Missing Lies (Reissue)

by Chris Collett

  ‘Don’t be,’ said Mariner. ‘It’s got nothing to do with altruism. I didn’t have much choice. My chickens coming home to roost, you might say.’

  ‘Well, I still think it’s commendable.’

  ‘Believe me, you wouldn’t if you knew how relieved I am that he’s away this weekend.’

  ‘But you obviously feel guilty about it.’

  ‘That’s true enough. If I’m brutally honest, I never understood why my ex’s first priority was to get her brother into residential care. From my high and mighty position, it looked to me like a cop-out. Now I completely get it. At the moment it feels like Jamie’s being passed around from one person to another, so that I can have a life.’

  ‘You can’t help the demands of your job. It must be a lot like mine: long stressful hours that don’t allow much time for anything else.’

  ‘Some people seem to make it work,’ Mariner said, thinking of Vicky Jesson.

  ‘Maybe that’s a difference in the level of commitment. This woman, Mercy, she’s reliable?’

  ‘Very. And she’s kind to Jamie. I can’t fault that. It’s her son I worry about. The more I hear about him, the worse it gets. Mercy openly admits he’s never had a proper job, and the only time she sees him is when he wants something — usually money.’

  ‘Does that bother her?’

  ‘If it does, she doesn’t mention it to me. She’s got one of those indulgent ways of talking about him that parents can have, as if she’s blind to all his faults. She’s always making excuses for him.’

  ‘She’s his mum,’ said Ellen. ‘That’s her job. You must have seen that before.’

  ‘I suppose so. I paid her a bit extra one week. Jamie had been especially difficult, and she’d said she was going to get her hair done. I wasn’t sure then if she had and when I asked her about it she admitted she’d given the money to Carlton after all. According to her, “He needed it more.”’

  ‘So, I’m guessing from all this that you’re not married,’ she said. ‘Any special reason for that?’ She held up her glass. ‘Sorry. You’ll have noticed I’ve had a few drinks. It turns me into a nosey cow.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mariner, in answer to her question. ‘I suppose if I was a different generation I’d have a couple of failed marriages under my belt by now, but as it is I’ve settled for a string of failed relationships instead. How about you?’

  ‘The same.’ She sighed. ‘It’s just never happened, though there have been a couple of long-term situations that didn’t quite work out. And now I’m getting increasingly used to living on my own. I like my space.’ As if to illustrate the point, she spread out her arms on the banquette. ‘It means that I can keep things on my terms. And I’ve never been particularly desperate for kids. Just for the record, though, I’m not quite a dried-up old spinster just yet. I still get offers.’

  ‘Oh, me too,’ said Mariner, and he told her about the approach in the gay bar earlier in the evening. It made her laugh. ‘You mean you didn’t see that coming?’

  ‘I know. Naive or what? And if I was to make you an offer?’ Mariner asked, only half joking.

  Her eyes widened. ‘You don’t hang about, do you?’

  ‘Well, I’ve had a few drinks too,’ said Mariner. ‘And I’ve just realised I haven’t really eaten today.’

  ‘Me neither. Actually, I’m starving.’

  ‘Want to go and get something?’ said Mariner.

  She studied him for a moment, thinking it over. ‘OK,’ she said eventually.

  They ate steak frites at an intimate French restaurant off New Street. In the usual sing-song voice they were informed of the day’s specials and told that their waitress this evening would be Sophie. ‘That’s in case we can’t read,’ said Ellen, when Sophie duly arrived, the badge on her chest pronouncing her name. In the course of the meal they also consumed the better part of two bottles of house red between them, so they were quite drunk by the time they piled into a taxi. As it lurched around the first corner, Ellen was thrown against Mariner, and when he slipped a protective arm around her waist, there she stayed. He must have briefly nodded off then, because all too soon the taxi drew up outside a row of mews houses that could have been anywhere in the city.

  ‘About that offer,’ Ellen said sleepily. ‘I’m happy to consider it, pending CV and health screening, of course. Do you want to come in?’

  ‘All right,’ said Mariner, taking the fare for the cab from his wallet.

  Stumbling into Ellen’s house, Mariner couldn’t help noticing a series of stunning monochrome photographs on the wall, of mountains against the cloud. He stopped to look more closely. ‘These are good,’ he said. ‘Who took them?’

  ‘I did, most of them,’ she called from the lounge.

  ‘This is Tryfan,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Christmas Eve about twenty years ago.’

  Mariner did a mental calculation. ‘I might have been there on that day too. I’ve got a similar picture on the wall of my office.’

  While he was talking she came up behind him and snaked her arms around him, running one hand down to grope around for his fly.

  ‘Now who’s getting ahead of herself?’ said Mariner, and when he turned he found that she had taken off the top and skirt.

  ‘Bugger the pictures,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘My bedroom’s much more interesting.’

  Kissing her briefly, Mariner picked her up and attempted to carry her up the stairs but her legs, dangling over his arm, blocked their ascent. Instead he finished up heaving her over his shoulder in an undignified fireman’s lift. It made her giggle, but towards the top of the stairs the giggling gave way to a gasp. ‘Bathroom!’ she managed to splutter, waving her arms in the general direction, and Mariner delivered her there just in time.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mariner was chasing Jamie up Hill Street, petrified that, at any moment, he was going to dash out into the speeding heavy-goods traffic. Dozens of people, their faces pressed up against the steamed windows of the restaurants, watched as he ran past. A strange yet familiar tune was jangling in his head. Breaking free of the dream, Mariner opened his eyes on a grey dawn. He was cushioned on something soft and giving, still wearing nearly all his clothes, even his shoes. Lifting his head made his brain bounce around inside his skull, sending shooting pains around his eyes and forcing a bitter taste up into his mouth. Gulping it back, he groped around for his jacket, trying to work out if this was still part of the dream, and as his phone started up again, he swore under his breath as he scrabbled around to stifle it as quickly as possible.

  The light snapped on with a painful intensity and Ellen Kingsley blinked sleepily at him from her place beside him, under the duvet. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m used to this routine too, remember?’

  Having finally located his phone, Mariner held it to his ear. It was Vicky Jesson. ‘We’ve got a body,’ she said. ‘Well, a mummy, to be more precise. I’ll stop by and pick you up.’

  ‘Sure.’ Mariner was about to terminate the call, when he remembered something. ‘Oh . . . er . . . actually, I’m not at home.’

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Jesson, her voice entirely neutral.

  Mariner covered the mouthpiece. ‘Where am I?’ He relayed the address to an inscrutable Jesson, before turning to Ellen. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. Are you all right?’

  She managed a weak smile. ‘Thundering headache, and food’s off the agenda for the foreseeable future, but it’s nothing I don’t deserve. Bad news?’

  ‘For someone, yes. I’ll call you later.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I know you’ll be busy. But maybe we can try a re-match sometime?’

  ‘Look forward to it,’ said Mariner.

  Outside in the semi-darkness Mariner found it was drizzling, the cloud was low and the street slick in the beam cast from the headlights of Jesson’s car. ‘What the hell were you doing in work at this hour?’ he said, ducking into the passenger seat. He saw from the
clock, as they navigated through the empty city streets, that it was still only a little after seven.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ Jesson said. ‘I woke really early and couldn’t get back to sleep, everything going round in my head. My mum’s staying the weekend anyway, so she just told me to go . . .’ She didn’t need to say more. Mariner recognised that kind of compulsion. It was what had drawn him back to Granville Lane yesterday afternoon.

  ‘You found a diversion,’ said Jesson. It wasn’t an accusation, just a slightly amused statement of fact.

  ‘For a couple of hours,’ said Mariner. ‘Ellen Kingsley.’

  ‘Dee Henderson’s boss?’ She turned to glance at him. ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘Probably not, but one of her patients died yesterday, so it passed some time for both of us. Not that it has anything remotely to do with you, but all we did was get rat-arsed. Nothing happened unless you count her throwing up and me passing out.’

  ‘Delightful,’ said Jesson. ‘You know how to give a girl a good time.’

  They were coming out of the city now, picking up speed on the Rubery bypass. Mariner’s head was throbbing and he was beginning to feel slightly queasy. Something on the edge of his consciousness was bothering him too, but he couldn’t quite pin it down. ‘Where are we going anyway? And what’s this about a mummy?’

  ‘The surgeon’s word, not mine.’ Jesson took them out along the main Stourbridge road, before turning left towards the outlying commuter villages of Fairfield and Dodford, and happily breaching the thirty-miles-per-hour limit. The rain had eased, but a low-hanging mist remained, and once on the minor roads she slowed down, but with just enough swing around the corners to unsettle Mariner’s stomach further. He opened a window.

  ‘Don’t you dare throw up in my car,’ warned Jesson. At a T-junction she turned left again, deliberately ignoring the police ‘Road Ahead Closed’ sign that had been placed there.

  ‘Who found it?’ Mariner asked, taking in deep draughts of the sharp air.

  ‘A woman out foraging for mushrooms,’ said Jesson.

  ‘People still do that?’ Mariner said. ‘In this weather?’ The mention of mushrooms reminded him of those in a cream and garlic sauce he’d consumed the evening before and he gagged slightly.

  ‘Yeah, who’d have thought?’ Jesson eyed him sideways. ‘You’ll warn me if you’re about to puke, won’t you?’

  Coming over the brow of a hill the road dipped down between high hedges, at which point Jesson braked gently as they picked up a line of marked and unmarked police vehicles parked higgledy-piggledy along the verge. It ended at a more substantial blockade being manned by a uniformed officer, and marked a crossroads with, on one side, a farm track leading off to the left, and almost directly opposite this, the entrance to a public car park that was surrounded on all sides by woodland.

  ‘Pepper Wood,’ said Mariner.

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘I’ve walked through it often enough. One of the Royal Hunters Walks. All this used to be part of the Royal Forest of Feckenham.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jesson, ‘you learn something new every day.’ In an efficient feat of precision parking, she brought the car to rest between a squad car and the Land Rover that Mariner recognised as belonging to one of the West Mercia Divisional Surgeons. As they opened the car doors, the ripe smell of manure hit their nostrils, leaving Mariner fighting back another wave of nausea. Jesson retrieved a couple of zoot suits from the forensic services van nearby and brought one set to Mariner. Zipping it up, and managing to not fall over in the process, his overshoes immediately sank into the mud and leaf mulch underfoot.

  Kitted out, Mariner and Jesson entered the public car park as a jagged line of uniformed officers was beginning to seal off an extensive area of the woodland with their magic circle of crime scene tape; a fraction of the sixty miles of the stuff West Midlands Police managed to get through every year. Ducking underneath, they signed into the crime scene log before making their way along the designated entry and exit corridor. The area was carefully waymarked, directing them around the outer edge of the car park, though as Mariner glanced across he could see that any chance of isolating tyre tracks in the quagmire was slim. Another uniformed officer directed them into the trees and after a few yards they picked up the aluminium stepping plates put down to preserve the scene, they were already beginning to sink into the mud.

  After a few metres the plates left the main footpath and veered off into the woods through patches of deadened bramble and knots of creeping ivy. Eventually, up ahead they saw a group of half a dozen people standing over something on the ground. A gap opened up to let them through. ‘Aha, the cavalry have arrived.’ Mariner recognised the surgeon as Evan Gray, his round, boyish face the only visible part of him above his jump suit. ‘Lovely day for it.’

  ‘Bit early for me today,’ said Mariner.

  ‘Oh, some of us have been up for hours,’ said Gray cheerily. ‘Nothing like a two-year-old insomniac to put a spring in your step of a morning. You’ve got here at just the right time.’ The facetiousness evaporated as he returned to his gruesome task.

  As Mariner stepped forward, Jesson’s use of the word ‘mummy’ began to make a terrible kind of sense. The body, lying in a shallow grave, had been tightly wound in cloth. Probably once white, it was now stained a dirty brown. It was buried in a grave no more than eighteen inches deep and had been discovered because some creature, most likely a fox, had begun to dig it out. In doing so, the animal had exposed at one end, the vivid white toes of what could only be a human foot. Now Gray, working at the opposite end, had dug the soil and leaf matter out from around what should logically have been the head, and he was beginning to carefully unwrap the linen. Over his shoulder the crime scene photographer leaned in, capturing every second on video. As Mariner and Jesson watched, Gray eased back the folds to reveal an alabaster-white face, the flesh taut and smooth and bordered by what were now lank and damp, dark curls.

  ‘Grace Clifton,’ said Mariner gulping back a burning reflux. He always did his best to avoid throwing up at crime scenes; it set a poor example to junior officers. At that moment a tiny chink of sunlight penetrated the mist and trees to dapple the carpet of brown leaves beside the makeshift grave. As it did, a spark of light winked back at them. ‘What’s that around her neck?’ asked Mariner.

  Gray eased back more of the cloth, and with a spatula he lifted from her throat a fine gold chain. As he raised it, a tiny charm slid down towards his finger. ‘The letter P,’ said Gray.

  ‘P?’ Jesson echoed. ‘That doesn’t make much sense.’

  Stepping back, Mariner turned through 360 degrees, scanning the landscape, looking for any other sites where the ground might have been disturbed. ‘How far have we walked? Thirty, forty metres?’ he said to Jesson. ‘This is well off any kind of path. And there are no tracks, even in the soft mud, so she must have been carried. Whoever brought her here has to be fit and strong.’ He was remembering the weight of Ellen Kingsley’s slender frame. ‘It has to be a man. Try and get hold of Superintendent Sharp for authorisation of the manpower to conduct a thorough search. We’ve found Grace, but it may well be that this is where Rosa and Dee have been brought too. And have the FLO meet me outside the Cliftons’ house in an hour.’

  A little way off, Mariner saw an open basket tipped on its side, the contents, a few scrawny-looking fungi, spilling onto the ground. ‘Where’s the person who found her?’ he asked one of the uniforms, a lad so young his complexion hadn’t yet settled from adolescence.

  ‘Miss Collins. The old dear who lives up at that farmhouse across the road, sir.’ He indicated back beyond where Jesson had parked the car. ‘She was in a bit of a state so I thought it was best to let Kelly — PC Shreeve — take her home and make her a cup of tea.’ The boy looked suddenly panicked. ‘I hope that was all right, sir. I told Kelly to stay with her. She’s quite old and I thought—’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Mariner reassured him. ‘I’m sure
that was the best thing to do in the circumstances. I can’t imagine she’s going to be very high on our list of suspects.’

  Leaving Jesson at the scene, Mariner retraced his steps through the woods and back to the car park, where in addition to all the police vehicles there was now also the typical group of curious onlookers, accompanied by a dog or two. They watched him with interest as he crossed over the road to Jesson’s car to deposit his forensic suit, before walking on up the track from that side of the road.

  Mariner was glad of a few minutes alone. In any other circumstances it would have been an idyllic start to the day. Now that the rain had passed, the low autumnal mist was breaking up to reveal patches of a crystal clear blue sky set to emerge from behind the white clouds, the ripples of sunlight lighting up the brilliant reds and oranges of the trees. Today was going to be a beauty. But all Mariner could think of was Grace Clifton’s parents. They were about to have the worst day of their lives.

  He kept on along the track until he came to a long, low, whitewashed and timbered house with an elaborate trellis around a faded front door. He couldn’t see a door bell or knocker, so rapped the letterbox. PC Shreeve appeared and took Mariner through to a kitchen whose wide windows looked out over rolling fields and woodland. A faint smell of boiled cabbage did little to settle Mariner’s churning stomach. Irene Collins was seated at a small Formica-topped table, still wearing her heavy woollen coat, belted around a stout middle, with a scarf tied around her neck and some kind of crocheted hat jammed down on her head. Her hands, in fingerless gloves, were clasped around a delicate bone-china tea cup. As Mariner went in, a ginger cat blinked at him from its cushion beside a wood-burning stove.

  Mariner introduced himself before taking one of the chairs on the opposite side of the table. ‘It’s Miss Collins, I understand?’ From what little he could see of her face, he put her age at someway north of seventy.

  ‘Mrs,’ she corrected him, mildly. ‘My husband passed away eight years ago.’

  ‘You’ve had quite a shock.’