The Redeemed

by M. R. Hall

  'I should have known you'd be belligerent.'

  'Fearless independence is my legal duty.' She arrived at the end of the list and a message marked 'urgent' from Bristol CID. She clicked it open.

  'All manner of sins can masquerade as principle,' Cramer said.

  'What exactly are you asking me to do?' she said, her attention shifting to the few brief lines of text on the screen. A young man's body had been found on the Langan Estate.

  There was a pause. 'The right thing.'

  'Or?' Jenny stiffened with shock. The brief email ended with: '. . . thought to be that of missing teenager Frederick Reardon.'

  'Let's not be childish, Mrs Cooper. It's in nobody's interests not to bring this inquest to a rapid close.'

  Jenny didn't answer.

  Amanda Cramer said, 'Can we expect a conclusion tomorrow?'

  'I think that's very unlikely now.' Jenny put down the phone.

  A small rag-tag crowd of residents had been drawn out of the surrounding tower blocks and stood at the cordon that marked off a section of the car park and the rough parkland beyond. Jenny pushed between them and announced herself to the young constable holding them back.

  'Can you wait a minute? I've been told not to let anyone through.'

  'I'm the coroner.'

  'Yeah, but-'

  'Do you know what that means?'

  He looked at her uncertainly. 'Yeah—'

  'Dear God.' Jenny ducked under the tape.

  'Ma'am—'

  'It's all right, Constable, she's with me.' Alison hurried out from between the assortment of police vehicles.

  'Can you please explain to this idiot who the coroner is?'

  'Sorry,' Alison said to the young policeman.

  'Don't apologize, tell him!'

  She strode off towards the scene of activity that centred on an area of undergrowth. It was near the bench on which she'd sat alongside Freddy only a few days before.

  Alison caught up with her halfway across the grass, out of breath and perspiring.

  'I only just got here, Mrs Cooper. I tried to call you.'

  Jenny cut through her lie with a look.

  'I was just about to.' Alison searched for an adequate explanation. 'I was trying to find a way of breaking it to you.'

  'Because I'm so unused to people dying.'

  'No. I just thought you might feel—'

  'What? Responsible?'

  'He hanged himself, Mrs Cooper. Some time last night they think.'

  Jenny felt nothing. A complete absence.

  'Does anyone know why?'

  'There was a note in his pocket,' Alison mumbled. 'It said, "I'm no good.'"

  They approached a thicket of spindly birch and hazel clogged with nettles and bindweed. Two officers in white overalls emerged from a break in the undergrowth, peeling off their masks and hoods.

  'Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner,' Jenny snapped at them and pushed past with Alison at her heels.

  DI Wallace was standing in his shirt sleeves talking into his phone as two officers dressed in white overalls zipped the body into a nylon bag. Directly above it a length of blue plastic washing line hung limply from a branch.

  Wallace hurriedly ended his call as Jenny approached.

  'Hello again, Mrs Cooper,' he said, a trace of apprehension in his voice.

  'May I please see him?'

  Wallace gestured to his officers to comply.

  The zip came down to reveal Freddy's swollen face. A purple welt where the line had cut into his flesh circled the front of his neck and rose vertically behind his jawbone. He was dressed in the same yellow T-shirt he had been wearing the afternoon they had met at the Mission Church.

  'Time of death?'

  'Between one and three this morning.'

  'Where's his mother?'

  'In her flat. Family liaison's with her now.'

  'Have you spoken to her yet?'

  'No.' He was in a hurry to get on. 'Seen enough?'

  Jenny nodded. 'What about the note?'

  'I'll get you a copy sent over.' He gestured to the body. 'To the Vale, is it?'

  'Yes.'

  The two officers hoisted the stretcher and pushed out of the thicket. Jenny looked up at the dangling length of line.

  'Any idea why?' Wallace asked.

  Jenny pictured Freddy stooped forwards on the bench only yards from where they were standing, the way he'd gripped on to his cuffs with clenched fists as he told her, 'God changes people. Not just a little bit, completely. And for ever. All you have to do is let him.' It was the one thing he had seemed certain of, and the one thing that had reassured her.

  'He was fragile,' Jenny said, 'with a history of psychiatric problems. I don't think his grip on life can have been very strong to begin with.'

  'I'll tell you what, I'm happy to treat this one as suicide for now,' Wallace said. 'This looks more like your territory than mine.' He turned to Alison. 'You'll drop me a copy of the p-m report?'

  'Of course.'

  Wallace glanced up at the line. 'I'll have someone take that down.' Dipping his head to avoid the low branches, he pushed his way out to the light.

  Alison said, 'You really mustn't blame yourself, Mrs Cooper. If he's had mental problems—'

  'I don't,' Jenny said. 'When you lift stones you find worms. That's just the way it is.'

  Several ragged bunches of flowers wrapped in cellophane lay on the dirty tiled floor outside the door to the Reardons' flat. Jenny pushed them gently aside with her foot and lifted the knocker. A female liaison officer who didn't look any older than her son answered. Jenny asked to see Mrs Reardon alone, leaving the girl to dither over whether to bring the flowers in or to leave them outside. Were these unsolicited offerings which had become part of the modern death ritual, a private gift or a public memorial? It was hard to say.

  Eileen Reardon was sitting with the curtains drawn in the airless sitting room. It reeked of stale smoke. Sniffling into a grubby handkerchief, she looked up at Jenny with eyes that seemed to have sunk into her face. Propped up against the empty cigarette packets littering the coffee table was a photograph of a smiling Freddy in front of a roller-coaster.

  'That was on a trip last year,' Eileen said. 'He went with the church.'

  Jenny sat on the edge of the sofa opposite, trying to tolerate the foul-smelling air.

  'I'm sorry, Mrs Reardon. I truly am.'

  Eileen lowered her chin, her exhausted marbled features telling Jenny that Freddy's death was less a complete surprise than a tragic conclusion to events she had been powerless to influence.

  'How had he been?'

  'Quiet.'

  'Last night?'

  'Went to church, came home about half-past ten. I left him in here watching the television.'

  Jenny tried to imagine what it must have been like for Freddy returning from an evening of euphoria to this pit of despondency.

  'When did you notice he was gone?'

  'He gets up before me in the mornings, you know, takes himself to school.'

  'Did he mention the inquest?' Jenny asked. 'I'd asked him to give evidence today.'

  'I didn't know a thing about it.'

  'There would have been a letter in the post.'

  She shook her head.

  'The police came here today—'

  'I don't talk to the police.' She glanced at the partially open door. 'Rotten, hypocritical bastards.' She looked at Jenny. 'They can't do enough for you when they're dead.'

  'You've been told there was a note in his pocket?' Jenny ventured.

  Eileen nodded.

  'This probably isn't the right time, but if there's anything you want to tell me—'

  The corners of Eileen's mouth twisted downwards as she seemed to struggle against a feeling of overwhelming revulsion. 'He'd talk to me about Jesus. Walk with Jesus, love Jesus. Jesus is going to save you. Jesus is going to heal you. All that crap.' She spat out the words. 'I told him I didn't do bullshit any more. I'd had e
nough of that from his father and every other man I'd ever known. If there are answers in this world you find them yourself, you don't get taken in by some church that wants to send us back to the Dark Ages.'

  'When I spoke to you before, I got the impression that you respected his belief.'

  'Sometimes I'd pretend to. I know you've got to try to let them have a mind of their own, but all this religious stuff . . .' Running out of words, she shook her head.

  'Did he ever talk to you about Eva Donaldson?' Jenny asked.

  'She's sitting at the right hand of God, isn't she? I'd rather he'd been watching her movies, if I'm honest.'

  'Did he ever talk about her death, the way she died?'

  'It was the devil, you know. He did it. And it was unbelievers like me who were helping him, of course.'

  'Freddy never talked about her wavering, losing her faith?'

  'Was she now?' Eileen laughed, stirring the mucus in her rattling lungs. 'Oh, my God.'

  'He never mentioned that?'

  'I think I would have remembered. Oh, yes.' Her smile contorted into a mask of pain. 'He worshipped those people. But I was the one who got him out of hospital, it was me who nursed him and got him back to school.' She pounded her fist into her chest. 'But I was the one who was damned because I wasn't with Jesus!'

  It was called the Eagle's Nest, a man-made balcony seven hundred feet above the western side of the Wye valley, midway between Chepstow and Tintern. Jenny pulled on the walking shoes and jeans that now lived permanently in the boot of her car and made the climb up the three hundred and sixty-five steps and narrow paths that snaked through the woods and traversed the jagged cliffs. The fading evening sun filtered through a dense canopy of ivy-choked oak and beech; ancient yews clung implausibly to the rocks, their gnarled roots strangling boulders like the slow-moving tentacles of sea monsters. In damp hollows and dark corners untouched by summer light, moss grew six inches deep in a carpet of emerald velvet.

  It was a mythical place, like the forests of her childhood storybooks, where the trees came to life and spirits flitted between the shadows; a netherworld through which she ascended up ringing iron steps to the clearing on the summit. There she was met by the sight of twenty miles of patchwork countryside beyond the gorge. She stood at the railing, gazing out over a landscape slowly descending into twilight, and wondered, not for the first time in her brief career, why it was that she felt as if she had one foot in the place where the dead went when they were wrenched unwillingly from this world. The living part of her wanted to close the door on them, to bring her inquest to a rapid end and to deal with Freddy's death with one of the discreet thirty-minute hearings her colleagues managed to conduct without a trace of guilt. But try as she might, she couldn't force the door shut; hollow, frightened faces peered at her from the darkness, silently pleading.

  She had hoped that the exertion of the climb and the majestic view would have cured her of her maudlin thoughts, but they merely brought her dread into sharper focus. For the first time since McAvoy, it had happened again: she could no sooner walk away with the truth half told than leave a grave half filled. Eva, Jacobs and Freddy felt close enough to touch; it was their voices she heard on the breeze, their faces she saw among the scattered clouds in the pink-tinged sky.

  Chapter 16

  Ignoring Alison's grim warnings of recriminations from above, Jenny postponed the resumption of the inquest for twenty-four hours and forced her officer to spend her evening making phone calls to grumpy lawyers and tetchy witnesses. She unplugged her telephone at the wall and spent the evening holed up in her study. She imagined Ed Prince pacing his hotel suite, venting his anger on exhausted assistants while concocting his plans for revenge. Michael Turnbull would be quietly sounding out friends in the government, seeking assurances that this wasn't some elaborate rouse to derail his precious bill. To them he would present the calm and rational face of a well-meaning reformer, but at home with Christine the talk would be of the devil's voice making itself heard in Cassidy's testimony.

  As she lay in bed dosed with pills to deaden her jangling nerves and stamp out her unruly imagination, Jenny picked up Eva and Lennox's book, Forgiveness. It was trite stuff written in a folksy style, half a chapter by Lennox, half by Eva, but as sleep threatened, a passage caught Jenny's eye. Eva had written:

  'Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us,' is one of those little phrases I didn't think about much at first, but which changed my life. It's that little word 'as'. God forgives us as we forgive others. It means that you can be free of your sins and living in peace with him only so long as you're doing all in your power to forgive those who've hurt you, including yourself. God's forgiveness is always there like water to your house, and just like the water company he leaves it completely up to you whether the tap's on or off. People wonder how someone who has been born again can so easily fall out of step with God; often the simple reason is they've turned off the tap and stopped forgiving.

  The book fell from Jenny's fingers and clattered to the floor as her eyelids drooped and closed. She switched out the light and slipped from consciousness with a picture of Eva at her kitchen sink turning the tap on and off.

  A mortuary technician was sluicing down a body as Jenny arrived at the Vale early the next morning to talk to Andy Kerr. He was caught up in a call to the lab, which he took on the phone screwed to the autopsy room wall, leaving Jenny, dressed in green overalls, to watch the end of the procedure on the table next to the one on which Freddy's naked body lay. The corpse was that of a woman of about her age and bore no obvious signs of injury.

  The technician, a small, wiry man with unnaturally bright eyes, said, 'A bit close to home, eh?'

  Jenny gave a half-hearted smile and looked away. She didn't want to know how the woman had died.

  'Sorry about that.' Andy came off the phone and pulled on a pair of gloves. 'Is there anything I should know about him?'

  'I'm still waiting for his medical records,' Jenny said, 'but I do know there was a history of mental illness, I'm guessing manic depression.'

  'We'll run blood tests for the usual drugs. Anything physical?'

  'Not as far as I know.'

  Andy began with a visual examination. Starting at the feet, he checked for signs of bruising, abrasions or needle marks. Finding nothing of note, he moved on to the midsection, scanning the skinny abdomen and chest before levering the body onto its side to examine the back.

  'No cuts or bruises. No sign of a struggle.' He leaned in close to inspect the welt left by the washing line. 'No bruising around the mid or lower neck -' he glanced back down at the legs - 'the blood's pooled in the lower half of the body. A classic case of self-inflicted asphyxiation I'd say.'

  Jenny nodded. It was exactly as she had expected, but part of her had been hoping for evidence of violence having been used against him. She didn't want any doubt hanging over Freddy. She was sure she would establish that he had been at the Mission Church the night of Eva's murder, but his suicide raised a suspicion she couldn't ignore. His history suggested instability; his closeness to Eva hinted at motive.

  She dismissed the thought. It was more likely that Freddy had killed himself out of despair. Having looked up to Eva and seen her as living proof of healing and redemption, her death must have shaken him to the core. Perhaps he had been in love with her. Scarred as she was, it would have been almost impossible for any young man who knew her not to have been.

  'Are you OK?' Andy asked, reaching for the nine-inch knife he would use to make the first incision.

  'Fine. Just thinking.'

  'You've never got used to this, have you?'

  She glanced at Freddy's plaster-white face, the sharp bones jutting through his hollow cheeks. 'I was with him the other day.'

  Andy set the knife down on the counter. 'Why don't you wait in my office?'

  It would have been the sensible thing to do, but a voice in her head insisted she stay, telling her she owed it to Freddy t
o see it through to the end.

  'I'll stay,' Jenny said, 'I'll just look the other way.'

  She stepped back to the corner of the room and stared at anything but the autopsy table as Andy opened the cadaver, first with a knife, then with shears to crop through the stubborn ribs. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him excising the tongue muscle, drawing it down through the throat and carrying it to the counter for dissection. The small, horseshoe- shaped hyoid bone, which sat halfway between the bottom of the chin and the Adam's apple, always yielded the first major clue in a suspected suicide by hanging. If the victim had been strangled by a third party, it would invariably be broken; if he had hanged himself, the point of compression would be higher up the neck.

  'Hyoid's intact,' Andy said. 'Looks like my theory's safe.'

  She heard it rattle as it hit the kidney dish. Andy turned back to the opened body.

  Next he removed the stomach, carefully cutting it open with a scalpel to reveal the contents.

  'Empty. He hadn't eaten in hours,' he announced, and turned his attention to the duodenum. A short while later he confirmed his finding. 'I'd say he probably hadn't eaten all day.'

  'No sign of pills or alcohol?' Jenny said.

  'No. We'll wait for the blood tests, but I'd be prepared to bet he was completely sober.' Andy looked over his shoulder at her. 'Would it help to put some music on? I'm about to use the saw.'

  'Maybe I will wait outside.'

  She stepped out into the corridor as Andy fired up the fine surgical saw with which he would remove the top of the skull. She felt ashamed of herself for still being squeamish, but every post-mortem still felt to her like an act of sacrilege.

  She had been loitering for nearly fifteen minutes when Andy came to the door.

  'All done. Not a lot to report.'

  She followed him back inside, tugging off her overalls and dropping them in the laundry bin. The bright-eyed assistant was already at work, humming quietly to himself as he stitched Freddy's bloody torso together again.