Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01]

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Eddie’s bank account looking altogether healthier. Mariner couldn’t help wondering to what extent these numbers had given added impetus to Eddie Barham’s death. Medication may have been one of the reasons Jamie left the respite provision, as Joyce Clarke had told them, but it looked to Mariner as if the monetary constraints were greater. Like any other human, Eddie would have needed some relief from the demands of caring for Jamie, but he simply couldn’t afford it. And he couldn’t put in the overtime to make more cash because there was no one to look after Jamie. Catch-22. This was building up to look like a classic case.
    And Anna Barham’s doubts about suicide receded a step further into the background.
    After a while, the figures on the paper began to jump around before Mariner’s eyes and his throbbing head felt ready to burst. Aside from the injury, he’d barely slept in forty-eight hours. It was time to go. But, as he started to gather up the statements, something else sprang out at him.
    At the end of December, Eddie’s bank account had taken a sudden, unprecedented upward turn, thanks to a single deposit made by standing order from another unknown account. When Mariner checked, the same sum appeared again on the same day in January. On the day of his death; on Sunday, Eddie Barham had been a comparatively wealthy man as each of those payments was for five thousand pounds. Suddenly it turned everything he’d been thinking on its head, but right now Mariner hadn’t the stamina or the inclination to figure out the full implications.
    The crux of it all would be the pathology report, which Mariner felt confident would be categorical enough to allow them to tie this thing up and move on, but so far this evening the telephone had remained mute.
    Leaving a note instructing Knox to follow up the source accounts for those standing order deposits, which he felt sure would turn out to be cosmetic, Mariner retrieved his jacket from the hook on the back of the door, switching off the light as he left.
    One more job to do before he went home: the bar of the Chamberlain was quieter than it had been on Sunday night, so she would have stood out as much as he did, drawing half-concealed stares from around the room. But one look around told Mariner that the brunette wasn’t working here tonight, unless she’d been in earlier and he’d missed her.
    The same barman was restocking the bottles of deceptively colourful alcopops. In the absence of a photofit Mariner gave him as close a description as he could muster, but it was to no avail. If the girl was regular here she’d struck a deal with the barman to keep schtoom.
    Eschewing the inflated prices charged for the exotic beverages of the Chamberlain, Mariner deferred having a drink himself until he was closer to home, and even then he wasn’t sure. Being the centre of attention was becoming wearisome. But some ten minutes later he pulled into the car park of the Boatman Inn. His vehicle brought the total number to five, mainly because most of the Boatman’s regulars were beyond the age when it was safe for them to drive. Lacking the dubious attractions of piped disco music, fruit machines or wide-screen satellite TV, the pub was on borrowed time, ripe to be snapped up by one of the larger brewery chains and turned into one of the ‘fun pubs’ that, in Mariner’s experience, were too much of an assault on the senses to be anything like fun. An old man’s pub, Greta had dubbed it, and not as a compliment.
    Locking his car, Mariner decided to risk a pint, in the hope that the few customers knew him well enough by now to leave him alone. He’d be the first to admit that he wasn’t an attractive sight, but if anyone else asked where he’d been ‘sticking that’ he didn’t quite trust himself not to give them one to match.
    The only sounds to greet his ears in the Boatman were the comforting clatter of dominoes that underpinned the gentle banter from four elderly

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