Jenny Cooper 03 - The Redeemed

by M. R. Hall

  Rocked by the ferocity of her response, Sullivan was briefly silenced. ‘We’ll have to agree to differ,’ he muttered, and returned slowly to his seat with a look to the jury as if to warn them that they were being sorely misled.

  With adrenalin now coursing through her veins, Jenny informed the jury that despite what Mr Sullivan might believe, their duty was only to the truth, whatever they found that to be. They would spend the morning hearing from police witnesses and the pathologist who had most recently examined Eva Donaldson’s body. Later in the proceedings they would hear from her friends and colleagues, and finally from Paul Craven himself.

  Sullivan and Fraser Knight exchanged a glance. They were looking forward to that.

  Dressed in a crisp charcoal suit with a purple silk tie, Detective Inspector Vernon Goodison strolled to the witness chair with the air of a man only too happy to help. Jenny immediately marked him down as one of the new breed of media-savvy detectives, outwardly benign and aware that every word they uttered in public and published by the press would be forever recorded on the internet. Jenny watched the jury respond warmly to his trust-me smile.

  With impressive fluency, Goodison recounted how he received a call early on the morning of Monday, 10 May to say that Eva Donaldson’s body had been discovered by her cleaner. Together with four scene-of-crime officers, he had arrived twenty minutes later. The paramedics had had the good sense to realize she was irretrievably dead and had left the scene virtually undisturbed. Alison handed the jury copies of various police photographs showing the body lying on the kitchen floor, and views to and from the front door through the hallway. Jenny saw several of them flinch at the pin-sharp images: Eva curled up like a baby, her silky blonde hair trailing in a huge, sticky pool of coagulated blood.

  Goodison confirmed that there was no sign of forced entry to the property, nor any indication that it had been ransacked. An extensive search had been made for the murder weapon – presumed to be a knife with a blade approximately seven inches long – but none had been found.

  Jenny said, ‘You must have seen many murder scenes in your career, Inspector. What was your initial assessment?’

  ‘I thought it was a domestic,’ Goodison said, ‘a row with a boyfriend that had got overheated. But there again you take care only to respond to the evidence.’

  ‘Was there evidence that anyone had been in the house with her?’

  ‘Nothing that we could find. None of the neighbours had heard anything. There was a bottle of wine open on the counter, only one glass.’

  ‘Where did you and your team conclude the stabbing had taken place?’

  Goodison held up the photograph that was taken from just outside the front door. ‘It’s exactly twenty-seven feet from the threshold to where she was lying. There was no evidence of blood in the hallway, but some spots were found just inside the kitchen here. It’s possible they could have sprayed out from across the room, but my best guess is it happened here, near the kitchen door. If I was forced to speculate, I’d say she was backing away from someone who’d come through the front door.’

  ‘And there were no signs of sexual assault?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did that strike you as odd?’

  Goodison said, ‘When he got to the house, I don’t believe Craven had the courage to go through with what he intended. She opened the door to him, he forced his way in, stabbed her and ran.’

  ‘Not pausing to steal anything?’

  ‘There was no evidence of that. Nothing of interest was recovered from his bedsit.’

  ‘But there were items missing from Miss Donaldson’s house you might have expected to find: a personal computer, a mobile phone.’

  Goodison smiled patiently, as if to congratulate Jenny on spotting the obvious. ‘We were informed by Miss Donaldson’s employers that they had advised her to cease electronic communications in February of this year. We think she may have disposed of her laptop computer altogether. We do believe she possessed a mobile phone, though she hadn’t retained a regular contract for more than a year.’

  ‘Was it recovered?’

  ‘No. But there are several possibilities. Craven may have taken it, or even an opportunist thief. Miss Donaldson may have mislaid it. We simply can’t say.’

  ‘Did you discover her phone number?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll have one of my officers provide it if you wish.’ He nodded to Fraser Knight and his team. The police solicitor made a note.

  Jenny said, ‘You didn’t recover the murder weapon either?’

  ‘No. That was slightly more troubling. Craven said in interview that he threw it in some bushes, but he couldn’t remember where. It’s seven miles from Miss Donaldson’s home to his address, and he claims to have covered the entire distance on foot. We did all we could within our resources.’ He turned to the jury. ‘Obviously once Craven had confessed and his DNA was confirmed at the scene, our efforts were better spent elsewhere.’

  The power of a taped confession was such, Jenny soon realized, that only the most cynical and experienced of lawyers could resist its allure. As the film played on an old-fashioned television monitor, Jenny observed the jurors frown and shake their heads as Craven told his story about going to visit Eva to help her with her good works, and claimed that she had touched him, saying, ‘Fuck me for the devil.’ She studied their faces as Goodison teased out his final admission: ‘And that’s when I picked up a knife from the counter and stuck it in her, right there, in the chest.’ They shuddered, appalled at the casualness of his delivery. His obvious lies and vagueness over detail only confirmed the impression of guilt. He was the perfect embodiment of the inexplicable face of evil.

  ‘Did you collect the doormat before or after this interview?’ Jenny asked Goodison when the film was over.

  ‘We already had it bagged up. It was sent for analysis after Craven said he had urinated on it.’

  She cut to the chase. ‘I appreciate you had a confession from a man a psychiatrist deemed sane enough to be telling the truth, but once he had said those words, did you consider any other possible explanation for Miss Donaldson’s death?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ Goodison answered. ‘There was no need.’

  ‘Did you ever doubt the reliability of his confession?’

  Goodison considered his answer carefully. ‘He clearly wasn’t as sane as you or I, but this was a man who had killed before, and once we had his DNA on the doormat there was no question.’

  Jenny gestured to Alison and handed her a copy of the list of people Goodison’s team had spoken to at the Mission Church of God. Alison passed it to Goodison, who pulled a pair of designer reading glasses from his breast pocket and took his time fully digesting it.

  ‘One of your officers recorded the names of people your team spoke to informally. I presume these conversations happened on Monday, 10 and Tuesday, 11 May before Craven presented himself at the police station.’

  ‘I would presume so,’ Goodison said.

  ‘Do any records of these conversations exist?’

  ‘It’s unlikely unless anything of interest was said, in which case we would have taken a statement.’

  ‘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 tw
o 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 postmortem 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 precisely, 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?’

&
nbsp; ‘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.’