The Chosen Dead

by M. R. Hall

  Karen’s words rang in her head as she looked into Webley’s expectant face: ‘This is government, isn’t it? He didn’t kill himself – they murdered him . . .’

  Jenny served her the question straight. ‘Did you have anything to do with the break-in at Mrs Jordan’s home?’

  Webley was bemused. ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

  ‘Because his colleague, Harry Thorn, says that the British government is never off his back. In fact, he gives every impression that independent aid agencies such as his are seen as tools of foreign policy, and when they refuse to play they find themselves in trouble.’

  Webley smiled. ‘I think you’ll find that Mr Thorn is generally considered to have “gone troppo”, as the Australians say, some years ago. The file I’ve seen suggests that he would be one of the last people our agents would attempt to deal with.’

  ‘And Adam Jordan?’

  Webley hesitated, choosing her words with care. ‘He wasn’t unknown to us, but neither was there a close relationship. As I said, the picture is complicated.’

  It was Jenny’s turn to dissemble. ‘It’s clear you know far more than I do, Ms Webley. Perhaps you’d be good enough to forward me all you have for the purposes of Mr Jordan’s inquest.’

  Ruth Webley’s voice hardened. ‘I’ll pass your request on, certainly, but we can’t allow the inquest you’re currently conducting to go any further.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Moreton leaned forward. ‘Jenny, you know as well as I do that this inquest is turning into one massive fishing trip. Both girls died of meningitis. There’s nothing more to say. If you insist on delving further I’ll have no choice but to request the Secretary of State to have you removed on grounds of unfitness.’

  Jenny fought her desire to fire back and forced herself to think ahead. She was now as sure as she could be that there was a connection between Jordan’s death and those of Sophie and Elena. And if she were removed from one case, it would surely follow that she would be removed from the other.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But perhaps we can we agree on a compromise?’

  Moreton looked pleasantly surprised. ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘All rise.’ Alison’s voice rose above the hubbub that had continued unabated for the full twenty minutes since proceedings had been abruptly adjourned.

  Jenny entered the courtroom at a brisk walk and sat at her desk without looking up. Dismissing the lawyers’ attempts to register their protests, she began to read from a handwritten note she had brought in with her. ‘Having heard all the evidence currently available to me, it is clear that Sophie Freeman died from a deadly antibiotic-resistant strain of meningitis. Much as I would like to inquire further into the nature of this organism and the manner and circumstances of her infection, the law places limits on the scope of a coroner’s inquiry which, in this case, I judge I have reached. Normally, in the case of a person who has died as a result of an infectious disease contracted by chance, a verdict of death by natural causes would be returned. I do not feel able to make such a finding, so am therefore returning an open verdict.’

  All three lawyers rose as one to voice their objections. Jenny glanced up and saw the shock and dismay on the faces of Ed and Fiona Freeman.

  ‘I have nothing more to add,’ Jenny said. ‘The inquest is closed.’

  She exited as swiftly as she had entered, feeling, for the first time in her career as coroner, that she had delivered grieving parents a bitter injustice. She only hoped she could find answers before one of them decided life was no longer worth living.

  TWENTY

  ‘JESUS, JENNY. WHAT DID YOU think you were doing? I just had a call from Fiona Freeman. She said you didn’t even offer an explanation. One minute the inquest was in full swing, the next you’d delivered an open verdict. Now they’re both going over the edge.’

  Jenny had been back behind her desk in Jamaica Street less than an hour when she answered the call from David. She was already consumed with guilt, and he was confirming her worst fears.

  ‘I will speak to them. It’s just—’

  ‘Just what, Jenny? Have you any idea how upsetting this is? I told them they could trust you, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I know!’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I said I’ll talk to them.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I’ve something to say. It may take some time. A few days.’

  David sighed, infuriated. ‘This is hopeless. Thanks for nothing. I hope you can live with yourself.’

  She started as he slammed down the phone. A hard lump had formed in her throat: all the symptoms of anxiety clawing at her one by one. She knew the signs well enough; she was approaching the load at which she would soon no longer be able to function without resorting to the drugs she thought she had kicked for good. If only she could grow a skin as thick as her ex-husband’s she could push on, confident that she had done the right thing, but she was like a child, tossed to and fro by the emotions of others. Where was her sense of herself? You’re a coroner, for pity’s sake, you can’t let him diminish you like that.

  The words boosted her self-esteem for a fleeting second, only for a fresh wave of anxiety to surge over her. Teetering towards a full-blown panic attack, she grabbed her handbag and searched for the Xanax she kept tucked away for emergencies.

  She popped one out of the foil and swallowed, forcing it past the tight muscles of her throat. As the drug seeped into her blood and slowly began to untie the knots that had threatened to choke her, she asked herself why she couldn’t be like David, Simon Moreton, Ruth Webley and the lawyers who had barracked her. They all asserted themselves as naturally as they breathed, while she, just as Dr Allen had told her, invariably found herself on the defensive. She was always the one reacting, always searching for the sense of entitlement that others seemed to claim without conscious thought.

  It was a chemical calm, but a calm nonetheless. She used it to weigh her options. Part of her was desperate to give up the fight and bury herself in the hundred mundane cases mounting on her desk, but each time she tried to imagine the calls she would make to the Freemans and Karen Jordan, all she could feel was the emptiness of their despair. No, retreat wasn’t an option, but the way she was feeling, neither was going it entirely alone.

  Jenny went through to reception, where Alison was behind her desk, her things arranged neatly around her, a safe and secure pocket of order in which she had ensconced herself. She continued to type on her computer, her expression registering nothing other than mild irritation as Jenny recounted all that she had found out about Jordan and her suspicion that his death somehow linked with those of Sophie Freeman and Elena Lujan.

  ‘I need to find the African girl,’ Jenny said. ‘We can’t know anything without her.’

  Alison didn’t answer.

  ‘I thought that might be something you could help with – your contacts in the police.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Cooper,’ she answered flatly. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be that difficult. Someone connected with Adam Jordan must know who she is.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know how to make myself any clearer.’

  ‘I’m only asking you to do your job.’

  ‘No. You know that’s not right. You’re asking me to get involved in something they don’t want us involved with.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t do that any more.’

  ‘Have Moreton and Webley spoken to you, too?’

  ‘Mr Moreton did, yes. But it’s not because of him . . . I need to give myself the best chance, Mrs Cooper. I’m not ready to say to hell with it all.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jenny tried to fathom her reaction. ‘I just . . . I thought you wanted to keep on as normal.’

  ‘I do. But this isn’t normal, is it?’ She met Jenny’s gaze. ‘You’re talking about murder, and not just the ordinary kind. You know as well as I do, Adam Jordan’s case is the least normal we’ve ever had.’

&
nbsp; ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘You’ve got in so deep you can’t see it for what it is.’

  ‘What do you mean, Alison?’

  ‘I mean you’d be foolish not to give it up now. But I know I’m wasting my breath.’

  It wasn’t yet five o’clock, but in their brief phone call Detective Superintendent Owen Williams of the Gwent police had suggested the Chepstow Castle Inn as their meeting place. Nestled at the foot of the town next to the medieval castle that stood imperiously on a cliff overlooking the Wye, the pub was far enough away from the police station for him not to risk being seen by his colleagues. Several times in recent years she had persuaded him into investigations in which his force could claim only limited interest, and the new Chief Constable – a ‘frigid English bastard with both thumbs stuck up his backside’ – wasn’t prepared to tolerate any more of the border skirmishes Williams so relished.

  She carried her orange juice out from the empty bar to the garden at the rear, and found him soaking up the late-afternoon sun, a pint glass in his hand.

  ‘Come to disturb my tranquil waters again, Mrs Cooper?’ Williams said, in the exaggeratedly sing-song Welsh accent he had cultivated to make every sentence sound like a line of poetry.

  ‘Some might say I’ve made your life more interesting, Superintendent.’

  ‘Too bloody interesting. What have those English scumbags dealt you this time?’

  Blinking against the sharp sunlight, Jenny gave him the essentials of the Adam Jordan case. He betrayed no hint of alarm or surprise as she told her story. Nothing that happened in England, it seemed, could ever shock him, not even the suggestion of an innocent aid worker being murdered by government agents working to suppress details of a dirty African war. For a man whose professional life had been mostly taken up with small-town burglaries and closing-time brawls, he had an admirable ability to absorb the unexpected.

  ‘So in a nutshell, Mrs Cooper, you’d like me to knock on the door of MI5 and drag them all down to Chepstow police station,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘I can’t see that being too much of a problem.’

  ‘I was hoping you might help with tracing the girl.’

  ‘And how would I justify that, exactly? I can’t see that a crime has been committed in Wales.’

  ‘I live in Wales—’

  Williams gave a tolerant smile and took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.

  ‘I think I may have been followed. I went to a restaurant with my son and his girlfriend. There was a man outside in a car. He was watching me.’

  ‘After all you’ve told me I’d be surprised if you weren’t being watched, but it still doesn’t get me over the border all the way down the M4 to bloody Berkshire, does it?’

  ‘There’s nothing more to be found out there. I’ve a feeling she’ll be in Bristol – that’s where he’d been withdrawing money.’

  ‘Last time I checked, Bristol was still in unliberated territory, Mrs Cooper. Cigarette?’

  She wavered.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She shared the flame from his battered brass lighter, recalling the first time she had seen it. It had been in the interview room at the police station nearly five years before, when Williams had arrested both her and her then boyfriend, Steve, who had had the habit of growing marijuana on his farm tucked away in the woods. Williams had been wise enough to see that the tip-off had been a malicious attempt to throw Jenny off her investigation, and days later was dragging reluctant witnesses to her impromptu courtroom in Chepstow Baptist Hall. In no small part thanks to him, the death of fourteen-year-old Danny Wills in a privately run juvenile prison had been exposed as a vicious murder.

  ‘You remember the Danny Wills case?’ Jenny said.

  ‘I remember your face when I nicked you. You were wearing a blue silk dressing gown, and not a lot else, as I recall.’

  ‘You told me to hold the inquest here in Chepstow so you and your team could help out. What if I were to do that again? The African girl’s a witness I need to trace – no one could object to that.’ Jenny tried to read Williams’s face.

  He blew out a long, thin stream of smoke and turned to her with a look of amused resignation. ‘You always find your bloody way round everything, don’t you, Mrs Cooper?’

  It was six o’clock. She was tired and tense, but it was too early to give up on the day, and the weekend loomed like a void. Driving back through the valley Jenny found herself glancing nervously in her rear-view mirror, checking for phantom followers. She hadn’t truly allowed herself to believe that she had been watched coming out of the restaurant with Ross and Sally, but Williams’s comment had unnerved her. Suddenly her rural haven didn’t feel so safe any more. She had planned to drive home and call Dr Henry Blake, Sonia Blake’s ex-husband, a man whom she had established was an immunologist working at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, but a cautionary instinct told her that might not be wise. A few simple keystrokes on a GCHQ computer and every word of her landline and mobile calls would be relayed directly to Ruth Webley.

  She descended into the village of Tintern, but rather than turn left up the hillside to Melin Bach, she continued on past the abbey ruins and around the bend in the river until she arrived at the phone box that stood a little along from the Rose and Crown pub. Pulling off the road, she again checked her mirrors, but the only vehicles in view were a tractor and an old Toyota pick-up truck that belonged to a local stonemason. Save for a handful of tourists who had stopped to admire the view over the Wye, there was no one in sight.

  It had been years since she had pulled open the heavy, creaking door of a red phone box. Its familiar, powerful odour – as unpleasant as ever – evoked teenage memories of being marooned at far-flung railway stations, rain beating against the scratched and broken panes; and of precious ten-pence calls to long-forgotten boyfriends, the ‘I love you’s whispered in the desperate dying seconds after the warning pips had sounded. But coins, she discovered, were no longer necessary. The phone demanded her credit card and charged her obscenely before allowing her the privilege of dialling a number.

  She connected to a receptionist and asked to be put through to Dr Henry Blake. She tracked him down to an extension in the immunology department.

  ‘Dr Blake? It’s Jenny Cooper. Coroner for the Severn Vale.’

  ‘Severn Vale? I thought this was an Oxford matter.’

  ‘This isn’t about your ex-wife.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking it is, but I’m not the coroner dealing with her case.’ She was floundering. Pull yourself together, Jenny. ‘I’m dealing with another death, one that occurred in my jurisdiction. I was talking to your wife before she—’

  ‘Hold on. Whose death are we talking about here?’

  ‘The name of the deceased was Adam Jordan.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him. I’m sorry. I don’t think I can help you.’

  ‘Could we please meet, Dr Blake?’ She headed off his protest. ‘It really is most urgent.’

  ‘I’m very busy this week—’

  ‘Tonight. I can be with you in an hour and a half. I’d be grateful.’

  He made no reply. In the silence, she could hear the faint click of computer keys. She guessed Blake was doing what had become second nature to her: checking the bona fides of his caller online even as their conversation was in progress.

  ‘My inquiry is into the death of a man who had met professionally with your wife,’ she continued. ‘He was an aid worker recently returned from South Sudan. This may mean more to you than it does to me: he had bought an out-of-print book by a Professor Roman Slavsky. Your ex-wife had a file on Slavsky in her college rooms, but after her death I found its contents to be missing.’

  She heard the sound of Blake’s breath on the receiver. Her mention of Slavsky seemed to have shocked him.

  ‘How well do you know Oxford?’ he asked her.

  ‘Better than I did a fortnight ago.’

  ‘I’ll be at the High Street e
ntrance to the Botanic Garden at 8.15.’

  ‘I’ll hurry.’

  Blake rang off, and as Jenny set down the phone she saw from the corner of her eye a dark, expensive-looking car drive slowly past, the driver invisible behind its tinted glass. She waited, frozen, until it had turned the corner and disappeared from view, then hurried to her Land Rover.

  The figure waiting outside the iron gates opposite Magdalen Bridge took her by surprise. She had pictured a precise and businesslike man in a suit; a younger version of her ex-husband. Blake could have been mistaken for a student: he wore jeans and a long-sleeved V-neck T-shirt that hugged his slim torso. Thick black hair flopped over his forehead.

  ‘Dr Blake?’ she ventured cautiously.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jenny Cooper. Sorry I’m late. I always forget there’s nowhere to park in this city.’

  His eyes, dark blue, scanned her with a scholar’s precision. He would be comparing her with the photographs he had seen of her online. If he had taken five minutes to read the press reports triggered by her name, he would know her whole life history, too. The Internet had made it a curse from which she would never entirely free herself.

  ‘Hi.’ He extended a hand. ‘Henry Blake.’

  She saw in his eyes something of the deep seriousness behind his casual appearance. He was an observer, she sensed, someone whose mind never ceased making connections.