The Chosen Dead

by M. R. Hall

  Jenny tried for more detail, but Eda persisted with her studiedly bland answers that delivered no new insight into Adam Jordan. And all the while Toby appeared to take no notice of their conversation as he tapped quietly on his computer. Jenny decided to up the pressure.

  ‘Do you know the two main reasons people kill themselves, Miss Hincks?’

  She seemed thrown by the question. ‘Depression, and . . .’ She shrugged.

  ‘Shame,’ Jenny said. ‘Was Mr Jordan depressed, to your knowledge?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Did he have anything to be ashamed of?’

  Eda’s eyes darted involuntarily to Toby.

  ‘He completed his project precisely as planned. He had no reason for regret.’

  Her answer rang as hollow as a pebble hitting the floor of a dry well.

  ‘Somehow I struggle to believe that. It wouldn’t be human.’

  ‘What wouldn’t be human?’ A voice bellowed from across the room.

  Jenny swung round to see Harry Thorn stepping through the door, thrusting his phone into the pocket of his threadbare jeans. He glanced at Toby, who started up from his desk and headed out. Harry clapped him on the shoulder as he passed, as if in thanks. The penny dropped – the gesture was for tipping him off. Toby had been transcribing their conversation and relaying it straight to Harry’s phone by email.

  ‘Turning up unannounced is your signature, isn’t it, Mrs Cooper?’ Harry looked ruffled and hung-over, and even from several paces smelt sourly of stale smoke. ‘You think we’ve got something to hide? Do your worst, turn the place over. See if I fucking care.’

  Jolted by the violence of his outburst, Jenny tried to remain composed. ‘If you prefer, we can leave all this to court.’

  He was standing close by now, looking down at her in a way that suggested he might just grab her by the lapels and toss her out of the door. ‘Why don’t you piss off, Mrs Cooper, and leave us to get on with our work?’

  ‘I would have liked to spare Mrs Jordan the ordeal of a lengthy inquest.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Karen. She’s heard all there is to know.’

  Jenny felt her frustration turn to anger. ‘There are aspects of Mr Jordan’s work in Africa I would appreciate your help in understanding,’ she said coolly.

  ‘How’s this? Don’t listen to the cock-sucking spooks who think we must be terrorists because we refuse to work for them.’ He smiled at her surprise. ‘You think they haven’t knocked on my door, too?’ He laughed, a short dismissive burst like gunfire. ‘You know squat about Africa. Take some good advice and leave it to those that do.’

  ‘Why did Adam Jordan take his life, Mr Thorn?’

  Harry looked at her with narrow, reptilian eyes. ‘The problem with Adam was he took it all to heart. Me, I’ve learned to keep the sluices open. In it comes, then washes right out again. That’s the only way to survive in this business – keep the sluices open.’ He looked at Eda Hincks, who since his arrival had displayed neither shock nor embarrassment. She seemed to admire his bravado. ‘Show Mrs Cooper out, Eda.’

  ‘I’ll see you at court, Mr Thorn,’ Jenny said, and made her own way to the door.

  Harry gave a dismissive grunt, and as Jenny crossed the room, he said, ‘Some can take it, some can’t. That’s just how it fucking is.’

  Jenny stepped out onto the hot pavement with the feeling that she had panicked Harry Thorn, not so much by her unannounced arrival – he had been anticipating that – but by her insistence. He was used to playing rough, to bargaining and twisting his path out of awkward corners the African way, but it couldn’t work with her. Behind the bluster, she had seen fear. There had been something else, too: someone who had truly learned to keep the sluices open would have kept his cool. Harry had shown all the signs of a man whose grip was loosening, a man whose past was rushing up to meet him. Push him a little harder and he might just crack open.

  Turning left onto Great Marlborough Street, Jenny saw Toby emerge from the coffee shop across the street. And as by some sixth sense, he sensed her presence, glanced her way, then guiltily averted his eyes. She started towards the kerb, hoping to intercept him as he turned right towards the office, but anticipating her, he went left and melted in amongst the pedestrians heading towards Oxford Street.

  Crawling through the west London traffic, Jenny tried her best to convince Alison that she was as good as in the office. In an extended phone call that lasted nearly the entire hour it took to progress as far as Heathrow, she answered queries, dictated emails and made decisions to issue death certificates in three separate cases. Alison remained stoical in the face of her abandonment, but her silent disapproval held up a mirror to Jenny’s impulsiveness. Again, she questioned whether it was pride, pig-headedness or neurosis that was driving her to pursue the Adam Jordan investigation beyond all reasonable limits. It was Alison who unwittingly provided part of the answer when, at the end of their extended call, she was silent for a long moment, then asked, ‘I’m not being rude, Mrs Cooper, but are you sure this case hasn’t stirred something –’ she hesitated, groping for the appropriate word – ‘unhealthy in you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘I don’t like to be personal, but I’ve seen you react this way before. It’s because he left his child like that, isn’t it? You don’t like to accept that someone can behave so callously without a good reason. But sometimes there just isn’t one. People who have been good fathers and husbands can suddenly be selfish and cruel. Don’t you think you should try to accept that?’

  Her plea was as heartfelt as it was unprompted, and delivered with such concern that it was impossible for Jenny not to take it to heart.

  ‘Thank you,’ she found herself saying. ‘I’ll give it some thought.’

  Little thought was required. Alison had simply put into words what was obvious to both of them: unable to mend her own broken family, she spent her whole working life trying to fix other people’s. But was that unhealthy? Did accepting this truth make her choices any easier? The one that faced her now was whether to continue on to Bristol and devote herself to all the other bereaved families awaiting her answers, or to turn off the motorway to retrace Adam Jordan’s steps on the day he died. As she approached the exit road, the sensation in the pit of her stomach made the decision for her.

  Great Shefford was a small, mostly modern-built village a little over two miles from the motorway. She approached through a patchwork of fields, many of which were planted with hybrid rapeseed that made carpets of brilliant, unnatural yellow too dazzling to look at directly. She turned at a crossroads where the Swan pub stood, and headed out of the village centre to its margins. After a short distance she arrived at Brookside filling station. Behind it, a grassy meadow rose up in a gentle slope. Jenny pulled in and found hers to be the only vehicle on the forecourt. Feeling a little foolish, she fetched the picture of Adam Jordan she had taken to carrying with her and took it into the small garage shop.

  Jenny approached the counter. A large woman in her early twenties was seated on a high stool, turning through the pages of a gossip magazine.

  ‘I wonder if you could help me.’ Jenny handed her the photograph. ‘I’m Coroner for the Severn Vale District. Unfortunately this man died a little over a week ago.’

  The girl looked at the picture, then up at Jenny, with vacant eyes. ‘You what?’

  ‘I’m a coroner. I have to determine the cause of death . . .’ Jenny could tell she wasn’t following. ‘He was here on Monday the 23rd at a quarter to six in the evening. He bought petrol, drinks and a sandwich. He had a young child with him in the car, he may have brought him in.’

  The blank face behind the counter failed to animate.

  ‘Do you remember if you were working then, or if not, who was?’

  The girl said, ‘I work Mondays till six.’ She looked down at the photograph and frowned. ‘I might have seen him.’

  ‘He was driving an estate car. An old black Saab
.’

  ‘I remember a man with a black girl.’

  ‘A girl? What was she like?’

  ‘I say girl, she was a woman. Small, thin . . . And there was a kid. A little white boy. And she was holding him.’ She nodded. ‘That’s it, that’s what made me look – she was black but holding a white kid.’

  Jenny felt her heart quickening. Now she had someone to look for. A living witness to Jordan’s final hours. ‘Do you remember anything more? What did they do? How did they seem together?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘That’s all I remember, really, except . . .’ She hesitated for a moment as an image floated back to the surface of her mind. ‘There was another guy, that’s right . . .’

  ‘With them?’

  ‘No. They were here in the shop. He was standing here paying, and the girl came and tapped him on the shoulder and said something, maybe his name.’

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. She said, “Adam?” And he looked round and another car, a small one, had pulled up alongside his and there was a bloke getting out of it. Then the man you’re asking about went outside, and I think shook hands with him. And then they went around there. There’s a little place you can park out the back of the building. I think that’s where they went.’

  ‘Both cars?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And this other man? What did he look like?’

  ‘Thirtyish, thirty-five. Kind of . . . ordinary. Glasses. Yeah, he was wearing glasses.’

  ‘Have you seen him before?’

  ‘Maybe. I couldn’t say for certain.’

  Jenny glanced up behind the counter and saw a security camera.

  ‘You don’t have any of this on tape, do you?’

  ‘Not that far back, no.’

  Jenny continued to interrogate the cashier for several more minutes, hoping to pick up any small detail that might lead her closer to the girl or the nondescript man they met with, but all she could offer was her impression that Adam Jordan and the girl hadn’t been intimate. ‘It was more like she was working for him or something,’ she said, ‘when she tapped his shoulder, she seemed nervous, as if she didn’t like to touch him.’

  Jenny left the shop and drove her car around to the side of the building, where she found the entrance to an unmade track leading to a farm. A galvanized five-bar gate stood open, and just inside it was space enough to park three or four cars side by side. Jenny stared through the windscreen at the empty field beyond and tried to imagine what on earth would have brought Adam Jordan to this spot only a few hours before his death. Puzzling over who the second man might have been, she recalled Harry Thorn’s outburst: ‘Don’t listen to the cock-sucking spooks who think we must be terrorists because we refuse to work for them.’ His weary, mocking smile. ‘You think they haven’t knocked on my door, too?’ And the girl. Who was she? Jenny’s initial thought had been that it might have been Harry Thorn’s girlfriend, Gabra, but she was over six feet tall. The girl with Adam had been small and slight.

  Jenny turned the Land Rover around and started back to the motorway, wondering where to look next, and even if she dared. She had driven less than half a mile when her phone rang.

  ‘Mrs Cooper – it’s Andy Kerr.’ He was speaking from beside a busy road, his voice partially obscured by traffic.

  ‘What’s happening? Any more news on Elena Lujan? Please don’t tell me we’ve more cases.’

  ‘No.’ Jenny heard him swallow nervously. ‘It’s nothing so obvious.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘After what happened to Sophie Freeman’s body I had the technicians run an audit on the forty or so we’ve got here at present. I don’t know if you’ve heard that the hospital’s being swept by a team who are refusing to talk to anyone. They won’t even say who they work for.’

  ‘I had heard something along those lines.’

  ‘I thought it might be them. I assume they’re some sort of private company hired in by the management. That’s the only way I could think that someone would have got access to the locked refrigerator. The thing is . . .’ He paused, as if questioning his own soundness of mind. ‘None of the other bodies had been touched, except one. Your road-bridge suicide – Adam Jordan.’

  Jenny felt as if she had just wandered into a darkened room to hear the door click shut behind her.

  ‘Precisely the same procedure,’ Dr Kerr said. ‘Cerebro-spinal fluid drained and brain tissue removed. Have you any idea what the hell’s going on?’

  FIFTEEN

  JENNY ARRIVED IN THE MORTUARY to see Adam Jordan’s body lying on one of the two tables. Dr Kerr had emptied the contents of the clear plastic bag containing the previously dissected major organs onto the stainless-steel counter and was now meticulously sorting through the pieces. Jenny tugged a paper mask from a dispenser and pulled it over her mouth and nose.

  ‘My God.’ The smell of the reopened body was overpowering.

  ‘Someone’s had it out of the fridge, that’s why,’ Dr Kerr said, engrossed in his task. ‘You can see the decomposition in the tissues. It must have been gone twelve hours or more.’

  Jenny glanced behind her. There was a technician wheeling a gurney past the door in the corridor, but otherwise they were alone.

  ‘It’s all right, he knows,’ Dr Kerr said. ‘It was him who spotted it.’

  Jenny could see sections of heart, lungs, kidneys and liver, but no sign of brain tissue.

  ‘Same MO?’ she asked.

  ‘Exactly. The top of the bag was even folded the same way. Someone had taken a lot of care to cover their tracks – they’d re-stitched using the same holes. Must have taken hours.’

  ‘Have you told anyone?’

  ‘No. Thought I’d keep this one quiet. My manager might already know, of course.’

  ‘What are you checking for?’

  ‘Any other signs of interference. I think they may have taken biopsies, but there’s nothing else missing, as far as I can see.’ He stopped work for a moment and looked at her over his mask. ‘This man did not have meningitis, and there is no evidence of the bacteria in the back of his throat.’

  ‘Someone must think there’s a link. Perhaps because he’d been in Africa?’

  ‘Who would know that?’ Dr Kerr said. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. Why choose a body that has no connection?’ He let out a sigh that seemed to say the incident caused him a profound loss of faith. He was a man who lived on procedure; the sacred rules had been violated.

  Jenny said, ‘All I can think of is something that sounds too elaborate – whoever it is, whoever they are, might be trying to concoct a link where none exists, fabricating evidence that Adam Jordan brought the bacteria into the hospital.’

  ‘They’d still have to know Jordan’s history. Not even I would know that, unless someone like you told me.’

  Jenny said, ‘Are you sure it’s safe to talk in here?’

  ‘After this, I don’t think I care either way. Last time I checked my contract, complicity in the theft of body parts wasn’t a requirement.’

  Jenny said, ‘I admire the sentiment, but I’d rather we didn’t take the chance.’

  They stepped out of the back door of the mortuary and sheltered from the rain under the loading-bay canopy. Huddled in a corner where they couldn’t be seen from the hospital building opposite, Jenny gave Andy Kerr the highlights of Adam Jordan’s recent history. She told him about Harry Thorn and his uneasy relationship with British officials in Africa, about Karen Jordan and the break-in at her home, and ended with Sonia Blake and the newspaper article she’d found about her murdered father.

  Far from being surprised, each element fed into a picture he had already partially formed.

  ‘I thought you’d be more sceptical,’ Jenny said, when she came to the end of her story, ‘or at least think I was being paranoid imagining that anything could connect it all together.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’s starting to make some sort of sense.’

/>   ‘It is?’

  ‘The team sweeping the hospital are going through this place like they really mean business. I’d put money on them being from the Defence Science Lab at Porton Down – they’re the only outfit I can think of with the manpower and expertise. They’d also have people capable of borrowing bodies from my mortuary – whoever it was needed keys.’

  ‘Porton Down is the military’s research laboratory in Wiltshire?’

  ‘Government and military. It’s also where the HPA have their Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response.’

  ‘That would explain the secrecy. I still don’t see why they singled out Adam Jordan’s body. There must have been hundreds, if not thousands of people who had travelled to Britain from central Africa in recent months.’

  ‘What about the girl he was with?’ Andy Kerr said. ‘Do you think she was African? What do you know about her?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jenny admitted.

  ‘Maybe someone else does? She could be the connection.’

  ‘What sort of connection? Do you mean she might have been carrying the infection?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s all shooting in the dark. I don’t like to speculate.’

  ‘I’m asking you to. I need to make some decisions. Do you think I should be looking further, or should I just sign Sophie Freeman and Elena Lujan’s deaths off as due to natural causes?’

  He looked uncomfortable being challenged so directly.

  ‘Natural causes would mean that there had been no human act or omission that contributed, of course,’ Jenny added. ‘But last time we met you seemed to think that might not be the case. You were talking about recombinant strains.’

  ‘All right.’ He couldn’t have sounded more reluctant. ‘I’m going to stick to logic, OK? We’ve got a drug-resistant strain of a highly dangerous organism. It either evolved naturally in a human host or, less likely, it’s leaked out from a vaccine-research project, possibly through someone who works in a lab becoming infected. If it’s entirely human in origin, your initial suspicion would be an African source. If there’s a connection with a lab, you’d turn to the Public Register of Genetically Modified Organisms to see who in the UK has a licence to work with these bacteria. As I mentioned to you, I’ve checked it – there are currently three university labs working with meningitis, all on standard strains, none of them modifying to create anything like what we’ve seen here. But if government or military scientists have a project running it might not be on the register – there’s an exemption from publication on grounds of national security.’