan.’
Jamie shook his head irritably, ‘No Sally-Ann.’
Mariner looked at Anna. ‘Well, that has to be more than coincidence.’
‘He must have heard Eddie say it.’
‘And why would Eddie say it? Because it was of some significance. Maybe Eddie had stumbled across a drug that would help Jamie that has no side effects. What exactly did the doctor say when you asked him about it?’ Mariner asked, showing a renewed curiosity. ‘Just that he hadn’t heard of it.’
‘But did he ask what it was, or how you’d come across it?’
Anna thought back to her brief meeting with Dr Payne.
‘No, he didn’t. That was strange, wasn’t it? He just cautioned me against going down that route. He reminded me about my mum and dad.’
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