The Chosen Dead

by M. R. Hall

  ‘Called in sick.’

  ‘Coping?’

  ‘No,’ he said, in the unflappable Northern Irish way of his she had come to find so reassuring. ‘Maybe when they can smell us in the staff canteen they’ll hire in some more fridges.’

  ‘I just wanted to check on a suspected suicide – Jordan. I doubt you’ve had a chance to look at him.’

  ‘Only a glance.’ He placed the lungs on the steel counter alongside the liver and heart, and rinsed his bloody gloves under the tap. ‘It’s that one there.’

  She waited for him to dry his gloves on a paper towel and come over. He tugged his mask down beneath his chin and smiled. At thirty-five he still looked unnaturally youthful for a senior pathologist, his eyes bright and keen. His work was clearly suiting him.

  ‘You told me you weren’t squeamish any more,’ Dr Kerr said. ‘Have a go.’

  Jenny shook her head. ‘Please?’

  He lifted the plastic by the corner and pulled it back to reveal a face that had been staved-in by an overwhelming impact. Jenny felt an involuntary shudder travel the length of her spine. There were no visible features remaining above the lower set of teeth. The torso was spectacularly bruised and most of the ribs were broken. The right arm lay straight, but the left was dislocated at the shoulder and broken in several places, fractured ends of bones jutting through the skin. Dr Kerr drew the sheet all the way back and revealed another massive set of injuries around the waist. The pelvis was shattered and both legs showed every sign of having been driven over by a large, heavy vehicle. Jenny’s eyes went to his hands: they were almost untouched. The fingers were delicate and slender like a pianist’s. There was one ring: a plain wedding band.

  ‘Jumped from a motorway bridge,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Dr Kerr said. ‘I’d say he’d been run over several times. Look at the crushing injuries across the lower legs – that was done by big wide tyres.’

  ‘No one stopped.’

  ‘They never do.’

  Over the initial shock, Jenny leaned forward for a closer look. She ran her eyes over the forearms, looking for the telltale signs of an addict, but there were none.

  She noticed the skin was deeply suntanned above the waist and below the knees, and the man had been slim and muscular. No tattoos or other jewellery; no powerful smell of alcohol that usually accompanied male suicides.

  ‘Anything in the clothing?’ Jenny asked.

  Dr Kerr shook his head and reached beneath the trolley for the list of effects that was kept alongside the bag containing the bloodstained clothes. He handed it to Jenny. It revealed that Jordan had been wearing jeans, a T-shirt, cotton sweater and canvas shoes. The police had retained his wallet. There was no record of a phone, money or keys – the usual items that men carried in their pockets – nor was there any evidence of prescription drugs.

  Jenny said, ‘We’d better have a full suite of tests on bloods and stomach contents. I’ve never known a suicide be entirely clean.’ She turned away, Dr Kerr’s cue to draw the plastic over the body.

  ‘Is something troubling you?’ he asked, reading her frown.

  ‘No,’ Jenny lied. ‘I’m sure I’ll learn a lot more from his wife. When can you have him ready?’

  ‘Give me a couple of hours. We’ll clean him up best we can.’

  ‘Maybe a mask?’

  Dr Kerr nodded. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Jenny left the mortuary and crossed the car park to the main hospital building. She was dreading the encounter with the widow, not for all the usual reasons, but for the unusual ones she knew were coming. Fit, good-looking, well-dressed young men seldom jumped from motorway bridges; less still did they leave their two-year-old children to spend a night alone outdoors. It felt like the worst and most unsettling kind of death: a suicide that had come from nowhere.

  Jenny heard the woman’s anguished cries even before she had pushed through the door. They emanated from behind a curtain drawn around a bed in the children’s ward, and were disturbing everyone within earshot. Staff exchanged glances, parents at other bedsides attempted to distract their fragile sons and daughters from the sound. Jenny was momentarily paralysed, overcome by the widow’s all-consuming grief. She stopped and gathered strength, reminding herself she had to appear strong even if she didn’t feel it.

  A nurse appeared carrying an IV bag. Jenny intercepted her, fishing her identity wallet from her pocket. ‘Jenny Cooper. Severn Vale District Coroner. I’m looking for Mrs Jordan.’

  ‘I’m not sure now’s a good a moment.’ She nodded towards the curtained-off bed.

  ‘Is the child all right?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Mild hypothermia. It’s not life-threatening.’

  ‘The police said he wasn’t found until this morning.’

  ‘He was admitted just under three hours ago.’

  The woman’s cries grew louder. The nurse responded to the anxious faces up and down the ward. ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘This isn’t helping him, is it?’ Jenny heard her say patiently. ‘Maybe it’s best you come with me. Just for a while.’

  Mrs Jordan was younger than Jenny had imagined, perhaps not yet thirty, with long, crow-black hair and wide blue eyes that her anguish did little to dull. There was no question of talking to her in her current state, but curiosity caused Jenny to wait a moment longer while another nurse drew back the curtain to reveal a cot bed containing a tiny child. He was barely more than a toddler and was hooked-up to a heart monitor and several drips. He had his mother’s eyes and they were wide open, staring unfocused into space.

  Jenny felt the silent buzz of her phone. She fished it out of her pocket and saw her officer’s name, Alison, on the screen. She headed out into the corridor to take the call.

  ‘Mrs Cooper. Did DI Watling get hold of you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m at the hospital now. I tried to call you.’

  ‘Sorry. I was out of the office for a while.’ She paused. ‘How’s the little boy?’

  ‘Fine. Physically, at least.’

  ‘Oh . . . Good.’

  Jenny registered a flatness in Alison’s voice and sensed that something was troubling her. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. Would you like me to visit the scene of death? We ought to have some pictures.’

  ‘Won’t the police have done that?’

  ‘They’ve already emailed them. They’re not very clear. What about where the boy was found?’

  ‘Anything you think would be helpful.’

  ‘Righto. I’ll see you back at the office.’

  ‘Alison?’

  She had already rung off. Jenny held the phone in her hand for a moment, unsure whether to call back to tease from her whatever it was she had failed to say, but was interrupted by the nurse, who had appeared from a doorway to her right.

  ‘Now might be a good moment, Mrs Cooper.’

  Jenny looked at her, taking a moment to reorient her thoughts.

  ‘I’ve told her you’re waiting,’ she said with a trace of impatience. ‘She’s calmed down a little.’ The nurse started back towards the ward.

  Jenny approached the door. Pausing outside it, she glanced through the observation pane into an unoccupied side room. Beyond the empty bed, Karen Jordan was standing at the window looking out over rooftops to a line of distant hills. She wore jeans and a plain T-shirt that hugged her slender frame, and dabbed at her eyes with a wad of paper towel. Even with a door between them, Jenny felt her bewilderment like a radiating force. She knocked lightly and stepped inside.

  ‘Mrs Jordan?’

  The young woman turned, a sob catching in her throat.

  Jenny moved cautiously towards her. ‘Jenny Cooper. I’m the coroner.’

  Karen Jordan stared at her with eyes frozen in an expression of shock.

  ‘Would you mind if I asked a couple of questions about your husband?’

  She shook her head, her lips clamped tightly together.

  ‘His name was Adam Jordan?’
r />   She nodded.

  ‘His age?’

  ‘Thirty-two.’ The words came out in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘He worked for a charity. It’s called AFAD – Africa Aid and Development . . . He came back from South Sudan at the end of May.’

  ‘Is there anything about your husband’s state of mind that I ought to know?’

  She shook her head violently, her hair sweeping across her face and clinging to her cheeks. ‘No.’

  ‘I was told he had parked at the Bristol Memorial Woodlands – that’s a cemetery, isn’t it?’

  ‘A natural burial ground. Adam’s father died last autumn. He’d gone there with Sam, that’s all. I was working.’

  ‘Sam’s your son?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Was your husband close to his father?’

  ‘I suppose—’ Her voice cracked.

  Thinking it better to get the painful conversation over quickly, Jenny persisted. ‘Can you think of any reason why your husband may have taken his life, Mrs Jordan?’

  ‘He didn’t!’

  ‘I see. And how do you know that?’

  ‘He was my husband.’ She stared at her with wild, enraged eyes. ‘Don’t you tell me I don’t know my own husband!’

  Jenny wanted to tell her the agony would pass, that as despairing as she felt now, it would not get any worse, but she was unreachable. There was no question of putting her through the ordeal of an identification. She turned to the door and quietly left her to cry herself out.

  FOUR

  FROM THE MOMENT SHE HAD ENTERED the mortuary early that morning, Jenny had felt something intangible, a deep, uneasy sensation that had stayed with her and intensified after her unhappy encounter with Jordan’s widow. As hard as she tried to be rational, she couldn’t help acknowledging her instinct that something about the dead man hadn’t felt right.

  Dr Kerr, along with every other pathologist she had ever met, seemed able to deal with each set of human remains with the same degree of clinical distance: the flesh on the table was nothing more than a forensic puzzle to be solved. But for Jenny, each body carried its own complex atmospheres and stories. There were those empty shells from which the soul had passed peacefully; those that still carried the pain of a protracted struggle to cling to life; those that seemed still frozen in the violent moment of suicide; and those, like Jordan’s, that hurled confusion at her. She had dealt with more than a handful of bridge jumpers in her five years in post, and all had had a history of depression or worse. As suicides went, they were at the considerate end: they had chosen an emphatic death away from the intimacy of the home. Nearly all had jumped into water from either the Severn or the Clifton Suspension Bridge. But a leap from a motorway bridge was something altogether different. It was an enraged choice made by someone intent on inflicting their suffering on the innocent strangers who would have the misfortune to run over their bodies. It spoke of a fury that bordered on the murderous.

  Jenny carried these thoughts with her during the drive across the Downs, wearing thin and brown at the end of a dry spell that had lasted nearly a month. Descending the hill, she entered the bustling street-life of Whiteladies Road: crowded cafes and music throbbing out of a reggae record store, kids with waist-length dreadlocks dancing outside on the pavement and bemused old women stopping to watch.

  The Georgian terrace in Jamaica Street where Jenny had her modest, two-room ground-floor offices was drenched in unaccustomed sunlight that showed up the cracking paint on the window frames and the rivulets in the ancient panes of glass. There was a faded grandeur about the slowly crumbling sandstone facade that might even inspire a level of awe in the casual visitor, but beyond the front step, the building she shared with three other sets of offices on the upper floors was tired and uncared-for. A worn carpet covered creaky boards in the hallway, and unclaimed junk mail spilled from a shelf which none of the tenants ever cleared. Jenny made her way along the passage to the heavy oak door that bore a dull brass plaque that read simply, ‘Coroner’.

  The reception area – the inviolable domain that belonged to Alison, her officer – was deserted. The magazines set out for visitors were neatly ordered. Jenny’s bundle of messages and overnight death reports were precisely clipped together and sitting squarely in a brand-new wire tray. The papers that usually cluttered Alison’s desk had been filed. Gone too was the array of sticky notes that invariably decorated the surround of Alison’s computer monitor, along with the postcards and photographs that had covered the noticeboard behind her chair. Alison had done more than merely tidy. It felt like a purge. Jenny instinctively scanned the desk for some clue – there was always a reason for her officer having one of her irregular clear-outs; it was her way of imposing order on churning emotions – but all personal traces had been swept away.

  Unsure whether the fresh sensation of unease she felt steal over her had been carried with her from the hospital or stirred by the unquiet atmosphere left in Alison’s wake, Jenny moved through into the comforting disorder of her office on the far side of the connecting door. Files were stacked in heaps either side of the desk, books and papers covered every surface and much of the floor. It had been a more than usually hectic summer and Jenny sensed it was about to get busier.

  A computer groaning with unread emails was waiting for her. Much of the mail was made up of the tedious circulars and bulletins that were spewed out daily by the Ministry of Justice, but one email was from DI Watling’s station at Gloucester. Attached to the cursory message were scans of the papers in their file: statements from the traffic officers who had found Adam Jordan’s body, several photographs of it lying in situ, a statement from the female officer who had discovered his child wandering in the memorial woodlands, and two photographs of Jordan’s car as it was found, an elderly black Saab parked on a grass verge. Jenny noticed that the passenger door was open, there was a child seat in the back and what appeared to be a small wooden figurine hanging from the rear-view mirror. The final document was a scan of two petrol receipts found stuffed in the Saab’s cup-holder, one several days old from a Texaco garage in Bristol, the other bearing yesterday’s date from a filling station in Great Shefford, Berkshire. The time code showed it was paid for at 5.45 p.m., along with a sandwich and several soft drinks.

  Jenny clicked back to the photographs of the inside of the car and increased their size. There was very little to see. She homed in on the figurine and saw that it was a slender female form carved in dark wood, naked from the waist up. Recalling the one piece of useful piece of information Karen Jordan had managed to give her, she ran a search on AFAD. The Aid Agency’s website popped up at the head of the list. Jenny opened it and surfed through its pages, learning that it was an organization operating chiefly in South Sudan, Ethiopia and Chad. Partnered with a host of environmental charities that shared the ‘small is beautiful’ philosophy, it seemed to concentrate its efforts on digging wells and setting up sustainable agriculture programmes in areas that had been ravaged by drought and famine. All the photographs were of Africans working for themselves; barely a white face featured. She searched the site for Jordan’s name, but AFAD didn’t appear to be an organization keen on personalities. Jenny quickly gained the impression that one worked for AFAD as you might for a church: for a higher purpose.

  The agency had an office in central London and a contact number was listed. Professional etiquette dictated that it was largely the job of the coroner’s officer to gather evidence, but in a small provincial outpost like Jenny’s, the load tended to be shared a little more evenly than it would have been in better-funded jurisdictions. Jenny didn’t need an excuse, however; she was impatient for an insight into Adam Jordan.

  The phone was answered by an earnest-sounding young woman with an accent Jenny guessed to be Dutch.

  Introducing herself, Jenny asked to speak to whoever was in charge.

  ‘You can speak with me,’ the girl said, ‘we all share responsibility.’<
br />
  ‘I see. And your name is—?’

  ‘Eda. Eda Hincks.’

  Jenny hesitated. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about Adam Jordan—’

  ‘We have,’ the young woman interjected. ‘We are all very shocked.’

  ‘The police are satisfied it was a suicide, but I now have to carry out my own inquiry. I appreciate it’s very soon after the event, but would you be able to provide a statement for me?’

  ‘I have no idea what happened.’

  ‘I’d appreciate just a little background. The nature of his work, any personal details that you think may be relevant, or observations on his state of mind. Anything that might help me understand what was going on in his life.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Eda replied. ‘Adam was here last week. He was perfectly fine. It’s such a shock . . .’ She tailed off.

  Jenny said, ‘You don’t feel there’s anything immediately obvious I should know about?’

  ‘No. He always seemed so happy. That’s what we thought.’

  ‘You knew him well?’

  ‘Professionally, yes. Not so much socially.’

  ‘Did he have a close colleague, someone he’d been working with abroad? His wife said he’d recently come back from Africa.’

  ‘Yes—’ Eda sounded hesitant.

  ‘I assume he wasn’t working alone?’

  ‘No. He was in South Sudan with Harry. Harry Thorn.’

  ‘May I have Mr Thorn’s details?’

  ‘I can give you his number, but I couldn’t say for certain where he is. He’s out of the office at the moment.’

  ‘The number will be fine.’

  Eda read it out to her, and then explained that he and Adam had recently completed a four-month tour of duty working on a trickle-irrigation project. They’d turned parched scrub into maize fields using buried pipes that drip-fed stored rainwater into the soil. It was a huge success, she seemed keen to emphasize; Adam had been delighted with it.

  Jenny ended the call feeling that there was a subtext to Eda’s account that she had failed to grasp. It was as if she had been apologizing for something. She tried Thorn’s number – a mobile phone – but it was switched off with no voicemail.