Deadly Lies (Reissue) Read online

  DEADLY LIES

  A gripping detective mystery full of twists and turns

  Detective Tom Mariner Book 1

  CHRIS COLLETT

  Revised edition 2017

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  FIRST PUBLISHED BY PIATKUS IN 2004 AS “A WORM IN THE BUD.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.

  We hate typos too but sometimes they slip through. Please send any errors you find to [email protected]

  We’ll get them fixed ASAP. We’re very grateful to eagle-eyed readers who take the time to contact us.

  ©Chris Collett

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  THERE IS A GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH SLANG IN THE BACK OF THIS BOOK FOR US READERS.

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  Afterword

  DI TOM MARINER SERIES

  CHARACTER LIST

  Glossary of English Slang for US readers

  For Richard.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is the first mystery featuring Tom Mariner. It is set in the early 2000s, when the internet was in its infancy, mobile phones had yet to evolve into smart phones, and people still read print newspapers.

  CHAPTER 1

  Mariner glanced at his watch again. Only ten to eight, yet it felt as if he’d been here for hours. Getting here first had been his way of keeping control, but now, as his stomach knotted with anxious speculation, he wished he hadn’t been so keen.

  He’d managed to secure the only vacant seat in the crowded bar: a stool positioned directly under an air-conditioning vent that blew a steady stream of cold air down inside the unbuttoned collar of his shirt. Twenty-four hours ago this idea had seemed a good one, a simple solution to a growing problem, but now the doubts were creeping in faster than the chill descending his spine. Had he been a smoker he’d have hacked his way through half a packet of Silk Cut by now.

  The only reason he’d bought last night’s Echo was to check that his advert had been correctly placed in the ‘Accommodation to Let’ section. It had. Double room with en-suite facilities. No pets, non-smoker preferred. Placing that ad had been a big step, and not one he was completely sure he’d wanted to take, but mortgage rates were climbing steadily, and it was the only foreseeable way of sharing his house without necessarily having to share his life. Having placed the ad, he’d stayed in all evening absently leafing through the rest of the paper while he waited for the phone to ring. That’s when the ‘Solos’ page had caught his eye. Mariner had yet to see the appeal of internet dating. But lulled into a state of misplaced confidence by three pints of Brewmaker’s Traditional (one of his stronger concoctions), and charmed by the old-fashioned simplicity of the small ad, he had picked up the phone. Impulsiveness wasn’t normally one of his traits, and now, as his apprehension gathered momentum, he remembered why.

  Noting the assortment of ill-matched couples around him, Mariner sensed that his venture wasn’t unique. The comfortably anonymous mix of blond wood, brushed steel and pale blue leather upholstery made the bar of the Chamberlain Hotel perfect for any assignation — business, pleasure or both — and he had to fight a sudden hysterical urge to get out his warrant card and watch the place empty.

  ‘Derek?’

  Mariner’s stomach lurched. The girl who approached him was sleek and attractive with thick, chestnut hair and eyes the colour of dark chocolate.

  Recovering, Mariner shook his head and watched hope fade from her face. For a minute there, she must have thought her luck had changed. He was tall, reasonable-looking (so he’d been told) and — thanks to Greta’s past influence over his wardrobe — he was pretty sharply dressed tonight. Derek, her as yet unknown client, would almost certainly turn out to be a middle-aged, fat and balding suit, like the majority of the girl’s customers. Mariner had no doubts that she was a tom.

  With a brief smile that left her eyes untouched, she tottered away on ludicrously high heels to take a seat on one of the squashy sofas, crossing her long, tanned legs. For a moment Mariner half wished he was Derek. Being Derek would have been so much simpler. And his intention wasn’t so very different. Same planned outcome, just glossed over with the flimsy veneer of social respectability. Suddenly the knot felt ready to explode and he had to make a dash for the gents.

  Emerging minutes later, Mariner scanned the room, not allowing his eyes to rest on anyone who might conceivably be looking out for him. The brunette was on her feet again, engaged in animated discussion with a man. Not Derek, Mariner decided. This man was a rough diamond, unshaven with collar-length dark hair, in jeans and a well-worn leather jacket, the Harley Davidson logo stretched across his broad back. The body language was pure agitation: shoulders bunched, semaphore arms. Now he had his wallet out flashing money, cajoling. Her pimp, or just an over-attached regular? Whoever he was, he was giving her a hard time about something. At one point he grabbed the girl’s arm but she wriggled free. Then, before Mariner’s eyes, her resistance seemed to crumble and with a last cursory glance around the room for Derek, she slung her bag over her shoulder and reluctantly followed the Harley man towards the sliding glass doors.

  The whole exchange made Mariner uneasy, putting up just the excuse he needed. Feeling only a minor twinge of guilt for his own date, he tailed the couple out of the hotel and into the orange sodium-glare of Broad Street, to where an eight-year-old Porsche with a dented boot squatted on double yellow lines, its hazard lights flashing. Concerned for the woman’s safety, Mariner watched the couple get into the car . . . but Harley man was visibly calmer now and, as they drove off, the woman seemed more irritated with him than anything else. Mariner perceiving trouble where there was none. You got the wrong idea, mister. Occupational hazard.

  * * *

  Left alone on the pavement, Mariner stared through the window to the hotel bar, where the ‘attractive blonde, seeking male 35-45 for discreet fun’ was even now anticipating his arrival, and knew he wasn’t going back in there. He’d phone her tomorrow and apologise, maybe. Turning away, Mariner threaded a path through the snarled traffic to the opposite side of the road and into a dark and rowdy Australian bar. Over a pint of foul-tasting non-alcoholic beer he watched the closing minutes of what most of the city’s male population were glued to this evening: the live cup tie between Blues and Wolves. But after an u
ninspiring and goal-less second half, followed by the usual inane discussion from the pundits, Mariner retraced his steps to the Chamberlain’s underground car park.

  With nothing to distract him on the drive home, Mariner reflected on the evening’s non-event, knowing deep down that it had never been a viable option, however desperate the circumstances. Was he desperate? It was nearly a year now since Greta had left. For a while Mariner had really believed that they had something. But that was before Greta turned forty and mutated into his mother, running his life for him and imposing unreasonable expectations until finally trying to force a commitment he couldn’t make. That she’d abandoned him after that was no big surprise. The mystery was that she’d taken his confidence with her. Not his social confidence — his small talk had always been pathetic — but his confidence in bed, something he’d never had trouble with before.

  That last time, when he’d been unexpectedly invited to spend the night with a young WPC, he’d resorted to distraction tactics. As intimacy progressed, he’d tried mentally rehearsing the names of the actors who had played the Dirty Dozen and the Magnificent Seven respectively. It had worked like a dream until he had inadvertently spoken Steve McQueen’s name out loud.

  ‘What?’ She’d halted him mid-thrust, the expression on her face enough to precipitate his collapse, leaving them both agonisingly frustrated and Mariner with a big enough question mark over his head to discourage her from ever seeing him again. That had been nearly six months ago and Mariner hadn’t had the guts to pursue anything or anyone since.

  Tonight’s quick fix was the intended solution, but if he couldn’t keep it up with the assistance of Hollywood’s finest, how would humiliating himself with a total stranger help matters?

  ‘Delta one to all units.’ The car’s radio, tuned to the NPU wavelength, cut through his maudlin train of thought. ‘Request for urgent assistance at 34 Clarendon Avenue, Harborne; informant an unidentified female.’ It was just a few streets away, on this same patch.

  Under normal circumstances Mariner would have ignored the call. It was one for uniformed patrol and, in any case, he’d been off-duty for hours. But he was in no hurry to go home and, judging from the lack of any other audible response, there was no one else nearby. Resources tonight would be concentrated around St Andrews, keeping the rival fans apart and diverting any trouble. Like the comforting glow of a distant refuge, Mariner felt himself drawn towards the secure predictability of work. He’d take a small detour to check whether the incident was already attended. If it was, he would simply drive on by. Making a second circuit of Five Ways traffic island, Mariner peeled off in the direction of Harborne.

  Almost immediately the nervous energy of Birmingham nightlife melted away into silent darkness, taking with it Mariner’s own anxieties. Typical of Birmingham’s mongrel suburbs, Harborne had its rough patches but was inhabited in pockets by university professors and consultants from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, their relative affluence reflected in the sprawling detached houses that were set in immaculately tended gardens.

  Clarendon Avenue was easy enough to find, but locating the house itself was a different matter. Here, the properties were modest and compact, but set back from the road, hiding behind hedges and wrapped in swathes of ivy and wisteria, making individual identification in the dark almost impossible. There was no outward indication of any disturbance or any sign of a police presence at any of them.

  Picking out a number at last, Mariner counted along, hugging the kerb as he went. Thirty, thirty-two, thirty-four . . . that was it, a mock-Georgian detached, ablaze with lights and standing out like a bloody carnival float. Then Mariner noticed the eight-year-old Porsche with a dented boot parked on the drive, and a sudden draught stirred the hairs on the back of his neck.

  Mariner got out of the car and walked up the gravel driveway, past the Porsche and stepped into a narrow porch. From inside the house he could hear the babble of a TV, mainly because the front door swung slightly ajar. It was not a good sign. His warrant card at the ready, Mariner advanced cautiously along a bare, parquet-floored hallway, alert to any possibility. ‘Police!’ he warned, easing open the nearest internal door, already visualising the brunette cowering in a corner, her face bruised and bloodied. But in the event there was no blood, only a sterile and unnatural calm.

  CHAPTER 2

  The man lay sprawled on the sofa, his arms widely splayed. Even from a distance, Mariner could see that his eyes were glazed, his complexion waxy. The right sleeve of his leather jacket was pulled up to above the elbow and a hypodermic syringe dangled grotesquely from his inner arm, its needle still tugging at the vein. A message beside him, scrawled in block capitals on a curled scrap of paper, was short and to the point: ‘NO MORE.’ Had he rolled him over, Mariner would have seen Harley Davidson advertised across the man’s back.

  There was no sign of the brunette but the TV chattered on, with a youthful Carol Vorderman providing an obscene accompaniment. Struck by the strangeness of it all, Mariner moved quickly across the room, his footsteps crunching on debris underfoot. Checking for signs of life at each of the pulse points, twenty years of experience already told him that he was too late, while his mind struggled to reconcile the fact that only a couple of hours earlier he’d seen this man so very much alive.

  ‘Anyone home?’ Though loud, the voice was too guarded to be a threat, and even in those three words Mariner thought he recognised a familiar intonation. ‘In here,’ he called back.

  A uniform appeared, confirming his hunch. PC Tony Knox, formerly of the Merseyside Police, was about Mariner’s age but had moved with the times, his number two buzz-cut obscuring the onset of baldness and combining with his sinewy build to make him look every bit the hard man he was reputed to be.

  ‘Sir . . . ?’ The question hung in the air unanswered as Knox took in the scene. ‘Shit. Is he dead?’ As Knox squatted down to verify it, Mariner watched him try to make sense of things. Finally his brow creased to a frown. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded at last, subtlety never one of his strengths. The exact reason for the transfer from Liverpool had never been made explicit, but rumour had it that it wasn’t entirely Knox’s decision. In this case, however, the question was justified. A DI wouldn’t normally be first on the scene of a bog-standard disturbance.

  Mariner hoped it wouldn’t complicate things. ‘I was in the area and heard the call,’ he said. ‘When I got here I recognised the car on the drive.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Mariner briefly recounted what he’d witnessed earlier that evening. If Knox wondered what a senior officer was doing hanging around the bar of the Chamberlain Hotel on his night off done up like a dog’s dinner he was, for once, astute enough not to ask.

  ‘It’s ironic,’ added Mariner. ‘The way this guy was behaving made me afraid for the woman’s safety. But then, that was more than an hour ago.’ And, as they both knew, practically anything could have happened in the interim.

  As he inhaled Mariner caught a whiff of something, a sort of unwashed smell. At first he assumed it was the dead man, but studying Knox more closely he noticed suddenly the grimy rim around the collar of his white shirt and the thin sheen of stubble coating his chin. Thanks to tonight’s match they’d be short of police around the city, which probably accounted for why Knox was solo, but even so. ‘How long have you been on duty?’ Mariner asked him.

  ‘Since two,’ Knox shifted uncomfortably. ‘The wife has locked me out so I had to kip in the car last night. I’ll get a shower at the end of the shift.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Mariner with feeling, making an effort at shallow breathing and shaking off any speculation about why Knox might have been barred from his own home.

  Taking the hint, Knox got up and moved away. ‘I’ll check over the rest of the house.’

  ‘It’ll be a start. Our friend here drove off with the brunette, and it was a woman who made the emergency call, so there’s a strong possibility that i
t’s the same one. She looked more like a tom than a user to me, but this guy was waving his money around, so it’s possible that she supplied and serviced him. Let’s make sure that she isn’t still hanging around somewhere, then get Scenes of Crime out of bed.’

  Whatever the circumstances might imply, this was a sudden unexplained death and in the absence of any reliable witnesses they would have to remain open minded for now. It didn’t look much like many other crime scenes Mariner had attended — unless the reckless dispersal of potato snacks had suddenly become a felony — but until they found conclusive evidence of suicide nothing was certain, and they would treat the scene accordingly.

  ‘You’ll need these,’ said Knox. Throwing Mariner a small polythene packet, he went off to search the rest of the house, speaking into his lapel radio as he went. Mariner opened the packet and squeezed his hands into the tight latex gloves, grateful, as always, that he was only a policeman and not a vet.

  Knox reappeared. ‘We’re on our own,’ he confirmed, tactfully keeping his distance. ‘No sign of life. And SOCO are on their way.’

  ‘Good.’ Taking care not to disturb the syringe, Mariner slid his hand into the inside breast pocket of the dead man’s jacket to retrieve the soft leather wallet he’d seen earlier. It contained a hundred and thirty in notes, along with a variety of standard credit and loyalty cards, plus a larger, laminated press card, conveniently displaying a photograph of the deceased. He’d been right. This wasn’t Derek. But it seemed he’d been way off the mark about everything else. ‘Edward Barham,’ he read out loud, for Knox’s benefit. ‘And this is his place, according to the address.’ He made a swift mental calculation. ‘Age thirty-nine, and a paid-up member of the National Union of Journalists.’

  ‘A hack,’ said Knox. He walked the length of the room and stopped in front of a fitted cupboard, on top of which, high up and almost beyond Mariner’s line of vision, was a row of plaques and trophies. ‘He was a good one too, if this lot’s anything to go by,’ he craned his neck to read the engraving: ‘Midlands Reporter of the Year three years running.’