by M. R. Hall
Freddy was quiet for a moment. ‘He was one of them.’
‘Was it him who told you about the Mission Church?’
‘No. He had nothing to do with it. I thought you said you weren’t like the police. I’ve had enough of this. You people are all the same.’
He shot up from the bench and took off across the grass.
‘Freddy—’
He broke into a run and didn’t look back.
It had been there all along. Buried in the police files was a rough photocopy of a barely legible handwritten list entitled, ‘Persons spoken to informally’. All the big names at the Mission Church of God were listed: Bobby DeMont, Michael and Christine Turnbull, Lennox Strong, Joel Nelson, and more than twenty others. Two-thirds of the way down she made out Frederick Reardon and, a little further on, Alan Jacobs.
Jenny had called DI Goodison, who made no attempt to disguise his annoyance at being troubled by her a second time. He had had a team of five detectives going through the church, he said. In the two day after Eva’s death they spoke to whoever they could find who had been associated with her. They stopped when they did because Craven had come forward and confessed. There was no particular significance in the names on the list.
‘But are they all people connected with the Mission Church?’ Jenny had asked.
‘As far as I recall,’ Goodison answered, and made his excuses. He was far too busy to waste his time on a nitpicking coroner.
She had tried DI Wallace, but he was no more forthcoming. There was no evidence of any connection between Jacobs and the Mission Church, he said dismissively, and even if there was, it would do nothing to shake his belief that Jacobs had killed himself.
The two policemen probably occupied next-door offices, but might as well have inhabited separate continents. Each had their own teams and caseloads and seemed to run their fiefdoms with no interest in their colleagues except in beating them to their clear-up targets. In the race for results, the truth was an inevitable casualty.
The prospect of meeting Mrs Jacobs again filled Jenny with a dread she could only suppress with another Xanax. The one mercy was that the widow had insisted on coming to see her at her office rather than have her daughter’s routine disrupted by the appearance of another sombre stranger. She arrived a little after five, but when Alison brought her in, it was with a companion. Jenny recognized him as the priest who had sat at the back of the inquest.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Cooper,’ Ceri Jacobs said stiffly. ‘This is Father Dermody from St Xavier’s. I asked if he’d come with me. I trust you don’t have a problem with that.’
‘I’ve no objection,’ Jenny said.
‘I’m very grateful to you, Mrs Cooper,’ Father Dermody said, and gave a kindly smile as he shook her hand.
The widow and her priest settled into their chairs as much at ease with each other as man and wife. Jenny observed their exchange of glances and decided that Ceri Jacobs trusted him more than she trusted herself.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you again, Mrs Jacobs,’ Jenny said, ‘but it’s not so much your husband’s death I need to ask you about, as what he may, or may not, have known about someone else’s. I presume you’ve heard of Eva Donaldson.’
Ceri glanced nervously at Father Dermody, who answered for her. ‘Of course we have. What about her?’
Jenny opened a file and extracted the list. She passed it across the desk, placing it between them.
‘After she was killed the police informally questioned a number of people at the Mission Church of God who had been in contact with her. You’ll see your husband’s name appears on it, towards the bottom of the page.’
Ceri Jacobs shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything about this.’
Jenny said, ‘I’ll try to find out which detective it was who spoke to him, but I was wondering if he said anything about this to you.’
‘No.’
Father Dermody frowned. ‘Where would this questioning have taken place?’
‘If wasn’t at your home, Mrs Jacobs, then I assume it was at your husband’s workplace, or perhaps at the Mission Church itself.’
‘Why would he have been there?’ Mrs Jacobs said with a note of panic.
Jenny said, ‘I’m conducting an inquiry into Miss Donaldson’s death. Since the inquest into your husband’s death there have been several separate indications that he was connected with the Mission Church in some way—’
‘He bought one book, that’s all,’ Mrs Jacobs protested. ‘He didn’t go to that church, he went to St Xavier’s.’ She appealed to her priest. ‘Father, tell her.’
‘He was with us every Wednesday evening, Mrs Cooper, at our enquirers’ class.’
‘I made some calls this afternoon,’ Jenny said. ‘During the last two months he was also attending a study group at the Mission Church. He’d signed up to the mailing list using his work address, and also to their email newsletter.’
‘He can’t have done. He wouldn’t have gone behind my back. We told each other everything.’
‘Calm yourself, Ceri,’ Father Dermody said gently. ‘It’s hardly a grave sin.’
‘What day of the week was he meant to have been going there?’ Mrs Jacobs demanded.
‘Fridays, it seems,’ Jenny said.
‘He told me he was working late, the staff shortages. Why would he lie? He never lied to me.’
Father Dermody laid a hand on her arm. ‘The poor man was suffering, Ceri. He didn’t want to burden you. We prayed for him, we did what we could.’
Fighting angry tears, Ceri Jacobs said, ‘Please tell me you’re not going to open this up again. I couldn’t face that.’
‘I don’t think that would help anyone. But so that I can rule him out, I would like to know where he was on the night Eva Donaldson died. It was Sunday, 9 May.’
‘He worked an extra half-shift Sunday evenings,’ Ceri Jacobs said. ‘He had done for several months.’
Jenny stepped outside into reception to make the call. She caught Deborah Bishop just as she was leaving the office and persuaded her to return to her computer to check staff rosters. The answer was as she expected: Alan Jacobs hadn’t worked on a Sunday evening all year, and on Fridays he had worked one hour of agreed overtime and clocked off at six.
Ceri Jacobs listened to the news wearing a look of pure contempt, not for her husband, but for Jenny for shattering her already fractured illusions beyond any hope of repair.
Father Dermody did his best to soften the blow. ‘I know how much you wished for him to enter the faith, Ceri, but there are other types of Christian.’
Deaf to his soothing words, Mrs Jacobs said, ‘You won’t stop here though, will you, Mrs Cooper? You won’t be happy until every last sordid detail is dragged out and paraded in public. Can’t you let the poor man rest in peace?’ How can there ever be peace without truth? Jenny wondered, but kept the thought to herself. Now was not the time for preaching.
THIRTEEN
THE CHILLY, GREY MONDAY MORNING could as easily have been in March as late June. Jenny gave an ironic smile as she gazed out at the bleakness of the scene that perfectly reflected her mood. All attempts to persuade the Courts Service to provide a courtroom in the handful of intervening days had failed. The only venue Alison had managed to find which could accommodate an inquest at short notice was a former working men’s clubhouse on the fringes of Avon-mouth, the area of heavy industry where the River Avon emptied into the Severn estuary. Nestled between the factories that lined the shore from the sprawling docks to the east to the new Severn crossing in the west, it was a single-storey cinder-block building with a sheet tin roof, surrounded by a weedy area of gravel which merged into the surrounding wasteland. Nearby the massive chimney of a bitumen plant pumped out foul, cream-coloured smoke that smelled of hot tar and burning rubber. It was an unloved place that existed only to be passed through on the way to somewhere else; a fitting location, Jenny decided, to unpick the details of Eva Donaldson’s death.
She had had five days
including the weekend to prepare and summon witnesses, and had fully expected the Ministry of Justice to intervene to make her think again. But apart from a solitary email from Amanda Cramer, they had remained eerily silent. Cramer’s message had been tersely headed ‘FYI’, and contained a link to a newspaper article reporting insider gossip that the government and Decency were in advanced negotiations to secure the Decency Bill’s safe passage through Parliament. It was to have its first reading in a week’s time. Michael Turnbull himself was slated to open the debate in the Lords. Jenny interpreted it as a warning for the long term rather than as a threat. It was intended to remind her that as a junior member of the Establishment, she had a duty not to throw a spanner into the machinery of government. Even if she was technically within her rights to conduct an inquest, it would count as yet another black mark against her.
To make matters worse, Steve had been asked to stand in for his boss at a series of meetings with prospective clients in Edinburgh. He had been stuck in the office at the weekend, and Ross had cancelled their fortnightly Sunday lunch, claiming he was overwhelmed with coursework. Jenny had made the mistake of calling her ex-husband while she was still smarting with the pain of rejection, and had humiliated herself by bursting into tears. It was the excuse David needed to suggest she should try a new psychiatrist. He recommended a colleague at the hospital. She had felt so wretched she had taken the woman’s number. Before he rang off, David said, ‘I’m so glad you can talk to me like this now, Jenny. You do realize how far you’ve come in three years?’
Pushing open the creaking door to the former Severn Beach and District Working Men’s Club, Jenny couldn’t be sure if this was progress or not. Before her ‘episode’, the formal beginning of which she marked as the day she dried up and broke down in the middle of a family court hearing, she had been a well-respected lawyer running an entire local government department. Colleagues told her she could have applied to any of the big London law firms specializing in millionaire divorces and negotiated a six-figure salary with prospects for an equity partnership. By the time she was forty-five she could have been earning more than David and heading for a place at the top of her field.
Instead she was a local coroner making just enough to get by, and surviving on ever-increasing doses of anti-anxiety medication. Ignoring Dr Allen’s warnings, she had been taking double doses for most of the past week and was still starting at shadows and imaginary phantoms. Entering the clammy, featureless room that had once been the club bar felt strangely like reaching the end of a long road. As soon as this was over, she told herself, she would take a holiday. Then she would attempt to drain the poison once and for all.
She retreated to the former committee room which would serve as her office, while Alison directed workmen arriving with hired-in chairs and trestle tables to set out the main room in a way that vaguely resembled a court. In between sips of coffee from a Thermos flask, she touched up her make-up with shaky fingers and tried to resist the temptation to swallow another Xanax.
Even with her lipstick perfect and all her lines concealed, she remained too edgy to rehearse the questions she had planned for her first witnesses. Unable to relax, she closed the tatty brown curtains, leaving a tiny gap through which she watched a steady stream of people start to arrive. Despite the sign saying CORONER’S COURT Alison had planted outside, prospective jurors, witnesses, press and lawyers all appeared equally baffled by the incongruous building. Jenny smiled to herself as she watched Ed Prince and his entourage disembark from a chauffeur-driven Mercedes van and drag their smart pull-along briefcases across the rough gravel between a jumble of parked cars. The squalid building had one virtue: it would be a great leveller.
Alison knocked shortly before ten and announced that Dr Kerr and all the police witnesses were present.
‘What about Craven?’
‘The prison has promised to get him here later this morning. That’s the best they can do.’
‘Then we’d better make a start,’ Jenny said with starchy formality, but under her tightly buttoned jacket her heart was racing. The air felt suddenly muggy, a bead of perspiration trickled down the centre of her chest.
Alison stepped out in front of the now crowded courtroom. ‘All rise.’
There was an obedient scraping of chairs and a subdued chorus of coughs.
Jenny entered and took her place at the head of the room at a table which had been draped with green baize. Fifty people waited obediently for her to sit before they resumed their seats. She picked out the face of Eva’s father, Kenneth Donaldson, sitting alone at the end of a row, surrounded by a brood of journalists eager for a titillating story. From the brief statement he had reluctantly tendered, Jenny knew that he was sixty-six years old and the recently retired managing director of a respected and successful local company which engineered aircraft parts. Sitting stiffly in a pinstriped suit, he looked every inch a man used to being in command who wasn’t going to let his suffering show in public. Three rows behind him, also unaccompanied, sat Father Starr. He fixed her with a still, penetrating gaze designed to remind her that she was answerable to only one authority, of whom he was the official representative.
No fewer than eight lawyers were spread across the two rows of tables ranged opposite Jenny’s. The most senior of them, Fraser Knight QC, rose to make the formal introductions. A tall man with elegant features and an aristocratic bearing, he had earned a formidable reputation representing the Ministry of Defence in a succession of awkward inquests involving the deaths of badly equipped British soldiers in Afghanistan. An eloquent advocate whose deadliest weapons were studied charm and feigned deference, he greeted her with a courtly nod and declared that he represented the Chief Constable of Bristol and Avon police. Two further members of his team sat behind him: junior counsel and a young instructing solicitor. Representing Kenneth Donaldson was Ruth Markham, a solicitor from Collett Abrahams, one of the oldest and most prestigious firms in Bristol, though one noted for its expertise in wills and probate rather than coroners’ inquests. In her late thirties, expensively dressed and with a slender figure of which she was evidently very proud, she exuded confidence. In a team of one, Ruth Markham gave the impression of being more than able to cope alone. Decency and the Mission Church of God were jointly represented by a pugnacious rising star of the criminal bar, Christopher Sullivan. Good-looking in a slightly rough-hewn way, and supported by Ed Prince and two further junior solicitors armed with laptops and imposing piles of textbooks, Jenny recognized Sullivan from a recent article in the Law Society Gazette. Tipped to become the youngest Queen’s Counsel of his generation, Sullivan had battled his way up from tough working-class roots in Bradford to a Cambridge scholarship. But rather than turn his skill into millions at the commercial bar, he had chosen criminal law and become a notoriously fearless prosecutor. The pundits said he was certain to make a move into politics before he was forty.
It was an impressive array of legal talent and the nods and smiles they exchanged amongst themselves told Jenny that despite representing different clients they were united in wanting the same result, and quickly. Her suspicious were confirmed when, as Alison swore in the eight jurors who had been chosen by lot from a pool of fourteen, the lawyers huddled and whispered to one another, as if finalizing battle plans.
The preliminaries dealt with, Jenny turned to address the newly empanelled jurors, who sat in two rows of seats to her left positioned at ninety degrees to her and the advocates’ desks. In an arrangement far more intimate than that found in a regular courtroom, the six women and two men would sit in the thick of the action, almost within touching distance of the small table and chair which would serve as a witness box; close enough to Jenny and the lawyers to spot every tic and gesture.
Hoping that only she was aware of the hint of a nervous tremor in her voice, Jenny explained to the eight puzzled faces that a coroner’s jury had a completely different task from that in a criminal case. Their job was to listen to all the evidence cal
led concerning the violent death of Eva Donaldson, a twenty-seven-year-old former adult movie actress whom they had doubtless known as the public face of Decency. At its conclusion they would be asked to use their common sense and good judgement in completing a questionnaire known as a ‘form of inquisition’. The most important questions they would have to answer were when, where and precisely how she died. Finally, Jenny reminded them that there had already been a brief but well-publicized criminal investigation into Miss Donaldson’s death, which had concluded with Paul Craven’s confession and subsequent guilty plea to her murder. Given that fact, they might be forgiven for thinking there was nothing more to be investigated, but, she stressed, the coroner’s court had a duty to look at the evidence independently from the criminal court. What had gone before must not influence them in any way.
Sullivan couldn’t contain himself. ‘With respect, ma’am,’
he said in a thick, combative Yorkshire accent, ‘the jury must be reminded that they have no power to contradict the finding of the criminal court. Craven has been properly convicted of Miss Donaldson’s murder and therefore this tribunal cannot, under any circumstances, contradict that finding.’
His aggression hit her like a fist. Battling a fresh eruption of anxiety, Jenny said, ‘I don’t agree, Mr Sullivan. The law is very clear on the point. In the Homberg case the High Court said, “The coroner’s overriding duty is to enquire how the deceased died, and that duty prevails over any other inhibition.” ’
‘As I understand the law, ma’am, the only verdict this jury is entitled to return is one of unlawful killing. And with all due respect, given Craven’s conviction, it could be argued that these proceedings are of doubtful legitimacy at best.’
Jenny’s apprehension was overwhelmed by a rush of anger. ‘I will forgive you for not being familiar with the status and procedures of the coroner’s court, Mr Sullivan, but you should know that it is neither inferior nor superior to the Crown Court. Although there are many who wish it were not so, a coroner has an entirely separate jurisdiction and must conduct her inquiry in a spirit of uncompromised independence. Is that understood?’