Written in Blood (7 page)

‘I’m a copper. Where do you want me to start?’

‘What about political groups?’

‘I had to question members of The Right Way as part of an investigation last summer, nothing since then that I’m aware of.’ The enquiry into the disappearance and subsequent murder of Asian teenager Yasmin Akram had, for a while, put several right-wing factions under scrutiny. But not for long, and Mariner had fleetingly considered and, with equal speed, discounted them. ‘Do you think this could be them?’

‘You want my honest opinion? If someone was getting at you personally there are easier ways of doing it.’ Addison handed him back the letter. ‘It’s far more likely that someone who has a grudge against you has seen an opportunity in the press coverage. Anyone who reads the papers could have seen your picture and cooked this up. Didn’t you even make some comment to the effect that you should have been inside the church when the bomb went off?’

He was right. Mariner was being paranoid. Why and how could a disaster of such magnitude have been orchestrated just for him?

 

When everything around it was torn down to make way for the International Convention Centre and Symphony Hall, the Prince of Wales, an Edwardian Grade II listed building, had been spared. The pub’s clientele had also remained loyal, comprising an eclectic combination of theatricals from the nearby Repertory Theatre and sportsmen from the county cricket ground, making it one of the few haunts in Birmingham where celeb-spotting could be a worthwhile exercise. The reason Mariner chose it as the venue to meet Dave Flynn had more to do with the extraordinarily and consistently good real ale. It was also conveniently across the road from the Hyatt where Flynn was staying.

When Mariner arrived, Flynn, his glass almost drained, was already at the bar, in conversation with a woman. Slim and elegant, a smooth curtain of blond hair hung down her back. She moved her hand along the bar, something concealed beneath her fingers, and at that moment Flynn looked round and caught Mariner’s eye. At Flynn’s word the woman slipped off her bar-stool perch and walked out, her looks and walk somehow not quite in sync, as if the tight skirt and four-inch heel combo had been a touch overambitious.

Mariner went over. ‘You don’t hang about,’ he observed.

Flynn glanced out onto the street in the direction the young woman had gone. ‘Just being friendly,’ he said, but Mariner couldn’t help noticing that he’d pocketed the card. ‘It’s good to see you, Walking Man. What are you drinking? ’

Tall and muscle-packed, Flynn had put on a bit of weight, Mariner thought, and his dark hair, always unkempt, was beginning to recede, but otherwise he’d hardly changed. ‘How are you?’

Mariner shrugged. ‘I was one of the lucky ones. I guess it will start to feel like that at some point.’

‘It’s a tough call. I heard your wife was involved.’

‘My partner. She’s okay. Still in shock of course, but she’s all right.’

‘I’m glad.’ Flynn glanced around him. ‘You haven’t lost your touch anyway. This is a terrific pub,’ he said, lifting the dregs of his beer. ‘I knew I could rely on you.’

‘Is that why you’re here?’ Mariner asked. ‘The blast?’

Flynn shook his head. ‘Let’s go and sit down, eh?’ He picked up a battered sports bag from where it squatted at his feet, and led the way to a booth in a corner of the room, where they spent a few minutes catching up on personal lives. Dave’s marriage, shaky four years ago, was now over. ‘Irreconcilable differences,’ he said. ‘Stuff we should have resolved before we got married.’ The job was the issue as Mariner remembered it, Flynn’s wife wanting more of a nine-to-five routine. Fat chance. It brought their train of thought inevitably to work.

‘Still a DI then?’ Flynn asked.

‘That conference was enough to put me off going any further,’ said Mariner. ‘How about you?’

‘I’ve taken a sideways shunt. I work for the Met Special Branch now.’

Mariner was impressed. It was a bit like staying on the substitutes’ bench but moving from St Andrew’s to Stamford Bridge. ‘That must make for a more interesting life,’ he said.

‘I’m working on the Geoffrey Ryland case.’

‘Christ. Playing with the grown-ups, then.’ Mariner looked up at him. ‘Is that why you’re here? There’s a Birmingham connection?’

‘You could say that.’ Rummaging inside the sports bag, Flynn produced a padded envelope, which he tossed onto the table in front of Mariner. ‘And as we used to say in our school playground: “You’re it”.’ He picked up his empty glass. ‘I’ll get another drink in.’

The envelope had been broken open and left unsealed. Mariner unfolded the flap and tipped out the contents, a pile of assorted snapshots. He picked through them with a growing feeling of disquiet. In all there must have been more than a dozen photographs of varying sizes, some black and white, some in faded colour. Most were curling at the edges with age, and on all but one the backs were annotated with numbers and dates.

Looking up he saw that Flynn had returned to the table and set down a glass of single malt in front of him. ‘I thought you might need something a bit stronger,’ he said. ‘We thought at first that we’d uncovered Sir Geoffrey’s penchant for young boys. Then we noticed the pattern.’

The pictures themselves were innocuous enough, but they’d made the hairs on Mariner’s neck stand on end. The main subject, the face smiling out at Mariner from all those photographs, in various stages of development, was his. Most of the shots were familiar to him, copies of those he’d seen at home over the years. Only one, of him as a newborn, was unfamiliar. The most recent was dated 1974, when he’d been fifteen and in the fourth year at grammar school. Mariner tried to come up with a logical explanation for the discovery, and could only find the one. He’d always wanted to know. There were times in his life when the desperation had been crippling. But he never expected to find out like this, out of the blue from a guy he hardly knew. His whole body felt wired, as if a few thousand volts were buzzing around his veins. Sensing that some kind of reaction was called for, Mariner somehow found his voice and forced a wry laugh. ‘Well, what do you know?’

‘You had no idea?’

Mariner took a slug of the whisky in an effort to still himself. ‘Not a clue. My mother died suddenly last year and took the secret of his identity to her grave. She’d never felt that the time was right to tell me. Then all of a sudden it was too late.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Mariner shrugged, unsure of what Flynn was sorry for.

‘It was bloody lucky really.’ Flynn was giving him time to try and take it in. ‘I happened to be overseeing the search of Ryland’s house and was there when one of the plods found the key to a safety deposit nobody knew he had. When it turned up these I recognised them straight away, remembered what you’d told me that night at the Drunken Duck. I can help you to arrange a DNA test, just to make sure. But I’m fucked if I can see any other reason why this guy would keep your life history in photographs hidden away, can you?’

‘It’s a struggle.’

‘And these would seem to pretty well confirm it.’ Reaching into the bag again, Flynn passed Mariner half a dozen letters bound by an elastic band. Yellowing slightly, they were written in his mother’s sloping italic hand, and among them was a programme for a promenade concert at the Albert Hall.

‘The Sibelius,’ Mariner said.

‘Significant?’

‘My mother’s got the same programme. I found it among her things last summer.’

‘They must have gone together.’

Mariner looked again at the date. ‘She would have been pregnant with me at the time.’

‘Romantic.’

Tucked inside the programme was a card, half the size of a postcard and decorated with sprigs of holly, advertising the Christmas Special at Pearl’s Café: purchase one hot drink and snack and get another free.

‘Nothing new under the sun,’ observed Flynn. ‘BOGOF existed even back then, or in this case POGOF. Pearl’s café must have been somewhere they met. Very
Brief Encounter
.’

‘Except that Celia Johnson wasn’t up the duff.’

The last items, sandwiched between the letters, were a couple of press cuttings. Recent newspaper reports of cases Mariner had worked on, a photograph of him that had accompanied a piece about the death of local doctor Owen Payne a couple of years ago. ‘And all this was in a security box?’ he asked.

‘These are the entire contents. According to the bank, Ryland had accessed it not long ago, too, sometime in November.’

‘Christ.’ Dazed, Mariner sat back a moment, trying to assimilate what this all meant; his father, a man in the public eye whom he’d known and yet not known at all, a man until recently very much alive and well, successful and wealthy, and apparently aware that he had a young son growing up not so very far away. This area of his life that had been void was suddenly filled with a huge persona, not just anyone, but Sir Geoffrey Ryland, and Mariner was overwhelmed by it. It was too huge to take in right here, right now. He’d deal with that later. In the meantime he steered the conversation back to the questions that came naturally. ‘So I finally find out who he was, weeks after he gets shot. Are the press on anywhere near the right track about that?’

‘It looks like it,’ said Flynn. ‘I mean, I’m not party to the main investigation, it’s being led by Chief Superintendent Griffin. But she has a good reputation. For a change the media have got a lot of the facts right. Ryland’s chauffeur, Joseph O’Connor was a former client. The JRC successfully backed his appeal against a possession-with-intent charge in 1998.’

‘Do you know the history?’

‘Vaguely. O’Connor was arrested for driving around north London in a van with a large amount of H stashed under the boot. He claimed he had no idea it was there.’

‘If his conviction was quashed then doesn’t that mean he was right?’

‘That part’s a bit hazy. As you know, the Commission was created in response to cases like the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, to look at wrongful convictions and to root out police corruption. It was one of Sir Geoffrey’s bugbears. A lot of people felt that he’d been appointed to the chair for that reason. From what I understand O’Connor’s conviction was overturned on a technicality, mainly because his statement had been coerced. I don’t think there was much question that rules were broken during the interview. Let’s face it, that sort of thing happened more often back then, didn’t it? Trouble is that dodgy interview techniques can cloud the issue of whether a suspect is actually guilty or not.’

‘Ryland must have believed he was innocent otherwise why would he have taken him on as a chauffeur.’

‘Self-justification? Ryland had a point to prove where O’Connor was concerned. There’s no doubt that at the time of his conviction O’Connor was spending a lot of time in the company of some major league drug dealers. They split into two factions soon after his arrest, and he may have been innocent of the original crime, but it looks as if he made contact with one of his old acquaintances after the dust had settled.’

‘Or they got in touch with him,’ Mariner said. ‘Why have the press dubbed it a revenge killing?’

‘It’s not in the public domain yet, but the killers used the victims’ blood to write a message to that effect on the window. The two factions are rivals in an ongoing tit-for-tat turf war, as violent and deep seated as the one going on between the Johnsons and the Burger Boys on your patch. The MO is a perfect example of a drug-related hit executed by one of these gangs, identical to the others there have been in the last couple of years. The only deviations are the fact that in this case the innocent bystanders happened to be VIPs and the unusual location.’

‘How’s that explained?’

‘The drugs were in the car being shifted around London until the Rylands’ trip to Oxfordshire interrupted the transfer. The assassins must have seen it as a golden opportunity. They were right to. Out in the sticks nobody saw or heard anything.’

‘But why would O’Connor get involved in that stuff again and risk what must have been a steady job?’

Flynn clearly hadn’t anticipated this interrogation, but he played along. ‘Why does anyone get involved with drugs? It’s bloody lucrative. Ryland might have employed O’Connor, but it was only as a driver. He wouldn’t have been paid much, would he? And it was the perfect cover for moving drugs around. Who’s going to stop and search a diplomatic car? He might have only done it the once. Perhaps he was presented with the right offer and was tempted.’

Seemed like a nice guy,
the girl in the bookshop had said.

‘And are you happy with the theories?’

‘Like I said, I don’t know all the details, I’m only on the secondary investigation team, but from what I know, it’s where all the evidence points. They wouldn’t be following that line for nothing.’

‘So if it’s that straightforward, why involve Special Branch at all?’

‘Ryland’s position. The Home Office has to make sure we get it right, especially with him.’

Mariner had a feeling that it wasn’t quite all, but Flynn’s tone implied that he’d no more to say.

‘So what else can you tell me about Ryland?’ Mariner asked instead.

‘Recent history? Probably not much more than you already know.’

Mariner felt a sudden unbearable surge of anger. ‘Well at least I know now why he pissed off and left us. He must have been an ambitious son of a bitch.’

‘You don’t know that. Maybe there was good reason—’

Mariner’s glare cut him off. ‘Like what?’

Flynn gave an impotent shrug. ‘He kept your photographs. You must have meant something—’

‘Sure. So much that in over forty years he couldn’t be arsed to get in touch or come and see me. Not exactly living at the other end of the planet, was he?’

‘You have no memory of him at all?’

‘No.’ Despite the emphatic reply, something niggled at Mariner; a vague recollection that he could hardly give substance to. At his mother’s funeral Maggie, a friend of hers, had mentioned a limousine she’d seen pulling away from their flat shortly after Mariner was born. The two men sat through a long silence.