The Chosen Dead

by M. R. Hall

  ‘I’ve no idea who you’re talking about,’ he answered.

  ‘I’ll make you a deal,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ll move as quickly as I can on the Freeman inquest, and you remind Ms Webley and her colleagues that they’ve no business interfering with a coroner’s inquiries, no matter how uncomfortable it is for them.’

  He answered with an ominous silence.

  ‘So the law no longer applies?’ Jenny said. ‘The Coroners Act has been repealed, has it?’

  ‘Jenny,’ he said pleadingly, ‘I like to think we’re friends.’

  ‘They’ve really got you on the hook, haven’t they? Why don’t you just show these people the door and tell them they can’t interfere with justice?’

  ‘There are limits. You know that as well as I do.’

  ‘No one respects boundaries, Simon. It’s one of the laws of nature – boundaries are battlegrounds. Someone or something is always trying to move them.’

  ‘I really can’t protect you this time, Jenny.’

  ‘Then see if you can manage not to do me any harm.’

  ‘You don’t make it easy.’

  ‘Think how dull your life would be without me.’

  Another sigh. This one more wistful.

  ‘Where are you, by the way? Your officer sounded at the end of her tether.’

  ‘Never mind. Goodbye, Simon.’

  She ended the call and was about to switch off her phone when she noticed that she had a voicemail. She checked it, expecting to hear a grudging apology from Michael – it was about time – but it was from Ross, asking if she was free to have dinner with him and Sally. Jenny called straight back. She’d love to. She’d pick them up from David’s at eight. The deal sealed, she rang off, feeling her worries about him dispersing like smoke in the wind.

  It wasn’t the porter she had encountered on the two previous occasions behind the desk in the lodge at Worcester College, but a junior deputy with a thin frame and a cautious, helpful smile. Jenny introduced herself and informed him she was here to look over Sonia Blake’s rooms. In a dilemma, he explained that his boss, Mr Davies, had told him that the police had left instructions that no one was to be allowed in without their express permission. Jenny patiently informed him that the police had no power to obstruct her inquiry, and if it was any comfort, all she wanted to do was look. She wouldn’t be disturbing a thing.

  A warm smile won him round. Asking her if she could keep her visit quick, he fetched the keys and led her across the cloister. Jenny learned that his name was Will, and that the police had been back earlier that morning asking if any unauthorized visitors had been spotted in recent weeks. They had been up to Sonia’s rooms but hadn’t appeared to take anything.

  They emerged from the vaulted stone roof of the cloister into bright sunlight. A large group of boisterous Chinese students spilled out of a doorway ahead of them.

  ‘Summer school,’ Will explained. ‘The Chinese don’t seem to do holidays.’

  Coming up behind them was Alex Forster. His eyes widened in surprise, as if Jenny were the last person he was expecting to see.

  ‘Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not at present.’

  Forster glanced to the deputy porter as if for an explanation, but Jenny headed him off. ‘Sorry, Mr Forster. I’m in rather a hurry.’

  She stepped past him and continued on to the far staircase, Will following at her heels.

  ‘Do you know if he and Mrs Blake were close?’ Jenny asked, as they started up towards the second floor.

  ‘You’d see them together now and again, but she always seemed quite a loner to me.’

  ‘Do you know if she got on with her students?’

  ‘They seemed to like her.’

  Jenny remembered Katya, the girl who had come to the door the first time she had visited the college. She tried to describe her, but Will couldn’t place her. There were so many students coming and going, it was hard to remember faces.

  The full glare of the sun was streaming through the landing window, making stage-light beams of circling dust. While Will unlocked the oak door, Jenny gazed out over the quad and felt herself slip back in time. She pictured young men in frock coats dreaming of making fortunes in far-off continents, with all the weight and confidence of an empire behind them.

  ‘Mrs Cooper?’ Will held open the door. ‘I’ll stay out here if you don’t mind.’

  The office was more or less as she had seen it the previous afternoon, except that the cup had been tidied away and the papers on the desk had gone, along with the computer. The expanse of wall opposite the windows overlooking the quad was lined floor to ceiling with a fitted, heavy bookcase, and against the wall opposite the door, a set of cheap bookshelves of the kind you might slot together yourself was loaded with disorderly files.

  Jenny began her search – for what, she had no idea – with the stack of three drawers in Sonia’s desk. They were as chaotic as Jenny’s, filled with dead pens, assorted stationery, and in the middle drawer, several birthday cards from students and some photographs taken on a punting trip. Jenny pulled them out for a closer look. Sonia was the oldest in the group, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and drinking champagne. She looked a little drunk, abandoned even. The top drawer seemed to serve as a way-station for items that went in and out of pockets and handbags: keys, loose change, a wristwatch, a deodorant stick, a couple of bracelets and what looked like a pendant – a rectangle of silver metal an inch wide, with a ring attached to its bottom edge, hanging from a chain that seemed a little too heavy-duty for a woman’s necklace. Curious, Jenny picked it up, hooking her finger through the ring. But as she lifted it from the drawer, the chain snagged and the ring separated from the body of the pendant. To Jenny’s surprise, she saw that this was no mere piece of jewellery. The ring was attached to a triangular, razor-sharp blade that had been sheathed in the pendant. Keeping her back to Will, she studied it more closely and noticed that the ring was fashioned to spread the weight of impact across the knuckle. It was a carefully engineered weapon: hook your middle finger through the ring and you could strike out with a blade that would slice effortlessly through flesh. Still unseen by Will, she returned it to its sheath, then slipped it into her jacket pocket.

  With her blood pumping a little harder, Jenny turned to the shelves laden with files. The subjects were scrawled on the spines in Sonia’s semi-legible hand: Egypt – Revolution stood alongside French C19th Colonialism and Somalian War. On another shelf were files that appeared to be more directly connected with her teaching: exam papers, copies of student essays and papers relating to the university’s Politics department. The haphazardness of it all told Jenny that Webley and her people would already have been through and taken anything of interest to them. Ready to give up and accept that she was unlikely to find anything more she spotted a small file buried amongst others with a single word, Slavsky, written on the spine. She pulled it from the shelf, but opened it to find it empty. All that remained were a few traces of torn paper pinched between the spring clips; the contents had been hastily removed.

  She put the empty file back, knowing now that Professor Slavsky was a man of interest not just to Adam Jordan.

  ‘Will you be long, Mrs Cooper?’ Will said, hovering nervously in the doorway.

  ‘Just a moment.’

  ‘I think there’s someone coming.’

  Sure enough there were footsteps and voices approaching up the stairwell.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Jenny said, pretending indifference.

  She hurriedly scanned each one of the bookshelves. There was a large selection of novels, mostly by literary writers, as well as many thick academic tomes. The footsteps drew closer.

  She heard a voice she recognized as the porter’s, thick and hoarse as if he’d been roused from sleep, call out, ‘Is she in there? I told you not to let anyone in.’

  ‘Leave him t
o me,’ Jenny said, continuing to study the shelves.

  She alighted on a section filled not with political books, but scientific texts. She saw titles including ‘Brock, Biology of Microorganisms’ and ‘Primrose, Principles of Genomics’. She searched the spines for Slavsky’s name, but failed to find it. She turned back to face the desk as the porter’s voice berated Will, ‘What do you think you’re doing? What did I tell you?’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Davies. But Mrs Cooper—’

  The porter pushed past Will and shoved his way into the room as Jenny leaned down to pick up a scrap of folded paper that had fallen beneath the desk.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded, red-faced and perspiring. ‘The police said no one was to be allowed in.’

  ‘As I explained to your colleague, the police have no right, and certainly no power, to obstruct a coroner’s investigation.’ Jenny spoke calmly. She glanced at the piece of paper she had picked up. It looked as if it had been torn from a message pad. It was thick with phone numbers, names and doodles. In the bottom corner Sonia had written Gina, and absentmindedly illuminated it with intertwining flowers.

  ‘Give me that!’

  Davies shot out a thick hand and seized her wrist in a powerful grip that cut off the blood.

  ‘Out.’

  She dropped the note. ‘Let go. You’ve no right—’

  ‘You can call the police, then.’

  He hauled her onto the landing, kicked the outer door shut and let her go.

  Will stood mute, avoiding her gaze.

  ‘Go on, call them,’ Davies taunted.

  ‘You could do with learning some manners, Mr Davies,’ Jenny said, refusing to rise.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Will whispered to his boss, as Jenny started down the stairs.

  ‘You can shut your mouth,’ Davies hissed back at him.

  Slavsky. The name bounced tirelessly around her brain as she made the twenty-minute drive from Oxford to Harwell. Sonia Blake had kept an entire file on him. Why? Adam Jordan had bought his book. He connected the two of them, but all Jenny knew was that he had been a Soviet biologist who defected to the West. There had been mention of the Soviets in the article reporting the discovery of Roy Emmett Hudson’s remains, but he clearly hadn’t defected. Slavsky might conceivably have been working in a similar field to Hudson, a fact which might have been of interest to Sonia Blake, but it was hard to find a reason that would tie in Adam Jordan.

  The questions continued to mount as she turned into the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. She found herself driving along a dead-straight road named Fermi Avenue, approaching a large, circular construction that sat incongruously amidst the surrounding fields. The other buildings nearby were as anonymous as those in an out-of-town business park. But there was nothing unremarkable about the worlds behind the bland exteriors. Aside from the synchrotron, Jenny had learned that the campus was also home to the Rutherford Appleton laboratory, which, among other things, was an international hub for cutting-edge research in particle physics. More than ten thousand scientists and engineers were based here, working to solve the secrets of dark matter and probing the atmospheres of distant planets.

  All their collective brainpower, however, had failed to conjure names for the campus’s grid of internal thoroughfares any more charming than Road One, Road Two and Road Three. Jenny had wanted to be awed, but the entrance to the Diamond Light Source reminded her of an airport terminal. A glass and steel atrium, sterile and air-conditioned, all function, nothing beautiful to catch the eye.

  She arrived at a reception desk separated from the rest of the building by a panoply of barriers, cameras and high-grade security guards. The corporate smile of the man behind the desk faded as Jenny explained that she was a coroner inquiring after a recent visitor who had died less than twenty-four hours before.

  Jenny waited while he called through to a superior and watched the occupants of the building come and go. She was struck by how young they were. Most were in their twenties, nearly all were male, and not one suit and tie between them. Anywhere else, she would have mistaken them for students on their way to a bar.

  The security manager was named Dawn Leyton. Jenny guessed she was ex-military: superficially polite, squarely built and without warmth. She handed Jenny a visitor pass and took her through the security barrier. Then she led her across the atrium and along a small enclosed corridor, accessed by a separate card-swipe, off which she had a small, impersonal, paperless office.

  ‘Do you have any identification?’ Leyton asked.

  Jenny gave her several. Leyton studied each of them in turn before typing her name into a computer. Jenny glanced at the monitor’s reflection in the window behind her and saw that she had searched under ‘images’, which had thrown up a number of photographs from the rash of newspaper reports that had so inaccurately reported her life story two years before. If she had chosen to, Leyton could have read all about the troublesome coroner who as a child was implicated in the suspicious death of her five-year-old cousin; her run-ins with the police and, of course, her arrests.

  ‘It’s a simple query,’ Jenny said, growing impatient. ‘All I need to know is who it was Sonia Blake was visiting when she came here.’

  ‘For what purpose?’ Leyton inquired.

  ‘It may be of relevance to an inquest I’m conducting.’

  Leyton said, ‘This concerns a death? Is it a criminal matter?’

  ‘It’s a coroner’s inquest,’ Jenny said, straining to remain civil. ‘Depending on what emerges, criminal charges can sometimes ensue. There’s no suggestion of any crime at this stage.’

  ‘Whose death does this inquiry concern?’

  Jenny considered the consequence of Leyton consulting with superiors, who within minutes would be in touch with government departments, whose security protocols would see her request finding its way to Ruth Webley and her colleagues before it was ever answered. A flash of inspiration sent her on a different tack.

  ‘A Spanish prostitute called Elena.’

  ‘Surname?’ Leyton said, glancing back at her computer, doubtless ready to search the Internet again.

  It was time to pull rank. ‘I get the impression you’re not eager to assist,’ Jenny said. ‘That’s fine. I can either come back with the police or summon you to give evidence to my inquest. Which would you prefer?’

  ‘What happened to this prostitute?’ Leyton hedged.

  ‘Would it make it easier if you had an official order? I can have one emailed to you right away.’

  ‘Is this person implicated in the death?’ Leyton said, ignoring Jenny’s offer.

  Jenny met her gaze. The show of politeness was over. Leyton, she sensed, was a real brute. The kind that would need a punch between the eyes to realize who it was she was dealing with.

  ‘There have been four deaths, Ms Leyton. Three of them within my jurisdiction. Either you cooperate, or I’ll consider you to have obstructed my investigation. I’m sure you are bright enough to understand the implications of that.’

  Leyton checked her screen one last time. ‘Email me the order. I’ll get you the name.’

  Half an hour later, Jenny followed Leyton along a corridor that led into the heart of the building. She began to feel the pervading sense of excitement in the air: the anticipation of scientific secrets that had remained stubbornly hidden being unlocked. The small amount she had read online had given her only a basic understanding of what happened here, but she had learned that each of the beamlines – the sources of light channelled from inside the circular particle accelerator – had its own experimental station divided into three compartments. The raw light entered an optics hutch, where it was tuned to the correct wavelength before passing through to the experimental hutch, where it was aimed at the sample being analysed. The process emitted X-rays, so the scientists observed from a separate insulated room.

  They arrived at a numbered door that might have been the entrance to a supplies cupboard, b
ut which in fact led to a beamline control cabin. Leyton’s knock was answered by an edgy, slender-limbed man in his early thirties whose name Jenny had already been told was Dr Jason Kwan. According to Leyton’s records, it was he who had requested Sonia Blake’s visitor pass.

  Leyton made cursory introductions and waited, as if expecting Jenny to hold her conversation in the corridor.

  ‘We’ll need to have a moment alone,’ Jenny said.

  Leyton glanced at Kwan, then nodded – satisfied, Jenny assumed, that she would get full particulars of the conversation one way or the other.

  ‘You’ll see Mrs Cooper out of the building when you’re finished?’

  Kwan gave a nod and Leyton turned and walked away, with solid jailer’s footsteps.

  The control room was cramped and stuffy, and cluttered with computer equipment. A bin overflowed with empty coffee cups and food wrappers, and to pass the dull moments its occupants had built a pyramid of soft-drinks cans in a corner of the floor.

  ‘You’re part of a team?’ Jenny asked, trying to put him at his ease.

  ‘My colleagues are at lunch,’ Kwan replied. ‘What would you like to know?’

  Jenny helped herself to one of the three swivel chairs while Kwan perched nervously against a desk.

  ‘The reason I’m here, Dr Kwan, is to ask you what you know about Mrs Sonia Blake. I believe she visited you here.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Unfortunately she died yesterday.’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Oh?’ Jenny tried to conceal her surprise. ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘I saw it online. One of her colleagues I’m friends with must have posted it.’

  ‘Friends? You mean someone on a social network, not an actual friend?’

  ‘Yes.’ He seemed to tolerate her old-fashioned distinction.

  ‘Do you mind telling me what she was doing here?’

  ‘She contacted me. She said she was interested to see how the beamline worked. I said sure, and arranged for her to come over.’

  ‘Do you remember when that was?’

  He drummed his fingers on the table as he tried to recall. ‘She emailed me in about May and came here at the beginning of June. A Friday, I expect – that’s my maintenance day. You can check the visitor log.’