by M. R. Hall
Taken aback, Jenny mulled over what she had heard. Was Alison’s daughter in a relationship with another woman? It would explain the scratchy moods and the New Dawn Church. Its slickly produced newsletter, which Alison had taken to leaving out on the coffee table, was full of stories of drunks, junkies and homosexuals who had been brought back to the straight and narrow by the power of prayer. Some of the testimonies, she had to admit, were very moving.
‘Hi,’ Jenny said, as she came through the door. She went to Alison’s desk to check the message tray.
There was a moment of moody silence before Alison came to the kitchenette door.
‘Mrs Jamal called – three times. She thinks someone’s been in her flat.’
‘I’ve got to speak to her anyway. I’m going to adjourn until next Monday.’ Jenny flicked through three death reports that needed immediate attention. A previously healthy man of thirty-two had dropped dead while jogging on the Downs and a van had plunged down a motorway embankment killing both occupants. Neither had been wearing a seat belt. Alison had printed off the emailed police photographs of the wreck: two bloody snowflake shatter-patterns on the windscreen where their heads had impacted.
‘Oh? Any particular reason?’ Alison asked, disapproving.
‘Alec McAvoy, that legal executive, came forward with a few pieces of information. I’d like to follow them up before I call any more live witnesses.’
‘I know who McAvoy is. He’s one of the most corrupt lawyers this city’s ever produced.’
‘He mentioned that you were part of the team that brought him to justice.’
‘I’m sure that’s not how he put it.’ Alison scowled. ‘He fabricated evidence. It’s what he did for a living. I heard it straight from the mouths of his ex-clients. Anything he told you this afternoon I should take with a shovelful of salt, if I were you, Mrs Cooper.’
‘I appreciate there’s a history. I won’t ask you to get involved.’ She tucked the reports under her arm. ‘If you wouldn’t mind putting the word out that we’re reconvening next Monday—’
‘Do you mind my asking what this information was?’
Jenny told half the truth. ‘It’s about a suspicious vehicle that was seen near Anwar Ali’s flat the night of the disappearance. It just seems odd the police didn’t pick up on it, seeing as they had an observation team nearby.’
‘Why not ask Dave Pironi? He’ll give you a straight answer.’
‘Didn’t you tell me that the Security Services were calling the shots?’ Jenny said. ‘He’s not going to want to talk about that, is he?’
Alison didn’t respond.
Gently, Jenny said, ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Perfectly, thank you, Mrs Cooper. I’m just concerned you don’t get taken in by a professional conman, that’s all.’ Alison turned at the sound of the kettle coming to the boil and hurried back to her tea-making.
Jenny retreated to her office and closed the door behind her. A fresh pile of unread post-mortem reports sat on her desk alongside the growing heap of correspondence she had been avoiding for several days. She slumped into her chair and clicked onto her emails, anything rather than start into work. Amidst the trivia and spam there was a message from DS Murphy asking her for further details of some of those who had come to view the Jane Doe, the latest turgid round robin from the Ministry of Justice – this one instructing coroners to refrain from emotive or potentially headline-generating language in court (the duller and more mechanical they could be the better) – and a brief request from Gillian Golder to call her on her direct line.
Jenny bit the bullet and dialled her number.
Gillian Golder answered on the second ring. ‘Jenny. Thank you so much for calling.’ She sounded delighted.
‘No problem. How can I help?’
‘Look, obviously we don’t want to interfere, but Alun told me that you’ve allowed the BRISIC lawyer rights of audience.’
‘It’s a matter in my discretion. I took the view his client has a legitimate interest.’
‘Of course. But it’s only right you should know that their agenda is far from benign. This is a political Islamist organization that peddles malicious conspiracy theories. Take a look at the message boards on their website – they accuse the British state of everything from black propaganda to murdering its own citizens. I’m afraid I’d have to disagree that their interest is legitimate.’
Refusing to be cowed, Jenny said, ‘I’m sure I can keep them under control.’
‘I understand you’ve adjourned already. One of our people was due to give evidence tomorrow . . .’
‘It’s nothing sinister.’
‘Not according to our friends’ news interviews. You’re already orchestrating a cover-up as far as they’re concerned.’
‘And how are you suggesting I should be influenced by this information?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Gillian Golder said. ‘I’m merely forewarning you. Dangerous nonsense can sound very credible, even to a perfectly sound and rational mind.’ She drew out this final phrase, giving Jenny a message that needed no further articulation: embarrass us and we’ll rubbish you.
ELEVEN
THE WIND CAME UP IN the late evening, a cold northerly that found new cracks and crevices in the fabric of the cottage to penetrate. When it gusted, the back door rattled on its hinges, making Jenny start and long for a drink to soak up the childish fears that the creaking building stirred up in her. Ross was staying over at a friend’s in Bristol, and she was too embarrassed to phone Steve to say she was scared of being alone in her own home. She spent the evening locked in her study becoming steadily more jittery. Late in the afternoon the police photographer had emailed more images from inside the wrecked van and they refused to leave her: two men in their early twenties with exploded foreheads, one twisted across the bench seat, the other lying face up in the footwell, his broken features grossly swollen. A partially eaten burger lay on top of the dash. They were tree surgeons, men who earned a living clambering on rotten branches with chainsaws, but it seemed that something as tiny as a faulty tyre valve had sent them into oblivion. Her work was a constant reminder that every day, and without notice, life was snatched away from even the fittest and healthiest. And where did they go, these poor souls catapulted into the afterlife with a mouthful of flame-grilled and onions? To think it could be as simple as switching out the lights would be comforting, but she couldn’t believe that for a moment.
Two pills weren’t enough to put her under. In what was becoming a routine, she lay in the darkness, the duvet pulled up around her ears, flinching at every sound. Mrs Jamal, the missing boys and the corpses in the van paraded behind her eyes and entered her fitful dreams: she and Mrs Jamal chased through a labyrinth of anonymous streets after a fleeing black van which limped along with a flat tyre. Desperate, breathless and exhausted they eventually rounded a corner and found it crumpled against a tree. Blood dripped out from under the sills onto the pavement. While Mrs Jamal wailed and rent her clothes, Jenny steeled herself with righteous anger and wrenched open the cab door. Inside was a young girl who looked up with blood-soaked hands she had wiped across her face. The child split the air with a cry and Jenny recoiled and fled with legs that turned to stone. As she fought to drag one foot in front of the other, a cold shadow stole over her; she heard the disembodied voice of her son: ‘You don’t know me. You can never know me.’ She tried to call his name, to bring him out from his hiding place, but the landscape changed around her and became the street where she had lived as a child. For a brief second she was elated to be safe, then realized that the buildings were empty shells. There were no curtains at the windows, no people or furniture inside. Utterly and completely alone and bereft, she wept.
Jenny woke to a sensation of wetness on her pillow and with a sense of dread that was almost exquisite in its clarity. She sat upright and reached for the light, trying to shake off the image of the girl with the bloodied face. It was four-thirty a.m.
She reminded herself it was only a dream, the product of a churning, restless mind that would soon calm down, but it didn’t. The girl’s face, somehow familiar, lodged like a bone in her throat. She was impressing herself on her, haunting her, pleading to be seen.
She pulled on her robe and made her way downstairs, switching on all the lights as she went. She dug her journal out from the drawer of her desk and started to write, then frantically to sketch the face of the child . . .
She took the slip road off the M48 and drew into the car park of the Severn View service station for her early-morning rendezvous with McAvoy. He was leaning against his elderly black Ford smoking a cigarette. She pulled up in the space alongside and climbed out, the cold breeze biting into her cheeks.
He smiled through tired, red eyes that looked as if they’d seen little sleep.
‘Will you look at you, fresh and beautiful at this godforsaken hour.’
‘That’d be the three hours in make-up.’
‘Modest, too.’ He tossed down his cigarette butt and rubbed it out with his toe. ‘You truly are one of nature’s innocents.’ He pushed back his hair with both hands and rolled his stiff shoulders. She could feel his hangover.
‘Late night?’
‘It’s the people I have to do business with. They don’t tend to keep conventional hours.’ He shivered. ‘The air con’s busted in this heap – any chance I can come with you?’
‘Didn’t you say Madog was going to meet us here?’
‘That’s what I suggested. He seemed a little reticent. But I know he was on the early shift this morning. He should be about due his break.’
McAvoy’s smell was an aromatic mix of cigarettes, whisky and a hint of perfume. With the heater on full it filled her little car and conjured images of cheap casinos and topless hostesses.
‘Swing round onto the northbound carriageway and we’ll end up at the canteen block this side of the plaza,’ McAvoy said and opened his window a touch. ‘Do you mind?’
‘I’ve got some painkillers if you need them.’
‘Thank you, but I’m superstitious about treating self-inflicted pain. I worry the devil’d only give it back to me twice over.’
She smiled and drove on in silence for a short while. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Read your gospel of Matthew – nine separate mentions of hell. They can’t all have been metaphorical.’
‘You sound like my officer. She goes to an evangelical church—’
‘Bad luck. No poetry or humility those people,’ McAvoy said, interrupting her. ‘Try going to confession once a fortnight and spilling your sins out to a celibate priest. There’s something to put you in your place.’
‘Is that what you do?’
‘I try.’
Curious, Jenny said, ‘How do you find that squares with your work? I know criminals need defending—’
‘When I was in the jail, you know who visited me, gave money to the wife? My clients. From my upstanding colleagues, not a single damn word. We could have both been rotting for all they cared.’
‘Maybe they didn’t know what to say.’
‘The thing about villains, they live with the consequences. Forget your sociology bullshit, no one understands right and wrong like they do. Your lawyers and politicians and businessmen, it’s all arm’s length with them. They’re sipping Chablis while the wee girl’s getting her legs blown off in Africa. It’s not the robbers and thieves, it’s those suited bastards who are the rulers of darkness of this world.’
She glanced across and saw the tension in his face.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘Take no notice. I always rant like a madman when I’ve a sore head.’
‘Only then?’
He gave her a pained smile. ‘Shut up and drive.’
As they approached the English end of the bridge, McAvoy told her to pull over next to a single-storey building at the edge of the plaza just short of the toll booths. It was commuting time and traffic was heavy in both directions. He told her to sit tight while he found Madog.
She watched him approach a young woman in toll collector’s uniform who came out of the building to light a cigarette. She looked uncertain as McAvoy gave his spiel and glanced suspiciously over at Jenny, before pointing to one of the booths in the middle of the plaza. McAvoy thanked her and cadged a light before hopping out between the queues of traffic, giving the finger to the driver of a Range Rover who took exception to being held up for half a second.
She didn’t have a clear view, but she could see enough to realize that Madog was reluctant to stop work. She saw McAvoy rap on the glass and gesticulate, then finally step out into the toll lane and block it off with two plastic bollards. The angry chorus of car horns he provoked brought a supervisor hurrying out of the building. Jenny jumped out of the car and intercepted him.
‘Excuse me, sir. Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner. My colleague and I need to talk to one of your staff, Mr Frank Madog.’
‘What?’ He pointed to her car. ‘Who said you could park there? It’s an access lane.’ The supervisor was in his early thirties, pasty, overweight and spoiling for a fight.
She thrust a hand in to her coat pocket and dug out a business card. ‘I’m on an official investigation. Mr Madog is obliged to cooperate by law. I’d be grateful if you could arrange for him to come over.’
McAvoy’s voice carried over the din, colourfully cursing the driver of the lorry that was nudging aggressively up to his bollards.
Ignoring the card, the supervisor said, ‘Who’s that bloody lunatic?’
Jenny said, ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you take his registration?’
Judging by the tattoos on the backs of his hands, Frank Madog had a thing for Elvis. He’d swept his thin ginger hair into a semblance of a quiff and there was a hint of finger drapes about his overlong dandruff-scattered blazer, too roomy for his bony shoulders. That wasn’t a patch of wall in the module of portable cabins which served as a temporary canteen for the bridge staff that wasn’t decorated with a no smoking sign. Deprived of a cigarette, Madog’s nicotine-stained fingers fiddled with the frames of his greasy glasses.
‘You’re not kidding it was a long time ago,’ Madog said, ‘more ’n eight years.’
‘You remember my associate, Billy Dean, coming to talk to you in ’03? Big bull of a guy. Bald, red face. Ugly looking.’
‘I think so.’ He sounded far from certain.
‘Come on, Mr Madog, how often does collecting the tolls get you interviewed by a private investigator?’
Madog rubbed his forehead, showing yellow teeth as he grimaced. ‘Like I said, I think I remember the man.’
Jenny threw McAvoy a look, urging him to go easy. This was an official visit by the coroner, after all.
He struck a reasonable tone: it was clearly a strain. ‘I spoke with Mr Dean at the time, he gave me your details. He said you saw a black Toyota MPV coming through on the night of 28 June 2002. Two stocky-looking white men in the front, two Asian boys in the back. You told him it was an unusual sight – that’s why you remembered.’
Madog looked at Jenny with a vague expression, as if this information only rang the faintest of bells. ‘He’s got a better memory than I have.’
‘Actually he’s dead,’ McAvoy said, ‘otherwise we’d have brought him along. His face would’ve jogged your memory all right.’
Jenny said, ‘I would like you to do your best, Mr Madog. I will be calling you as a witness to my inquest.’
Madog’s Adam’s apple rose and fell in his crêpy throat. ‘Look, I might have told your friend I saw a car, but I’ve had a lot of nights out since then if you know what I mean.’ He tapped his temple. ‘The old memory slips a cog now and again.’
Jenny sighed. ‘Are you saying you don’t remember the four men in the black Toyota? It’s very important you tell the truth, Mr Madog.’
Madog looked from Jenny to McAvoy, and back again, his mouth beginning to work but failing to pr
oduce a sound.
Admiring Madog’s tattoos, McAvoy said, ‘It’s his gospel stuff I like best. “Peace in the Valley” – you know that one?’
Madog gave a cautious nod.
McAvoy said, ‘Do you remember how it goes? I’ve forgotten.’
Madog and Jenny traded a look.
‘Come on, Frank,’ McAvoy said, ‘You know that one. Let me see now . . . “Well the morning’s so bright and the lamb is the light, and the night is as black, as black as the sea.”’ He began to sing, the words coming back to him in an unbroken stream. ‘“And the beasts of the wild will be led by a child, and I’ll be changed, changed from this creature that I am, oh yes indeed . . .”’ He smiled. ‘A beautiful message of hope. We’re all going to change, Frank, and if he managed to avoid the hot place, even my friend Mr Dean’ll have cheeks sweet enough to kiss by now.’
Jenny felt her face redden with embarrassment, but McAvoy was in full flow and not in any mood to stop.
‘You see, the King was a deeply religious man, Frank, which is why I believe he did get to heaven despite all the drugs and girls and what have you. And I’m sure you’ll agree that any true fan would hate to sully his precious memory by telling a lie, especially about such a grave and important matter.’ He leaned forward across the table and placed his hand on top of Madog’s. ‘Can you imagine meeting him on the other side and trying to tell him why you didn’t tell the whole truth? There’s a mother down the road crying for her lost boy, Frank.’
Madog slowly eased his hand out from under McAvoy’s.
‘So what have you got to tell us?’ McAvoy said.
‘Who were they?’ Madog said. ‘What’s this all about?’