by M. R. Hall
‘It must have been.’ Jenny had done her best to forget the summer drinks party the Ministry had held in the Middle Temple Hall. Moreton had drunk too much cheap champagne – as had she – and made a clumsily veiled pass, mentioning several times that his wife was in France with the children. Unluckily for him, it was chiefly the mention of his family which had stopped her from being tempted.
‘You didn’t get my phone messages?’ he said.
‘I was out until late last night,’ she said, taking off her coat.
‘Never mind. I’m always glad of the excuse.’ He flashed a flirtatious smile and settled back in his seat.
‘I can guess what brings you here.’ She pulled her chair away from her desk, placing it at an informal angle. ‘I presume you’ve heard about Mrs Jamal?’
‘That would be something of an understatement even by civil service standards. I kept Gillian Golder and her people at bay – didn’t want to put you under any undue stress – but blind panic wouldn’t be a misdescription of their current state.’
‘Do they have any theories about where the caesium came from?’
‘Theories, yes; suspects, none at all. I believe they’ve pulled a few people in, including one of your witnesses.’
‘Anwar Ali?’
‘Sounds familiar. But I don’t get the impression they’re making any ground.’ He shrugged and looked expectantly to her for a contribution.
‘I suppose they’re assuming that whoever contaminated her had something to do with her son – a terrorist cell perhaps.’
‘I’m sure that’s the thrust of it.’
‘Do they think it was murder?’
‘It’s being considered.’
‘All I know is that she had become convinced she was being watched. She reported it to the police. And around the time she died the caretaker’s wife saw a suspicious man in the lobby of the building who pushed past her. My officer spoke to her; she’ll have given a statement to the police too.’
‘Yes, I had a bit of a briefing yesterday, got the general gist.’ He tapped the arms of his chair with his fingers, a sign that he was being forced unwillingly to the point. ‘Look, I know all about the sanctity of a coroner’s inquest, but they are rather hoping that any evidence you might have would be shared.’
‘I don’t have any.’
‘I understand you adjourned your inquest to pursue further lines of inquiry.’
McAvoy’s parting words echoed back to her. She could mention Sarah Levin, Anna Rose, Madog and Tathum, but where would that leave her inquiry? They’d get to her witnesses first and contaminate them like they had Mrs Jamal. Christ, she was thinking like McAvoy now. Why not tell just tell him everything, hand over responsibility?
‘Well?’ Moreton said gingerly. ‘Did they yield anything?’
‘No.’ Her denial emerged without conscious thought.
Moreton was disappointed. ‘That’s not exactly right, is it, Jenny? You’ve been sniffing after a car. Your officer’s taken a statement from a witness.’
‘You’ve been interrogating my officer? You’ve no right to do that. My inquiries are carried out in the strictest confidence.’
He spread his hands in a gesture of innocence. ‘I’m afraid in a situation like this the rules have to bend a little – surely you of all people understand that.’
Defiantly, Jenny said, ‘If you’ve been sent to mine me for information ahead of my inquest, you can forget it. Gillian Golder and her people can sit in the public gallery like anyone else.’
‘In any normal case I could see your point, but there’s someone running about out there with radioactive material. Who knows what they might be doing? Certainly not waiting to be caught out by your inquest.’
‘I have no information to offer on Amira Jamal’s death other than what I’ve told you. Anyway, it’s a police matter. All I’m concerned with is finding out what happened to her son.’
‘I must say, I’m very disappointed, Jenny. In this of all cases, I was hoping for a rather more cooperative attitude. We are all in this struggle together.’
‘I know it’s frustrating for your friends to have to accept there are some doors they can’t simply kick down when they choose, but this is one of them. I don’t just have the right, Simon; I have a legal duty to carry out a thorough and independent inquiry. I don’t even know what you’re thinking of coming here like this. You should be fighting my corner, not theirs.’
Moreton nodded patiently as if her outburst had gone some way to persuading him. ‘I’ll level with you, Jenny. MI5 think there’s an argument for seeking a warrant to search these premises under the Terrorism Act. They’d have done it yesterday, but I persuaded them you’d voluntarily offer up anything that could possibly be of use.’
‘They’d do the same for me, would they? They won’t even release their files from 2002.’
‘I could suggest they go some way to accommodating that request.’
Jenny could have picked up the telephone and hurled it into his gutless poor-me smile, but she held tight and suppressed her fury. It wasn’t just that the Security Services, a branch of the executive, was trying make a coroner into a puppet; a man whose job it was to defend the principle of judicial independence was doing his utmost to destroy it. All the fashionable talk of friendly cooperation across the branches of state meant only one thing: all power to the most powerful. Tyranny.
Looking into Moreton’s weak face with its superficial charm, any lingering doubts were dispelled.
‘If I don’t do my job as it’s meant to be done, Simon, there is no rule of law. All that’s left is what’s convenient, which is fine until you’re branded the inconvenient one. Mrs Jamal wasn’t convenient, nor was properly investigating her son’s death. I’m certainly not convenient, but if you were in a tight spot, I bet you’d rather have me on your side.’
With a note of regret, Moreton said, ‘If only all aspects of your character inspired such confidence.’
‘I’m resuming my inquest on Wednesday. And it’s not going to end until I’ve found out what happened to Nazim Jamal.’
To his credit, Moreton knew when he was beaten. He offered no threats or inducements, no warnings of retribution: Jenny had faced him down and won. With a limp handshake and a polite goodbye to Alison he left with nothing more than the name and occupation of Frank Madog.
Emboldened by her victory, Jenny stepped out into reception and followed the sounds of clinking crockery to the kitchenette. Alison glanced up guiltily from her ritual tea-making.
‘Can I get you anything, Mrs Cooper?’
‘You told Moreton about Madog.’
‘He didn’t give me any choice. He said I had to.’
‘Had to what?’
‘Tell him what more we’d found.’
‘Did he say what would happen if you didn’t?’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Cooper, but who am I to contradict him?’
‘You could have waited for me.’
‘He wouldn’t let me. He insisted. He said there would be implications.’
‘He threatened you?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Did he say why he wanted this information?’
‘No . . .’
‘You just gave it up without a struggle.’
‘It wasn’t like that. He said that the Security Services had spoken to him. They’d told him Nazim Jamal and Rafi Hassan were involved with terrorists. They think the same ones might even have killed Mrs Jamal.’
‘Did he offer any evidence for this?’
‘Maybe if you’d been here—?’
‘What else did you tell him?’ Jenny snapped, cutting her off.
‘Nothing. I didn’t even mention Dr Levin’s medical records.’
‘So you didn’t trust him that much?’
‘I’m not a lawyer. I didn’t know what to think.’
‘Who else have you been speaking to – Dave Pironi?’
‘Of course not.’
‘It’s a reasonable
question. You pray with him.’
Alison’s defensiveness hardened to anger. ‘With respect, Mrs Cooper, that’s my private business and nothing to do with you.’
‘It is if it affects my investigation. Have you ever stopped to think that he might be using you? For all I know he was personally involved in whatever happened to Nazim Jamal. Isn’t it a coincidence that when it comes back to light he casts himself as your spiritual mentor?’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I know about your daughter.’
Alison froze and stared at her. ‘Really? And what exactly do you think you know about my daughter, Mrs Cooper?’
‘I’ve heard you on the phone to your husband. She’s living with another woman. What’s Pironi told you – that she can be healed by the power of prayer?’
‘I’ll tell you about my daughter,’ Alison said. ‘When she was seventeen years old, a young man forced himself on her. You can call it rape, if you like. For two years she would hardly leave the house. And even then she wouldn’t be alone in a room with another man, even her father. And Dave Pironi didn’t seek me out. I went to him. I’d seen him lose his wife to cancer and cope with his son being out in Afghanistan; I wanted to know what he’d got that I hadn’t. It may not suit your way of seeing the world, but you of all people should know that the truth isn’t always what you’d like it to be.’
The kettle clicked off as it came to the boil. With trembling hands Alison poured water over her tea bag and doused it with milk. ‘I got your copies of Dr Levin’s records, by the way. She was diagnosed with chlamydia in April 2002. Too late, poor girl. She lost her fallopian tubes to it.’
TWENTY-ONE
‘WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THIS blackout happened?’
‘In my office . . .’
‘You became unconscious?’
‘Not quite. My heart started racing. It wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, not for half an hour or more.’
‘And then you called me?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then?
‘I took some pills and carried on working.’
‘What pills?’
Jenny paused and briefly considered lying but couldn’t summon the energy to face the cross-examination that would inevitably follow. ‘Xanax.’
Dr Allen’s registered no surprise. He simply made a note. ‘In addition to your other medication?’
‘No . . . I stopped taking that several days ago.’
‘For any particular reason?’
Jenny faltered. ‘I thought it would make me more effective, give me some passion back.’
He nodded with no hint of judgement. ‘Did it work?’
‘I suppose it heightened everything.’
‘Did you experience mood swings?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Erratic behaviour?’
She cast her mind back over the past several days. ‘I felt driven. Less inhibited . . . but anxious, on edge.’
‘Yes, you would have done.’ He gave her a look as if to say he was sorry he hadn’t been there to intervene.
If I was him I’d be furious, Jenny thought. I certainly wouldn’t have come running all the way from Cardiff to Chepstow because an irresponsible woman had deliberately ditched her medication. But that’s precisely what he had done, and not for the first time. She felt ashamed of herself. Her stupidity seemed all the more unforgivable in his benign, unruffled presence.
‘Tell me what was going on just before the attack,’ Dr Allen said.
Jenny cringed. ‘I argued with my officer. She’d given out information I thought she shouldn’t have . . . and then I accused her of something.’ Her voice deserted her.
‘What?’
Jenny forced the saliva pooling in her mouth down her throat.
Dr Allen smiled calmly. ‘Take your time.’
‘She had an issue with her daughter . . . She’s been preoccupied with it. I was annoyed that it was affecting her work, but it turned out I’d misread it all. I’d leapt to the wrong conclusions . . . I hurt her badly.’
‘Do you want to tell me what the issue was?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘I think you should, Jenny. It might help.’
She rolled her head from side to side trying to release the tightness in the back of her neck.
‘Try,’ he said, coaxing gently.
‘It’s not what it was about, it’s the fact I got it so wrong. I was so sure of myself . . . It’s why I stopped the pills, to get the certainty back, the fire . . . I felt so deceived.’
He noted down her answer. ‘Are you going to tell me or not?’
Jenny let out an angry sigh. ‘Her daughter’s a lesbian. She’s been praying with a man at a church for her to be healed. He’s a detective I don’t happen to trust. I said this man was using and misleading her. But it turns out the reason her daughter is living with a woman is because when she was a teenager she was raped. And the detective’s had more than his share of suffering too.’ She dug her nails into the arms of her chair. ‘God, I feel so much better.’
Ignoring her sarcasm, Dr Allen looked up from his notes and regarded her thoughtfully. ‘You hurt her and, what’s worse, you felt deceived into hurting her?’
‘It was just an incident. It was probably coming off the pills. It’s not as if you hadn’t warned me.’
‘Now you’re avoiding the issue.’
‘I’m not avoiding anything. I came straight here.’
‘Then if you want my help, you’ll let me offer it.’ It was first time she’d heard him issue anything like a rebuke. He continued in this sterner vein. ‘You practised family law for fifteen years, is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘You represented the local authority, taking vulnerable children into care.’
‘Mostly.’
He flipped back through the pages of his notebook. ‘Yes, here we are. And the first time you had a full-blown anxiety attack was in a courtroom. You were reading out a medical report . . . Can you remember anything about the case?’
‘I could hardly forget it.’ She felt her heart beat faster. She closed her eyes and took a breath, fixed her mind on a vision of a Mediterranean sunset. It helped a little, but not much. ‘There was an eight-year-old boy, Owen Patrick Lindsey. I’d dealt with his case off and on for two years. His mother wasn’t coping so we took him into care. Most kids are glad to be out of a chaotic home, but he kept trying to escape and get back. I went against the social worker’s advice and chose not to contest his mother’s application to have him returned to her. The first weekend he was at home she got drunk and threw a pan of scalding water over him . . . It was a report from the burns unit I was reading out.’
Dr Allen scribbled rapidly. Still writing, he said, ‘And you went from the vulnerable to the dead – dead people beyond help, or your ability to harm them, at least.’
‘Hmm. Maybe.’
He lifted his pen from the page and fixed her with a look of intense interest. ‘You don’t like hurting people, do you, Jenny? In fact, I’d say you’d do almost anything to avoid causing pain.’
‘I don’t make a very good job of it.’
‘When you’ve spoken of your ex-husband it’s always of his arrogance, the offhand way he treats you and his patients. Yes, I remember: you once said it infuriates you how little he’s affected by what you see as the damage he causes.’
‘A heartless heart surgeon. Work that one out.’
‘Perhaps he’s just reconciled to a basic fact of life. You can’t live without causing some pain. And we do tend to marry people with qualities we lack.’
‘I despise his attitude.’
‘But you try to mimic it. It’s not a submissive, motherly woman I see sitting in that chair twice a month.’
‘A moment ago you were saying I couldn’t bear to hurt people.’
‘Your defensiveness tells me I’m onto something. People’s emotional r
esponses break down when they can no longer bear the burden they are consciously or subconsciously placing on themselves. Believe me, it’s becoming obvious you have an overwhelming sense of responsibility for things beyond your ability to control.’
‘Is this a eureka moment? It doesn’t feel like it.’
‘The dream you mentioned last time – the children vanishing into thin air. Nothing, not a thing you could do to help them. It terrified you.’
‘I can’t fault your logic,’ Jenny said drily.
‘And the other image that haunts you: the crack opening up in the corner of your childhood bedroom; the monstrous, unseen presence in a secret room behind it. It’s the realm beyond your control where the horrors happen.’
Jenny let out a heavy sigh. She had lost the ability to be excited by potential revelations.
Dr Allen continued undaunted. ‘What have you been writing about in your journal?’
‘Hardly anything.’
‘Really?’
Just the mention of it consumed her with yet another more powerful wave of shame. There was no question of confessing to him that Ross had found it. She couldn’t even deal with the thought herself. She parried him with a partial truth. ‘Mostly stuff about wanting to feel real again, connect with myself.’
‘To find what you haven’t got.’ He presented it as a statement, an answer that neatly completed his theory.
Jenny felt a sense of disappointment, of having been here so many times before. Dr Travis had had at least half a dozen big ideas that had come to nothing.
‘We’re going to try regression.’
‘Again?’ Jenny said, failing to conceal her cynicism.
‘Please, go with me,’ he insisted urgently. ‘It’s for your own good.’
She was taken aback. In eight months of consultations he’d maintained an unbroken mask of passivity. This was something new.
‘Close your eyes, feel yourself sinking into the chair . . .’
She forced her eyes shut and unwillingly submitted to the well-worn routine. He talked her down through the gradual stages of physical relaxation. Feet, ankles and legs grew heavy, hands, arms, head, chest, then abdomen, and lastly internal organs. As she sank deeper, Dr Allen’s voice became fainter, more remote, until it was little more than a distant echo in the comforting darkness that was her envelope of safety between sleeping and waking.