Innocent Lies (Reissue)

by Chris Collett

  ‘Can you tell us what happened on Tuesday afternoon?’ Mariner said.

  Nora flicked ash onto the path. ‘It was tea time,’ she told them. ‘Lily was in the dining room along with all the other residents when she said she didn’t feel well. She’s still fairly independent, so we just suggested that she should go back to her room and have a lie down. When I went up a little later to check on her, she was standing transfixed, in the middle of the room, just staring out of the window. She was in some distress. I thought she’d had a funny turn or something, but when I asked if she was all right she grabbed my arm and said we mustn’t, under any circumstances, let Casper out because she’d just seen a wicked man beating a dog to death down by the reservoir. I got her to show me, but of course when we looked out of the window there was nothing to see.

  ‘I didn’t think any more of it then because although generally speaking Lily’s one of our more lucid clients, she does have her moments. Casper was the cat she left behind when she moved in here two years ago, so she was clearly getting a bit confused. When I reminded her of this she realised her mistake, but I could see that something had upset her. Anyway, I helped her into bed and thought it was over and forgotten. But a few days later, Lily said she hadn’t been able to sleep for thinking about the poor dog, so I asked her to show me again where she’d seen it.

  ‘She told exactly the same story and the description of what she saw was absolutely consistent. She swore that she’d seen this man and that the dog could only be dead. As it seemed to be bothering her so much I thought the least I could do was humour her, so I called the RSPCA. I hoped they’d be able to go and have a look and confirm that there was no dead dog. And Lily would be reassured to know that she’d been mistaken. There was nothing to lose.’ She looked from one to the other of them. ‘The man I spoke to said they found blood.’

  ‘Well, we haven’t established what it is just yet,’ said Mariner. ‘But it would be helpful if we could speak to Lily herself, in case there’s anything else she remembers. Would she be up to that?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Would any other of the residents have seen anything?’ Knox asked.

  ‘No,’ Nora said. ‘Everyone else was in the dining room on the ground floor, which looks out over the side garden.’

  ‘You said this happened at tea time.’ Mariner checked his notes. ‘What time would that have been?’

  ‘About quarter to five.’

  Twenty minutes after Yasmin had said goodbye to her friends and disappeared off the face of the earth. Mariner didn’t like that timing one little bit.

  * * *

  Inside they trooped up a winding staircase to Lily’s room, a twelve-by-twelve box of floral wallpaper and chintzy fabrics. The bed was covered with a peach-coloured candlewick bedspread. On top of the mahogany chest of drawers were assorted remnants of her life: a few photographs and a couple of porcelain figurines alongside a varnished conch shell purporting to be a gift from Bridlington. It didn’t seem much to show for eighty-odd years on the planet. Still, as people were so fond of saying: you can’t take it with you. The view from the window wasn’t much to speak of either, overlooking as it did the jungle of yellowing scrubland that encircled the reservoir. Naturally Lily had her windows open and even up here you could smell the sour, stagnant water. Mariner’s heart sank when Lily turned out to be a frail old woman with whiskers sprouting from a face that was as lined and furrowed as the dry ground outside. Her sparse silvery hair had been permed into tight curls, exposing patches of scalp as pink and smooth as a baby’s flesh and the cotton frock she wore hung loosely on her withered frame. She was perched on an armchair, her eyes closed, but she opened them as they arrived, huge blue irises staring at them through the full-strength lenses of her glasses.

  ‘Lily, these are the policemen I told you about,’ Nora said, in a chivvying tone. ‘They just want to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Anything you like,’ said Lily, surprisingly gamely, once she’d come round. ‘I know what I saw.’ Perhaps she would turn out to be a decent witness after all.

  ‘I’ll get some chairs,’ said Nora, returning moments later with a couple of the moulded plastic variety, which she arranged next to the old lady. Mariner sat, but Knox maintained a disinterested distance, staring out of the window.

  ‘Can you tell us exactly what you did see?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘It was tea time, but I didn’t feel like eating, especially the rubbish that they give us here: ratty-twee or some such foreign muck.’ Mariner waited for Nora to contradict her, but then saw the glint in Lily’s eye. Why had he assumed that because she was old, she’d have no sense of mischief? ‘Anyway, I came up here, into my room and I could see someone down there on the bridge. I saw him straight away because there’s never anyone down there and the movement was . . . well . . . aggressive. He was swinging his arm up and down, up and down, hitting something on the ground.’

  ‘Can you show me where?’ Mariner asked.

  Using the armrests for support, Lily got shakily to her feet and she and Mariner joined Knox at the window, looking out at where the yellowing grass with its dark kernel was swarming with police officers, moving laboriously through the undergrowth, heads bowed as if performing some ancient religious ritual.

  ‘He was right next to that little wooden bridge,’ Lily said, pointing towards it, ‘the one with the broken railings, to the left of it where the long grass starts again.’ Nothing wrong with her eyesight then.

  ‘Was he standing or kneeling?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘He was standing, his legs akimbo but he was stooped over, low.’

  ‘Could you see his face?’

  ‘No, he had his back turned to me. He just kept swinging his arm up and down, up and down.’ Her eyes watered. ‘That poor little defenceless creature.’

  ‘The dog,’ said Mariner.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you see what colour it was, this dog?’ Mariner peered out. It was unlikely that she could have. If what she said was right, the creature would have been hidden by the tall grass.

  Lily shook her head. ‘Not very well, the grass was too long.’

  ‘But you’re sure it was a dog?’

  ‘What else—?’

  ‘Could it have been that he was, say, banging his shoe on the ground to dislodge something that was in it?’ Mariner suggested.

  Lily gave him a withering look. ‘I know what I saw. The way he was hunched over, you could see the hate in him. He sort of stood back to look at what he’d done. The creature was moving. Then it stopped moving.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell us about this man? The colour of his hair, say? What he was wearing?’

  ‘I think his hair was brown and he was wearing a suit, like yours.’ She looked at Mariner. ‘A nice summer suit, except yours is lighter. The one he wore was darker, more of a light brown. I remember thinking that he would spoil it and how warm he must be, too.’

  Gazing out of the window Mariner tried to establish whether Lily would have seen the comings and goings of Shaun Pryce.

  ‘You said you never see anyone down there, Lily. Do you mean that? Never?’

  ‘Never.’ She was adamant.

  ‘So you’ve never seen a young girl down there, or a young man, over there on the other side?’

  ‘No.’ On that point Lily stood firm.

  ‘Actually, up until about a week ago she wouldn’t have been able to see much at all from up here,’ put in Nora. That row of cypress trees was so tall it used to completely block the view. It was only then that Mariner noticed the line of tree stumps at the bottom of the garden, their timber inside freshly exposed.

  ‘They were lovely trees,’ said Lily. ‘I was sad to see them go.’

  ‘Lucky for us that they did,’ said Mariner. ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Cooper,’ he said, absently. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  He turned to Nora. ‘We’ll need to come and take a formal statement in the next few da
ys.’

  ‘Of course—’

  Suddenly, as they watched, a shout went up and the figures working below began converging on an area a couple of hundred yards away from the bridge where the foliage was at its most dense. Seconds later Knox’s mobile rang and Mariner felt a sudden weight in the pit of his stomach. Knox took the call out in the corridor, returning moments later, his face grim. ‘We’re needed down there, boss.’

  * * *

  It was only a few hundred yards away as the crow flies, but the drive around to the reservoir was nearly a mile in the car and seemed to take them an adrenaline-fuelled eternity. By the time they got there, the reservoir itself had been cleared of all but the essential personnel. The search parties had retreated to avoid contaminating the area and were now congregated in the car park, awaiting further instructions. As Mariner and Knox bumped over the uneven ground, the mood was sombre, voices low.

  Russell greeted them at the edge of the wood. Beneath his tan he was white-faced. ‘We didn’t find it until we were almost on it, despite the smell,’ he said. ‘The stink of the reservoir masked it.’

  ‘Is it her?’ Mariner asked, but Russell had already set off, eager to get this over with and pass on the find to a more senior officer.

  This time they followed the initial path over the bridge, continuing around on the other side of the water. On their last visit this had been uncharted territory, where the searchers before them had been forced to slash away the grass and brambles to create a narrow passage. Even now the thorns clawed at their trousers, their feet catching on loops of tangled grass. It was heavy going, speed impossible and the hike around the edge of the water seemed interminable. The heat beat sickeningly down on Mariner’s skull, while his imagination conjured up every possible variation on the horror he was about to see: the psyche’s desperate effort to prepare and defend. Even then, it came nowhere close.

  As Russell had warned, rounding a clump of burgeoning shrubs it was the smell that hit first, the cloying stench that smelt like nothing else on earth: the unmistakable odour of human decay. After the smell came the noise: the high-pitched, triumphant buzzing of busy insects. Finally the grotesque discovery came into view.

  Bile rose in Mariner’s throat and behind him he heard the glug of Tony Knox’s involuntary retch.

  Bizarrely, what first held Mariner’s attention were the many different shades and types of grass that had moulded themselves around the body, as if his brain was forcing him to focus on the peripheral detail to avoid the unspeakable. To begin with, the body itself was hard to make sense of, obscured as it was by the dense foliage. An attempt seemed to have been made to bury it under the thick strands of grass.

  The soles of the shoes were visible first of all. They were easy, normal looking, like any pair of shoes on any pair of feet. Pulling away the grassy coverage Mariner forced himself to work his way visually up the battered, bloodied and decaying form. And by the time his eyes reached the insect-infested skull he already knew. ‘Turn it over,’ he instructed Russell. Russell did so. Although the face and side of the head had been half eaten away, it didn’t matter. The Nike tracksuit and Manchester United football shirt were unmistakable from the description he’d been given only days earlier. ‘It’s Ricky Skeet,’ he said, dully, while inside he wanted to bellow all the breath from his lungs. Why hadn’t he listened to Colleen? Why had he let Fiske bully him into believing that Ricky had just run away? He’d never be able to live with himself over this.

  ‘Call Charlie Glover and get SOCO—’

  ‘They’re on their way, sir,’ said Russell.

  Mariner forced himself to look more closely. SOCO would confirm it, but the state of Ricky’s body would indicate that he was the ‘dog’ Lily had seen being beaten to death.

  ‘We haven’t found his bike yet,’ said Russell. ‘It must be around here somewhere and it might give us a clue about how he got in here in the first place.’

  ‘It might lead us to a witness, as well,’ added Mariner.

  ‘There’s something else interesting the lads came across too, sir.’ Russell walked them back over the bridge, towards where they’d left their cars. This time though he passed the entrance and kept right, skirting under the trees and around what would have been, in wetter weather, the lake’s shoreline. The flattened area was perfectly concealed by the high grasses around it, like a small arena. They were standing now on the opposite side of the water to the site where Ricky’s body lay and the reason for the location was obvious. Unlike the other side of the reservoir, this area would have been bathed in sunshine for most of the afternoon. ‘The guys have found a couple of used condoms too,’ Russell said. ‘We’ve bagged them up. But there’s no other sign of activity.’ Like blood, he might have added.

  It was the side nearest to the clearing where they had met Shaun Pryce. Knox stooped to retrieve something from the ground. ‘Good place to relax, eh?’ He held up a home-rolled dog-end, putting it to his nose. ‘Most animals don’t shit in their own backyard,’ said Knox, grimly. ‘Shaun Pryce doesn’t come down here on his own and he doesn’t settle for the clearing either.’

  CHAPTER 16

  Even as Mariner saw Charlie Glover approaching from twenty yards away, leading a procession of white boiler-suited SOCOs, he could read the expression on his face. It told Mariner that Glover was racked with the same guilt he was. He waited on the bridge while Charlie went to look at the body.

  Five minutes later Glover returned, a handkerchief held over his mouth. ‘What in God’s name was Ricky Skeet doing down here?’ he said, numbly. ‘It must be what, three or four miles from his house? And how did he get in?’

  Mariner had been giving that some thought. ‘The most obvious way in is the one we’ve all used, but looking around there could be any number of access routes.’ He indicated the way up to the station. ‘As for what he was doing here, God knows. Good place to hide out though. No one would think to look here for him.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t, did we?’ said Glover. ‘But how would he even know it existed?’

  Mariner gazed out over the dark water. ‘Ricky’s dad used to take him fishing. Maybe there were fish in here once.’ They were back on the bridge close to where Yasmin’s phone had been found. ‘This whole thing makes no sense. Yasmin’s phone here and Ricky’s body way over there.’

  Glover looked around, saw the brown stains on the grass. ‘If it’s his blood then Ricky was killed here. He could have somehow come by Yasmin’s phone.’

  ‘That’s the only plausible explanation. We believe Yasmin was seeing someone, a boy or man. Do you think there’s any chance it could have been Ricky?’

  Glover thought about that. ‘I don’t see how. How would they have met? They’re at different schools, from different parts of the city. He’s two years younger.’

  ‘Unless it was a chance meeting,’ said Mariner. ‘They could have bumped into each other down here, or at the station.’

  ‘What would have taken Ricky to the station?’

  Mariner was equally sceptical. ‘All we found was Yasmin’s phone. I think a more likely explanation would be that she dropped it and that someone — Ricky perhaps — found it and brought it here.’

  ‘Or he stole it.’

  ‘Ricky doesn’t do that. And anyway, when would he have had the opportunity? It’s much more likely that Yasmin dropped it. The afternoon she disappeared she had to run for the train. It could have happened then.’

  ‘Haven’t you got CCTV on that? It may have recorded the whole scenario . . . it might even show us if Ricky was at the station.’

  ‘Sure,’ Mariner said, absently, his mind not really on it. He knew he should be focusing on Yasmin but now all he could think about was Colleen waiting at home in hopeful ignorance. He didn’t want to leave all that to Charlie Glover.

  Tony Knox was hovering. ‘Shall we bring in Pryce?’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Glover’s ears pricked up.

  ‘A guy called Shaun Pryce turned u
p while we were here yesterday, back in the clearing, but claims that he doesn’t come onto the reservoir itself.’ Mariner filled Glover in on the main points of the conversation with Pryce.

  ‘But I think he’s a more regular visitor there than he let on,’ said Knox. ‘That flattened area of grass looks tailor-made for him. He wasn’t telling us the truth about that and he doesn’t come here alone either.’

  ‘Judging everyone by your own standards, Tony?’ said Glover.

  Mariner winced on Knox’s behalf at the reference to his colourful past, but he took it well enough. Would have been something of a double standard not to. ‘There were a hell of a lot of fresh dog-ends for one person,’ was all he said.

  ‘The weather’s been dry for weeks,’ said Mariner. ‘They could have built up over a period of time. And if he’s down here screwing some girl why didn’t he just say so? It’s no big deal. In fact I’d have thought it was something he’d be only too keen to tell us about.’

  ‘She’ll be married, won’t she? Didn’t you ever see Confessions of an Electrician? He’ll be having it away with someone else’s missus.’ There was a bitter edge to Knox’s voice. ‘Maybe Ricky saw Pryce knocking off some woman and threatened to let it out, so Pryce had to shut him up.’

  ‘How would Ricky know that what he’d seen was illicit?’ Glover said. ‘For all Ricky knew it could have been Pryce and his wife having a bit of open-air fun.’

  ‘Maybe Pryce didn’t like having an audience.’

  Mariner shook his head. ‘Oh no, Shaun Pryce would love it. He’s an actor,’ he added, for Glover’s benefit.