by M. R. Hall
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.
SIXTEEN
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 mid-section, 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 to 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.
‘All the major organs were very healthy,’ Andy said, stripping off his gloves, ‘though I’d say he liked a cigarette.’
‘That would be his mother.’
‘Then she’s been doing enough for both of them. No sign of any trauma or anything to indicate a struggle,’ Andy continued. ‘I’ve taken nail scrapings and internal swabs. Don’t ask for any results in less than forty-eight hours – you’re more likely to walk on water.’
‘That’ll do.’
There was a sudden rush of water as the technician switched on the shower head connected to the autopsy table and began to sluice Freddy’s body down.
Andy stepped over to the sink, soaped his hands and started to scrub.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t ask you until the inquest’s over, but did you find out what that tattoo on Eva Donaldson’s body meant?’ he asked. ‘It caused quite a stir yesterday. My name was in so many newspapers my mother’s making a scrap-book.’
‘I’m afraid she took her reasons with her.’
‘You know what I think? It was the Marilyn Monroe thing, you know, the whole little girl act to make up for the fact she was corrupted so young.’
‘What’s little girl about tattooing your crotch?’
‘She was what, twenty-seven? To that generation getting a tattoo’s as natural as buying a new outfit. She wouldn’t have thought twice. And with her public profile, beneath the bikini’s the only place she could have put it without running the risk of it being caught on film.’
‘It’s as good a theory as any,’ Jenny said, and turned to glance one last time at Freddy as Andy dried his hands on a paper towel.
The assistant casually moved a forearm to rinse down the right side of the ribs, and that was when Jenny noticed: a bracelet of red marks around the right wrist. She moved towards the table.
‘Look at this.’
Andy tossed the towel away and joined her.
‘Marks on the wrist. Why didn’t you see them?’
‘Turn that off,’ Andy ordered the assistant. ‘Now.’
He stepped round to the left side of the body and studied the wrist. He reached for a clean scalpel and scraped it gently across the skin. He held the blade up to the light. ‘There’s some sort of concealer on there, like make-up.’
Not bothering with scrubs, Andy pulled on another set of gloves. Jenny watched as he scraped away what looked like a hardened layer of foundation cream, revealing a ring of abrasions around the wrist.
‘See there, where it rubs against the bone,’ Andy said, pointing at the rawest section of flesh, ‘that was handcuffs.’
‘How recently?’
‘There’s scabbing, evidence of healing. I’d estimate a couple of days before death.’
‘There was no evidence of sexual contact?’
‘Not on visual inspection,’ Andy said. ‘The swabs will tell
us more.’
Jenny stepped away from the table and tried to fathom
what it meant.
She called Alison from the car but there was no answer at the office. She tried her mobile and got through to her on a bad line with the sound of seagulls and motor launches in the background. Alison claimed she was out running errands, but the sounds of the harbourside were unmistakable. She could tell from her assistant’s guilty inflection that she was meeting Martin again.
‘I was hoping you could go and talk to Mrs Reardon for me. It turns out Freddy had some abrasions around his wrists that he’d tried to conceal. It looks as if he’d been handcuffed.’
‘Oh, I might be a little while—’
‘Anything important?’
‘Where would you like me to begin, Mrs Cooper?’
Jenny winced; it was embarrassing to listen to. She gave up on the idea of avoiding confronting Eileen Reardon herself. Alison would hardly have her mind on the job even if she could be prised away.
‘It’s all right, I’ll go,’ Jenny said, and left Alison to her fun.
Eileen Reardon refused to answer her door. Jenny knocked and knocked again, but to no avail. The bunches of flowers which had been left the day before lay untouched, their petals browning in the heat. She pushed open the letterbox and peered into the darkened hallway. There was no sign of life.
‘Mrs Reardon. It’s Jenny Cooper. I really do need to speak to you.’
No answer.
‘We’ve found some marks on Freddy’s body. Please, it’s very important.’
‘You’re wasting your breath.’
Jenny turned to see a white-haired old lady standing cross-armed in a doorway across the hall.
‘Do you know if she’s in?’ Jenny asked.
‘She’ll be in there all right, never comes out. She’s got a “phobia”; that’s what her boy said, anyway. Fond of a drink as well, though God knows who’ll fetch it for her now she’s on her own.’
Jenny said, ‘Did you know Freddy?’
The woman eyed her suspiciously. ‘Are you with the police?’
‘No. I’m the coroner.’
‘Oh—’
‘Nothing to do with the police.’ She offered what she hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘Maybe you could help me?’
The woman thought for a moment, then glanced along the corridor to check they hadn’t been seen.
‘You’d better come in.’
Jenny followed her into a spotlessly clean flat and sat at a small table in the kitchen.
‘I didn’t catch your name,’ Jenny said, introducing herself.
‘Maggie Harper.’
Jenny’s eyes travelled over the shiny surfaces and polished cupboard doors. It was a world away from the flat across the hall. ‘Have you lived here long?’
‘Twenty-five years – about fifteen more than her. You wouldn’t think she was the same person to look at her now.’
‘I can believe it. She doesn’t look well.’
‘It’s ever since that man of hers,’ Maggie said. ‘He did for both of them in my opinion.’
‘Was that Freddy’s stepdad?’
Maggie pulled a face as she nodded. ‘He was a dropout. Hippy type, hair all matted. Didn’t do a stroke all day as far as I could tell, except yell at those two and smoke whatever it was.’
‘I heard Freddy got into a fight with him.’
‘He was only protecting his mother. He’d hit her – Gary, was his name. You could hear it all from in here. I’d call the police when it got too bad but she’d never say a word against him. Some women are like that, don’t ask me why.’
‘But this man, Gary, he pressed charges against Freddy, did he?’
‘Oh, yes. I told Freddy I’d speak for him in court, but he went and pleaded guilty. I think he did it to save his mum the ordeal of giving evidence.’
‘What happened to this man?’
‘Right after that he just packed up and left. Never heard of him again.’ She looked down at the table, shaking her head. ‘It’s a wonder that boy lasted as long as he did. He was lovely when you spoke to him on his own.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘He’s been coming over for ye
ars. I’d give him his tea sometimes when she was out of it. But he was ever so loyal to her, wouldn’t say a bad word.’ She looked up. ‘What is it you’d like to know?’
‘I know Freddy had been involved with a church, but I’ve no idea about his personal life, who his friends were, what he might have got up to.’
‘He never seemed to have any friends,’ Maggie said. ‘I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly never saw him bring anyone home.’
‘Did he ever talk to you about the people he’d met at church?’
‘Not much. We had our little routine, you see. He’d come over and watch TV in the front room and I’d bring him something to eat and sit with him. That’s the way he liked it. Cosy. No fuss.’
‘And lately? Did you see a change in him?’
Maggie frowned. ‘It’s not so much recently, it’s more since before Christmas. He hadn’t been coming over as often, maybe once every couple of weeks.’
‘How did he seem?’
‘Quiet. I thought he was worried about his mother – he said she hadn’t been well – but I suppose I should have seen the signs . . .’
Jenny waited.
Maggie had a kind face, she thought, and she was glad Freddy had had at least one caring and trustworthy adult in his life. Her orderly flat must have been an oasis for him.
‘There was one night; it must have been three months ago. It was a Friday, quite late. He came to the door all pale, as if he’d had a fright. I sat him down in the other room as usual and came in here to make him some supper. I thought it was something on the television at first, but it was him, he was sobbing. He’d dried his eyes by the time I came back in. I asked if he was all right. He said was fine, but I could see he wasn’t. He was like this –’ she curled her fingers into her palms and pressed her elbows to her sides – ‘like a little lost soul.’
‘He didn’t say anything?’
‘No. I probably should have asked, but I didn’t want to scare him off. You can understand.’
‘Of course.’
‘I didn’t see it as any of my business. I just wanted to be there for him when he needed me,’ Maggie said. ‘But it wasn’t enough, was it?’
