The Chosen Dead

by M. R. Hall

  They waited impatiently for Jenny’s response. She wanted to trust them, to believe that they had had no part in Jordan’s death, but if she handed them everything, if she gave them Guy Harrison, she would lose both him and the truth. She hadn’t come this far to let that happen.

  Jenny looked at Moreton, then at Webley. ‘I’ll offer you a fair exchange: I can give you the source of both organisms in return for an unimpeded public inquest into Adam Jordan’s death.’

  Webley shot Moreton a glance, expecting him to stamp down hard on the suggestion, but he said nothing.

  ‘Any inquest would have to be held in camera,’ Webley said, with a note of concern. ‘We couldn’t have the media reporting the evidence. That would be out of the question.’

  Jenny said, ‘Take it or leave it.’

  ‘Mrs Cooper, if you don’t cooperate fully—’

  Moreton, who had remained tight-lipped, snapped. ‘With respect, Miss Webley, this issue will be settled far beyond your pay grade. Jenny, you’ll have to trust me, but for God’s sake give her what she needs – you’ve got far more pressing concerns.’

  She felt the sting of his judgement like a sharp, sobering slap in the face. He was right, of course, there was only one thing that mattered, but submission would mean the fight was over, reality would come crashing in.

  ‘Jenny?’ Moreton coaxed.

  ‘The company’s name is Combined Life Systems,’ she said flatly. ‘It was founded by the late Professor Roman Slavsky.’

  She hadn’t finished speaking when her eyes filled with tears, and the sides of the tunnel caved in and buried her.

  ‘Mrs Cooper? . . . Mrs Cooper?’

  Jenny woke as if from the depths of a coma, to find herself lying on a sofa in an unfamiliar, brightly lit room. A middle-aged nurse was looking down at her.

  ‘You can see your son now, if you like. They’ve lifted the restrictions.’

  The words travelled to her through the fog. She moved stiffly into a sitting position, images from the events of the previous evening ghosting behind her eyes like scenes from a half-remembered film. A clock on the wall opposite swam into focus. It was 9 a.m. She’d been asleep since six.

  ‘Just buzz at the door,’ the nurse said. ‘They’ll be expecting you.’ She turned to go.

  ‘He’s all right?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Turning the corner.’ She bustled out, leaving Jenny alone.

  Turning the corner. What did that mean? She pushed up to her feet, desperate to get to him, and caught her dishevelled reflection in the windowpane. Her hair was wild, her crumpled shirt was hanging open to her navel. As she fumbled for the buttons she noticed the fabric was spotted with blood. Alison. Jenny relived the moment of impact, the brutal sledgehammer collision that had tossed Alison’s car aside like a toy. She saw the squat, bald-headed man reaching into his pocket, felt the sharp pain in her knuckle as she had sliced into his skull. She glanced down at her hand and saw the bruise across her middle finger: a neat black line. She reached up to her neck and felt the chain, complete with the ring. She lifted it over her head and dropped it into the plastic bin marked Sharps.

  The sister gave her a mask, gown and gloves and led her along the ward to the sealed negative-pressure cubicle at the far end. She was allowed to view Ross through the perspex window but not permitted to step through the door and touch him – not yet – that would have to wait at least another twelve hours. A medic in a biohazard suit was at his bedside recording his vital signs and keying them into a hand-held computer. He would be in the care of the military medics until they were satisfied they had beaten the infection, the sister explained, and thus far the indications were positive.

  He was lying still, sedated and unconscious, breathing steadily through a mask, stripped to the waist. Jenny’s eyes traced the contours of his unclothed body, thinking how unrecognizable he was from the skinny boy she had seen off to university. The figure lying on the bed was a fully formed man, tall like David, but with the deep, broad chest and heavily defined muscles of her father and his stock. Yes, the Cooper genes had won the day. Her blood was running through his veins.

  ‘His girlfriend’s on the way,’ the sister said. ‘She called a few minutes ago. She’ll be here in half an hour. Poor girl spent the night on a train from York.’

  ‘What about his father?’

  ‘He called earlier. He sounded very relieved to hear he was doing well.’

  ‘Not on his way?’

  ‘He said he’ll be here later this morning.’

  ‘Can I stay with him for a while?’

  ‘Only a few minutes, I’m afraid. However small the chance, we can’t risk you getting infected.’

  Looking at her son lying helpless, her own survival had never felt less important. If she could have traded places with him, Jenny would have done so in a heartbeat.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  FOR FORTY-EIGHT HOURS, JENNY had scarcely seen the outside of a hospital or police station. Ross had made slow progress; the infection had been neutralized by Guy Harrison’s antibiotics, but his depleted body had been pushed to the very margins of life, and the journey back would be slow, with inevitable setbacks on the way. Thankfully he was conscious now and could speak a little, he had even held her hand and squeezed it, but at every visit she had competed for his attention with Sally, who had assumed the role of nursemaid with an easy cheerfulness that Jenny had never been able to equal. Jenny hadn’t told him that he had been deliberately infected by someone who had thought that killing him as they had Sonia Blake would stop her from digging down to the truth. Whether she ever could was a question for another day. For now, she just wanted to see him strong again.

  David had been at the bedside during several of her visits, kidding and joking with Ross and Sally, but had hardly spoken a word to her. She had begun to explain the chain of events which had led to her arriving at the hospital with life-saving drugs, but he hadn’t wanted to hear. David inhabited a reality that didn’t allow outlandish facts to intrude. She knew he would simply blot out what didn’t suit him and hold her morally responsible for what had happened to their son. How ironic, Jenny thought, that it had always been him who accused her of not squaring up to reality.

  Michael had removed himself from the scene entirely. Jenny could hear his ‘I told you so’ in his brooding silence. He had warned her what would happen, and it had. No mother worthy of the name would have done what she had, his absence seemed to shout, and neither would any lover of his. She had hoped he would make his point and reappear, but as days passed she had a fearful sense that she was losing him, that he had chosen the moment of his vindication to slip away. She had left him messages, pleading like a lovesick teenager for another chance, but he hadn’t answered her, and deep in the seat of her being, Jenny started to believe that perhaps he never would.

  On top of everything else, she had endured three inconclusive sessions with the Wiltshire detectives who had accompanied the ambulance to the Savernake Forest. Webley had been a lurking presence in each of these encounters, silently making notes and guiding the police officers with nods and glances along a prescribed line of questioning. The occupants of the Range Rover had vanished into the night. The absence of footprints suggested another vehicle may have arrived to collect them. Their identities remained unknown. All that could be said for certain was that the man Jenny had struck in self-defence had spilled several pints of blood onto the forest floor and he hadn’t been admitted to any hospitals. There were few doctors in the country qualified to repair a slashed eyeball, but none that had been contacted had reported having done so. The Range Rover was registered to a shell company with untraceable directors, and none of the fingerprints recovered matched any on the national database. By their third session, the country detectives were running out of ideas and Webley had tactfully suggested that their time might be better spent elsewhere. The file, it seemed, was being shelved until the arrival of further evidence.

  Shortly before dawn on W
ednesday morning, Harry Thorn, Gabra Giorgis and Ayen Deng had been apprehended at the port of Swansea while attempting to board a ferry to Cork. Williams’s men arrived at the Border Agency’s offices less than three hours later to find that Webley’s people had already spirited them away by helicopter. Jenny suspected it was a move designed to crush the remnants of her morale and dissuade her from pressing ahead with an inquest into Jordan’s death, and for a long, bleak morning she had been tempted to do just that. But help arrived unexpectedly in the unlikely form of Simon Moreton.

  The deal had been struck in Moreton’s office in Petty France the following afternoon. Webley had been replaced by her superior, a lean and unsmiling man named Fitzpatrick, whose expressionless grey eyes reacted to nothing. Across the polished mahogany desk, Moreton eloquently argued Jenny’s case for holding an inquest, causing her to wonder what was motivating him. Had the near loss of her son pricked his conscience? Was he telling her his affection for her ran far deeper than he had ever dared to admit? It was a little of both, she concluded, and perhaps – she tried to convince herself – recent events had so shocked him that he was finally putting self-interest aside to strike a rare blow for justice.

  Fitzpatrick had no interest in issues of legal principle, less still in the ancient right of the coroner to hold a free and open inquest. His only concern was what Guy Harrison might spring on an unsuspecting world from the witness box. His officers’ initial visits to Combined Life Systems had, it seemed, proved unfruitful. The company’s employees had denied working on either meningitis or Q fever, and no incriminating evidence could be found at their laboratories, housed in an anonymous business park near the Berkshire town of Hungerford. The company had another facility in the small Gulf state of Qatar, but jurisdictional issues prevented it from being searched. The problem with microorganisms, Fitzpatrick said without irony, was their size. The UK plant had an incinerator in which the evidence could have been disposed of in minutes. The real asset resided in the knowledge, which could have been hidden electronically anywhere in the world.

  Fitzpatrick had studied the written statement Harrison had produced from his safe house somewhere in the South Wales countryside, but wasn’t satisfied. He demanded to have exclusive custody of him for several days before he set foot anywhere near a coroner’s court, and he certainly wasn’t prepared to allow his evidence to be reported. Moreton refused on both counts, placing no faith whatever in Fitzpatrick’s assurances that Harrison would be returned, unharmed, to give evidence.

  They reached stalemate.

  The silence stretched to the point where the first to speak would have conceded defeat. Fitpatrick stared unblinking out of the eighth-floor window across the rooftops towards the spires of Westminster Abbey and Parliament beyond. Moreton sat forward on his throne-like chair, elbows on the table, fingers steepled in front of his face. Jenny looked from one silverback to the other and, ignored by both, felt compelled to break the impasse.

  She addressed Fitzpatrick. ‘I think what you’re looking for is something to prise Combined Life Systems open – physical evidence linking them directly to these organisms. Would it help our cause if I could give you that?’

  For the first time that morning, the perfect neutrality of Fitzpatrick’s expression gave way to something approximating a smile. He thought she was joking.

  Jenny reached into her bag and brought out the small steel flask Harrison had handed to her the previous Saturday night and placed it on the corner of Moreton’s desk.

  ‘Guy Harrison gave me this. Apparently it contains live, recombinant meningitis bacteria that he took from the lab. You’ll more than likely find they contain an antibiotic-resistant cassette unique to Combined Life Systems, for which they hold the patent. It carries resistance to all commercially available drugs and several that have yet to make it to market. I’d bet my house on the same cassette showing up in the Q fever and meningitis cultures the HPA already have. It’s the company signature.’

  The Adam’s apple in Fitzpatrick’s slender neck rose and fell, his eyes fixed on the flask. ‘Is this safe?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘No reporting of Harrison’s evidence.’

  Moreton, eyes wide in alarm, agreed. ‘Now what the hell do we do with this thing, Jenny?’

  In line with their agreement, the inquest was a low-key affair. It was held far away from the public gaze in a community hall on the fringes of Chepstow, where the suburbs of the small market town bled into the lush green fields and woodlands of the Wye Valley. As it was unannounced to the outside world, the only journalist who had got wind of the hearing was an ageing reporter from a local newspaper, whose chin was nodding towards his chest even as nine puzzled jurors swore their oaths and settled into their uncomfortable schoolroom chairs. The few seats set aside for the public remained unoccupied. Apart from the handful of witnesses, a junior sent from Ruth Webley’s office to take a note, and two police constables sitting either side of the door, the only others present were Karen Jordan and her mother, Ed and Fiona Freeman, and a slight, middle-aged Spanish woman named Pepita Lujan, Elena Lujan’s aunt and representative of the family. A solitary solicitor, Martin Brightland, represented Karen Jordan. Far removed from the realm of his usual small-town practice, he sat alone and exposed in the front row, determined if at all possible to keep his contribution to a minimum.

  Jenny turned to the six women and three men of the jury, and told them that they had been summoned to decide the cause of death of Adam Patrick Jordan, aged thirty-two, whose body was found at the edge of the southbound carriageway of the M5 motorway beneath a bridge from which he appeared to have fallen. Having heard the evidence, they would be required to return a verdict of accident, misadventure (meaning that the deceased had died whilst freely undertaking a risk), suicide, unlawful killing, or, if what they heard proved inconclusive, an open verdict.

  Adam Jordan had been an aid worker in the turbulent border territory of South Sudan, Jenny told them, he had helped to raise crops from the arid scrub and had saved countless lives, but that was the least remarkable thing they would hear about him. Here, in this hall, in this quiet corner of the Welsh countryside, it would fall to them, nine ordinary men and women, to listen to and assess some quite extraordinary evidence that nothing in their day-to-day lives was likely to have prepared them for. The coroner’s court, she explained, was a unique institution: it may be small and without the funds to reside in the splendour of its cousins the criminal and civil courts, but for eight hundred years coroners and their juries had provided answers to unnatural deaths, no matter how bizarre or unexpected their circumstances. This was a court made up of ordinary people, and its only duty was to the truth.

  Her opening remarks concluded, she did the job that Alison would always have done, and called for the first witness: Detective Inspector Stephen Watling.

  Watling cut an evasive figure, in the chair between Jenny and the jury that served for a witness box, and rattled through his evidence with the impatience of a man eager to be elsewhere. He described the discovery of Adam Jordan’s mangled body at the side of the motorway as matter-of-factly as if he had been reading a schedule of exhibits. The discovery of two-year-old Sam, wandering alone in a nearby woodland cemetery, was also relayed in the same dispassionate tone. Jordan had left no note; his phone records had revealed nothing except business and domestic calls; his wife was at a loss for an explanation; nothing he had learned suggested either a motive for suicide or evidence of foul play.

  He paused, as if to gather strength, before concluding his testimony with a statement that gave a clue to his determination not to let the names in his narrative become human beings. ‘In my experience, which is more extensive than I would wish, men who kill themselves tend to do so violently and without warning. In that respect, I see nothing at all unusual in Mr Jordan’s case.’

  Jenny let his words go unchallenged. He didn’t know what was to come, or how radically his version of events would be overtur
ned.

  Dr Andy Kerr was next to come forward. He opened with a description of Adam Jordan’s body when it arrived in the mortuary. As a result of a massive impact with a fast-moving vehicle, there was little remaining of the head and face above the lower jaw, and the pelvis and legs had been crushed by the wheels of several vehicles. The nature of the injuries was such that it was impossible to say whether he had landed head or feet first on the carriageway, or whether he was killed by the fall or as the result of being run over. He had had no alcohol or drugs in his system, which was unusual in male suicides: it placed him in an exclusive 10 per cent.

  Jenny prompted him to tell the jury what had subsequently happened to Jordan’s body in the mortuary. He related the events of Sophie Freeman’s and Elena Lujan’s deaths and described his accidental discovery that Sophie’s vital organs, along with Jordan’s, had been removed without permission.

  Sticking to her agreement with Fitzpatrick to keep mention of the activities of his officers to a minimum, Jenny steered Dr Kerr past the events of Sophie Freeman’s inquest, and asked him whether he later had cause to take further tissue samples from Jordan’s body.

  ‘I did,’ Dr Kerr said, in his deadpan Belfast accent.

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘In Mr Jordan’s stomach contents there were present meningitis bacteria of the identical strain to that which killed Miss Freeman and Miss Lujan. It’s most unusual. I can only presume that shortly before death he consumed some contaminated liquid; whether he did so voluntarily or not, I couldn’t say.’

  There was a sound – a muted exclamation – from the cluster of waiting witnesses. It had come from the slender figure of Ayen Deng, who was seated between Harry Thorn and his unnaturally beautiful girlfriend. Gabra put a comforting arm around Ayen’s shoulder. Harry stared straight ahead, pretending not to have noticed Ayen’s momentary distress.