Jenny Cooper 03 - The Redeemed

by M. R. Hall

  Christine Turnbull reacted exactly as Michael had feared. They spent the whole of Saturday night and Sunday arguing bitterly. Personal issues aside, Christine believed Eva was intent on destroying the Decency campaign just as it was nearing a successful conclusion, and the Mission Church of God too. Michael spent many hours pleading with her to stay away from Eva, and eventually she promised she would. He had no idea that she had driven straight from the church on the Sunday night to Eva’s home. According to Michael, Christine claimed to have acted in self-defence, saying she took a knife with her only for protection in case Eva became violent, but it was clear to me he wasn’t convinced, and in the light of the evidence that has since come to light, nor am I.

  My experience of Christine Turnbull was that she was a woman of extremes. Nearly all of the time she was remarkably calm and relaxed, but on several occasions I witnessed her erupting into violent rage, even lashing out at her husband. To say that her personality altered beyond all recognition during these episodes is an understatement. I believe Michael Turnbull tolerated these outbursts because they were rare. On this occasion I have no doubt that, faced with the prospect of Eva Donaldson derailing the Decency campaign and disgracing the church, Christine Turnbull lost all self-control and set out deliberately with the intention of killing her. I would describe her as a woman possessed.

  The following two days were spent in crisis mode. I held numerous meetings with Ed Prince in which we monitored the progress of the police investigation and made contingency plans. It was decided that if evidence emerged which placed Christine at Eva’s home, she would say that she had gone there out of friendly concern but that Eva hadn’t answered the door. She would explain the delay in telling her story on advice given to her by her overly cautious lawyers.

  When Craven came forward and confessed, it seemed our prayers had been answered. The officer in charge of the investigation, DI Vernon Goodison, had been a longstanding junior colleague of mine and had kept me fully informed of all major developments. He was convinced of Craven’s guilt, but was very concerned that his confession could be undermined by psychiatric evidence; he desperately needed evidence that placed him at the scene. It was Prince who came up with the idea of Craven’s urine being found on Eva’s doormat, and he urged me to plant the idea in Goodison’s mind. I resisted at first, but Ed Prince is a very persuasive man; after two hours of talking it over with him, he convinced me I would be doing God’s work.

  I met Goodison for a drink and suggested that he plant Craven’s DNA at the scene. I pretended that all senior officers knew such things had to be done from time to time, and that it would almost be expected of him. Goodison thanked me for the advice. In so far as it’s possible, I believe he was acting out of the best of motives.

  As far as I was concerned, the only fly in the ointment was a series of complaints from one of our congregants, Alan Jacobs. In the days following Eva’s death, he sent the church trustees a number of emails claiming that he and several others, including a young man called Frederick Reardon, had been psychologically damaged by prayer counselling they had received at the church. I spoke to our administrator, Joel Nelson, about these complaints and he assured me they were groundless. He told me that Jacobs was a confused and unhappy individual who had been close to Eva and was very upset by her death. As I was especially determined to protect the reputation of the church at a difficult time, I sought Ed Prince’s advice on how to deal with Jacobs. Prince then interrogated Nelson at length about prayer sessions he had conducted with Jacobs. I know he also spoke to Jacobs in person. I wasn’t privy to exactly what was said, but afterwards Prince told me he had ‘explained the facts of life’ and that Jacobs wouldn’t be making any more complaints.

  A few weeks later Joel Nelson called me late on a Saturday night to say that our night security officer had found Jacobs’s body outside the main entrance to the church. I telephoned DI Tony Wallace, who is a loyal and longstanding member of our congregation and a man I have known both professionally and personally for over twenty years. We met at the church and both agreed that it was obviously a case of suicide. Initially, we resolved to report the death in the normal way. In fact, Wallace had already contacted the coroner’s office when Ed Prince became aware of the situation and demanded that the body be moved elsewhere, to protect the reputation of the church. On this occasion I objected strongly on the grounds that the risk to the church was far greater if we were discovered, but I was overridden by Prince, who persuaded Wallace to organize the body’s transfer to another location.

  Again, I convinced myself that we had done nothing substantially wrong and had saved the church from potential scandal.

  About this time I became aware that Ed Prince was concerned about the possibility of a coroner inquiring into Eva’s death. In particular he was worried that the local coroner, Mrs Jenny Cooper, had a reputation for asking uncomfortable questions. Together with several of his colleagues he held a number of meetings with potential witnesses to an inquest, including Michael and Christine Turnbull, Joel Nelson and Pastor Lennox Strong. On one occasion he telephoned me to ask about one of the church’s young congregants, Frederick Reardon. Prince’s team had discovered that Reardon had a criminal record and wanted to know if there was any way of finding out if he had been arrested for or was suspected of having committed other offences. I told him that it might take some time to persuade former colleagues to access police files. Prince said that was no good – he demanded the information immediately. If it wasn’t forthcoming, he threatened to ‘scare Reardon into doing what he was told’.

  I have no idea what contact Prince had with Reardon, but I am in no doubt he would have spoken to him. Whether there was any direct connection between this and the young man’s suicide, I am unable to say, but from what I have since learned, Reardon was an extremely fragile personality who relied on the church, quite literally, for his sanity. I sincerely regret that I didn’t intervene to protect him. This, more than anything, weighs most heavily on my conscience.

  The following morning Christine Turnbull appeared at Horse-ferry Road Magistrates’ Court in central London charged with murder. The news photographs showed her smiling and serene as she arrived with her police escort, still convinced, perhaps, that an angel would be sent to save her. But there was no miracle, only a brief five-minute hearing at the end of which she was remanded to Holloway women’s prison. Jenny could only imagine how she would be faring amongst the addicts and prostitutes. She would need every ounce of her unnatural strength to survive among them.

  Other arrests followed in rapid succession. Within hours of Solomon swearing his statement, Michael Turnbull was charged for his part in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, along with Ed Prince and DIs Goodison and Wallace. Other associated lawyers and detectives would follow. The Reverend Bobby DeMont swiftly issued a press release from the safety of his Montana ranch to say that he had no knowledge whatever of recent events at the Mission Church of God, Bristol, and that he saw them merely as one small setback in his ever-increasing struggle against the principalities and powers that were always poised to strike at God’s chosen people.

  Jenny hadn’t expected a fanfare, but some small acknowledgement of her efforts would have been appreciated. There was none. Not a word from the Ministry of Justice, and not so much as a note of thanks from Kenneth Donaldson, Eva’s father. She supposed that, like sudden converts to a cause whose faith had been suddenly and spectacularly shattered, they felt foolish, perhaps even ashamed. Their vision of the truth had been destroyed. The world wanted, it seemed, quickly to forget.

  Father Lucas Starr, too, had fallen eerily quiet. Jenny called the Jesuit house several times, only to be told by the various brothers who answered that they would pass her message on to him. Mystified by his silence, she pursued Coughlin and caught him briefly on a bad line. Starr would probably be on retreat, he said, but you could never be sure with Jesuits; if a novitiate had got too involved or too comfortable, he cou
ld be spirited away to the far side of the world.

  ‘Something tells me you know where he is, but you’re not letting on,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I’ve been asked to respect his privacy,’ Coughlin answered. ‘I’m sure you can understand that.’

  ‘He left me with a lot of unanswered questions,’ Jenny said. ‘We didn’t exactly have a deal, but I more than delivered on my side of the bargain.’

  ‘What kind of questions?’ Coughlin asked.

  ‘He’d been in contact with a friend of mine, a man who went missing.’

  Coughlin didn’t answer.

  ‘Mr Coughlin? Are you there? Do you know what happened to Alec McAvoy?’

  ‘I’ll pass your message on, Mrs Cooper. Take good care of yourself.’

  Jenny spent the afternoon tying up loose ends. She visited Ceri Jacobs with the news that she would hold a fresh inquest into her husband’s suicide after Wallace’s case had been dealt with by the criminal courts. She was hopeful of finding whoever he had been with in the final hours before he took his life outside the Mission Church. Neither Ceri Jacobs nor Father Dermody, who had sat with her during the meeting, had looked pleased at the prospect, but Jenny had felt unmoved. For the first time in her career as coroner she experienced a true state of professional detachment. It felt good.

  She delivered a similar message to Eileen Reardon, promising that Joel Nelson and his colleagues would be forced to confess every last detail of their encounters with Freddy. She even heard herself say that if she could prevent anything similar from happening in future, some good might yet come from his death. Delivering her message of hope in Eileen’s gloomy sitting room, she imagined this being a turning point for the grieving mother, a last chance to make a life beyond the permanently drawn curtains. She had seemed to rally a little. When it was time for Jenny to leave she showed her to the door. Waiting for the lift, Jenny glanced over her shoulder to see Eileen scooping the dead flowers outside her flat into a rubbish sack.

  Driving home, she took a detour past the Mission Church. The barrier to the car park was padlocked. Steel shutters scarred with fresh graffiti were drawn down over the windows of the cafe. The huge white cross still stood outside the main building, but the lights that had given it the holy aura had been switched off. Now raucous seagulls perched on the cross-beam. It seemed to her like the mast of a sinking ship.

  Too restless to spend the bright evening confined by the cottage’s garden, Jenny had an urge to strike out into the woods and purge the city from her soul. Full of excitement she pulled on her old jeans and boots, like a child embarking on a longed-for outing. She strode up the lane, running her fingers through the cow parsley, and turned onto the forestry track which meandered its way beneath a vaulted canopy of beeches towards Barbadoes Hill.

  The woods, which had frightened her a little when she had first moved out of Bristol, were now a place of wonder to her. She had learned to identify the different trees from the shapes of their leaves and the texture of their bark, she knew her way to a secret glade in which a five-hundred-year-old oak stood, slowly shrinking and dying a death that would linger over two centuries. She had discovered a beech whose lower branches had rooted to form fresh shoots where they touched the ground, and the stump of an ancient lime coppice, the hollow centre of which formed a pool of rainwater that teemed with tadpoles in early spring.

  She covered the two uphill miles that took her to the lookout spot high above Tintern without breaking sweat. Through the gap in the trees she looked down on the abbey from her favourite angle, with the sun slanting through the empty windows and casting magnificent shadows across the meadow beyond. It was impossible to believe that less than twenty miles away there were high-rises and screaming sirens, and a multitude of people who would spend a lifetime entombed in concrete, disconnected from all that sustained them.

  Jenny drifted down the hill in a dream, letting thoughts float in and out of her mind as lazily as dandelion feathers on the breeze. She’d call Ross when she got home. Now she was in a better state of mind she could trust herself not to rise to his spiky moods. What they needed was some time together so he could see how she had changed. In a little over a year he’d be at university or off travelling the world; there was no time to lose. She had to make him her first priority: from now on, whatever work threw at her, her precious and only son would come first.

  She picked up her pace for the return journey, anxious to get home and make the call. Approaching the final leg, the path dipped steeply through a dense stand of conifers and she passed from light into shadow. A twig snapped behind her, a foot scuffed on loose ground. She glanced back to see the silhouette of a slender male some thirty yards distant.

  ‘Is that you, Mrs Cooper?’

  The voice was familiar, yet not one she could place. He sped up to a jog, his features catching the light as he drew closer. Jenny felt suddenly cold.

  ‘It’s Paul. You remember me.’

  ‘Yes—’ She continued walking. There was a long S-bend and a straight, one-hundred-yard stretch between her and the road. A quarter of a mile or thereabouts; three or four minutes’ walk at the most.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind. I read in the paper you lived near Tintern. A man in the pub told me you were up this lane.’

  But you must have been following me for nearly four miles, Jenny thought. Were you lurking in a hedge, or hiding inside the cottage, perhaps? Why choose this moment?

  ‘I got bail pending my appeal,’ Paul Craven said.

  ‘So I heard. Congratulations.’

  ‘My solicitor reckons there won’t even be a hearing. I’ll get a pardon, from the Queen he says.’ He laughed.

  Jenny glanced at his smooth, angular face, unlined by the stresses of the world outside prison walls. He had the restless, coiled energy of a feral child.

  ‘I wanted to say thank you, Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘I appreciate it,’ Jenny said, quickening her pace as much as she dared. Some instinct told her to take the initiative, to distract him. ‘I hope they’ve found you somewhere to stay.’

  ‘Probation hostel. It’s not bad . . . At least I’m in with some other blokes this time.’

  ‘What about Father Starr? Has he been in touch?’

  ‘It’s a different priest who visits the hostel, Father Jason. I like him, he’s a good man. Takes a while to get to know someone though, doesn’t it – so that you can trust them, I mean?’

  ‘I should make good use of him, if I were you, it’s his job to help.’ She’d made it to the first bend. If she kept him talking she could reach the road. But then what? She’d be lucky to see a car between the end of the track and the house. ‘Have you thought about work? Is there anything you’d like to do?’

  Craven looked at her strangely. ‘The thing I didn’t say to you, Mrs Cooper, is why I confessed to something I didn’t do. You’d like to know that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘It’s up to you,’ Jenny said cautiously.

  ‘Father Starr always warned me that the devil would come when I least expected it,’ Craven said. ‘When I saw her picture on the television and heard what had happened to her, I could see myself doing it. I actually saw her face, the knife, the look in her eyes as the life went out of her. It was him put it all in my head, made it so I thought it was real. It was the devil . . . I can see that now. And then Father Starr found you. You know what I thought when you came to see me in prison? I thought you must be an angel. Who else would come to help a man like me?’

  Heart thumping, Jenny visualized the terrain ahead. There was a drainage ditch on the left that was overgrown with nettles. She’d push him in then take off, get the five seconds’ head start she needed to break clear. She glanced down at his shoes: a pair of ill-fitting leather lace-ups. Another few seconds’ advantage.

  ‘I’d been praying for an angel to come, Mrs Cooper, just like Father Starr told me to.’

  ‘Believe me, Mr Craven, I’m no angel. I’m just a coroner doing my job.’


  ‘You’re wrong about that, Mrs Cooper. It’s like Father Starr says, God works in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. Maybe you can’t see how he used you, but he did. You’re looking at the proof.’ He smiled, as if he were experiencing a sudden rush of ecstasy.

  They were rounding the middle of the bend – only a few more yards to the home straight. Perhaps Father Starr had been right to trust him? He might be perfectly harmless, just a little gauche and bewildered.

  She had to drive the agenda, set the boundaries. That must be what he needed, an authority figure. ‘What time do you have to be back at the hostel, Mr Craven?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, does it, if they’re going to pardon me?’

  ‘It might be as well not to upset them. What if I were to drive you home? You can be back by nine.’

  ‘No need, Mrs Cooper. I’ll be fine.’

  She attempted a sterner tone. ‘You know, if you break the rules they could turn you out, or even send you back to prison. You don’t want that.’

  ‘No . . . I’m never going back there. Never.’

  Good. She was in control, making him feel safe again.

  ‘Well, this is what we’ll do. I’ll call the hostel and arrange to get you home. I’ll make sure Father Jason’s looking after you and everything will be fine. Does that sound good?’

  Craven nodded. ‘Yes . . .’

  The end of the track was in sight. A tractor drove past on the road, a car tucked in close behind it.

  She groped for some words to fill the void. ‘Have you made any friends yet? I expect it takes a while in a new place.’

  ‘No,’ Craven mumbled.