by M. R. Hall
‘Did you communicate with anyone?’
Craven shook his head. ‘No.’
Father Starr said, ‘Paul lost contact with his family when he was ten years old. He was taken into care.’
‘Where were you on the Sunday evening?’ Alison asked.
‘Inside. I didn’t go anywhere.’
‘Were there any neighbours, or anyone else, who might be able to verify your movements?’
‘I never saw them to speak to.’
Alison frowned. ‘And when did you make your confession to the police?’
Craven looked down and shook his head.
‘It was on the following Wednesday at about midday,’ Father Starr said. ‘I received a phone call here at my office from Detective Inspector Goodison. He handed me over to Paul, who asked me to find him a lawyer. I arranged that for him.’
‘Why did you turn yourself in to the police, Mr Craven?’ Alison asked.
Jenny watched him twist the fingers of his cuffed hands together as he struggled to explain.
‘I wanted it to go away . . . I couldn’t take hearing about it any more.’
‘What did you want to go away?’ Alison said.
‘The pictures on the television. They didn’t stop. She was everywhere . . . looking at me.’
Alison carefully wrote down his answer. ‘You’re saying you went to confess to Eva Donaldson’s murder because you couldn’t bear seeing her picture on television?’
Craven didn’t answer, his gaze fixed on the table between them.
‘Did you explain this to the police?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘What happened when you went into the station? What did you say?’
He shook his head.
‘Do you remember?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Had you been drinking, taking drugs?’
‘No.’
Jenny leaned forward, lightly touching Alison’s arm as she interrupted her. ‘We’ve read your police interview, Mr Craven – was what you told them true or false?’
He lifted his face and met hers with his child’s china-blue eyes. ‘It wasn’t true. I didn’t kill her, I didn’t. I didn’t. That’s God’s honest truth.’
‘Then why tell the police you did?’
Craven’s eyes flitted to Father Starr, then back to Jenny. ‘Because I was weak. Because I let my faith weaken.’
There were many leading questions Jenny would like to have asked but they all fell into the category of cross-examination, which wasn’t appropriate unless or until she held an inquest. A statement had to be an unprompted narrative by the maker, and they had already strayed too close to putting words into his mouth. But there was one direct question she could properly ask him: ‘You told the police in interview that you urinated outside Eva Donaldson’s house. They later claimed to have found traces of your DNA on the mat outside her front door. Can you explain that?’
Craven slowly shook his head.
Father Starr said, ‘Samples get confused or contaminated at laboratories, it happens all the time. Even experts can be mistaken.’
Alison said, ‘Do you have anything to say about the DNA evidence, Mr Craven?’
‘It’s wrong. I never went to her house. The only times I saw it was on the TV. That’s the truth.’ Agitated, he turned to Starr. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Father? Tell them. That’s God’s honest truth.’
Starr reached out and put a comforting hand on Craven’s. ‘That’s what Mrs Cooper is going to do, Paul. She’s going to find out the truth.’
Losing patience, Alison kicked Jenny’s ankle under the table.
Ignoring her, Jenny said, ‘Do you have anything else to add, Mr Craven? This is your one chance to speak to me directly. We won’t be meeting like this again.’
The prisoner closed his eyes for a moment, as if summoning the strength to force the words out of his mouth. When they came, it was in a lucid stream that seemed to bubble up from deep inside him. ‘You’re right to think I’m lying to you. I did once murder an innocent young woman and I know God will judge me for that, but I didn’t kill Eva . . . I’m a different person now. I couldn’t do that. I’d kill myself before I’d hurt another human being.’
And as he held her in his innocent gaze, Jenny was tempted to believe him.
Jenny waited for Alison to stop off in the ladies’ room at reception before turning to Father Starr, who had hardly spoken during the walk back through the prison. ‘There was a question I should have asked him – why wasn’t he at church on the Sunday?’
‘My fault, Mrs Cooper. I should have made arrangements. I was on a study retreat during the week he was released.’
‘If I was a more cynical person I’d say you were finding it hard to accept that a man you’d worked so hard with could have left here and killed three days later.’
‘There is more than likely to be an element of pride. I am only human.’
‘I don’t doubt your good intentions, Father, but I’m afraid that the scales didn’t fall from my eyes. I saw a man who needs a psychiatrist, a priest and a good criminal lawyer, probably in that order.’
‘You were touched by him, weren’t you?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Father Starr smiled. ‘Lack of prejudice is a wonderful gift. I have had to work hard to try to acquire it. I sense you possess it naturally.’
‘Listen, let’s be straight about this now. If I decide to hold an inquest it’ll be because there are issues around the cause of death that require further investigation, not out of any desire to assist Craven.’
‘Of course. I understand.’
‘I may even turn up more evidence against him.’
Father Starr turned his gaze out of the rain-flecked window and up towards a moody sky. ‘Do you believe in good and evil, Mrs Cooper, and that the former attracts the latter?’
‘I try not to get too philosophical during business hours.’
‘Really? That’s not what a mutual friend of ours once told me.’
Alison emerged from the ladies in a fresh cloud of perfume and glanced between Jenny and Starr, sensing an atmosphere between them. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Starr said. ‘One other thing I should have mentioned, Mrs Cooper – as far as I know the police neglected to interview Miss Donaldson’s former boyfriend. His name’s Joseph Cassidy. He’s an actor of sorts. I understand she and he resumed their acquaintance in the weeks before her death.’
‘How do you know that?’ Jenny said, feeling her cheeks flush with emotions she couldn’t yet articulate.
‘Craven’s lawyer tried to speak to him, but he was reluctant to cooperate. I contacted his local priest.’
‘You’re quite the detective, Father,’ Jenny said, feeling an unchristian stab of hostility.
‘I try to live by a very simple philosophy: there is that which is right and just, and that which is not. As convenient a belief as it may be, there is no middle ground.’ He opened his hands in a gesture of gratitude. ‘Thank you both for coming here today. And now I must excuse myself; I have to conduct Mass.’
With a nod he turned and retreated into the depths of the prison.
‘Didn’t I tell you, Mrs Cooper?’ Alison said.
Jenny scarcely heard her. She was thinking of their mutual friend, and dared to wonder with thundering heart if Alec McAvoy might still be alive.
FOUR
IGNORING ALISON’S WARNINGS that anything other than an endorsement of the criminal court’s verdict would threaten her already shaky tenure as coroner, Jenny wrote to Eva Donaldson’s father informing him that she was ordering a final post-mortem examination of his daughter’s body before releasing it for burial. Her next pressing task was to track down Eva’s ex-boyfriend, Joseph Cassidy. He wasn’t hard to find. An internet search revealed that he had starred alongside Eva in a number of films, all with names as obscene as the images that advertised them, and since leaving that business he
had reinvented himself as the managing director of Wild West Productions, a television production company with offices in Bristol and Soho, central London. Not surprisingly, his company website contained no mention of his past in adult movies.
Jenny called him at his office number. Cassidy answered the phone himself, no assistant to protect him from the pestering hordes. When she announced herself and requested a meeting, Cassidy said, ‘I’ve really nothing to say. Eva and I hadn’t been seeing each other for more than two years.’ He spoke with a Dublin accent that made him sound endearing even when he was being evasive.
‘But I understand you had recently got back in touch?’
There was a brief silence.
‘Where’d you get that from?’ Cassidy asked.
‘You’re not under suspicion, Mr Cassidy. I’m just trying to find out if there’s anything more about Eva’s death that ought to be known.’
‘It’s all been said.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Honestly, I wish I could help you.’
She sensed him wavering and pounced. ‘Why don’t I buy you a drink and you can tell me what you do know?’
They met in a waterside bar at the harbour and sat at an outside table overlooking the boats, a warm breeze playing off the water. Joseph, or Joe, as he preferred to be called, resembled an ageing surfer. Suntanned, with tousled blonde hair, he wore an open-necked pink shirt under a black summer-weight suit. He ordered neat vodka with ice and a dash of lemon juice. Jenny settled on neat tonic, her nerves still held in check by the Xanax she had taken before visiting the prison.
Keeping to small talk while they waited for their order to arrive, she asked him about the television business. The small screen was taking care of itself, Cassidy said, but he already had ambitions for feature films; he had just discovered a screenwriter who was going to be hotter than Tarantino. There were plenty doing the rounds who claimed to have mixed with gangsters, but this young man was the real thing – gold dust – a former drug dealer who had served time for shooting a rival through the kneecap.
Jenny listened patiently, but was glad when the waiter arrived with their drinks. Joe waited for Jenny to sip hers before he took a mouthful of the neat vodka, pretending he could take it or leave it.
Jenny said, ‘Tell me about your relationship with Eva.’
More confident now he had a glass in his hand, Joe said, ‘I’d like to know what you’ve heard about me first.’
‘Just what I told you on the phone – that you and Eva had communicated recently.’
‘Yeah, but who told you?’
‘Paul Craven’s solicitors knew about it,’ Jenny lied, instinctively wanting to keep Father Starr’s name out of the conversation for now.
‘Hmm.’ Joe took a big gulp of his vodka. ‘I guess they must have talked to her lawyers. Trust those bastards to break their word.’
Jenny waited for him to enlarge.
‘Does what I say here go any further?’
‘That depends on what it is.’
‘And if I don’t talk?’
‘I’d probably have to summon you to my inquest and make you answer under oath.’
‘And this way I don’t have to do that?’
‘Possibly.’
‘The thing is, Jenny—’
‘Would you mind if we kept it to Mrs Cooper?’
Cassidy smiled. ‘Whatever you like, Mrs Cooper. I did have a couple of meetings with Eva at the beginning of the year, but the matters we discussed were in strictest confidence.’
‘Is that still relevant now she’s dead?’
‘It could be.’
‘I don’t follow.’
Cassidy pushed his hands through his hair. She noticed it was thinning at the temples. ‘Look, I get that you probably know my history, how Eva and I met, but we both felt pretty much the same way about the adult entertainment business. I didn’t even make money – girls get five times as much as guys, did you realize that?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ She took a patient sip of her tonic.
‘And if there’s one good thing that comes out of all this, it’s that Eva actually achieved something.’
‘You mean Decency?’
‘Yes. She wanted the law changed and so do I. In less than two weeks from now the bill gets debated in Parliament. That’s what she’d been working for ever since we split up.’
‘You’re saying that whatever you discussed could jeopardize that in some way?’
‘It’s certainly possible.’
Jenny put her hands on the table. ‘Mr Cassidy, we’re talking about a young woman who was murdered. Unfortunately, it seems the police didn’t go as far in their inquiry as they might have done – you’re one of the people they should have spoken to, but didn’t. One way or another you will eventually have to reveal what you know.’
Cassidy emptied his glass and crunched on an ice cube. Jenny tried to banish the image of him she’d seen on her computer: a still from Locker Room Orgy. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t that Eva wasn’t totally committed to Decency, but she needed to make money. She’d got used to a certain standard of living, and who can blame her? She’d heard I’d gone into straight film-making and she came to me in the hope of lining up some work for later. We talked about using her reputation to pitch a TV series. It was going to be about these women she used to work with who were trying to shake free of their pasts and lead ordinary lives. She had a title: Fallen Angels. But nothing was going to happen until after the campaign was over, OK? Decency came first.’
‘Did she tell anyone else about these plans?’
‘Not as far as I know.
Jenny studied his face and decided he seemed more or less genuine. He didn’t come across as sharp enough to be a good liar. If he were female, you would have called him a bimbo.
‘Tell me, what was Eva’s state of mind when you met her?’
‘To be honest, I thought she was feeling the strain of being on show the whole time. She reminded me a little of how she was after the accident, when she was depressed. She was showing the same signs.’
‘Such as?’
‘She was jumpy, smoking a lot, and her hand would shake – you know, like an old person’s.’
‘Did she have any enemies that you knew of?’
Cassidy glanced up and down the boardwalk, then leaned in across the table, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘If you’re asking do I think someone other than Paul Craven killed her, I’d say anything’s possible. But what I do know is the porno business, and that the people that run it are far too rich and clever to get their own hands dirty – you know what I’m saying? I’ve thought about it every which way, and if Craven didn’t do it, he must have arrived to find her already dead, right? So it could have been a professional hit – why not? You should hear the stories this scriptwriter tells me.’
Jenny said, ‘Would you like another drink?’
Cassidy said, ‘Only if you’re having one.’
The second dose of vodka loosened Cassidy’s tongue to the point at which Jenny sensed he was trying to please her. He told her that he’d met Eva when she’d already been in the industry for some time and they were cast in the same movie. They’d bonded over their love of sixties music – a time when pop was a rebellion, not just a business. From the moment he met her, Cassidy said, he knew she was different from the other girls he worked with; there was something behind her eyes, an intelligence, depth. It was what made her so special: her audience wanted to get to know her for more than just her body. And even though she was making big money, she was always planning for the future. Way before she found God, he remembered her saying, ‘There’s no reason we only have to be one person throughout our lives, we can be as many as we like.’
Thinking Eva would have been an interesting woman to have met, Jenny said, ‘How did that happen, her conversion?’
‘Just like the story goes. “He caught me just as my fingers were slipping from the edge,” is how she desc
ribed it to me.’
‘And you’re convinced it was genuine?’
Cassidy grinned, showing off expensive teeth. ‘Put it this way, I hadn’t been inside a church since my First Communion. When we met that second time, in February, Eva said she’d had a word of knowledge – I think that’s what she called it – telling her to tell me to go to Mass. Can you believe it? Me! But just for her I went four times in a row, confessed my many sins, and – guess what? – the first channel I talked to about Fallen Angels virtually bit my hand off. The only problem was they wanted someone else to play Eva’s part.’
‘How did she react to that?’
‘Like you’d imagine – she was disappointed, but I kept telling her she’d have a share of the show and a creator credit. That would have made her a proper player, part of the business. Pretty actresses are ten a penny.’
‘But it wasn’t going to solve her money problems.’
‘I told her she should work in PR, cash in on all the skills she’d learned with Decency.’ He stared into his empty glass and shook his head. ‘Let me tell you the funny thing about Eva. She could walk naked onto a set and have sex with six guys in front of a full crew, but ask her to make a simple phone call, it’d take her half the day to pluck up the courage.’
Jenny said, ‘We all suffer from our contradictions.’
‘Yeah,’ Cassidy said, ‘we certainly do.’
Unless the whispers Starr had received from Cassidy’s priest contained something darkly sinister, Jenny couldn’t see that Eva having entertained ambitions to be a straight actress gave her any reason to conduct a full inquest. Of course it was logically possible that Craven hadn’t killed Eva; he could have gone to her house and, acting on some strange animal impulse, urinated on her door mat without actually coming into contact with her, but that wasn’t what he claimed. He denied having been there at all. Her lawyerly instincts, ingrained over fifteen years of practice, told her it was unethical to explore possibilities that a criminal defendant hadn’t suggested in his own defence, but as a coroner she had to force herself to think differently. She wasn’t bound by any one version of events; she could investigate and test whatever theory she wished. Her overriding duty was to uncover the truth. She could feel her conscience drawing her towards holding an inquest, but at the same time another voice was warning her to beware.