Blood of the Innocents

by Collett, Chris

  Mariner’s conscience told him that he ought to go over to see his mother again tonight, but after the sort of day he’d had, he couldn’t face her. In any case, it was late and by the time he could get there, visiting would be over. Instead, he phoned and spoke to the duty nurse.

  ‘She’s fine,’ the girl reassured him. ‘Though I expect she’ll be disappointed not to see you.’ I wouldn’t count on it, thought Mariner.

  Knox had already left and in any case, Mariner didn’t feel much like company, so he went home. The evening was warm and sticky again, the air heavy with unresolved tension. Opening up a bottle of home-brew, Mariner went to sit on the bench outside his front door, overlooking the canal. Towards dusk, the sky darkened ominously and thunder rumbled in the distance. A few spots of rain followed, temporarily making the air smell a little fresher, but this time the storm never quite broke.

  The next morning he was in the shower, considering their next move with Shaun Pryce, when away in the distance he heard the phone. When he got out there was a message from the hospital on the answering machine, asking him to call back as soon as possible. He hoped it wasn’t that they were letting his mother go home early. That was a diversion he could do without today.

  ‘Mr Mariner, I’m afraid your mother has suffered a slight heart attack. You may want to come in.’ The voice was calm and unruffled, implying nothing more than a setback, though this would inevitably delay her discharge from the hospital.

  On the drive over, Mariner could visualise his mother’s frustration as she was wired up to monitors and drips that would further restrict her independence. This had obvious implications for her after-care, too. He’d need to play a more active role, something he didn’t relish, but it might mean getting to know each other again, which in turn may present new opportunities too. The nursing sister met him on reception and took him into a side room to explain what was happening. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Mariner, we weren’t able to resuscitate her.’

  For several seconds her words didn’t make any sense. Then, one by one, their meaning hit him like a forty-foot wave, almost physically knocking him off-balance.

  ‘She died at just after nine o’clock,’ the nurse went on, gently. ‘It was very sudden, so it’s unlikely that she knew anything about it. She wouldn’t have been in any pain.’ Her carefully chosen words were designed to offer comfort and consolation. They were words of the kind that had spouted from Mariner’s own mouth a hundred times before, when he’d broken bad news to the relatives of crime victims. In all that time it had never occurred to him that one day, he might be on the receiving end. So this was what it was like. A feeling of complete disorientation, as if time had suddenly slowed to nothing.

  ‘Would you like to see her?’ the nurse repeated when he failed to respond the first time.

  He had to wait a few minutes, while they made her presentable, presumably. But it made no difference. When he went in he didn’t see Rose. They hadn’t succeeded in making her look as if she was sleeping, as was the desired outcome. The life in her was gone, leaving only an empty shell. In the past he’d watched families say their last good-byes, to kiss the cold cheek of their loved ones, but Mariner couldn’t bring himself to do that. His mother wasn’t there. Why was he so upset? It wasn’t as though he would miss his mother’s daily presence. They’d hardly seen each other in recent years. And it wasn’t that he was suddenly brought face to face with death. Any reminders he might need of his own mortality came regularly at work. Perhaps it was because now he had to accept the possibility that he would never know.

  He realised too how much he’d taken her for granted, expecting her to never not be there. He’d always assumed that she’d be one of these women who lived well into her nineties. An afterthought struck him: she’d never meet Anna now.

  They were still holding some of his mother’s personal effects at the nursing station on the ward so he went to fetch them. ‘You’ve just missed your dad,’ said the nurse. ‘I think he’s gone home.’

  Mariner gawped. ‘My what?’

  Had he been thinking rationally and stopped to consider, Mariner would have recognised the unlikelihood, but suddenly, in a warped kind of way, everything began to make sense. The ‘something to tell him’, was that his father had reappeared on the scene. It might explain why she was doing up the house, too.

  He dashed back to his mother’s house, where an old style pushbike was leaning against the wall. That hadn’t been there two days ago. He let himself in with the key, his heart pounding in anticipation. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello. You must be Tom.’

  Harry turned out to be a softly spoken widower who had worked for years as an engineer at Potterton’s boilers in Coventry and had lost his wife soon after his retirement.

  ‘How long have you known Rose?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘About a year. I was planning to move in with her.’

  ‘Were you?’ Mariner’s surprise was genuine. He was struggling to get his head round the idea that his mother had met another man after all this time. If there had been liaisons over the years Mariner had not been aware of them. As far as he knew, there had been nobody since his father who hadn’t stuck around long enough to see his son born. Just like the Akrams with Yasmin, this was where he’d find out how little he knew about his mother.

  Harry was flustered now. ‘No, it wasn’t like that. We were just friends, but I was coming to stay here with her. She’d offered me a room.’

  ‘A room?’

  ‘I’m living in rented accommodation at present but the lease expires at the end of the month and the landlord wants me out, so your mother had said I could have her spare room. It was all above board. We had agreed rent.’

  ‘I see.’ Typical of his mother to be adopting waifs and strays, even at her age. As he spoke, Mariner recognised that Harry and his mother had espoused the kind of pragmatic approach to life that is the privilege of the older generation. They’d reached the point where, having taken their share of knocks, they’ve realised that there’s too little time left to waste it arguing about the minutiae. Harry was about to lose his home. Mariner’s mother had a spare room. The two things fitted logically together, end of story.

  ‘I’m not a con man,’ said Harry, answering the very question that Mariner had moments before dismissed inside his head.

  ‘No.’ And you’re not my dad.

  Harry ‘liked to keep busy’ as he put it, hence the fresh coat of paint on the house. Mariner’s mother had been helping him, but mainly by providing cups of tea, from the sound of it. ‘I didn’t want her to be up ladders. I don’t know why she was.’ Harry had come to collect his overalls and brushes. ‘I expect you’ll want to sell the house and I wouldn’t want them to be in the way. No time like the present.’

  When Harry had gone, Mariner called the office from his mother’s old Bakelite phone and spoke to Fiske.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Tom,’ he said, formally. ‘Is there anything we can do?’

  ‘No thanks, sir.’

  ‘Police Complaints are still here.’ Fiske couldn’t resist mentioning it, even though the timing was completely inappropriate. ‘They’re going through all the paperwork with a fine-tooth comb.’

  ‘That’s what they do, sir.’

  ‘Yes. They’ll want to talk to you, too.’ Fiske paused. ‘Tom, I hope—’

  ‘Not really the right moment, sir.’

  ‘Of course. Well, take as much time as you need.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ I won’t be hurrying back on your account. He’d let Fiske squirm. Even if the DCI were vindicated, the fact that there had been an investigation in the first place could blight his career. With any luck, the mud would stick.

  The truth was that Mariner was still uneasy about his own part in the fiasco. He should have been more assertive about keeping Ricky’s case, and more proactive, both with Ricky and with his mother. Now he’d paid the price for both.

  He went to the registry office to record his mother’s d
eath. Technically, it had been a sudden death, so there would have to be a post mortem, but it would be routine. The people around her when she died had all been fighting to save her life. Nothing suspicious about that.

  Sitting on the hard plastic seat, waiting his turn, it occurred to Mariner that to all intents and purposes he was now an orphan, with very little family to speak of. His mother had a couple of cousins as far as he remembered, but there were no family gatherings when he’d been a kid. It gave him something else in common with Anna, too. She’d lost her parents several years ago, except of course that he didn’t really know about the one, and perhaps now never would.

  Ironically, if he’d been adopted it would have been simple. These days, there were routes to follow. But not for him. The only way of solving this particular puzzle would be if there was some clue remaining at his mother’s house, something she’d hung onto. He thought about the bond between the father of a child and the mother. Ronnie Skeet was a nasty piece of work but it still didn’t stop Colleen from letting him back into the house time after time. ‘He’s the father of my kids,’ she’d said.

  Mariner’s mother had never given him any reason to doubt that she knew the identity of his father. Was there an unbreakable bond there, too, however tenuous? However effectively she managed to keep him a secret, would there still be some fine strand connecting them? If there was then there would be a trace of it at her house. It was the only place to start. Hours later he was back there.

  For the sake of being thorough, he began with all the obvious places, but knowing beforehand that there would be nothing in the bureau in the dining room or in her drawer in the bedroom. It was too accessible. He found all her current paperwork: bank and building society accounts, letters from the last few years. Most of the numbers in her address book were local: friends and contacts made when she moved back up to Leamington. There was nothing from before that time.

  Amongst the documents was his birth certificate, but he’d seen that years ago and it gave nothing away. He was officially a bastard. That would amuse some of the crooks he’d put away in the past. She’d kept all his old school reports too, most of them a variation on a ‘could try harder’ theme. But it was futile. She’d kept a secret for this long. She’d never leave anything around down here that would give it away. Mariner knew where the important stuff was. The past had literally been hanging over his head all the time he’d lived in this house.

  When they’d moved in with his grandparents, space was at a premium and, consequently, much of their stuff had vanished up into the loft, and had never, to his knowledge, come down again. Rose had always vehemently discouraged him from going up there on the grounds that he might clumsily put a foot through the fragile floor and into the ceiling of the rooms below, but Mariner suspected the real reason lay deeper than that.

  No one had been up there for years, mainly because it was such a production to get up there, involving balancing precariously at the very top of the stepladder before launching off into the narrow aperture. But in adulthood, Mariner had height on his side and the manoeuvre was relatively easy. The loft space was stifling and dirty, everything coated in a layer of black dust. A bare bulb draped over one of the rough timbers provided the minimum amount of light and in the yellow gloom, Mariner could see the enormity of the task: boxes and trunks, rolls of yellowing wallpaper, a collection of old camping equipment that could have belonged to Edmund Hillary, complete with rusting tartan vacuum flasks and heavy canvas groundsheets.

  Opening a cardboard carton, he found old crockery and cutlery, including a child’s porcelain Peter Rabbit dish that had probably been his. In another, a whole willow-patterned bone-china dinner service. There was a suitcase full of dusty, dun-coloured blankets. Finally, he found what he was looking for in a brown cardboard suitcase with catches that had almost rusted solid. Working them back and forth finally slid them across and the lid flipped open to reveal yellowing paper: letters, cards, newspaper cuttings and photographs. The faded and peeling address label stuck to the inside of the lid had written on it: Rosemary Ellen Mariner, in neat italic ink-penned script. This was his mother’s life in London.

  She’d been twenty-four when he was born in that other long hot summer of 1959, which left him looking for anything dated 1958-59. Her twenty-first birthday cards were bundled together, as were letters from his grandmother, even a few birth congratulations cards, most from women or couples. There were black-and-white photographs of him as a baby, wrapped in a woollen shawl. There were mementoes from special occasions: tickets from London Zoo, a programme from the Henry Wood Promenade Concert in September 1958: an evening of Sibelius, conducted by Malcolm Sargent.

  The only things that might reveal any clues were the letters. He sat on an old crate and strained his eyes to read. The letters were addressed to several different places in London, where his mother had lived an apparently nomadic existence. Mostly, his grandmother described trivial events in Leamington, though occasionally she made reference to things that Rose must have mentioned in her letters home. It was these brief glimpses that Mariner clung to. In the dim light, the curling italic handwriting wasn’t easy to decipher and he took his time, anxious not to miss anything.

  But he realised as he came to the last, with overwhelming disappointment, that there was nothing to miss. His neck ached and his eyes were sore with the dust and effort. It had gone cooler. When he had emerged back on to the ladder he found out why. It was dark and almost eleven at night. Turning on the landing light, he left a black fingerprint on the switch. He looked as if he’d been up a chimney. He was filthy.

  His mother had never gone in for showers so he ran a hot bath and lay in it, soaking. He had a decision to make. He could either waste further endless time and energy trying to uncover something that was probably unattainable, or he could get back to his life. Later, he crawled into the spare room to sleep on it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The morning brought with it a firm decision. Mariner locked his mother’s house. He’d get on to the estate agent soon and arrange a skip and some visits to a local charity shop. At home he found a message from Anna on the answer phone. It wasn’t exactly an olive branch, but carefully handled, it might have the potential to become one. He called her back straight away, half expecting her recorded message. To his surprise she was there, but the conversation didn’t go according to plan. ‘Where have you been?’ Anna asked. ‘I’ve been trying to contact you.’

  ‘My mother’s dead.’

  ‘Oh God, Tom, I’m so sorry. What happened?’

  ‘A heart attack, Thursday morning.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Do you want me to come over? I can see if Simon could—’

  ‘No!’ he snapped. ‘It’s all right, I’m fine, really.’

  ‘OK, then.’

  So the experience hadn’t changed him. In an emotional crisis he still couldn’t manage sharing his feelings with someone else. It was so long since he’d done it that he’d forgotten how.

  It wasn’t any less depressing back in the office where, in his absence, nothing much had happened. Fiske was still technically overseeing things but his mind was, understandably, preoccupied with other matters. The team itself seemed to have lost all coherence, too. Mariner recognised that he was still in a state of shock. Tony Knox seemed lower than ever, and recent past history had generated an awkwardness between himself and Millie, all of which was nicely exacerbated by the fact that beyond the initial expression of condolences, suddenly no one quite knew what to say to him.

  There had been no progress, either forensic or otherwise, to pin down Shaun Pryce. The grass and soil traces on the blanket in his car were a match with the reservoir, but then Pryce had never denied that he went there. There was a feeling all round that both investigations were beginning to lose momentum as demands on resources continued to be made from elsewhere, and there were mutterings about calling i
n the murder review team. That and the ominous presence of the PCA was doing little to inspire confidence.

  Partly to get out of the building, Mariner went to visit the Akrams, who unusually were both at home. ‘You’ve closed the school?’

  ‘We had to. It was impossible to keep going. We hope to reopen in a few days, but we’re in limbo. Until we know who did this to Yasmin we can’t get on with our lives. It’s like unfinished business.’

  ‘I’m sorry: there’s no news, but we’re still doing everything we can.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Another uncompromisingly sunny day dawned for Mariner’s mother’s funeral. He put on one of his lighter suits and perused his collection of dreary ties. Had he been Fiske, he’d have had a whole array of jolly cartoon characters at his disposal, but he wasn’t, so in the end he chose a sky/navy stripe.

  ‘Very smart.’

  Coming down the stairs, he looked up to see Anna standing in the hallway. She’d let herself in and was waiting by the front door, wearing an elegant floral dress and a wide-brimmed hat.

  ‘I thought you could use some support,’ she said. ‘After all, I’ve had some experience at this stuff.’ Over the last few years, death had been a loyal companion, as she’d seen both her parents and her older brother killed. It was Eddie’s murder that had brought them together in the first place.

  ‘Thanks, I appreciate it,’ said Mariner, truthfully.

  She saw him appraising her outfit. ‘Would she have approved?’

  ‘She’d have approved whatever you were wearing.’

  They spoke little on the drive over to Leamington and he was grateful for that, too. His nerves jangled in anticipation. Not because of the funeral: that he could cope with. But in the days after his mother died, he had placed announcements in both local and national press. At the very least he was hoping to meet someone who would be able to tell him who his father was. And then there was the possibility he hardly dared consider: that his father might turn up in person.