Jenny Cooper 02 - The Disappeared

by M. R. Hall

  Jenny leaned heavily against the reassuringly heavy and cumbersome front door and made for the sanctuary of her office. Her brief interview with Miah had disturbed her to an extent which felt out of all proportion. Here was where she made sense of things, surrounded by her books and the trappings of office, the objects that told her who she was and all that she stood for.

  Alison looked up with a start as she entered. She was sitting at her desk in her overcoat, her face drained of colour. An answerphone message was playing: Mrs Jamal pathetically pleading for someone to answer, please. She was frightened, she said, there had been more phone calls in the night. Wouldn’t somebody help her? She lapsed into sobs and sniffles.

  ‘I thought she was going to stop that,’ Jenny said.

  ‘She left three like it. Claimed she was being watched—’

  ‘I’ll call her,’ Jenny said and started towards her office.

  ‘She’s dead, Mrs Cooper.’

  Jenny stopped midway across the room. ‘What?’

  ‘I called her back,’ Alison said, ‘just now. A young constable answered. A neighbour found her body in the front garden about fifteen minutes ago. She’d fallen from her balcony.’

  Numb, Jenny glanced at her watch. It was a quarter past two. It had been an hour and a half since she had left the office.

  ‘When did she make her last call?’

  ‘Just after one,’ Alison said. ‘I feel dreadful . . . You can never see it coming, can you?’

  Jenny left a message on McAvoy’s phone telling him she wouldn’t be able to meet him, something – she didn’t say what – had come up. She replaced the receiver and reached for her pills, shook out one of each and swallowed. She doodled agitatedly on a legal pad while waiting for them to dull the frantic thoughts that were crowding her mind. She felt nauseous with guilt that she hadn’t answered Mrs Jamal’s call. An irrational part of her blamed McAvoy for phoning when he had. A second later and she would have answered Mrs Jamal’s call, and perhaps . . . It didn’t bear thinking about.

  FOURTEEN

  A POLICE CORDON HAD GONE up across the street, attracting a small crowd of onlookers eager for a glimpse of the corpse. Jenny pushed through them and caught sight of DI Pironi leaving the front of the building. It was his patch. New Bridewell police station was less that half a mile away. She caught up with him as he stood on the pavement pulling off latex gloves and the elasticated plastic bags that covered his shoes.

  ‘David—’

  ‘Jenny.’ He didn’t seem pleased to see her. ‘You can’t go in, I’m afraid. Forensics have got to sweep it first.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Looks like she fell from the balcony.’

  She looked up at the building. ‘How could she fall? Those railings must be waist high.’

  He balled up the plastic bags and gloves and tossed them into the gutter. ‘She could have jumped, I suppose.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘No idea. You can take a look at her if you like. She’s still there.’ He gestured to a female constable who didn’t look old enough to be out of school. ‘Show the coroner the body, would you? Don’t get too close.’ He aimed a key fob at a pool car that was double-parked in the street. ‘We’ve booked her in for a post-mortem early this afternoon. I thought you’d appreciate a swift turnaround, what with the inquest and everything. I expect we’ll talk in the morning.’ He gave her a flat smile and left.

  Jenny followed the constable, stepping over the cordon tape and crossing a damp patch of lawn around to the side of the building. Two more uniforms stood guard in front of a temporary screen made from black plastic stretched between two poles. The constable said she was permitted to look around the edge but not to go beyond the barrier. Jenny moved towards it, reminding herself that it was just a body behind there, an empty shell, and took another step forward.

  The corpse was naked and the legs soiled. It lay in a contorted heap: bent in the middle, partially kneeling, a dislocated arm twisted under the torso, face planted in the grass. Jenny was surprised at how little shock she felt.

  ‘Did anyone see it happen?’ she said.

  The constable said, ‘No one’s come forward yet. A neighbour thinks he might have heard a scream.’

  ‘What happened to her clothes?’

  ‘In a heap on the sitting-room floor – next to a whisky bottle.’

  ‘Whisky? She’s a Muslim.’

  ‘The man who found her said she reeked of it.’

  A sense of loyalty and a large measure of guilt propelled Jenny to the mortuary. Next of kin – her ex-husband and a sister in Leicester – had been informed. According to the detective sergeant she had spoken to, neither had showed any inclination to get involved. Both, apparently, had listened to the news in silence and merely thanked the officer for letting them know. He had gained the impression that Mrs Jamal’s apparent suicide hadn’t come as a shock to either of them.

  Jenny sat and waited by the defunct vending machines in the empty reception area. It was nearly six p.m. and all but one of the technicians had left for the night. The only sound in the building was the whine of the surgical buzz saw, which she pictured Dr Kerr carefully tracing around Mrs Jamal’s skull, not forgetting the little v-cut at the back to stop the excised portion slipping when replaced.

  In the silent thirty minutes that followed Jenny couldn’t help but imagine the procedure being conducted on the other side of the wall. The brain would be lifted free of the skull and cut into slices on the stainless-steel counter. A small sample would be taken for analysis, and the remainder would be stuffed unceremoniously into a polythene bag along with the rest of the carved-up internal organs and pushed back into the abdominal cavity. She could tolerate the dissection of liver and kidneys, even heart and lungs, but there was something about the treatment meted out to the brain that felt sacrilegious.

  Andy Kerr came out to meet her already washed and scrubbed. The smell of soap only partially obscured that of sickly disinfectant, which, after a day in the autopsy room lodged deep in a pathologist’s pores.

  ‘It’s pretty much as per the police report,’ he said rapidly, eager to finish up and get home. ‘There was a dislocated shoulder, neck fracture and broken ribs. Those alone wouldn’t have been fatal – cause of death was cardiac arrest, probably caused by the shock of the fall. Judging from the photographs of the body at the locus I’d say it was pretty much instantaneous. It didn’t look as if she moved after impact.’

  ‘What about alcohol?’

  ‘We’ll know in the morning, but there seemed to be a large amount of what smelled like whisky in the stomach.’

  ‘Could you tell if she was a regular drinker?’ Jenny said.

  ‘Her liver was perfectly healthy. No scarring. I’ve asked for tests that’ll tell us if it was an unusual occurrence or not. Anyone who consumes alcohol regularly develops certain enzymes to digest it.’

  ‘Was there anything else in her stomach – had she taken any tablets?’

  ‘No. Apart from the alcohol it was virtually empty.’

  Jenny nodded, her uneasy sense of being personally responsible for Mrs Jamal’s death intensifying. How much had Mrs Jamal drunk after she’d dodged her call? Could anything she might have said stopped her, or would she have snapped at her to calm down and merely hastened the end?

  ‘Are you all right?’ Andy said, ‘You look—’

  ‘I knew her. Her son—’

  ‘The police told me. I’m sorry. But I don’t have to tell you, we see a lot of suicides like this. Drunk, naked. There’s always something that’s tipped them over the edge. I guess it was the inquest.’

  ‘She fought for it for eight years,’ Jenny said.

  Andy shrugged. ‘Maybe the fight was the one thing that kept her going.’

  ‘Surely she would have waited for a verdict?’

  ‘What if it turned out to be the wrong one?’

  The Coroner’s Rules obliged the coroner to step asi
de while the police investigated a suspicious death, but Jenny was in no mood to wait. She knew her motives were partly selfish – the urgent need to absolve herself of blame – but there was also something else, a niggling fear that Mrs Jamal’s emotional phone calls weren’t entirely the product of delusion after all. Painful experience had taught her how easily irrational thoughts could take hold, but what if she had been far saner than she appeared? What if someone had been watching her? Or what if she had been lying and hiding evidence vital to the inquest all along?

  By the time she had crossed the hospital car park Jenny had convinced herself of the need to trespass on police territory. She imagined Pironi’s foot soldiers, lumbering and incompetent, knowing nothing of Mrs Jamal’s state of mind or history. Whatever they could do, she could do better and faster.

  Revving the engine to crank up the sluggish heater, she started to make calls. She checked in with Ross and told him she’d be back late. She caught Alison as she was leaving the office and told her to record Mrs Jamal’s surviving messages to tape and pass a copy to the police. She already had. Lastly she called directory enquiries and tried to track down Zachariah Jamal. She got hold of the number of his dental practice: her call was answered by a machine. She tried the emergency number it gave out and reached the off-duty receptionist, who was dealing with a crying baby. The woman refused to give out Mr Jamal’s private number and would only agree to pass on her details.

  Waiting for his call back, Jenny checked her own messages. There were two from consultants at the Vale asking if death certificates had been issued for their respective deceased patients – second only to being sued, the prospect of their professional competence being scrutinized in a public inquest was the most frightening prospect a doctor could face – and one from McAvoy. Sounding apologetic, he said, ‘Sorry you can’t make it – I’ll have one for you. You know where to find me if you change your mind.’ She was fighting the temptation to call him back – but to say what? – when a beep indicated an incoming call.

  Zachariah Jamal sounded as if he was phoning from outside his home: there was traffic noise in the background, his voice was brittle and uncertain. She wondered if he had even broken the news of his first wife’s death to the new Mrs Jamal and children. Drunk, naked and very publicly dead, they’d know soon enough.

  ‘What is it I can do for you?’ he said. ‘I’ve had very little contact with Amira in recent years.’

  Jenny said, ‘It looks as if she might have taken her own life. Would that surprise you?’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t know. She was a very complicated woman. Emotional, but . . .’

  She waited for him to articulate his thoughts.

  ‘. . . determined. Long after I had resigned myself to Nazim’s death, she kept on.’

  ‘Why do you say death?’

  ‘Of course he died. Probably in Afghanistan. I know my own son. If he were alive he would have made contact.’

  ‘But your wife, your ex-wife, didn’t want to believe that?’

  He paused for a moment. She could feel the force of his suppressed emotion. ‘No. She didn’t want to believe that.’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible that the inquest into your son’s disappearance was confronting her with having to accept that.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘I think we might be having the same thought, Mr Jamal. Maybe you could give me your version?’

  ‘Our contact has been entirely businesslike. I don’t know what was in her mind.’

  You don’t want to get involved, Jenny thought, too many painful memories, guilt layered upon guilt. Shut the door and bolt it. Forget that she or Nazim ever existed.

  Jenny said, ‘I’ve met her a few times in the last two weeks. She was emotional, maybe even a little paranoid, but I wouldn’t say depressed. Depressed people go into themselves, shut off from the world. She’d forced an inquest, she was being dynamic. Wouldn’t she have wanted to hear the jury’s verdict?’

  ‘I really can’t say.’

  ‘I can imagine a bereaved mother killing herself in the belief that she might be reunited with her son. Is that possible?’

  Mr Jamal didn’t answer.

  ‘Was your ex-wife a religious woman?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Excuse my ignorance, but doesn’t Islam consider suicide a serious sin?’

  ‘It does,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I wouldn’t expect someone who feels suicidal to think logically—’

  ‘She must have been ill,’ he said, and then, with a catch in his voice, ‘she must have been very ill . . .’

  ‘The post-mortem showed that she’d been drinking whisky shortly before her death. Quite a substantial amount.’

  At this Mr Jamal fell completely silent. Jenny could hear the wind over his handset, a car pass by.

  ‘I’m just trying to get a picture of what it would mean. Alcohol, suicide – even if she were ill, certain taboos can be more powerful even than the disease. I was with her yesterday, she wasn’t psychotic.’

  Faintly, Mr Jamal said, ‘I agree with you, Mrs Cooper. I don’t know what to say. It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘I’ll let you go now,’ Jenny said, ‘but there’s one more thing. Has your wife ever told you anything about Nazim’s disappearance, about his friends, anything she might not have wanted to be publicly known?’

  ‘No. There was nothing. That’s what drove her – the need to know.’

  The last members of the forensic team were dribbling out of the building and climbing into their minibus. A single constable was winding up the plastic cordon tape. Business appeared to be nearly over for the day. The front door was propped open with an upturned broom. Jenny stepped inside and took the lift up to Mrs Jamal’s floor. DI Pironi and a younger plain-clothes officer with patchy stubble and his hair in corn rows were locking up the apartment as she approached along the landing.

  Jenny said, ‘Hi. Any objection to me having a look around?’

  The detectives exchanged a look. ‘Mrs Cooper, the coroner,’ Pironi said to his subordinate. ‘I think we should christen her Mrs Snooper.’

  The young guy smiled and ran his eyes over her, thinking – she could read his mind – just about.

  Jenny snapped angrily, ‘Have you got a problem with that or not?’

  Pironi looked at his fancy watch and sighed. ‘As long as you’re quick.’

  ‘Mind if I catch a smoke, boss?’ the younger man said. Pironi waved him on and drew out a set of keys, sorting through them laboriously as if she were asking a huge and unreasonable favour of him.

  ‘Have you taken anything away?’ Jenny said.

  ‘Some prints, a pile of clothes and a whisky bottle. Looks like she swallowed about half of it – enough to send anyone out the bloody window.’ He found the key, unlocked the door and held it open for her. He might as well have said, ‘After you, your ladyship.’

  Jenny stepped inside. It looked and smelled just as it had yesterday, a vaguely exotic scent in the air: herbs and spices. She pushed open the bathroom and bedroom doors. Both were spotless and tidy. The bedspread was drawn tight across the single bed, chintz cushions arranged against the headboard. The kitchen, too, was in perfect order. There was a single dirty cup in the sink, breakfast crockery sitting clean on the drainer. A shopping list was stuck to the fridge with a quaint, floral-patterned magnet.

  ‘Mind if I look in the drawers?’ she said to Pironi, who was waiting impatiently in the doorway.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  She pulled several open: cutlery, tea towels, utensils. Everything clean and in its proper place.

  ‘Any sign of prescription medication?’

  ‘Nope.’

  She opened an overhead cupboard and found the source of the smell: bunches of dried thyme and outsize jars of spices. ‘No booze in the house apart from the whisky?’

  ‘Not a drop.’

  ‘No note?’

  Pironi shook his head.

 
Jenny stepped past him and went into the sitting room where she had sat yesterday morning. It was precisely as she remembered it, only stiller. There was an inertia about the rooms of the recently deceased, as if the air had ceased moving. She could smell the carpet and the fabric of the furniture: the place, rather than the person who had inhabited it. Her eyes circled the room a second time. Something had changed.

  ‘Has anything been moved in here?’ she said.

  ‘Just that chair.’ He pointed to the wooden upright chair which yesterday had been at the desk in the corner. It was now on the opposite side of the room next to the French window leading to the balcony. ‘It was where you’re standing. Her clothes were in a heap next to it with the bottle.’

  ‘With the top screwed on?’

  ‘Who are you trying to be, Miss fucking Marple?’

  Jenny let his remark pass without comment. ‘Were the curtains open? What about the French window?’

  Pironi rolled his eyes. ‘The curtains were closed and there was one lamp on in the corner. She sat there drinking, took her clothes off then jumped out of the window.’

  ‘It’s only three storeys down.’

  ‘If you’re having a brainstorm, you don’t fetch out the plumb line and measuring tape,’ Pironi said. ‘Seen enough? I’m expecting a call from my lad in Helmand.’

  ‘Won’t be a moment.’ She moved over to the French window and tried to picture a naked Mrs Jamal climbing over the railings. It wouldn’t have been a graceful exit. She turned and took one last look around the room. The photographs of Nazim were all arranged as she remembered them, as were the ornaments on the shelf unit: fussy china figurines and several shiny sporting trophies.

  She was walking back to the door when she noticed – the two shelves above the desk. The day before they had held half a dozen grey box files. Now there was a stack of magazines on the top shelf and a few paperbacks on the bottom.

  ‘Did you take any files from here?’ Jenny said. ‘There was a whole row of them on that shelf when I was here yesterday. All her paperwork to do with her son.’

  ‘We didn’t take anything.’