The Redeemed

by M. R. Hall

  'Did any suspects emerge?'

  'No,' Goodison said confidently.

  You liar, Jenny thought to herself, but let nothing show on her face. 'Who compiled this list?'

  'That would have been Detective Constable Stokes,' Goodison replied. 'He was coordinating the inquiry team.'

  Jenny turned to Alison. 'Ask DC Stokes to come to court this afternoon.'

  Goodison glanced at Fraser Knight, who remained inscrutable, his only gesture a slight, disinterested raising of his chin. Jenny knew it would be no use her pressing the point any further with this detective. He would bluff and obfuscate all morning.

  She changed the subject. 'The time code on the interview tape says you commenced at four thirty-five p.m. According to the duty sergeant's log, Craven presented himself at the police station at two minutes past midday. Did you or your officers have any informal conversations with him during the intervening four hours?'

  'Only a brief one,' Goodison said. 'He wanted to talk straight away. I asked him to keep it for the interview. It took four hours for his solicitor to arrive.'

  Jenny made a note to check what Craven had to say on the subject.

  'One last point: Craven said he picked up the knife from the kitchen counter. Did you check the cutlery drawers to see if there was a seven-inch carving knife missing? Was there an incomplete set, perhaps?'

  Goodison said, 'You know as well as I do, ma'am, without concrete proof that a knife was missing, evidence that one may have been missing wouldn't have been let anywhere near a criminal court.'

  'Was there or wasn't there a knife missing? You must have a view.'

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jenny saw Fraser Knight give the tiniest shake of his head.

  Goodison said, 'No, ma'am. I don't.'

  Fraser Knight offered no cross-examination of his man, calculating that while Jenny might have revealed her suspicions, the jury needed no reminding of them. Sullivan preferred the head-on approach, and set to with the energy of a boxer stepping up to the mark.

  'I think what's being suggested to you, albeit in code, Inspector, is that you had a quiet word with Mr Craven before his interview to make sure he remembered his lines.'

  'No,' Goodison said, with a faint smile. 'It's absolutely out of the question.'

  'Maybe I'm reading a little too much into the subtext,' Sullivan said, 'but we might as well air it. In the back of some people's minds might be the thought that Craven urinated on the doormat of a former female porn star, but that he didn't actually kill her. Is it possible that he left his deposit hours, or even days before she died?'

  Goodison said, 'This is a man who had spent his entire adult life in prison and had only recently been released.' He looked towards Father Starr. 'I know there are some who believe he'd experienced a genuine religious conversion, but in my view this was a psychopath capable of murder and deceit; a man beyond redemption.'

  'Thank you, Inspector,' Sullivan said, as if with relief that the truth had at last been heard. 'You have been most helpful.'

  Ruth Markham, the lawyer representing Kenneth Donaldson, took up the baton, greeting the detective with a polite, unchallenging smile.

  'Can you confirm for us please, Inspector, that your inquiries didn't reveal any other suspect with a motive for murdering Miss Donaldson?'

  . 'I can.'

  'And can you also confirm that her home address was in fact listed on contact-a-celebrity.com, as Craven claimed?'

  'It was.'

  'Thank you, Inspector. That is all.'

  His cross-examination over, Goodison stepped down from the witness box without having suffered a single uncomfortable moment. Jenny began to wonder if her suspicion of him had been misplaced.

  She took the uncontentious witnesses next, and dealt swiftly with two scene-of-crime officers and a senior forensic scientist, Dr Jordan, who had tested the doormat and the various scrapings and tissue samples taken from Eva's body. There was no evidence of foreign DNA under Eva's nails, Jordan confirmed, nor any traces on the swabs taken from her lips, cheeks, eyelids and the backs of her hands. If there had been a physical struggle he would have expected the attacker's saliva to have sprayed onto the victim's skin; its absence suggested their contact was extremely brief. He produced a photograph of the doormat which had successfully trapped the small number of epithelial cells present in urine. He attempted to explain the finer points of mitochondrial DNA amplification to a glazed jury, but with no evidence to contradict his findings, Jenny saved him the effort. She was satisfied that Dr Jordan had proved beyond doubt that some base male instinct had caused Paul Craven to urinate on the threshold of Eva Donaldson's home. The only question in her mind was what had happened next.

  Father Starr's expression grew darker and more censorious as the morning drew on; Jenny deliberately avoided his accusing gaze as Alison read aloud the original post-mortem report filed by the Home Office pathologist, Dr Aden Thomas. Starr had expected her to confront and challenge aggressively, to test each witness to the limit and upbraid them for not having exhausted every possible explanation for Eva's death. Justice was something his spiritual brothers had frequently died for, she could imagine him saying, and here she was letting partial truth pass unchallenged. But there was a limit to how far she could question the integrity of witnesses, a barrier of convention beyond which she simply could not go, even for a priest.

  As Alison recited the final sentences, the flaking double doors at the back hall creaked open. Michael and Christine Turnbull entered, followed by Lennox Strong. Heads turned and even jaded members of the press smiled in acknowledgement of the famous couple. Jenny noted Kenneth Donaldson's nod of greeting and their smiles in return.

  A knot of tension formed in the pit of Jenny's stomach at the prospect of what she now had to do.

  She called for Dr Andrew Kerr to come forward.

  The pathologist was not yet a confident public performer. He was capable of spending entire winter evenings alone in the mortuary, but giving evidence to a room full of people was an ordeal she knew he dreaded. Jenny would have to lead him by the hand.

  'Dr Kerr, recently you examined Miss Donaldson's body and carried out a review of the findings of the first post-mortem carried out by the Home Office pathologist, Dr Aden Thomas.'

  'That's correct.'

  'Did you agree with Thomas's conclusion?'

  'Yes,' Dr Kerr said cautiously. 'Broadly.'

  'We've seen the photographs of the single stab wound. You do accept that was the cause of death.'

  'It was. But with respect to Dr Thomas, he didn't comment on either the angle of the wound or the force needed to inflict it.' He glanced at the restive lawyers. 'The blade penetrated to a distance of six and a half inches and pierced the aorta. Blood pressure would have collapsed in seconds. The victim would have been unconscious in moments, dead in a minute or two at the most.' He brushed his face nervously with his hand. 'But to force a blade, even that of a slender carving knife, right through the chest wall, would take considerable force.'

  'Can you quantify that for us?' Jenny asked.

  'An average person's full strength.' He paused to take a gulp of water, wilting under the sceptical glares of lawyers sitting less than six feet away from him. 'And the blade went in almost exactly horizontally, whereas most aggressive knife wounds are either angled upwards or downwards —’

  'Because?'

  'I'll show you.' He took a pen from his jacket pocket and held it in a clenched fist. 'You're either stabbing down from the top of the chest, or up from beneath the ribcage. And it's hard to kill someone with a knife. That's why you read that victims have been stabbed twenty or more times. The attacker doesn't often get the penetration to deliver a fatal blow.'

  Ed Prince leaned forward and whispered urgently in Sullivan's ear. Sullivan frowned and gave a dismissive shake of his head. He wasn't impressed so far.

  Jenny said, 'Are you able to say precisely how this wound was inflicted?'

  'Not precise
ly, but I can draw certain reasonable conclusions.'

  'Such as?'

  'It was either a lucky blow or the killer acted very deliberately, aiming the knife horizontally so as to pierce the ribs with a single deep strike.' He rubbed a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. 'What it doesn't look like is a frenzied, emotional attack such as you might see following a rape, for example; it feels too calculated for that.'

  The lawyers frowned. The police solicitor tapped Fraser Knight urgently on the shoulder and handed him a note.

  Jenny said, 'Why do you think Dr Thomas failed to raise these points?'

  'Each pathologist tends to draw their own frame of reference. He obviously didn't see it as his job to speculate.' He shrugged. 'Times change. I was taught differently.'

  Jenny watched two women in the front row of the jury look again at their shared photograph of Eva's body. They were starting to think, to imagine different possibilities.

  Bracing herself, Jenny said, 'Was there anything else about the body which you noticed that Dr Thomas hadn't remarked on?'

  'It's not of any forensic value,' Dr Kerr said, eager to get to the end of his ordeal, 'but I noticed that there were two tattoos on the body. The first was a butterfly design just above the base of the spine, and the second two words tattooed just above the pubic bone on the left side of the mid-line.'

  'Can you say when she had these tattoos done?'

  'The one on her back had been there for some time, years perhaps. The one on her front was very fresh, perhaps only a few weeks old.'

  Jenny nodded to Alison, who handed out two photographs showing the front and back of Eva's body to the jury and to the lawyers. Inset on each was a close-up of the corresponding tattoo.

  'Did you take these photographs, Dr Kerr?'

  'I did. Early last week.'

  Sullivan rose abruptly to his feet. 'Can I ask you, ma'am, why these photographs weren't disclosed to the interested parties before this hearing?'

  Jenny glanced at Kenneth Donaldson, who was in whispered conversation with one of Ed Prince's assistants.

  'There's no legal requirement for a coroner to disclose in advance, Mr Sullivan.'

  'There's a right to see a post-mortem report in advance,' Sullivan snapped back.

  'And copies were sent to your instructing solicitors.'

  'It contained no mention of these tattoos.'

  Praying that Andy Kerr would hold his nerve, Jenny said, 'Perhaps Dr Kerr didn't consider them relevant. And I fail to see what difference disclosure of this detail would have made.'

  'Ma'am, I wish to raise a matter of law in the absence of the jury.'

  'No, Mr Sullivan. There is no reason for this evidence to be withdrawn, and there is certainly no reason for its existence to be suppressed.'

  Sullivan jabbed the air with his forefinger, 'Ma'am, there are extremely important issues of public interest that need to be addressed with a full consideration of the law.'

  'You misunderstand the nature of a coroner's court, Mr Sullivan. I am not an arbiter between competing cases, I decide what evidence I consider relevant. If you have a complaint you make it to the High Court.'

  'Then I request an immediate adjournment.'

  'Out of the question.'

  Prince's second assistant hurried to the door, phone in hand. Jenny had no doubt that within the hour a London QC would be in front of a judge pleading for an injunction to prevent reporting of the existence of Eva's dubious body art.

  Jenny turned to the jury. ' "Daddy's girl" is what the tattoo says.'

  Kenneth Donaldson fixed her with an expression of icy contempt.

  Ignoring Sullivan, who remained stubbornly on his feet, she continued, 'In a moment you'll be hearing from the artist who drew it.'

  In a matter of seconds, half the twenty or so reporters in the room had dashed from their seats and hurried for the exit to phone the revelation through to their editors. In a tight race against a possible injunction they could have their story on the internet in minutes and spread out across the social networks and blogs seconds later. Even if a High Court judge could be persuaded on spurious grounds to rule that the public had no right to know, it would be already too late to put the genie back in the bottle, and the lawyers knew it.

  Calmly, Jenny said, 'You can sit down now, Mr Sullivan.'

  The frustrated prosecutor slammed into his chair and turned to plot his revenge with a furious Ed Prince. Jenny didn't dare look at the Turnbulls and Lennox Strong, but she did catch a glimpse of Father Starr: for a fleeting moment he was smiling.

  Jenny turned to Dr Kerr. 'Is there anything else you wish to add, Dr Kerr?'

  'No, ma'am,' he said apprehensively.

  Fraser Knight rose to his full imposing height and fixed the young pathologist with a look of disappointment tinged with disbelief. 'How long have you been a fully qualified pathologist, Dr Kerr?'

  'Thirteen months.'

  'I see. And Dr Aden Thomas?'

  Dr Kerr reddened with embarrassment. 'I've only met him once or twice—'

  'Thirty-two years,' Fraser Knight said. He looked down at his legal pad and cast a disapproving eye over its contents. 'You have seen fit to "speculate" - your word - in a way in which he didn't.' He delivered his question while looking at the jury: 'Do you think that in his thirty-two years of practice he may have learned that it's not a wise, let alone a scientific, thing to do?'

  'I've no idea.'

  'No,' Knight said, with an indulgent smile. 'Nor do you know the state of mind of Miss Donaldson's killer, or the exact manner in which he held the knife, or the exact sequence of events leading to her murder.'

  'No,' Dr Kerr admitted.

  'From the evidence gleaned from her body, all you can say for certain is that she was killed by a single, powerful stab wound.'

  'Yes, but—' Dr Kerr hesitated in mid-sentence, losing courage.

  'So you would accept, therefore, that your speculation does not help us to establish any key fact. It is only speculation.'

  With an apologetic glance to Jenny, Dr Kerr answered, 'Yes,' his authority all but destroyed.

  Sullivan asked only one question of the witness: 'You have no factual evidence whatever, do you, for suggesting that anyone other than Paul Craven murdered Eva Donaldson?'

  'No, I don't.'

  Sullivan gave a theatrical sigh and threw the jury a look that said he pitied them for having their time so needlessly wasted.

  It was almost one o'clock, stomachs would be aching with hunger, but Jenny called the tattoo artist, Alan Turley, to give his evidence before the lunch break. With a shaved, tattooed head, and nose and ears peppered with rings and studs, he was a man Jenny would have crossed the street to avoid. But Turley, who practised his craft under the name Doc Scratch, was quietly spoken, and gave the impression that he was a gentle soul, devoted to his work.

  Alison handed him a copy of the photograph of Eva's body. He looked at it briefly and lowered his head, visibly upset. Jenny took him carefully through the evidence he had given in a statement he had made to Alison the week before, making sure that he repeated every detail. He told the jury that Eva had booked the appointment by telephone several days in advance under the assumed name Louise Pearson. When she arrived for her appointment she wrote down the words she wanted tattooed and selected the font from a style book. It took no more than fifteen minutes to apply and she paid in cash: sixty pounds.

  Jenny stole a glance at Kenneth Donaldson. What she saw in his face surprised her. In the back of her mind she had invented a story of abuse for Eva's tattoo: riddled with guilt at her years prostituting herself, it was to be an ironic testament to the true cause of her pain, a mirror image of the scars that disfigured her face. Marking her body in this way was a form of therapy: sex could never be had for the sheer hell of it again; it would always be married with the truth. But Donaldson's expression didn't fit with her neat version of history. In her many years in the family courts dealing with men who had done unspe
akable things to their daughters, she had learnt to recognize the benign, detached, self-deluding smile the guilty ones adopted. There was nothing self-deluding about Kenneth Donaldson's reaction; no, he was in genuine pain.

  'Mr Turley,' Jenny said, 'did Miss Donaldson talk to you at all while you were drawing the design?'

  'Very little. She seemed sort of distant.'

  'Did you ask what it meant to her?'

  'No. It didn't seem right.'

  'Why was that?'

  Sullivan rolled his eyes. Ed Prince drummed his fingers impatiently. Jenny ignored them and urged Turley to answer.

  'It was just a feeling,' he said. 'A lot of people want tattoos when they've just lost someone - it's like a memorial. The young lady felt like that. Sad. As if she'd just come to the end of something.'

  Chapter 14

  What had she done?

  It had been less than twenty minutes since Dr Kerr had revealed the existence of Eva's tattoo and it was already the major headline on newspaper websites. Jenny surfed through them in her office. All grasped the opportunity to print photographs of Eva from her porn-star days, and took care to mention the fact that her father was a retired industrialist who had been widowed for almost fifteen years. Jenny could picture Michael and Christine Turnbull and their colleagues wincing at the damage the story would already have done to their campaign: even as she was championing anti-pornography laws that would have turned the clock back forty years, Eva was marking her body with a tattoo which was ambiguous at best. Somehow it smacked of hypocrisy and mixed motives, and far more damagingly of buried secrets from a woman who claimed to have none left. Out of a simple desire to have the whole truth told, Jenny realized that she had unleashed a story that wouldn't die until there was an answer. She slammed down the lid of her laptop and grabbed her pills from her handbag.

  She had barely forced the tablet down when Alison arrived to tell her that Ed Prince had nearly come to blows with reporters who had swarmed around the Mercedes van he and his team were using as their mobile office. The Turnbulls and Lennox Strong were in there with them, besieged by a news-hungry mob who had blocked the van's exit from the car park.