Jenny Cooper 03 - The Redeemed

by M. R. Hall

  The world’s media and politicians were stunned by the level of public enthusiasm for Decency’s cause. Liberals poured scorn on what they dismissed as an old-fashioned moral backlash, but facing down her critics in what would become her most famous network television interview, Eva Donaldson said, ‘Do you think it’s right that images of me having sex with men and women I barely knew, committing acts I sometimes had to drug myself to perform, are available to your child at the click of a mouse?’ She left her opponents floundering.

  Jenny reminded her visitor of the time. His fifteen minutes were up.

  ‘I’m giving you the history, Mrs Cooper,’ Father Starr said, ‘to emphasize how many people there were with a motive to silence her.’

  ‘But hasn’t she been made a martyr? I’ve read there’s a good chance the Decency Bill they’ve been agitating for might actually become law.’

  The priest leaned forward in his chair. ‘Look at the circumstances of her murder. There were no signs of forced entry, indicating she opened her door to a caller. She was stabbed once, in the kitchen, with a weapon which has never been recovered. There was no evidence of sexual violation. At the time of her death Mr Craven was residing in a bedsit in Redland, over seven miles from her home. Read the transcript of his police interview – he couldn’t state her address or even describe the route he would have taken to it.’

  ‘I’ve not read the whole file,’ Jenny said, ‘but I do recall that Craven gave himself up at a police station, confessed freely, and that his DNA was found in the grounds of Miss Donaldson’s house.’

  ‘The DNA is unreliable. They say he urinated on the doorstep. I have spoken to experts who say there are very few cells excreted in urine.’

  ‘Then it sounds as if you’ve grounds for appeal. An uncorroborated confession by a man in a fragile state of mind isn’t usually sufficient for a conviction.’

  ‘The psychiatrists say there’s nothing wrong with him. I know otherwise, but what notice would the courts take of a priest?’

  ‘Surely Craven’s had good lawyers representing him. What do they think?’

  ‘He told them he was guilty. Now he insists he isn’t, they are professionally embarrassed and he has to instruct new ones. But without some evidence, some lead, he won’t get legal aid. I understand that leaves him at the mercy of the Criminal Appeal Cases Review Commission. Who knows when they might get to his case – months, years?’

  ‘Look,’ Jenny said, ‘where there’s been a conviction a coroner is entitled to investigate the circumstances of the death, but the law states that I mustn’t return a verdict which undermines a finding of the criminal court, and that includes a guilty plea.’

  ‘I’ve informed myself on the point,’ Father Starr said. ‘But as I understand it, you would be acting perfectly lawfully in investigating the circumstances of Miss Donaldson’s death. And if you were to discover evidence exonerating Mr Craven, it would be grounds for an appeal.’

  Jenny smiled. ‘I can’t fault your optimism, Father. But is that all you’ve got? Tell me what makes you so sure Craven didn’t kill her.’

  The priest studied her, carefully weighing his words. ‘When he was a vulnerable and disturbed teenager Paul Craven killed a young woman. I have now known him for five years. I know him more intimately than any other human being: I am his confessor. I have seen him turn to God and I have seen God change and redeem him. I ask you to believe me when I say I can divine whether he’s lying about such a profound matter as whether he committed murder.’

  ‘Then why did he confess?’

  ‘I think it’s best that you ask him that. It’s not possible to judge a man until you have met, don’t you think?’

  ‘I can certainly send my officer to take a statement—’

  ‘Please,’ Father Starr interjected, gesturing with his hands, ‘I ask this one thing of you, that you interview him in person. Then, I guarantee, you will understand.’

  He was a hard man to resist, and someone Jenny already felt she would like to know more about. ‘And if I say I can’t?’

  ‘I shan’t beg you, Mrs Cooper.’ He got up from his chair. ‘Thank you for your time. You have been most generous.’ He produced a card from his jacket pocket and placed it in front of her. ‘I’ll leave you to decide what’s right.’

  She should have started working through her phone messages or reading her mail, but the priest’s plea lingered like a watchful presence. It demanded that she make a decision on whether to rubber-stamp the Crown Court’s verdict in line with usual procedure, or to risk the ire of her overseers in the Ministry of Justice and conduct an inquest of her own.

  She reached for the court file and began skimming through its pages.

  There was a statement from Eva Donaldson’s domestic help, who had arrived in the morning to find her employer’s body on the kitchen floor of her modest home in Winter-bourne Down, a village just outside the northern margins of the city; statements from the several detectives who were called to the scene; a list of items that were removed from the house; a forensics report on the DNA sample recovered from the doormat; and a report by the Home Office pathologist. A bundle of photographs showed the body at the scene. Eva was curled into a foetal position surrounded by a huge pool of congealed blood. Two shots of the body on the slab showed a single stab wound to her chest midway between her breasts and her shoulder-length blonde hair. The final photograph was a close-up of her heart sitting in a kidney dish. A flagged pin marked the stab wound, which had penetrated her upper right ventricle, making death a rapid certainty.

  Jenny stuffed the pictures into the back of the file and flicked through the transcript of Craven’s police interview. He wasn’t much of a talker. The DI conducting the interrogation, Goodison, had had to tease him along. When eventually he found his tongue, Craven said he kept seeing Eva on the television news talking about her past in blue movies and how she had found God. He had found God, too, which was what gave him the idea of going to talk to her on his release. When the detective asked how he’d found her address, he said he had got it from contact-a-celebrity.com while he was still in prison. Jenny arrived at a section of the interview that had been highlighted:

  DI G: You say you walked all the way to her house.

  [suspect nods]

  DI G: What did you do when you got there, Paul?

  PC: Hung around for a while, then rang the bell.

  DI G: What did you do while you hung around?

  [suspect shrugs]

  DI G: Come on, Paul, you can remember that. What did you do? Look through the window, check out the house, go to the toilet, what?

  [long pause]

  PC: I think I went to the toilet, had a leak.

  DI G: Where?

  PC: Don’t remember. No. Don’t remember.

  DI G: By the house?

  PC: Yeah, that’s it, by the house.

  DI G: Then what?

  PC: Like I said, I rang the doorbell.

  DI G: What happened next?

  PC: She came to the door. She said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I’m Paul, like the apostle, and I think God told me to come and talk to you about all the good work you’re doing, because I want to give my life to good works too.’ And she said, ‘Oh, well you’d better come in and tell me more.’ [long pause] I followed her into the house, into the kitchen, then she turned to me with this strange look on her face, and she put her hand on me [suspect indicates his chest] and she said, ‘You don’t have to say anything, Paul, I know what you want and I want it too.’ And she moved her hand downwards, you know, down there [suspect indicates his groin area] and I said, ‘No, that’s not right, please don’t do that to me,’ but she took no notice. I said, ‘Eva, that’s a sin.’ She said [pause] I can’t say what she said.

  DI G: It’s not a problem, Paul. Just tell me what she said.

  [suspect covers face with hands]

  DI G: Come on, Paul. Let’s hear it.

  [pause]

  PC: She said, [s
obbing] she said, ‘Fuck me for the devil.’ And that’s when I picked up a knife from the counter and stuck it in her, right there, in the chest.

  DI G: How many times?

  [suspect shakes his head]

  DI G: What did you do then?

  PC: I ran out of that house. I ran away from there.

  DI G: What did you do with the knife?

  PC: Threw it away.

  DI G: Where? Where did you throw it?

  [suspect shakes his head, breaking down into tears]

  The last document in the file was a report from the court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr Helen Graham, who said she had examined Craven on three separate occasions during his remand. In her opinion he was suffering from a mild personality disorder which gave him ‘a sometimes tenuous grasp on reality and a tendency to fixate on abstract, often religious ideas’, but there had been no evidence of violence in his character during his long prison term. He had attended classes conducted by female teachers and been in contact with a female parole officer without any suggestion of inappropriate behaviour. He wasn’t clinically insane, and in her view there was no evidence to support any suggestion that he was suffering from diminished responsibility or a temporary psychological illness. During their three sessions Craven had refused to discuss the circumstances of the alleged offence, but on one occasion did express remorse for what he had done. Dr Graham concluded that there was no reason to question the validity of Craven’s confession and expressed the opinion that the stress of release had caused him to commit a crime very similar to that for which he had originally been imprisoned.

  Stapled inside the back cover of the file was a copy of Craven’s criminal record and a handwritten statement of the facts of his first murder. At eighteen, he had met a twenty-three-year-old nurse named Grace Akingbade at a Bristol nightclub. Late in the evening they were seen leaving together. Grace’s body was found in her room in a hospital accommodation block the following afternoon. She had been beaten and strangled but there was no evidence of sexual molestation. Craven was arrested the same day and made a full confession. His explanation for the killing was that the young woman had mocked him when he had failed to perform sexually.

  Jenny finished reading and made up her mind that there was nothing to investigate. If Craven wanted to protest his innocence he would have to do what everyone else did and find a criminal lawyer to fight his battles for him. There were far more deserving cases on her desk.

  She looked up with a start as Alison thumped through the door and dumped a fresh heap of papers in front of her. ‘Are you all right, Mrs Cooper?’

  ‘You shocked me.’

  ‘Fun as it was watching an autopsy on a nine-year-old, I thought I’d better tear myself away.’

  Jenny noticed that she was wearing shiny red lipstick and had brushed her dyed blonde hair forward over her cheeks. ‘It suits you,’ she said, her heart still pulsing hard against her ribs.

  ‘Thank you,’ Alison said with self-conscious abruptness and swiftly changed the subject. ‘The pathologist confirmed death by alcohol poisoning so social services have asked the police to look at criminal negligence. I doubt it’ll end with charges, but at least it’s off our plate for the time being. We’ve had an anonymous email from a man who claims he was one of the gang which erected the crane and says they were using sub-standard bolts, and Dr Kerr just emailed an interim report on Alan Jacobs – it’s not looking too pretty. Oh, and there’s been a fatal RTA on the Portway I should probably go and have a look at.’

  She turned abruptly to the door.

  Jenny sensed there was more to Alison’s agitation than her caseload. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘I’ve had more relaxing mornings.’

  ‘Is it Terry again?’

  ‘Terry?’ Alison said, as if her husband was the furthest thing from her mind. ‘He’s no trouble to me now he’s in Spain.’

  ‘Another holiday?’

  ‘I don’t know what you call it,’ Alison said, ‘but I suppose you might as well know before you hear gossip. He’s been seeing some woman he met out there last time.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’d no idea—’

  ‘Neither did I till last Thursday. But I told him if there was something he wanted to get out of his system I’d rather he did it out of my sight.’

  Jenny knew there had been arguments, mostly over her husband Terry’s desire to sell up and retire to a Spanish condo while he was still young enough to get round the golf course, but she had no idea relations had turned this sour. ‘So, where does that leave the two of you?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue, but I’m damned if he’s going to have all the fun.’ The phone rang in the outer office. ‘That’ll be traffic wanting to know if I’m coming to see the body.’

  ‘Couldn’t we make do with their photographs?’

  ‘I’d rather get out if you don’t mind, Mrs Cooper. I’m afraid I can’t tolerate my own company at the moment.’

  She left, thumping the door shut behind her. It seemed only a few weeks ago that she’d been wrestling with feelings for DI Pironi and had spent three days in self-pitying silence having stood him up on a dinner date. Veering between church-going piety and guilt-ridden desire, Alison spent weeks on end as moody as a teenager.

  Jenny picked up Dr Kerr’s single-page interim report and prepared herself for the worst. It didn’t disappoint:

  Rectal examination showed fresh and semi-healed abrasions consistent with intercourse on more than one occasion; swabs show presence of semen deposited in the hours immediately preceding death. Minor lesions on both forearms appear to have been made by human fingernails. Tissue samples from affected sites have been submitted for analysis.

  While the immediate cause of death is an overdose of phenobarbital, it is not possible to say with certainty whether consumption was voluntary.

  Jenny thought of Mrs Jacobs and tried to imagine her reaction as DI Wallace broke the news of her husband’s final hours. She pictured her face set in a stony mask of denial. How would she cope? Would she even understand? No. If Jenny had gained one insight into human nature through being a coroner, it was that two people could inhabit the same space for years and in all meaningful respects remain distant strangers.

  She placed the report on the arbitrary pile at the right side of her desk which she had started with Paul Craven’s court file, and was struck by the thought that only weeks and a handful of miles apart sex, drugs and God – a trinity of life’s most potent forces – had colluded in the untimely deaths of both Alan Jacobs and Eva Donaldson. The thought seemed to open a door to an untravelled corner of her subconscious. She found herself in a dark and downward-sloping tunnel. And in the gloom behind her the door slammed shut.

  THREE

  IT WAS IN THE EARLY evenings that the effect of her slow-release medication tapered off and the ghosts it held at bay returned to haunt her. They had no faces, these forms hovering at the margins of her consciousness, but they wanted her to know that they were only a breath away; that she had only one foot in the world of the living. Lately their presence had become sharper. It was as if the eruption of spring into summer, with all the valley humming with the urgency of life, had spurred them to greater efforts.

  There was no relief from them tonight. Throughout her drive home their presence had grown. They were waiting for her in the shadows at Melin Bach, behind the trees at the end of the cottage’s garden, amongst the clutter of ancient tools and implements in the dilapidated mill shed. She couldn’t settle to read her papers at the scrub-top table on the lawn without feeling watched by unseen eyes, feeling the touch of their hands in the breeze on her neck. The psychiatrists would call it mild paranoia, but that didn’t begin to explain the dark and complex landscape of her other world.

  The scent of the newly mown meadow was overpowered by the smell of the churchyard where Alan Jacobs’s body had lain. His features hovered behind her eyes, and the shame and anguish of his final moments tugged at her, as if she we
re somehow wrapped up in the cause of his despair.

  Such irrational thoughts were nothing new. They had dogged Jenny throughout her short career as a coroner, taunting her with the notion that she was doomed to consort with the dead, denying her the chance to live unselfconsciously among the living. She had tried to pull free, to confine her imagination within normal limits, but then Alec McAvoy had arrived and flung the door to the abyss wide open. My Dark Rosaleen, he had called her. He had seemed to know her secrets without her saying a word and he had left without saying how. But left her to what?

  Listless, and for the first time in weeks fighting the desire to drive into town to buy a bottle of wine, Jenny retreated to her little study at the front of the cottage and tried to lose herself in the most urgent files she had brought home. Top of the pile was Eva Donaldson’s. There’d been an email late in the afternoon from Eva’s next of kin, her father, asking when her body might be released for burial and her death formally registered. It was Jenny’s custom not to allow homicide victims to be released until the conclusion of a trial; there was now no good reason not to hand her remains back to her family, especially as Craven’s claim to innocence, such as it was, was based purely on the soundness of his confession.

  She reached out for a Form 21, Coroner’s Order for Burial, and began to complete it, but as she did so she heard the steady voice of Father Starr: ‘Believe me when I say I can divine whether he’s lying about such a profound matter as whether he committed murder.’ It was illogical, precisely the sort of superstition she had strained so hard in recent months to avoid, yet completing the form suddenly felt like a betrayal. What was it McAvoy had said that morning in the car when he’d been scratchy and hung-over? ‘Try going to confession once a fortnight and spilling your sins out to a celibate priest. There’s something to put you in your place.’ She remembered the smell of his cigarette smoke, the odour of cramped courtrooms, dirty cells and seedy nightclubs that clung to his damp woollen coat, a world she came to understand he was both called to and despised.