Blood of the Innocents

by Collett, Chris

‘I dare say I know as much as anyone.’ He looked out over the water. ‘It was built at the turn of the century to top up the canal system in times of drought. It’s what’s known as a feeder lake: the water diverting away from and back into the canal.’ He peered over the bridge. ‘My, my, that’s taken a battering.’

  ‘I understand that these gates were meant to open under pressure.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He went on to describe what Mariner had already surmised.

  ‘How big a release is it when it goes? Enough to carry something big with it, say seven or eight stone in weight?’ Mariner wondered if Dwyer had any idea what kind of object they were talking about.

  If he did he wasn’t curious enough to ask. ‘Given the gradient of the incline, I’d say easily. I’ve never seen this one in full spate, but I’ve seen other similar mechanisms and they usually flow at about ten cubic feet per second. That’s quite a force.’

  ‘How often does this release occur?’

  ‘At this time of year, as you’d expect, not very often. The drier the weather the longer it takes for the pressure to build. It’d be once a day, if you’re lucky.’

  ‘And would there be any way of telling what time of day this was occurring recently?’

  ‘Unfortunately not. It would depend entirely on the flow into the reservoir.’

  ‘And after heavy rain, such as we had the other night?’

  ‘After heavy rain the water would just flow straight through, much as it’s doing now. The gates would be permanently open, almost as if the reservoir were just part of the river. The river flows to here from its source in the Waseley Hills right through to Spaghetti Junction. After last night’s storms, by the time it got to this point it would be torrential, hence the damage. That will take some sorting out.’

  ‘So what’s down there?’ Mariner pointed into the tunnel.

  ‘At this end, a series of valves and valve vaults to control the flow.’

  ‘Would they hinder anything passing through?’

  ‘To a degree. The mechanisms are old, have been there for decades and under no particular pressure: but the sudden influx of last night’s rain was clearly enough to break the sluice gates and could have equally damaged or destroyed the valves too.’

  ‘But we’ve had rain like this before. Why would this happen now?’

  ‘Probably because of the work we’ve been doing upstream, clearing all the rubbish and dredging out where the river has got clogged up.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘We’ve been too thorough.’ He looked back over the pool itself. ‘The water hasn’t had such a clear run for years.’

  ‘Sounds like hard work.’

  ‘It’s not always. We’re quite a sociable group, too.’

  ‘Ever had a guy called Shaun Pryce in the group?’

  ‘Shaun Pryce? I don’t remember the name.’ Mariner described Pryce to Dwyer.

  ‘He doesn’t fit our profile. We’re mainly middle-aged, retired folk with too much time on our hands and a concern for the preservation of our city. But that said, people come and go. Occasionally we get more ecologically aware students who come and join us.’

  ‘I wonder if you could let me have a list of your members some time.’

  ‘Consider it done.’

  Mariner looked out over the wasteland of the reservoir. ‘So your work hadn’t brought you as far as this, then?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘Not yet. We’re running a bit behind schedule, dependent as we are on volunteers. But we did all the prep work some time ago.’

  ‘What does that involve?’

  ‘Myself and another member coming down here with someone from the rivers authority to look at what there is and what needs doing. That’s how I know about the tunnel.’

  ‘When did you come here?’

  ‘It would have been in about March, I suppose. We were being somewhat optimistic, as it turns out.’

  ‘And who came with you?’

  ‘Sheila Carr was the other member. It’s interesting because I’m sure that at that time the railings weren’t broken. It’s not something we put on our work list.’

  ‘Well, thanks for coming down here, Mr Dwyer, it’s been very helpful.’

  Watching him go, Mariner took another look around, noticing anew the break in the timber railings. ‘Lily mentioned that,’ he recalled.

  ‘It’s not that recent,’ Knox was examining them. ‘The wood on the inside of the break is weathered too.’

  ‘I think we do have to consider it a probability that Yasmin was put in the water here,’ Mariner said.

  Knox nodded agreement. ‘But is this where she was killed?’

  Arriving at the Newton Street mortuary later that afternoon, Mariner’s stomach began to bubble gently. Outside, the temperature had soared again: a signal that the storms had been just a blip on the meteorological radar.

  ‘Lucky for us that they happened at all,’ remarked pathologist Stuart Croghan. ‘Or Yasmin’s body might have remained hidden.’

  This wasn’t the first child murder Mariner had worked on, but contrary to popular belief, the average detective rarely deals with murder cases, children or otherwise. The experience was always guaranteed to be traumatic, even though the meeting would be conducted in Croghan’s office with reference to photographs, rather than walking around the cadaver itself, in the manner of all good TV detectives.

  Croghan had been working non-stop since the body had been brought in a couple of hours ago and already the file on Yasmin Akram was thick with detailed notes. Much of this information would be saved for the inquest, so Croghan confined himself to the salient points, knowing exactly what would be of practical use to Mariner now.

  ‘Death was by asphyxiation,’ Croghan told him. ‘She was strangled with some kind of ligature, probably some kind of wire. There’s no apparent discolouration or abrasion in the ligature wound so it was a clean or treated wire.’

  ‘Plastic coated?’

  ‘Could be. It was quite soft, around a twenty-eight gauge - about three millimetres thick. You can tell that from the shape and depth of the groove.’

  ‘Some kind of electrical wire, perhaps?’ Mariner was hopeful.

  ‘It’s possible but I couldn’t be certain.’

  ‘But not an accident, then.’

  ‘Absolutely not. She was already dead when she went into the water. There are diatoms in the throat area but not in the bloodstream, heart or lungs.’ Meaning, she hadn’t inhaled water. The microscopic algae were reliable indicators.

  ‘Decomposition is patchy though, which is unusual, not in keeping with being totally submerged throughout. Different areas of the body seem to have decomposed at different rates.’

  ‘Consistent with spending a few days in a drainage tunnel with an irregular through-flow?’

  ‘That would probably do it, yes.’

  ‘How long had she been exposed to the water?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d say several days. The decomposition pattern is going to make it hard to pinpoint the time of death very accurately. We’ll analyse stomach contents but there’s a limit to what that can tell us, too.’

  ‘But we’re looking at her being killed roughly when?’

  ‘It’s more than a week ago.’

  Mariner gave Croghan a look that said, ‘Thanks for nothing’.

  ‘I did warn you,’ the pathologist said.

  ‘Anything else that would help?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘Quite a bit of post-mortem bruising that would imply that she had a rough journey after she was put in the water.’ Yasmin progressing through that underground tunnel.

  ‘Any sign of a sexual assault?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘No physical signs, as far as I can see. And from the internal I’d have said that she wasn’t sexually active. However, she’s not wearing any underwear. Curious.’

  Croghan was right, that was curious.

  ‘So Lee’s message could have been confirming their meeting,’ said Millie. She looked shattered after the
visit to the Akrams, but had insisted on being present for the debrief. They’d gathered again in Mariner’s office: it was becoming a regular club meeting. ‘Yasmin disappeared at around the time Lee left. He could have done it before he went. Perhaps he wanted her to go with him and she refused.’

  ‘And the missing underwear would mean some kind of sexual activity, or the start of it,’ Knox added.

  ‘But as Croghan said, this doesn’t look like a spur of the moment thing. It smacks of premeditation. I can’t imagine that Lee would set out to kill Yasmin.’

  ‘No. It would have to be someone who just happened to have about their person a piece of electrical wire,’ put in Knox. ‘Like Shaun Pryce.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what Ricky saw,’ said Millie. ‘Someone assaulting and killing Yasmin.’

  ‘So why didn’t the killer tip him over the bridge too?’

  There were still so many questions. ‘I should go and talk to Yasmin’s parents,’ said Mariner. ‘They’ll want to know what comes next.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, sir.’

  The smiling face of Yasmin Akram beamed at Mariner from where the photo sat at the centre of the shrine for family and friends to pay their respects in the sitting room, where Millie and Mariner had been shunted to wait. Bypassing the huddle of people on the pavement outside, they’d been shown directly into the cool, formal room that was lavishly furnished and spotlessly clean and, Mariner guessed, rarely used.

  The house was busy, but in here an eerie silence reigned. If the body were not still being held at the mortuary, they would, Millie told him, be looking into an open coffin. A knock on the door preceded Amira, her dark mourning clothes emphasising the paleness of her skin. Millie got up and gave her a hug. ‘How’s your mother bearing up?’

  ‘She’s OK. My father’s taking care of her.’ Her face crumpled. ‘All this is my fault,’ Amira said. ‘If I hadn’t encouraged her—’

  ‘That’s not true, Amira,’ said Millie firmly. ‘Someone else did this. They are responsible. You only wanted what was best for Yasmin.’

  ‘I’ve let them all down.’ Overcome with grief, she began to weep, and while Millie attempted to console her, Mariner was suddenly struck by the inappropriateness of his presence here. This intrusion on the family’s grief, bringing the constant reminder of unnatural death was one of the most repulsive aspects of the job. He got up suddenly. ‘I’ll come back another time,’ he said.

  Millie chose to stay, and when Mariner drove away he found himself close to Anna’s house. Suddenly he was aware that he’d been letting down a number of people too. The Akrams he could do little about for now, but he could make amends with Anna. He took a chance and stopped by her house, but was disconcerted to see an unfamiliar car on the drive. Laid across the parcel shelf was a green sweat-shirt bearing the embroidered Manor Park logo. He parked and walked round to the side of the house, from where he could smell the charcoal fumes from a barbecue and hear the sound of music and laughing, as if a party was in full swing. The voices were predominantly male.

  Mariner opened the side gate. The first person he saw was Jamie, typically detached from the group, pacing the edge of the lawn, head down, muttering to himself and wringing the hem of his polo shirt in his hands. He was wearing shorts: something that even a few months ago he wouldn’t have countenanced. Good old Manor Park.

  Clustered at the far end of the patio, nearest the kitchen door, Anna stood, leaning back against the picnic table, wine glass in hand and deep in conversation with a man lounging below her on a garden chair, his back to Mariner. Anna wore a scrap of a vest and a denim skirt short enough to offer the Kingsmead girls some strong competition. Her face was open and smiling and attention focused one hundred per cent on her guest, whose gaze would have been at about the level of her smooth, lightly tanned thighs. No marks for guessing where his mind would be.

  ‘Any more drinks out there?’ called another man’s voice from the kitchen; someone else clearly at home.

  Sickened, Mariner turned to go, but he was too late. Without even seeming to glance in his direction, Jamie had seen him.

  ‘Spectre Man,’ he said loudly.

  In those early days when Anna had addressed him as ‘Inspector Mariner’, Jamie had found it impossible to get his mouth around it, Spectre Man being the closest he could get. Highly appropriate today when Mariner felt exactly that: the spectre appearing at the feast.

  ‘Hi, Jamie,’ Mariner said.

  Hearing Jamie speak Anna had immediately looked up and Mariner tried to read her face. Surprise certainly, but anything else? Hard to tell. She left her guest and came over. Big smile but no kiss: maybe he was giving off the wrong signals, or maybe not. ‘Hi. We weren’t expecting you. Coming in?’

  We? ‘You’ve got visitors.’

  ‘That’s OK. Come and join us. You can meet Simon and—’

  ‘I’m not much in a party mood. We found Yasmin Akram.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about it on the news. I’m sorry. Why don’t you stay anyway and have a drink?’

  He did consider it, but only for a split second. ‘No. It’s fine. There’s a lot to do.’

  ‘All right.’

  It was one of those occasions when she disappointed him. It had been a tough day and Mariner wanted to share it with someone. He was restless, and for once his own company wasn’t enough, so short of anything better to do, he went back to Granville Lane. After a while Millie returned from the Akrams’ house, looking drained, and by nine thirty only the two of them remained in the incident room.

  ‘Come on,’ Mariner said, ‘I’ll buy you a curry.’ Then he realised what he’d said.

  Millie just laughed. ‘I know a place where you can get the best,’ she said. The place turned out to be her ground floor flat, in Acocks Green.

  ‘This is fantastic,’ said Mariner as he scooped up rogan josh with a spicy naan that was as light as a feather. He hadn’t eaten all day, and until now hadn’t realised how hungry he was.

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ Millie said. ‘I didn’t cook it myself. My mum sends it over now and again. I think it helps to salve her conscience when the rest of the family won’t have anything to do with me. Dad doesn’t know she does it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Long story,’ Millie said.

  ‘I’ve got time. If you want to, that is.’

  ‘Why not?’ She dropped her chunk of bread into her dish and sighed. ‘My parents aren’t quite so enlightened as Yasmin’s. They always expected me to be a traditional Pakistani wife. I had to learn to cook and sew - all the usual. But when I got to about Yasmin’s age, I started to realise that there could be more to life than that. I was doing pretty well at school and decided I wanted to go to university. I fancied being a forensic scientist. But my dad has a rather more traditional view of the female role than the Akrams. Within our community the whole raison d’être of a woman is to look after her husband and produce lots of healthy children. I would have to do it the hard way. Over a number of years, I saved enough money to start paying my way through college, but a few weeks before I was due to go, Dad got hold of my building society book, confiscated my savings and that was the end of it.’

  ‘Christ, I had no idea.’

  ‘Naturally, this led to a massive row with my dad. I called him a lot of things that I shouldn’t have and my family and the rest of the community shunned me. I left home and came to live with a sympathetic auntie in Alum Rock, and this job was the nearest I could get to what I really want to be.’ Partly to conceal her emotion she got up and carried her plate to the kitchen.

  Mariner followed her through. ‘Do you still have ambitions for forensics?’ he asked as they stacked dishes in the dishwasher.

  ‘I don’t know. I like what I do now.’

  ‘You’re bloody good at it,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I mean it. You’ve built a great relationship with the family.’

  ‘Today was horrible, having to tell t
hem.’

  ‘It was always going to be. It’s one of the bits that doesn’t get any easier.’

  ‘I keep trying to imagine what they must be going through. Their own child. It must be—’ Her eyes watered and she wiped at them crossly.

  Mariner put a hand on her shoulder. ‘You made it as easy for them as you could,’ he said. ‘You supported them. It’s all you can do. You can’t bring her back.’

  ‘No, but I still wish I could.’

  Afterwards, Mariner couldn’t really be sure how it happened. One minute he had his arm around Millie comforting her, the next her lips were fused to his, her tongue, sweet and spicy, probing his mouth. Maybe the curry had aphrodisiacal properties, or perhaps seeing Anna like that had left him gagging for it. Whatever it was it seemed like the most natural thing in the world that he should kiss her back, his hands roaming her shapely body. And by the time her hand slid down to unzip him he was already hard.

  They made love urgently, only making it as far as the sofa, Mariner’s trousers shoved down to his thighs. For him it was over in minutes, too soon for Millie, who continued her frenzied pumping on his softening member for what seemed like an eternity, until spasms rocked her and she finally allowed him to withdraw, deflated and sore.

  ‘Sorry,’ Mariner said. ‘That wasn’t up to much.’

  ‘No.’ She seemed not to mind. ‘But probably about what you’d expect from a couple of drunks. I’ll call you a cab.’

  Thankfully, Mariner made it inside his own front door before his bowels decided to erupt. He awoke the next morning, still half-clothed, mind and body feeling lousy in equal measures. His system clearly wasn’t accustomed to industrial-strength curry and Millie’s mother’s, good though it was at the time, had consigned him to the bathroom for much of the night. He’d a thumping hangover and his dick hurt about as much as his ego. He didn’t think Millie was the type to broadcast details of their pathetic encounter around the station, but you could never really tell with women.

  When the phone rang, he really hoped it wasn’t Anna. It wasn’t. It was Mark Russell. ‘I thought you’d want to know, sir, we’ve got another body.’