Goodway returned with two mugs, handing one awkwardly to Mariner, before perching on the piano stool opposite. ‘They said they found her downstream from the reservoir,’ he said, talking into his tea mug. ‘Near to where Yasmin was found.’
‘So I gather,’ said Mariner.
‘Oh God.’ Dropping his gaze, Goodway fumbled in his pockets, coming out with an old-fashioned cotton handkerchief, which he used to noisily blow his nose. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not at all, Mr Goodway. I realise how hard this must be for you. But I won’t keep you any longer than necessary.’ To give Goodway time to compose himself, Mariner turned his attention to his tea. The green mug had seen better days and Mariner could barely pick out what was left of the design, a row of cartoonish trees that had succumbed to the regular abrasion of a dishwasher. He took a scalding mouthful.
Goodway sighed. ‘It wasn’t a huge surprise when Barbara went missing, you know,’ he said. ‘She’d been depressed on and off for years, and since last Christmas it had got much worse. We’ve got three children, all in their teens and for the last five years we’ve been looking after my mother, too. Sometimes things got on top of her. It was exhausting. Barbara said more than once that she could fully understand these women who just walked away from it all and never came back. I just never thought she’d actually—’
‘Did your wife often walk near the reservoir?’ asked Mariner.
Goodway shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t even know there was a reservoir there until the body of that boy was discovered there and I saw it on the news.’
Just like the rest of us, thought Mariner.
‘Barbara did go out a lot, just walking, particularly in the evenings. She needed to, to get a break from everything. But I didn’t really know where she went. There are parks around and I suppose I just thought that she walked the streets.’
‘Did your wife ever talk about meeting anyone?’
‘No,’ said Goodway instantly, then he seemed to reconsider. ‘Although it did cross my mind once or twice. She was a very attractive woman, but I’m sure—’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mariner. ‘I’m just exploring the possibilities.’
Goodway frowned into his mug. ‘The thing I don’t understand is that the reservoir is quite a long way from here.’
‘There’s a quicker way down to it from behind the station,’ said Mariner. ‘Your wife must have known about that.’
‘She lived in this area all her life,’ said Goodway, as if that explained it. He looked up at Mariner hopefully. ‘I keep wondering if perhaps it could have been an accident,’ he said. ‘The children . . . it would be so much easier . . .’
Mariner thought of the broken railings but he didn’t want to give the man false hope. ‘There will be an inquest, of course, but it’s possible. The coroner will consider all the evidence.’
‘Barbara was taking anti-depressants at the time. She wasn’t always thinking clearly.’
‘I understand,’ said Mariner. ‘Thanks for your time, Mr Goodway.’ He got up to go, pausing by the strip of fresh plasterwork. ‘You’ve had some electrical work done recently?’
‘Actually it was months ago,’ said Goodway. ‘I’m not very practical around the house and rewiring was long overdue. I haven’t quite got round to decorating again.’
‘In a house this size it must have been quite a job. Did you do it yourself?’
‘Heavens, no. I’m hopeless I’m afraid. We had a proper electrician come in to do it.’
‘Shaun Pryce?’
For a moment Goodway looked startled. ‘Yes, it was. How—?’
‘He modelled for students at your school,’ said Mariner.
Then Goodway remembered. ‘Ah, of course, you saw the art work on the walls.’ He hesitated. ‘It was Barbara who discovered him, you know, at one of her drama productions. I got home from school one day and here he was. We got talking and he said that really he was an actor. I thought he was so striking that I asked him to come and model for the girls at school.’
‘Did Shaun Pryce model for Yasmin’s class?’ Mariner asked.
‘Not her class, but I think he sat for the art club on one occasion.’
‘Your head said he was quite friendly with the girls.’
‘Yes. In fact it became a bit of a problem. He was a bit too friendly.’
And what about your wife? Mariner wanted to ask. How friendly was Shaun Pryce with her? But now was not the time. The man had more than enough to contend with.
CHAPTER 25
Mariner would have liked to report this latest news back to the team and get onto Shaun Pryce straight away, but he had put off seeing his mother for long enough. He opted to drive over taking the M42. Even though the rush hour was officially over, the road was still heaving with traffic. Hard to believe that just a few years ago this was the open, green countryside of the North Worcestershire way. On one of his frequent Sunday walks, he’d had the dubious pleasure of peeing on the foundations, right where the services were now.
His mother had rarely been ill. Not enough to be hospitalised, anyway. She would not make a good patient. But this episode might make her consider her own mortality and think about tying up any loose ends. His gut tingled with an edge of anticipation. Maybe now she would finally give in and tell him . . .
He’d been about seven years old when he’d first confronted his mother with the question that had been increasingly bothering him, and that he was being asked by some of his school friends. ‘How come everyone else has got a mum and a dad, but I’ve only got a mum?’ In time, of course, he’d come to realise that somewhere on the planet he did have a dad like everyone else, it was just that for some reason unknown to him, this man had failed to take any active part in his son’s life and was never mentioned. When he was a kid it had opened the way for all kinds of romantic notions, but with adulthood came the realisation that the truth was likely to be far more mundane: his father had simply been married to another woman.
It had crossed his mind on occasion that his mother, Rose, could have been bluffing all these years; that she didn’t really have any idea who his father was. He’d been conceived at a time when women were experiencing the new kind of freedom that the contraceptive pill had brought with it — so in many ways, a chance encounter with a stranger would have made sense. But in the midst of all her vagueness, his mother had always kept her story consistent. And once, when Rose had thought he was too young to notice, he remembered overhearing her say to a friend how much like his father he looked.
* * *
It took him a little over half an hour to get to Warwick. The hospital was some way out of the town, sandwiched between residential areas and business parks, the hybrid collection of buildings a reflection of the town itself. He could have been driving into a supermarket car park, with its brash Pizza Hut-style building squatting beside its older, Victorian forerunners. Ward eight, coronary care, was on the second floor of the old hospital and he arrived, along with a collection of other patients’ friends and relatives, just at the start of visiting hours. He spotted his mother right away. A nurse was at her bedside checking her blood pressure.
‘This is a turn up,’ Rose said, when she saw him approaching. ‘West Midlands police having a quiet patch, are they?’ The whiplash sarcasm reminded Mariner of where he’d developed a taste for it.
‘Hello, son, how nice to see you,’ he countered.
She was unyielding. ‘I don’t have to spell it out, do I?’
‘If you did I’d really think something was wrong.’
‘This is my son,’ she told the nurse. ‘He’s a policeman.’ It was said with savoured distaste. Mariner could recall with great clarity the look on her face the first time he’d turned up unannounced at her house, in uniform. It had been his intention to shock her of course, and he’d succeeded. ‘You’ve done this to spite me, haven’t you?’ she’d said.
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ was his reply. ‘Why does everythi
ng have to be about you? Perhaps I’ve done this because it’s actually what I want.’ Impossible to explain that, after the unlimited freedom of his unruly childhood, he craved discipline, order and routine. Only once he’d gained that grounding was he ready to flex his individuality again, when CID had offered him the chance.
‘So how are you?’ he asked now. ‘What happened?’
‘I went a bit dizzy and my arm went numb, that’s all. But now it’s passed and I’m ready to go home. Except, of course, they won’t let me until the man from Del Monte says yes. So I’m stuck here until the morning.’ Any speculation as to the origin of his own belligerent nature was always instantly dispelled by a conversation with his mother.
‘What were you doing?’ he asked.
‘I was up a stepladder decorating the hall.’ Said so casually, it was easy to forget that she was fast approaching seventy. Once she’d got used to the fact that he’d left home she’d reverted to her youthful independence.
‘Was that what you were ringing me about?’ Mariner asked.
‘Oh, so you did get my messages then. Like I said, there was something I wanted to tell you.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, obviously it’s nothing important enough for you to call me back. So it’ll keep.’ Leaning back on the pillows she folded her arms and Mariner noticed for the first time how bony she’d become.
All this probably meant it was nothing at all. She was simply punishing him for the time it had taken him to respond. Mariner was tired of his mother’s games and he could be as stubborn as she was. He wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of begging for it. She seemed about to tell him anyway but changed her mind. Sod it. She’d do it when she was ready. ‘I have been busy,’ he said.
‘I know. I saw you on the local news. But even a phone call would have been nice.’
‘Yes.’
‘Anyway, now you’re here you may as well make yourself useful.’ She leaned over and opened the cabinet by the bed. ‘Mrs Masud has brought me all these things that I don’t really need. It was kind of her but will you take some of it back to the house?’
‘Of course.’
She sorted out a plastic carrier bag of things that were surplus to requirement.
‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’
‘Twice in two days, eh?’ she said. ‘My cup runneth over.’
* * *
Outwardly the tiny, neat cul-de-sac in Leamington where Rose still lived had barely changed since Mariner was resident there too. The two of them had moved quite suddenly from their London home when he was small and it was the only place he could remember living as a child. Built between the wars, the house belonged to his grandparents first and the four of them had shared it right up until Granny and Grandpa had retired to a bungalow in Pembrokeshire, where he’d then spent some summer holidays. Tonight he could hardly get down the narrow road, which like so many, had not been designed for multiple-car families. Even with all the vehicles parked half on the pavement, a practice of which Mariner strongly disapproved, there was barely enough room for another to pass.
The street resounded with the shouts of the usual motley gang of neighbourhood kids playing and getting along or not, regardless of shape, size or skin colour. One or two adults were out too, tending their gardens as dusk fell on the balmy summer evening. Mariner pushed open the iron gate, which sported a recent coat of paint, as did the glossy white windowsills of his mother’s house. Guilt nipped at him again. Rose must have given up waiting for him and got on with it herself, and all that effort had probably put her where she was today. It surprised him that she’d gone to the trouble. His mother had always eschewed the trappings of constant acquisition and modernisation, so it was unusual for her to have been decorating at all.
Walking up the path he saw Mrs Masud and called across to thank her for ringing him.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure if anyone else would have contacted you.’
Mariner wondered what she meant by ‘anyone else.’ Who else was there?
His mother was one of the few remaining white residents in the street. During the late sixties and early seventies Asian families had begun moving in, prompting a mass exodus of whites and leaving his mother in the minority. But she’d always refused to make compromises based on the colour of her neighbours’ skin and, to her credit, barely even seemed to notice. He let himself in the front door. The house smelled overwhelmingly of emulsion and white spirit, and it took him a couple of minutes to work out what it was that looked different. The hall stairs and landing were coated in fresh paint, but then he’d known about that already. Then he realised: it was the tidiness.
Following his grandparents’ departure, the house that he’d grown up in had always been awash with clutter. Treasures collected along the way from every conceivable source, saved for a rainy day, or in case they ever came in useful: mementoes and keepsakes, all randomly piled on shelves and furniture, with barely a space between them. The genes responsible for orderliness were something he must have inherited from his father. Now though, many of the shelves and surfaces were bare in preparation for more decorating. He walked through the downstairs rooms noting that each one was the same. Rose was blitzing the place, and not before time. It hadn’t been touched in years, but even so he couldn’t help wondering what had prompted this sudden burst of activity. It crossed his mind that there could be more to her hospital admission than he’d thought, but he rejected the idea almost immediately. Everything had been too relaxed.
Upstairs in Rose’s bedroom was a more familiar scene, the dressing table crowded with trinkets. He put away the things that he’d brought home for her and out of habit checked each of the other rooms. In the spare room he found a stack of black bin liners stuffed full to bursting, with some of the stuff that had once taken up shelf space downstairs. There were old clothes and bric-a-brac; artefacts that stirred memories of Mariner’s childhood. Some of it was from the second large bedroom, the one that nobody had used since he left home. It too had been decorated. It was still a far cry from Lewis Everett’s room. Mariner got a sense that his mother was putting things in order for something, but right now he had little capacity for pondering another mystery. He returned the rest of the items he’d brought with him to what he deemed their most appropriate places and left.
* * *
On the way home he had to drive very close to Tony Knox’s house. After the visit to Brian Goodway he wanted to sound him out. There were lights on so that was encouraging, but the look on Knox’s face when he came to the door was not. The fumes nearly knocked Mariner off his feet.
‘All right, boss?’ Knox was surly and suspicious to an equal degree.
‘I wanted to talk to you about something. Can I come in?’
With great reluctance Knox stepped aside to let Mariner pass. Mariner almost wished he hadn’t bothered. In the living room, Knox repositioned himself facing the TV, in what looked like a permanent dent in the sofa, the result of many hours of sitting. Around him was a sea of detritus that could only have accrued over considerable time: a handful of mugs, several squat, green beer bottles, a plate bearing the remains of an unappetising looking sandwich . . . some fresh air would have been welcome too. Even Knox himself looked neglected and unkempt, wearing a grubby T-shirt over faded jeans that hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine for a while. And for the first time Mariner noticed that Knox’s trademark buzz-cut was beginning to grow into a crew.
‘Theresa not back yet?’ he asked, unnecessarily.
Knox grunted. ‘She’s not coming back.’
‘Her mum’s taken a turn for the worse?’ Mariner asked, struck by what a strange coincidence that was.
But Knox blew that one out of the water. ‘It’s our marriage that’s taken a turn for the worse,’ he said. ‘Theresa’s left me.’
‘What? Are you sure?’
Knox gave him the withering look the question deserved.
�
�I mean, are you sure this isn’t just a . . . temporary thing?’ said Mariner.
‘I’m sure,’ said Knox. ‘It hasn’t happened overnight.’
‘So what have you been up to this time?’ Mariner had already witnessed Knox’s extra-marital activities, first-hand, more than a year ago when Knox had hooked up with a student called Jenny. When Theresa found out and had kicked him out of the house, the couple had ended up staying at Mariner’s place. At the time, the consequences had seemed catastrophic, but happily it was only a matter of weeks until Knox saw sense and Theresa found it in herself to forgive him.
Mariner wasn’t aware that Knox had been dipping his wick again but it didn’t mean that he hadn’t. He’d never really understood what made Tony Knox tick. But surely even he was bright enough to grasp the obvious truth: that a woman will only put up with so much. ‘I thought you were meant to have stopped all that,’ he said.
‘Not guilty, boss.’ Knox held up his hands in defence. ‘I haven’t played away from home since Jenny. Then just as the halo was polishing up to a nice shine, Theresa told me she was going.’
‘Maybe she just needs some space,’ Mariner said, cringing inwardly at how glib that sounded.
‘She’s moved in with another bloke. Does that sound to you like she needs space?’
‘Bloody hell,’ was the best response Mariner could come up with. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘It’s embarrassing,’ said Knox. ‘She met him over the internet. It makes it worse somehow. It’s so bloody tacky.’
‘—only because of what you and I know. I’m sure there are plenty of responsible people who use the internet as a legitimate means of communication.’
Innocent Lies (Reissue) Page 24