Innocent Lies (Reissue)

by Chris Collett

  Mariner had successfully backed himself into a corner. The next question should have been: And do you have a problem with her being Asian? Instead he took the easy way out. ‘How’s Theresa’s mother?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Theresa’s mother. I take it she’s still up there looking after her?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, she’s up and down, you know, but T’resa just wants to be there to make sure she’s okay.’ Knox stared into space, lost for a moment in his own thoughts, before turning his attention back to the database he was working on.

  That was definitely it, Mariner thought. It was Theresa’s mother that was the problem. Touching that a bloke could be so concerned about the mother-in-law . . .

  * * *

  A walk-through was scheduled for late Tuesday afternoon, the one-week anniversary of Yasmin’s disappearance, and would provide an opportunity for the press and media to assemble to publicise the event to anyone who may have been in the area on the day that Yasmin vanished. Local newspapers, radio and TV were well represented and now that the case was gathering momentum there would be national coverage too. To maximise the potential for witnesses to come forward, they had to opt for the most likely scenario, based on Yasmin getting off the train at the university station as she would normally have done, and walking home. The length and complexity of the journey turned everything into a major production with three different camera crews on the train and at either end of the walk.

  Mariner was pleased with the turn out. Even considering that many of the onlookers were in all probability there to rubberneck, the fact remained that the more people there were in attendance, the greater the chance was that Yasmin would continue to be the topic of everyday conversation. And the more she was talked about the greater the chance that someone, somewhere would recall seeing something of relevance last Tuesday afternoon. Posters of the seventeen-year-old adorned the walls of the railway station and officers distributed more of the flyers among the small crowd that had gathered, though Mariner couldn’t imagine anyone who hadn’t just jetted in from Mars being unfamiliar with that smiling snapshot.

  The group of young girls from a neighbouring school, including the one who was to be Yasmin’s double, had been carefully primed and taken several times through each step of the journey as Yasmin would have made it. Miraculously at the appointed time everything was ready and Mariner was able to give the instruction to begin. On cue the girls left the high school and began the walk down towards the railway station. A small crowd followed them, supervised by uniformed constables, but despite the numbers, an unnatural hush had descended, interrupted only by the staccato snapping of camera shutters.

  On instruction, the girls waited at the top of the road leading down to the station until the train was seen approaching, so that ‘Yasmin’ could run for the train in the way that she had done on Tuesday. Today the train was several minutes late causing anxious moments while everyone stood about waiting for it. They’d been able to arrange for the original driver of the train to be back on duty, in the hope that his memory would be jogged, but as there was no routine ticket check on board they were relying on other passengers to have seen Yasmin. This was likely to prove difficult as at this time of the afternoon the trains going into the city were almost deserted, all the passenger traffic going in the opposite direction, out of the city, at the beginning of the rush hour.

  An additional carriage had been laid on for press only. Based on the assumption that Yasmin had got on the train and continued her journey home they followed her to the university station from where she would have walked home. The route took them along the walkway through the university grounds and past the meadow where Helen Greenwood had encountered the flasher, confirming that it would have been all too easy for Yasmin to draw attention to an unwelcome approach from a stranger. It seemed more implausible than ever that anyone with a gram of common sense would attempt a random abduction in these surroundings and in broad daylight.

  A film crew from the regional TV station was there to film this part of the journey and a clip would be broadcast the following evening on the regular Crimestoppers slot.

  Before long the story would be national news, too. That would really open the floodgates to the time-wasters.

  Mariner watched the beginning of the reconstruction before he and Knox drove across to the university to pick up the end. Despite his reservations, Mariner felt that it was going well and that they would have done enough to stir the memories of anyone who was around that Tuesday afternoon. What they really needed was one good, solid lead.

  * * *

  Mariner’s wish was granted, but not from the expected source. The walk-through successfully concluded, he and Knox were on their way back to Granville Lane when the radio crackled into life.

  ‘The manager at Currys electrical superstore has just phoned. He’s got something you might be interested in.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Yasmin Akram’s mobile phone.’

  * * *

  In a move worthy of Starsky and Hutch, Knox made an illegal U turn at the next traffic lights and they drove to the retail park where the store was based. Even at this time on a weekday there was a steady stream of traffic in and out of the park. The garden centre next door was displaying everything to enhance the summer experience and they had to pick their way through barbecues, garden furniture and a display of potted plants.

  Mariner walked into the electrical store, showed his warrant card and asked to speak to the manager. Mark Williams was an eager young man, clean cut in a dazzling white shirt with the company logo on the pocket. With a dramatic flourish, he put a plastic bag down on the counter. Mariner opened the bag and removed the only item: a purple mobile phone. ‘A Nokia 3100 with a mauve oil and water removable cover,’ said Williams, though whether the pride was in the phone itself or his own professional knowledge was hard to tell. ‘The bloke who brought it in had found it. He came in to check the registration, so that he could return it.’

  ‘He couldn’t get that from the phone?’

  Williams shook his head. ‘It’s pay-as-you-go so we had to track the owner on the system. As long as it’s registered, every time one of these is bought it’s logged with the company: in this case Nokia. You can check it out with anyone who sells the brand of phone. And this one matches up with Miss Yasmin Akram,’ he said. ‘As soon as I saw that, I knew whose it was, so I thought we should call you.’

  ‘You thought right,’ Mariner said. He looked around at the customers browsing the displays. ‘Where’s the guy who brought it in?’

  ‘Mr Hewitt? He couldn’t wait, but he left his address and his mobile number.’

  ‘You let him go?’

  Williams’ face fell. ‘He had to get back to work. I’m pretty sure he’s kosher.’

  ‘Let’s hope he is, for your sake.’

  Mariner called the mobile number. When it was picked up, after several rings, there was noise and disturbance in the background, animals yelping.

  ‘Mr Hewitt?’ Mariner enquired, over the din. ‘You handed in Yasmin Akram’s phone.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘We need to speak to you urgently. Where are you?’

  ‘The animal rescue centre on Barnes Hill.’ It explained the soundtrack.

  ‘We’ll be with you right away,’ said Mariner. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning to,’ replied Hewitt cheerfully.

  Meanwhile Knox had bagged up the phone so that they could drop it in at Granville Lane and have it sent on to forensics without delay. That tiny device could prove invaluable in the search for Yasmin Akram.

  * * *

  In this heat Birmingham could be navigated blindfold, from the acrid Longbridge paint shop to the sickly-sweet halo surrounding the Cadbury factory. The aroma that lingered over Barnes Hill was not entirely pleasant: antiseptic with a hint of dog crap. The pound was quiet, but for the persistent yapping of some kind of small breed dog
. It was getting on Mariner’s nerves before they even reached the office, but he guessed the staff working there must be immune to it.

  ‘Be with you in a sec.’ Paul Hewitt was processing paperwork in a tiny office just behind the reception desk. A lethargic Labrador wandered in out of the heat and plopped itself down in a basket in a corner of the room.

  When Hewitt finally appeared, Mariner had a visual impression of a kind of understated Friar Tuck. Medium height and rotund, his shiny bald scalp circled by a fringe that resembled a tonsure. Large square-framed glasses rested on the bridge of his nose and his cheery smile completed the image. ‘We’ll use the training room,’ he said. ‘It’ll be cooler in there.’

  The room was indeed airier and had a table large enough to spread out the map that Mariner and Knox had brought with them.

  ‘So, where did you find it?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘Kingsmead Reservoir,’ Hewitt said, scanning the map, ‘right here.’ He jabbed a finger at a spot right on the edge of the map, just beside the blue blob that symbolised water.

  Although he’d heard of it, Mariner’s knowledge of Kingsmead Reservoir extended no further than a label on the incident room map; an uninhabited wilderness on the other side of the railway track to the station, between the main Birmingham to Bristol line and Birchill Lane. Once functional, the reservoir had ceased to be used after Birmingham began drawing water from the Elan Valley, storing it in the much larger Bartley Green reservoir. What they were looking at now bore that out. ‘But that’s in the middle of nowhere,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ agreed Hewitt.

  ‘So what were you doing there?’ asked Knox, more than a little pointedly.

  Hewitt was unruffled. ‘We got a call from St Clare’s, the old folks’ home that backs onto it, just here.’ He put an index finger on the map. ‘One of the old biddies there had got it into her head that she’d seen a man beating a dog. She thought he might have killed it.’

  Something crawled up the back of Mariner’s neck. ‘When was this?’

  ‘She mentioned it to the staff a few days ago, apparently, but nobody took her seriously. The old girl has her “senior” days, if you know what I mean. But she wouldn’t let it drop. I think she must have driven them mad over the weekend with it, so to keep her happy they gave us a call, first thing this morning. I drove over with Sue, my partner, and had a look at the place she described. It took some finding, I can tell you. Even though Lillian — that’s Lillian Cooper — showed us from her window where she saw it happen, it was still difficult to find a way in. We had to use the A—Z.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Mariner, looking again at the map. There was no obvious access to the site.

  ‘When we got to it, there was no sign of any dog where the old dear said, but just to make sure we had a good hunt around, as far as we could — most of it’s like an untamed jungle — and that was when we found the phone lying in the grass. We brought it back to the office, charged it up then keyed in to find the user identity. But because it’s one of those pay-as-you-go phones I had to take it to somewhere so they could look up the name and address of the person who bought it. The Currys store’s not far away. We’ve all seen the news bulletins so once they’d looked it up, it didn’t take long to put two and two together.’

  ‘Well, I’m very glad that you did,’ said Mariner. ‘This could be quite a breakthrough.’ Suddenly he sensed that there was more. ‘Was there anything else you wanted to tell us?’

  Hewitt lowered his voice. ‘I wouldn’t want to be alarmist, but near where we found it there was brown stuff, sort of staining the grass. I didn’t say anything to Sue, but it looked to me like blood.’

  ‘We’ll need you to take us to the exact spot, Mr Hewitt.’

  Hewitt slapped his thighs, a little nervously Mariner thought. ‘Whenever you like.’

  CHAPTER 14

  They drove the route that Hewitt had taken to get to the reservoir, past the railway station, over the line, past a pub called The Bridge and onto Birchill Lane. Flanked on one side by a public park and on the other by wild woodland, the wilderness was broken only by a tall and rambling building that looked as if it had once been a country house of some kind.

  ‘That’s the nursing home,’ Hewitt said, just as the sign ‘St Clare’s’ came into view. Just along from the home they passed the entrance road to a small industrial park, which was followed by another half a mile or so of sparse, unhealthy looking woodland, which gave way to a row of four derelict cottages. The houses were fenced in by heavy duty spike-topped railings, with a huge pair of steel framed, chain-link gates padlocked against trespassers. A board in the entrance announced that the land was on the market for development.

  To the side, a narrow cinder-track service road curled round the back of the cottages into what might once have been their gardens, with perhaps an orchard, but was now an open piece of rough ground of about a quarter of an acre. And it was here that Hewitt took them, Knox easing the car cautiously over the uneven ground to avoid damaging the suspension. They drew to a halt in a small grassy clearing, pockmarked with litter and the sort of detritus left behind by glue sniffers. Here and there were areas of blackened grass where fires had been lit and an old filthy mattress lay on its side, springs spilling out of it like guts from a dead animal. Even in daylight any vehicle parked here would have been shielded from the view of houses on the opposite side of Birchill Lane by the cottages themselves, the trees and the rampant, overgrown shrubs.

  ‘This was the nearest place I could find to park,’ Hewitt said. ‘I was hoping to find a way through somehow. I was encouraged by the fact that other people obviously use it.’ He was referring to the tyre tracks carved out of the hard earth and the little heaps of dog-ends. ‘When I looked around I saw that opening there in the trees.’

  He’d done well to spot that, thought Mariner. It was nothing more than a small gap in the undergrowth. ‘Lead the way,’ he said.

  By now it was well after seven, but time had drawn none of the heat or humidity out of the day and even in shirtsleeves they sweltered. Knox and Mariner followed Hewitt through the wasteland, along the only clear path that cut a swathe through the low undergrowth and the straggling birch trees that had provided the adjacent road with its name. The dirt underfoot had been hardened by the long, hot summer, but Mariner stopped at a small patch where water drained across the path’s width, throwing up a couple of distinct footprints and a narrow tyre track, possibly belonging to a bike.

  They smelt it before they saw it: a thick, peaty methane smell. Then, as the path meandered from one side to another, the trees began to thin to low shrubbery, then long grasses and suddenly the path broke out again into the glare of the evening sun, at the edge of the reservoir — if it could still be called that. Today it was simply an expanse of black mud, shrunken and dried by the drought, with a single broad channel flowing sluggishly across the centre from the far side, maybe five hundred yards away, towards where they were standing now. ‘Kingsmead Reservoir,’ Hewitt announced.

  Mariner marvelled at how such an open expanse could exist on their patch without any of them really knowing about it. The size of three football fields, it was a vast and untamed open space, the water’s edge crowded with willows and reeds and shoulder-high grasses. The land was bordered along the far side by the Birmingham to Bristol railway line and beyond that a high bank of distant houses: the ‘cottages on the ridge’ from which the community of Cotteridge had taken its name. The factory site took up much of the near side, almost as far as the trees they’d walked through, though it finished four hundred yards away behind substantial wood-panelled fencing. The only building that had any kind of direct view of the area was St Clare’s.

  ‘How could we not know about this?’ Knox said.

  ‘I’d heard about it.’ Mariner admitted. ‘It’s part of the River Rea that runs down from the Lickey Hills right through the city and to Spaghetti Junction at the other end. It’s been neglected f
or years but there has been some conservation group, the Rea Valley Trust I think it’s called, working on areas further upstream to try and clear it and create footpaths and cycle tracks, that kind of thing. I’ve seen posters around advertising for volunteers.’

  As they surveyed the scene, a train thundered by on the opposite side of the water; not the local train that Yasmin would have caught, but the Birmingham to Bristol express. They heard rather than saw it, the wooden fence hiding it from view and equally preventing any passengers from seeing anything on the reservoir. Anyone operating down here would know that they had almost complete privacy from prying eyes. The thought made Mariner shiver, despite the heat. Alongside the railway were the long production hangars of a glass manufacturer, separated from the track by a fifteen-foot wall topped with broken glass and razor wire. Anything along that stretch could be discounted as means of access.

  They had come to a junction of sorts in the footpath. To the right was the rickety bridge that crossed the out-flow stream at the back of St Clare’s, but going round to the left, skirting the edge of the reservoir, there were clear signs that other feet had trodden that path.

  ‘We went this way,’ said Hewitt, leading them round to the rotting structure of a bridge. Constructed from wooden planks it was in a state of disrepair, the boards mottled with holes, though sound enough to take their combined weight. On one side the railings were snapped in two. Underneath the structure, the water flowed reluctantly onto a square plate of deeply rusted metal, accumulating at a pair of wooden gates. Though firmly shut, there were enough crevices to allow the pathetic dribble of water to slowly insinuate itself through them to where it flowed limply over a concrete shelf and down into a narrow tunnel.

  ‘So what’s all this about?’ Knox asked, peering over the edge.

  ‘It looks like some kind of slow-release mechanism to make sure the reservoir doesn’t go completely dry or flood,’ Mariner said. ‘They have them on some canals. As the reservoir fills, the pressure builds on that plate until it eventually gets unlocked by the weight and volume of water. The gates open and the water surges down the spillway into the tunnel.’ But he was talking to himself. Knox had already lost interest.