Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01] (18 page)

‘

‘It must have been hard, growing up though,’ she said.

It was a simple observation, no more.

‘Difficult for my mother at times,’ Mariner agreed, deliberately deflecting any imminent concern she might feel for him. ‘She got to be very dependent.’

‘On you?’

T was all she had. She gave up a lot to raise me.’ Mainly her itinerant lifestyle. Marching for world peace wasn’t so easy with a toddler in tow, so the sisterhood had come to her. ‘It got a bit intense sometimes.’

Anna was pensive. ‘I’d always thought I had a raw deal, not getting enough attention. I’d never considered the possibility that too much could be worse. What did you do?’

‘I stuck it for as long as I could. Then I ran off to join the police force.’

‘Very romantic’

‘Yeah, well, this was during the great circus shortage of 1977.’

‘And you lived happily ever after.’

She was right. He’d made it sound glib. But then, he’d missed out a couple of chapters in the middle. There seemed little point in telling her about the filthy squalor he’d moved into, the near starvation, or the months of depression that had followed. It was a bad time in his life, when the boundaries had become blurred and chaotic: dismal days and black, lonely nights when, unable to sleep he had sought out the open spaces, and prowled the dark chasms of the canals that on occasions had looked so very inviting. For a while he teetered on the edge of a slippery slope, until a young detective constable, Les Randall, had thrown him a lifeline. Even now, years later, he never failed to appreciate the comfort of clean sheets and clothes and an orderly, disciplined environment.

‘You didn’t have it so easy, either,’ Anna remarked, to bridge the silence that followed.

Mariner shook his head, grabbing the opportunity to change the subject. ‘It hardly equates with having a disabled sibling,’ he said. He looked around him. ‘Where is Jamie?’

Jamie, who only minutes ago had been hovering near an adjacent fruit machine, was now nowhere to be seen.

‘Oh God,’ said Anna. ‘He does this all the time.’

A loud ‘Hey!’ pointed them in the right direction, as they saw a young man snatch back the phone that Jamie had helped himself to from a table. He relinquished it, but only under protest, leaving Anna to make profuse apologies. She and Mariner were still laughing about it going out to the car park. She had a terrific laugh. A little later, Mariner dropped them outside the apartment block.

‘Thanks for that,’ Anna said. ‘Jamie loved it.’

Him and me too, thought Mariner. ‘No problem,’ he said, lightly.

‘So did I,’ she added, unexpectedly. ‘I mean it’s great to have some normal adult company again. And who knows, Jamie might even sleep tonight.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

She’d sat in the front passenger seat for the return journey and was smiling up at him, a warm, encouraging smile. Mariner breathed deeply, inhaling her perfume, sweet and heady. All he had to do was lean a little closer—

‘Consernunt please, Carol,’ piped up Jamie inaccurately from the back seat. They laughed again, and the moment, if that’s what it was, had passed.

Mariner thought his timing for getting home would be about right, but his heart sank when, on the approach, he saw that the ground floor lights were still on. To compound his irritation, he’d decided tonight to drive right up to the service road, to find it blocked not only by Knox’s car, but also a scarlet Fiat Panda.

Inside, a touchingly domestic scene greeted his eyes.

Knox and his female friend were watching TV together. Or at least they might have been, if the blonde hadn’t been draped across Knox’s lap treating him to some alternative entertainment. As Mariner walked in they jumped up like a pair of teenagers caught in the act, though in fairness, one of them at least appeared to accurately fit the age profile.

‘Hi boss,’ Knox said, running a nervous hand over his cropped scalp. ‘Erm, this is Jenny.’

‘Hello, Jenny,’ said Mariner, politely.

Blonde, petite and stunningly attractive, Jenny stepped forward and offered Mariner a hand, the same one that only moments before had been groping around inside Tony Knox’s police-issue shirt. ‘Hi. Tom isn’t it?’ she said turning on a beaming white smile that looked used to getting its own way. ‘Nice to meet you.’

Mariner nodded but declined the hand.

‘I love your house,’ she went on, effusively, as if seeking to justify her presence.

‘Thanks.’ Mariner was non-committal.

In recognition of the sudden awkwardness, she cast a meaningful glance at Knox and nodded towards the stairs.

‘I’ll go on up then.’

‘Sure,’ said Knox. ‘I’ll be up soon.’ The two men stood and watched her go. ‘Hope you don’t mind, boss,’ Knox said, sheepishly, when her small, shapely bottom had disappeared from sight.

Mariner gave an indifferent shrug that belied a powerful and irrational urge to punch Knox’s lights out. Instead he said. ‘How did you two meet?’

Knox squirmed like a guilty schoolboy. ‘She’s a second year medical student at the uni. I responded to a burglary at the hall of residence a couple of weeks back.’ He left Mariner to fill in the rest.

‘I take it she’s the complication.’

‘You could say that, yes.’

What the fuck are you playing at? Mariner wanted to ask. You’ve got a wife, a family, and a grandchild for Christ’s sake. How can you throw it all away for a five minute fling with kid who’s probably just turned on by the uniform? But he didn’t say anything. Mariner couldn’t begin to understand what Knox’s motives might be. And perhaps underneath it all he was just jealous, plain and simple.

‘Well, cheers, anyway,’ said Knox, clumsily.

Mariner just nodded again in response.

‘I’ll say goodnight then.’ There seemed little else to say.

Tonight, Mariner noted, lying awake below them, their lovemaking lasted a mere seventeen minutes. Not long by most standards, but still enough to be a painful reminder of what he was missing.

In a moment of half dream, half rampant fantasy, he imagined asking out Anna Barham, taking her out for dinner, or to see a film and back home afterwards. And what? Dazzle her with his non-existent conversational skills? Mariner had never had any problem attracting women, but until Greta came along his relationships had rarely strayed beyond the superficial. ‘There’s less to you than meets the eye,’ one former girlfriend had unkindly commented. A psychologist would have had a field day; an only child, bled dry by his mother. What else could you expect?

Over the years he’d come to rely heavily on sex, but now he couldn’t even manage that. Drastic action was called for.

Ignoring his problem in the hope that it would go away hadn’t worked. And he hadn’t had the guts to go through with the one-night-stand remedy. What any sensible man would probably do was see the doctor, but he just couldn’t face it. Somewhere at the back of his mind was a nagging worry. Didn’t a man reach his sexual peak at nineteen or something ridiculous? He was more than twice that age now. What if it didn’t get better and he was over the hill?

An ecstatic cry erupted from the room above his and Mariner shoved his head under the pillow and tried to block it out.

The following cold and blustery morning Mariner was scheduled to appear at the Queen Elizabeth law courts in the city centre, giving evidence in a fraud investigation he’d been involved in sixteen months previously. Small and unassuming, Peter Foley had single-handedly relieved the insurance firm for which he worked of two hundred and fourteen thousand pounds over a six-year period. His ingenuity was spectacular. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d broken the law, Mariner would have had a sneaking admiration for him. Mariner’s contribution to the prosecution case was over by mid-morning and as he was in the vicinity, he took the opportunity to drop in on DI Doug Lowry, ex-Vice Squad, now based with the recently formed Crime Support Team at headquarters in Lloyd House.

It proved an uncomfortable experience. Amid the overflowing in-trays, out-trays, stacks of files and empty coffee mugs, Lowry’s office resembled a landfill site, with about enough free space to swing a pencil. The only absent feature was the hovering seagulls. Mariner found the clutter almost unbearable.

‘Sit yourself down then,’ Lowry insisted cheerfully, leaving Mariner wondering if he was expected to perch on top of the filing cabinet. Instead, shifting a pile of dubiously stained paperwork from a moulded plastic chair, he parked himself gingerly on it. Lowry’s office was windowless, airless and overheated, and already the big man was sweating profusely. Mariner hoped this wouldn’t take long. ‘You knew Eddie Barham, didn’t you?’ he kicked off.

‘That journalist you lot thought had topped himself? Yes, I did.’

Mariner let the implied criticism go. ‘What did you think of him?’

‘That he wouldn’t be the sort to kill himself, for a start,’ said Lowry, smugly.

Mariner refused to rise to the bait. ‘What sort was he then?’ He pressed on.

‘To be honest, I quite liked the guy,’ Lowry admitted.

He made it sound like a major confession, and understandably felt the need to qualify his remark. ‘He was down to earth and pretty straight as reporters go. Had an unusual propensity for wanting to get at the truth.’

Mariner tugged at his collar. If he’d been in a cartoon a jet of steam would have escaped. ‘When was the last time you heard from him?’

Lowry shook his head. ‘Not for a long time. But I worked pretty closely with him on a story a few years back.’

‘Frank Crosby?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Tell me about that.’

‘You must know most of it,’ he said. ‘About four or five years ago. Eddie Barham was researching a story for the Echo about kids who were sleeping rough on the streets in Birmingham. It was going to be one of those social conscience pieces, you know. Shocking that this could be happening on our doorstep. He got to know one or two kids who used the drop-in centre on Alcester Street, the one run by the Streetwise charity.’

Mariner nodded, he’d driven past the place frequently.

‘They do some good work I’d heard.’

Lowry snorted, ‘Most of the time, yeah. Anyway, Eddie Barham got to know this one kid in particular, built up a friendship with her. She was bright, articulate, but had a bad start. Stepfather had knocked her about, so she’d run away. She’d ended up sleeping rough and God knows what else.’ Lowry told the story as if it was a normal every day occurrence which, in his line of work, it probably was.

There but for the grace of God, thought Mariner, grimly.

‘Anyway, one evening this kid had arranged to meet Eddie for an interview, but she didn’t show. Next time he saw her, the explanation was that the guy running the drop in had offered her some alternative work, and as it was well paid, she’d gone for that instead. Barham managed to wheedle out of her that this “work” was of the largely horizontal variety, in a seedy hotel with a fifty-year-old Dutch businessman who was visiting our fair city. When pushed, she admitted that it was common practice. Other kids, girls and boys, from the drop-in were regularly “employed” in exactly the same way. Some of them considerably younger than her.’ Lowry paused to allow that to sink in.

‘Under age?’

‘As young as eleven and twelve.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘No, Paul Spink actually; one of the workers on the project. Seemed he had a direct link with Frank Crosby and was lining his pockets nicely by procuring youngsters for Frank’s customers. If the kids turned him down, they were no longer made welcome at the drop-in. And most of them weren’t in much of a position to refuse.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Rumour had it that Frank supplied them, too. If they didn’t cooperate, it was cold turkey time, whether they liked it or not.’

‘Shit.’ Blackmail was never more cruel or effective.

‘Over a three month period Eddie Barham documented all this, with the help of the girl. Then he did the sensible thing and brought it to us,’ Lowry went on, ‘on the understanding that he got the rights to the story and a couple of good quotes from yours truly. I was impressed. He’d been bloody thorough—had photographs, dates and places. He as good as handed us Paul Spink and a couple of prominent local councillors on a plate. The rest is history. The news story exposed the drop-in for what it was, the guy working there was successfully prosecuted and his little racket was stopped.’ So Eddie Barham wouldn’t exactly be flavour of the month.

‘What about Crosby?’

‘He was the weak spot. Although Eddie Barham wrote a damning indictment of his involvement, Crosby’s no mug.

He must have known that it was only a question of time and he’d been very good at covering his tracks. We couldn’t get anything in the way of hard evidence to charge him on.

Apart from a bit of adverse publicity, he got away scot free.

Barham was pretty pissed off about that, as you’d expect.’

‘Did anybody else go down for it?’

‘A couple of councillors lost their jobs over it, but Spink, the guy working the shelter, was the real scapegoat. He was the only one to get time. About eight years if I remember rightly, for procuring minors.’

‘Is he still inside?’

‘No idea. He had no previous, so it’s possible he could be out on parole by now.’

And thirsting for revenge, thought Mariner. ‘What happened to the girl?’

‘Vanished before she was due to testify. Not that we were dependent on her. She and Barham had already given us enough. It wouldn’t surprise me if Eddie Barham helped her to get away. Protecting his source. I think he felt sorry for her.’

‘And Barham hasn’t been back to you since?’

‘No.’

‘Am I right in thinking that Frank Crosby deals in more up-market stuff, too. Escort agencies, that kind of thing?’

‘Frank Crosby deals in any shit that’s going. He owns a lot of properties across the city, rents out to all kinds of undesirables.’

‘Would he have anything to do with in the kind of agencies that might supply their clients with optional extras, chemical optional extras, if you take my meaning.’