The Innocent: A Coroner Jenny Cooper Crime Short

by Hall, M R

  Karen stepped forward willingly.

  ‘You’re still under oath,’ Bolter said. ‘I wonder if you can help me with this: why do you think your daughter chose the particular day she did to end her life?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Had she ever tried to hurt herself before, as far as you are aware?’

  ‘No. She never had.’

  ‘Were you aware of her having any romantic attachments with anyone her own age in recent months? I see she had a pregnancy scare.’

  ‘That was ages ago. I couldn’t tell you what she’d been up to since. You know what kids are like. And she wouldn’t have told me about Mrs Cooper, would she?’ She threw Jenny a poisonous glance.

  ‘It may be of some comfort to you to know that if necessary I will explore Mrs Cooper’s relationship with Natasha more fully. I have powers to summon her phone records, to request her to produce her diary, to examine the logs kept of her movements in and out of her office. If she was taking any opportunities to communicate with your daughter, I am sure I will find them.’

  ‘Good,’ Karen said.

  ‘But first I would like you to tell me about anything that had changed in Natasha’s life.’

  ‘She was with foster parents for one thing.’ She cast a contemptuous glance towards Mr and Mrs Bartlett.

  ‘She had also been introduced to her grandfather – your father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you knew about that?’

  ‘Judy phoned me. Said I could object but there wouldn’t be much point.’

  ‘Did you object?’

  ‘No. It was her life.’

  ‘By all accounts their meetings went very well. I have Mrs Harris’s notes here: Natasha was “bright and talkative … animated and at ease”.’

  Karen glanced down at her hands.

  ‘This was a happy episode in her life, wasn’t it?’ Bolter said.

  Jenny looked across at Jack Greenslade and saw him wait expectantly for Karen’s confirmation.

  ‘I suppose it must have been.’

  ‘Mixed feelings for you, I expect, because you didn’t want to communicate with your father when he tried to get in touch earlier this year. I presume you had a change of heart after Natasha’s death?’

  ‘Yeah—’ she said. But her glance towards her father as she fidgeted with her cuff suggested a reservoir of feelings still unresolved.

  ‘So all in all it was a good thing – his meeting Natasha,’ Bolter asked.

  Karen shrugged. ‘Like you said – mixed.’

  ‘What didn’t you like about it?’

  ‘What’s this got to do with anything?’

  ‘Was it that she was getting to know the father you never had?’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It may be relevant to Natasha’s state of mind, Miss Greenslade. It’s very important. Tell me, did you contact Natasha after school on’ – Bolter checked his notes – ‘three occasions?’

  ‘No. Why would I do that?’

  ‘You didn’t approach her on her way home from school and talk to her about the meetings with her grandfather?’

  ‘What’s this about? We know what happened.’ She pointed an accusing finger at Jenny. ‘You heard her!’

  ‘Mrs Bartlett says she came home out of sorts several times. The last was on the night before she died.’

  She kept her hostile gaze fixed on Jenny. ‘I’m not surprised. God knows what she said to her.’

  ‘Where were you at three thirty on that afternoon – the day before Natasha died?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you, Miss Greenslade.’

  ‘Listen, I’m the one who’s lost a daughter. I’m the one who’s lost a bloody daughter!’

  ‘It’s a simple enough question.’

  ‘I don’t know … At home.’

  ‘You can’t be sure?’

  ‘I said I was at home.’

  ‘You said you didn’t know.’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar?’

  ‘No. I’m asking who upset Natasha so much that she took her own life, Miss Greenslade. Was it someone we don’t know about, was it Mrs Cooper, was it your father, or was it you?’

  Karen stared at him in what Jenny took to be a stunned fury. Bolter waited for her answer, but before she spoke, Jack Greenslade’s voice sounded: ‘Tell the effing truth, Karen.’

  ‘What would you know about that? This is your fault. It’s your fault she’s gone. She was fine till you showed your face.’

  Her father rose sharply from his chair and headed for the door.

  ‘That’s right – walk away, why don’t you? Walk away and don’t come back. You could have been her dad for all I know, you rotten bastard. Go to hell!’

  Jack Greenslade slammed the door after him. Its echo rebounded off the bare walls. And then there was empty silence.

  ‘Is that what you told Natasha?’ Bolter said gently.

  Karen looked at him wide-eyed, like a child caught redhanded. And he hadn’t the heart to ask her again.

  TWELVE

  Jenny waited for the hall to empty before leaving. She didn’t want to have to face Elaine or Judy and she hadn’t the strength to talk to the Bartletts or deflect another snide glance from Detective Constable Clarke. Already she knew that it would take days, perhaps weeks or months to absorb the impact of the last hour and make sense of what it might mean. In the minutes since Bolter had delivered his verdict she had begun the process of picking through the facts that confronted her. Even at the moment she had handed Natasha her number, she had been aware that she was acting on some prescient instinct; but fate had intervened so heavily, with such force of purpose, to snuff out the girl’s young life, that it was impossible not to feel that events had unfolded in accordance with a plan of which she was an integral and predestined part. She couldn’t help feeling that she had somehow been tugged across an invisible threshold; set on a path to something.

  Heavy footsteps sounded on the boards behind her as she approached the hall door and pulled it open.

  ‘Satisfied with the suicide verdict, Mrs Cooper?’

  She turned to see Bolter, his tie slackened at his collar, a battle-scarred briefcase in his thick hands.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thought it best to keep it simple. I could have fleshed it out with a narrative, but I can’t see that it would have helped. The mother’s suffered more than enough without being publicly shamed as well.’

  ‘I’m sure life won’t be easy for her,’ Jenny said, ‘whether or not there’s any truth in what she said about her father.’

  ‘No.’

  They stepped outside into the churchyard.

  ‘How about you? Will you be all right?’ Bolter asked. ‘Gave you a bit of a rough ride in there. Had to, I’m afraid. You’re a lawyer, you know the form. I could write to your employers if you’d like – emphasize that your actions played no part, that you only acted for the best.’

  Jenny was touched. ‘Thank you. But why would you? I lied to the police.’

  He looked at her as if wondering that himself. ‘I suppose I approve,’ he said. ‘Like to think I’d have done the same in your shoes. One of nature’s innocents, wasn’t she? They provoke things in people, innocents: bring out the devil or the angel. No middle ground with them. They don’t allow it.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  He met her eyes and gave a brief, encouraging smile. They were kind eyes seen up close; determined, not cruel.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Cooper. Don’t weaken. Whatever you do, don’t weaken. And never stray from the side of the angels – they need you.’

  He raised his hand in a brisk farewell and strode off along the gravelled path.

  After a moment, Jenny followed, and as she rounded the corner of the church, she turned her face to the late September sun that lingered like a long goodbye.

  If you enjoyed The Innocent you’ll love

  The Chosen Dead

  Out January 2013


  Coroner Jenny Cooper investigates …

  An unlikely suicide or a deadly conspiracy?

  When Bristol Coroner Jenny Cooper investigates

  the fatal plunge of a man from a motorway bridge,

  she little suspects that it has any connection with the

  sudden death of a friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter

  from a deadly strain of meningitis. But as Jenny

  pieces together the dead man’s last days, she’s drawn

  into a mystery whose dark ripples stretch across

  continents and back through decades.

  In an investigation that will take her into

  the sinister realms of unbridled human ambition

  and corrupt scientific endeavour, Jenny is soon forced

  to risk the love and lives of those closest to her, as a

  deadly race to uncover the truth begins …

  The opening chapters follow here …

  ONE

  Scottsdale, Arizona, 12 March 1982

  The last thing Roy Emmett Hudson was expecting on the eve of his forty-first birthday was a bullet in the head, but life and death are only a single breath apart, and as a biologist, he appreciated that more than most. Even as he strolled across the company lot to the Mercedes Coupé he had driven all winter without once raising the roof, his killers’ thoughts were already moving on to where they might dump the body so that it might never be found. They were from out of town, and unfamiliar with the wilderness into which the city merged only a few miles away from the Airpark business zone.

  Unaware of what awaited him, Hudson counted himself a lucky man. There was no other word to describe the turn of events that had placed him in the ideal position at the perfect time. Aside from the gifted few who had secured comfortable professorships in Ivy League schools, most of his peers from the Brown class of ’ 66 were grinding out their best years in the labs and offices of the giant pharmas back east. They had become company men and women who had left their scientific ideals behind to climb the greasy pole and save for a retirement they might never reach in sufficient health to enjoy. He, on the other hand, had taken a chance. Or had chance taken him? He couldn’t decide. Either way, it had all come down to an ad in the appointments section that had lain discarded on the seat of a commuter train which he rode no more than three times each year. If he hadn’t chosen that particular Tuesday morning to put his car into the shop, or if he had arrived on the platform thirty seconds sooner in time to catch the earlier train, his working days would still have been spent on the fifteenth floor of the Meditech Building, wondering what had happened to the young man who was going to save the lives of millions and collect a Nobel Prize.

  The ad had simply read: Biotech start-up is seeking gifted and motivated scientists with experience in recombinant gene technology. Full details on application. Résumé to Box 657.

  The few colleagues to whom he had shown it dismissed the ad as having been placed by some gimcrack outfit trying to hitch up to the latest bandwagon. Either that, or it was a sneaky ploy by one the big corporates to test the loyalty of its precious R&D teams. Hudson hadn’t been so sure. He had had an instinct, a stirring in his gut that he hadn’t felt since he’d first stepped off the Greyhound and hauled his grip through the front gates of Brown. And he’d been right to trust it. The three directors of Genix, all young and visionary men, had wanted to attract only those curious and adventuresome enough to leave comfortable careers behind for an exciting and uncertain future. They could guarantee only twelve months’ modest salary, but offered generous share options to be taken up after three years’ service. If by that time the company had filed no patents nor had any realistic prospect of doing so, their backers would pull the plug. Simple.

  It had taken Hudson’s team of fifteen less than a year to splice human DNA into E. coli bacteria and start producing human growth hormone at a level which showed potential for future industrial production. This early success had made real the possibility that all manner of previously rare and expensive therapeutic drugs could in future be grown cheaply and in bulk by genetically altered micro-organisms. The investors piled in with more money than Genix knew how to spend. Five months down the line Hudson was running a team of fifty and racing Eli Lilly, Smith Kline and Johnson & Johnson all the way to the US Patent Office. By the time he picked up his share options he figured they’d be worth more than ten million dollars.

  Beneath the ice-blue desert sky, in this brand-new city where anything felt possible, Hudson marvelled at how close he had come to letting his dreams slip away. Back east, his vaulting ambitions had seemed more absurd and delusional with each passing year, but out here in Scottsdale, ‘The West’s Most Western Town’, nothing short of shooting for the moon was expected of every single employee of the new biotech businesses that were taking root in this burgeoning oasis. It had been a long sixteen-year journey with several false turns along the way, but one year into the second half of his life, Hudson believed that he was about to arrive; and he wasn’t just going to become a big name in the science of gene technology: he was going to change the world.

  The Mercedes’white-walled tyres (a little splash of exhibitionism he had allowed himself, along with the $200 sunglasses) made a pleasing squeal as he swung the car round to the exit and turned out into the light, pre-rush traffic heading for route 101. He had fifteen minutes to make the journey to McDowell Elementary, where his daughter, Sonia, was about to play in her first softball match. In the past, his wife, Louise, had taken care of school events, but now four months into studying for a doctorate in political science at Arizona State, she had started to insist he share responsibility. Hudson secretly resented the fact that his wife’s focus had shifted outside their home, but he had to concede that she had made more than her share of sacrifices to facilitate his career. They had been students at Brown together, but as soon as they had married, her ambitions had taken a back seat. While he scaled the corporate ladder, she had bottled up her intellectual frustration and made do with a series of part-time teaching jobs. The move west had been the final catalyst for change. ‘This isn’t just going to be about you or the money,’ she had declared, ‘this is my time, too.’ ‘Sure, sweetie, it’s time we both stepped out into the sun,’ he had said, and at that moment, he had even meant it.

  He followed the 101 due east for several miles towards the mountains, the land either side of it one huge construction site: entire neighbourhoods were going up as fast as the sunburned Mexican labourers could build them. Scottsdale was on the move. Businesses were flooding in. Thanks to the domestic air-conditioner and vast water-capture schemes, a town which in the 1950s had only a handful of residents had mushroomed to over 100,000. Just like the microorganisms he had spent his professional life studying, human beings had an uncanny knack of bringing life to the most unlikely corners of the planet.

  Hudson recalled some of the pot-smoking humanities students at Brown talking about ‘life force’as some abstract idea drawn from mystic Eastern philosophy, but to him, a microbiologist studying living things in their most elemental form, life was a measurable physical force just like any other in the universe. But whereas light or heat would penetrate indiscriminately wherever it was able, in accordance with fixed and unaltering constants set at the beginning of time, the force of life was strengthening and accelerating. There was and always would be the same amount of gravity in the universe, but while the conditions remained to sustain it, life was relentlessly increasing in complexity, ability and ambition. Viewed from this perspective, a city in the desert made perfect sense. As the most advanced form of life, human beings were the fullest expression of the elemental drive to survive and proliferate however and wherever possible. It was beautiful to behold. Beautiful – another word he couldn’t improve on. Life in its myriad forms was beautiful, but, as he always made the point of stressing to his few nonscientist friends, beautiful does not imply nice. Life is not a benign force; in fact, it is unique in the cosmos in be
ing calculatingly ruthless.

  The 101 swung south into the suburbs. The construction smells of concrete and bitumen now gave way to the sweet scents of cactus blossom and fresh-mown grass drifting over from Horsemen’s Park. Hudson leaned forward and switched on the stereo. The auto-tune clicked into a local country station, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs on slide guitar and banjo, belting out one of their chick-a-chack old-time numbers: ‘I’m on a big black freight train, and we’re movin’ on …’ He smiled as he tapped his fingers on the rim of the wheel. Man, those guys could pick.

  Leaving the 101 at 38, he followed East Raintree Drive for a mile or so, before heading south two blocks to the ball park opposite the school. Only three minutes after four: he was almost on time. The lot was already crowded with the outsize air-conditioned suburbans his fellow Arizonans felt compelled to drive, and there were no places left in the shade. He made do with a spot in the full sun and laid his linen sport coat over the passenger seat to save Sonia’s bare legs when it came time to go home. Hudson approached the mothers gathered on the bleachers in the shade of a row of palms. Aside from Coach Brewster he was the only man present. He nodded to the few women he recognized from the PTA barbecue Louise had hosted the previous fall, but no one invited him to join them. They seemed a little embarrassed by the presence of a father during office hours, and he sensed a trace of pity in their awkward smiles. He found a space on the bench at the end of the row as the first ball of the game was pitched. The little boy on the plate swung hard and got lucky. The ball sailed into the outfield and he scrambled to second base. Sonia was manning third and didn’t even twitch. Beneath the wide brim of her cap she was wearing a frown of intense concentration just like her mother’s. Hudson waved, but if she had noticed, she pretended not to. This was serious business, she was telling him; frivolity could wait.

  ‘Excuse me, sir—’

  Hudson turned, a little startled. The quiet, polite voice belonged to a young man in a suit and tie who had approached unseen from his left.