by M. R. Hall
Jenny realized that she’d missed something: God featured here, too. The simple oil painting on the wall behind the sofa was an icon – a modern rendering of the Virgin and Child – and Ceri wore a silver crucifix around her neck.
‘Did the police tell you anything about your husband’s body, Mrs Jacobs?’
‘I know he was –’ she could barely bring herself to say it – ‘naked.’
‘And the cross on his torso?’
She shot Jenny a look she wasn’t expecting, a flash of steel as sharp as a razor. ‘What about it?’
‘Why might he have done that – assuming it was him.’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘I assume you’re a Catholic, was—?’
‘No, he wasn’t,’ she interrupted. ‘For most of his life Alan wasn’t religious at all, his family had poisoned him against it. But he had begun to change. He was an enquirer at St Joseph’s. He’d been every Tuesday night for the last five months.’
‘An “enquirer”?’
‘The church runs courses for those who want to learn about the faith.’
‘Did he talk to you about it?’
‘We talked about everything, Mrs Cooper. We were man and wife.’ She stood up from the sofa. ‘I’m sorry, my daughter’s still crying. I’d like to go to her please.’
‘Of course.’
‘If you wouldn’t mind seeing yourself out.’
As Jenny made her way to the front door she felt the coldness of the widow’s disapproval follow her to the threshold and beyond. Driving away from the house, she was left with an image of Ceri’s face, the look she had given her: like an accusation of heresy. She imagined the dead man mute in the face of his wife’s silent judgement, enduring his suffering alone.
She was reluctant to trust her too-often flawed intuition, but the visit had left her in no doubt: Alan Jacobs had departed this world with many dark secrets.
TWO
IT HAD BEEN A MONTH since Jenny last sat opposite Dr Allen in the consulting room at the Chepstow clinic. During the one session they had had since her visit to her father in his nursing home, she had neglected to tell her psychiatrist what he had said to her. In fact, she hadn’t told a living soul. He had advanced Alzheimer’s, for God’s sake. She’d be madder than him to take any notice of his lunatic outbursts.
Dr Allen sported new glasses and a salon haircut. Finally having arrived at an age that matched his serious nature, he was beginning to find a look that he felt comfortable with: stylish academic. She had never asked him if he was married but she assumed not, and guessed that the subtle makeover was part of his strategy to remedy the situation.
He looked up from the bound notebook in which he made his precise longhand notes. ‘Has it really been four weeks?’ He smiled. ‘Any progress on the research you were promising to do?’
She felt a rush of electricity travel up her spine and she almost said it; almost confessed that her father had told her that Katy was a first cousin, his brother’s little girl. It had shocked her; her uncle and aunt had lived round the corner yet she had no memory of a little girl, let alone one her age. ‘What happened to Cousin Katy?’ she had asked him. Sitting there in his armchair, chuckling at the seagull on the windowsill, he had said: ‘You remember, Smiler. You killed her.’ A minute later he was out cold, the heavy sedatives he was fed giving him the death-rattle snore she would hear all the way to the lift at the end of the corridor.
Jenny said, ‘No luck, I’m afraid.’
Trying to hide his disappointment, Dr Allen said, ‘Never mind. I’m sure we’ll continue to make progress through regression.’
Jenny doubted that very much.
‘How have you been feeling? Is the medication working?’
‘On the whole.’ She smoothed a wrinkle from the lap of her black suit skirt. ‘It seems to hold the anxiety at bay – no panic attacks at least.’
‘You’ve managed to avoid alcohol?’
‘No problem.’
‘And how does that make you feel?’
She resisted the temptation to tell him how much that phrase irritated her; she had counted him using it eight times in their last session.
‘Honestly? . . . It makes me feel miserable, like there’s something wrong with me.’
‘Do you think there isn’t?’ He floated the question neutrally, as if whatever answer she gave was fine by him.
Jenny crossed her legs, trying not to let the lurch she felt in her stomach show on her face. She would tell him about her father, just not now. How could she be expected to probe an open wound first thing in the morning? And what would Dr Allen do with her answer anyway? It was her responsibility. She would deal with it when she had the time and space, which wasn’t now.
‘Well?’ he prompted her, his eyes searching her face.
‘The more often I come here,’ she said in what she hoped was a calm and measured tone, ‘the more I’m inclined to believe that acute anxiety doesn’t necessarily have one exciting cause. As you’ve said, sometimes time is the best healer.’
He kept his eyes trained on the centre of her face. He was making her nervous.
‘How is your relationship with your son? Is he still living with his father?’
‘For the time being. It makes sense him being close to college with all his commitments.’ She sounded like a fraud and could tell that he saw straight through her.
‘And with your boyfriend – Steve, isn’t it?’
‘We’ve both been rather busy. He works in the day and has to study at night. I barely get an evening to myself . . .’
‘So neither of you feels the need to make the effort? Last time we met I recall you said he’d declared himself.’
Declared himself. Where did he get these phrases from?
Jenny shrugged. ‘I suppose I have to take most of the blame.’
Dr Allen nodded, as if she had confirmed his theory. ‘I sense that you’re feeling somewhat disconnected from your emotions. Helpful as the new medication is, perhaps it has allowed you to retreat a little too far from the issues.’
‘I thought I was doing pretty well. No incidents, no breakdowns.’
‘On that level I’m very pleased.’
‘But you’d be happier if I was suffering a little more – is that what you’re saying?’
‘I’m sorry; I think we’re in danger of a misunderstanding—’
She didn’t let him finish. ‘I know how much you want to experience a big eureka moment, find some hidden memory that’s going to put everything right again, but to be honest, Dr Allen, I think I’ve moved beyond that now. Imperfect as things may be, I’m coping, and that’s a hell of an improvement.’
‘That’s all to the good.’ He hesitated, glancing down at his notebook. ‘I just have to check.’
She recognized that tic. He always looked down when he was hiding something. ‘Check what exactly?’
His cheeks flushed with embarrassment. There. She had nailed him.
‘Well, since you feel strong enough to have this conversation I’ll be honest with you. I . . . I’m a little concerned that just as we were making strides you’ve retreated into avoidance, and you’ve found a way of burying your feelings that allows you to function on one level, but on another might be making things worse.’
‘I thought this treatment was about helping me to cope.’
‘It is, but it’s also about cure, and about not making things worse. I feel we’re at a tipping point, Jenny.’ His left hand reached for the knot of his tie. ‘Look, I think it’s best for both of us if I’m completely honest. I respect the fact that you’re an intelligent, professional woman, but in some ways it makes my job harder – you feel able, quite rightly, to question my approach. But I remain certain of my diagnosis: you have a buried trauma which lies at the root of your generalized anxiety syndrome. I would like to persist with a fortnightly course of regression therapy for at least six sessions. If you don’t want that, I suggest I refer you elsewhere.’
He sat back in his chair and fixed her with a look. ‘We have twenty minutes. Shall we try?’
Jenny said, ‘What, in your opinion, might happen to me if I passed on the offer?’
‘Experience has taught me that there is invariably a day of reckoning. Painful as it may be, I really do recommend you give this a chance.’
She thought of the files stacked up on her desk, the emails and telephone messages that would be waiting for her in the office, the calls she would have to make, the endless petty but important battles each day brought. She wanted to say to him, All right, but just not now.
Jenny said, ‘Can I call you?’
Dr Allen closed his notebook. ‘By all means, but you’ll understand that it may not be me who sees you next time.’
Jenny spent the remainder of her commute to work on the phone, the recently acquired hands-free turning the once private space of her car into an office. Government fraud officers had broken into a disused industrial unit and discovered the crudely embalmed bodies of five elderly Asians whose various pensions and allowances were still being claimed by their relatives. The last thing the police wanted was to get involved in what they called an ‘all Indian’, and they were trying to offload the legwork onto the coroner’s office. Jenny was dealing with the crane collapse – six phone calls from victims’ lawyers before nine a.m. – and told the Detective Superintendent in charge to forget it. She had barely hung up when Alison called with the news that a nine-year-old girl had been declared dead on arrival at the Vale from suspected alcohol poisoning. Jenny sent her to witness the autopsy and take statements from the ambulance crew and A & E team. The thought of a pre-pubescent body stretched out in the morgue filled her with overwhelming and irrational dread. Child deaths were one thing she had yet to learn to cope with. She tried not to think why that might be.
She approached her office at 14 Jamaica Street to find a man standing on the pavement outside. He was snake-hipped with short dark hair and olive skin, dressed in a dark suit that emphasized the narrowness of his limbs. He turned sharply at the sound of her footsteps as if startled, and she saw that he was a priest: he wore a black clerical shirt of the Roman style, a thin collar tight to his neck showing only a narrow band of white beneath his Adam’s apple. She noticed his eyes were jet black, his slender features as smooth as polished walnut.
‘Can I help you?’ Jenny said. ‘I’m Mrs Cooper. The coroner.’
A look of relief came over the priest’s face. ‘Ah, Mrs Cooper. I am so sorry to trouble you. Father Lucas Starr. I was hoping to make an appointment to discuss a case.’ He spoke with an accent she couldn’t place. She would have said Spanish but couldn’t be sure.
‘Have you tried phoning? We are in the book.’ She stepped past him and unlocked the door.
‘It’s a matter of some urgency,’ he said calmly, but in a way which held her attention. ‘Of life and death, you might say.’
Jenny glanced at her watch: it was nearly ten and she had a hundred things that would demand her attention the moment she walked through the door.
‘Look, I’m really very busy this morning. How about at the end of the day?’
The priest formed his right hand into a fist and enclosed it with his left palm, the subconscious gesture somewhere between a threat and a prayer. ‘If you could only spare me ten minutes, Mrs Cooper. Your response might make all the difference to the man with whose welfare I am concerned.’
‘Ten? You’re sure?’
‘You have my word.’
She took him through the dimly lit, windowless hallway that led to her ground-floor offices. There was a vague smell of damp; the cheap wallpaper the landlord had recently pasted up was already starting to peel at the corners. Ignoring the heap of mail waiting for her on Alison’s desk, Jenny ushered the priest through the heavy oak door to her room. He waited for her to be seated behind her desk before he sat in the chair opposite, his back straight as a board, hands crossed precisely on his lap.
Jenny said, ‘I’m listening, Father . . . What should I call you?’
‘Father Starr is fine.’
Jenny nodded. ‘You’re a Catholic priest, I presume?’
‘Yes,’ he said, with a trace of hesitation. ‘Not a parish priest, a Jesuit in formation to be precise. I’m nearing the end of a five-year ministry as a prison chaplain. One final year of tertianship and I become a brother, God willing.’
‘I had no idea it took that long.’
‘Start to finish, seventeen years, sometimes more.’ He smiled softly. ‘They don’t let just anybody in.’
She placed him at about forty, but somehow his age didn’t seem to define him. She was curious about his accent, though: she detected traces of American; no, Latin American – that was it. ‘You said you were concerned for someone’s welfare.’
‘Yes, please let me explain. This relates to the death of a young woman named Eva Donaldson. I understand you are about to make the formal certification of the cause of death?’
Jenny glanced at the file bound with white ribbon sitting on top of one of three disorderly heaps on her desk.
‘Eva Donaldson, the actress?’
Jenny had skimmed the Eva Donaldson file and picked up bits and pieces from news reports over the couple of months since the young woman’s death, but hadn’t stopped to consider the full story of her transformation from art student to adult movie star, to religious convert and full-time campaigner for Decency, a pressure group advocating a ban on internet pornography.
‘The same. The man to whom I am ministering is named Paul Craven. He confessed to killing her.’
‘I remember. He pleaded guilty to her murder.’
‘You are correct, but he was not in his right mind. Paul Craven did not kill Eva Donaldson and he should not be spending the rest of his life in prison. I fear that unless the truth is told his life may not be very long.’ A look of pain briefly passed across the priest’s face. ‘He is a sensitive and a troubled man, and a deeply religious man also. He had been out of prison for only a few days, having spent twenty-one years, all of his adult life, in jail.’
‘Before we go any further,’ Jenny said, ‘you have got to understand – I’m a coroner. I determine cause of death. If you’ve evidence that could overturn the finding of a criminal court, the correct course is to instruct a lawyer to mount an appeal.’
Father Starr gave a patient nod. ‘If we had a year or two, maybe, but Mr Craven doesn’t have that long. There is a struggle within him that I sense he is losing.’
The phone rang. Jenny looked at it and pressed the divert button. ‘All right, fifteen minutes. Then I really have to get on.’
Father Starr reminded Jenny of the highlights of Eva’s career, telling her that she had been something of an inspirational figure to him and the prisoners he ministered to in Telhurst, a long-term prison in south Gloucestershire. At twenty she dropped out of art school and started acting in pornographic films. At twenty-five she was at the peak of her career when a road accident left her with permanent scars that disfigured one side of her face. The production company she was contracted to spat her out and sued her for loss of revenue, arguing that the drugs she had taken caused her to lose control of the car. They won. The pills she took to rev her up for a shoot cost her three hundred thousand in cash, her country house and her career.
Eva entered a downward spiral of drink, drugs and self-loathing. Later, she would tell audiences how she was on the verge of taking her own life – actually walking to the pharmacy to collect the painkillers she planned to wash down with the vodka she had ready in her bag – when she overheard a young woman telling a friend how the church she had joined had given her a permanent high. Eva caught the name of it as she pushed on the pharmacy door: the Mission Church of God.
Back then, nearly three years ago, the worshippers met in a disused bingo hall. The pastor was an inspirational young American named Bobby DeMont, who from nothing had built the mother church in Washington DC to be one of the bigg
est single congregations in the USA, over thirty-five thousand strong. That night Eva claimed she saw the light of God shine. It was in Bobby DeMont’s eyes as he spoke, and in the faces of the young men and women around her as they heard the unadulterated truth for the first time in their lives.
Not only did the church give her back her will to live, through it she was introduced to its chief benefactor, Michael, now Lord Turnbull. At forty-one years of age Turnbull had sold his software company for two hundred million dollars, but his conscience was troubled. As a young idealist, he had pioneered video-streaming software in the hope of putting the lie-peddling media multinationals out of business. What, in fact, he inadvertently provided was the means for the pornography business to reach into every home with a computer, making a lot of disgusting people exceedingly rich. A year later Turnbull had been struggling to hold down a consultancy to a lobbying company in Washington while suffering from increasingly crippling depression. Dependent on alcohol and pills, he had started to fantasize about jumping from his penthouse balcony when he chanced on an item on the local news about a spate of miraculous healings that had taken place at the Mission Church of God. Desperate, and with nothing to lose, the multi-millionaire sobered up and took himself to an evening service. When Bobby DeMont called on all those who hadn’t yet pledged their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ to do so right now, Michael Turnbull obeyed. He would later describe to television viewers around the world the feeling when Bobby first laid his hands on him as like being giddy with wine and madly in love, only many times stronger.
Born again, Michael donated generously to the church and hatched the idea of starting a sister church in his home city of Bristol. Fired up with the idea of taking the gospel back to a country that had brought so many evangelists to the US, Bobby DeMont himself came to England for the first few months to sow the seeds. Within a year the congregation had grown to a thousand members and Michael Turnbull had established a lobby group, Decency, to try to undo some of the damage he had inflicted on the world. When he heard Eva Donaldson had become a member of the church, he immediately recruited her to the cause. For the remaining year of her life she became the public face of the campaign: her scarred beauty a symbol of the ugliness of pornography; her first-hand testimony of being abused for profit a stain on the conscience of every man who heard her.