Free Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01] by The Worm in The Bud (txt)

admitting to it. Glimpses of Eddie or Jamie over the whole weekend were sparse. No one was prepared to get involved. The John Donne line kept coming back to him. ‘No man is an island, entire of itself.’ Maybe not in the seventeenth century, when Donne had first made the observation, but these days, despite mobile phones and e-mail, the gulfs between people seemed to be widening all the time. More people than ever were choosing to live alone and cars, personal computers and home entertainment systems all made it increasingly possible to exist without the need for social interaction of any kind. And there, at the extreme end of the scale was Jamie Barham, for whom even the simplest human exchange was meaningless.
    Even Mariner had read about the growing so-called autism epidemic: evolution’s kick in the teeth for an era when communication had never been easier or more invasive.
    Trawling through the paperwork now, there seemed little here to help or hinder the case either way, but maybe it wasn’t necessary. Mariner was already getting the sense of a man near enough to the edge to take his own life. Even in practical terms Eddie Barham couldn’t have had an easy time of it. Living with Jamie must have been a nightmare. Add to that the stifling of any career ambitions Eddie might have had, and an explosive cocktail was beginning to develop. But was it enough to make him throw in the towel without even letting their sister know first?
    Eddie’s computer had been brought in to the IT department to see what could be salvaged, but the lads in that section were stretched and Mariner had been warned that it would be a couple of days at least before they could come up with any kind of result. The only other items to plough through were the pile of zip-lock wallets of paperwork harvested from Eddie Barham’s house. Mariner began with the least interesting first: the bank statements. There was a year’s worth folded into each other. Spreading them out over his desk Mariner started with the oldest, scanning the columns of figures in search of any anomalies. No competition for Grace Kelly, but they did turn out to be more interesting than expected.
    The first obvious fact was that from last summer, Eddie Barham had been sailing pretty close to the wind with his finances, to the extent that, over time, significant debts were beginning to accumulate. By the end of every month Eddie was in the red, with a gathering overdraft. A closer look at his expenditure revealed that a large portion of his monthly salary was paid out to an organisation called Bright Care.
    Mariner had seen that name before, and hunting through the other wallets he found that the amounts corresponded with invoices issued from Oakwood, the respite care home that Joyce Clarke had mentioned. The puzzle was that those payments only began to appear on the current account statements back in June, while Mariner had got the impression that Jamie had been attending Oakwood for years.
    The answer to that query lay deeper in the wallet where Mariner came across a now redundant building society account book. The account dated back to 1983, when it had been opened with a substantial sum and some irregular deposits. From 1986 there were regular monthly standing orders to Bright Care along with the occasional additional payment. But though the outgoings were regular, from what Mariner could see there had been no cash paid into the account, and by June of last year it had dwindled to nothing. CLOSED was stamped in large forbidding letters over the remaining empty pages.
    Helpfully, the timing of that closure corresponded with the sudden appearance of the debits to Bright Care on Eddie’s current account statements, which solved one mystery. Payment switched to another account. The debits were then recorded until in line with what Joyce had told them, suddenly ceasing two months previously when Jamie had left Oakwood: there were none in January or February and that alone left