by M. R. Hall
‘Did you know Adam well?’ Jenny asked.
‘Well?’ She seemed embarrassed by the question. ‘I couldn’t say I understood him, particularly.’
‘Something of a free spirit?’
‘He was certainly that.’
Jenny gave her a look to show her that she understood her mixed feelings perfectly.
‘He came from a good family, well-educated, money, but I’ll admit there was something . . .’ She looked again at the photograph. ‘He just didn’t seem to engage with reality the same way as other people do.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I suppose it was hard to understand what drove him. I’m not even sure Karen truly did. But do you know who he reminded me of?’ Over the hurdle now, she was warming to her theme. ‘He was like one of those people you meet growing up that you knew were never going to make it past thirty. He wasn’t a drinker or a drug-taker – quite the reverse – but he’d take stupid risks as if he couldn’t see the consequences. Bringing a six-month-old child to an African village with no doctor, for example. It’s almost as if he felt a need to tempt fate.’
Jenny was intrigued. She had thought of him as an idealist, but not as reckless. And now the word was in her mind, she saw a death wish behind the smile, a buried grief subconsciously pulling him back to its source, keeping him balanced precariously on the edge.
‘I understand that he lost his mother when he was at university. And of course, he’d gone to visit his father’s grave—’
‘Are you suggesting he was more attached to them than to his own wife and child?’ Mrs King said. ‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘Because . . . ?’
‘My daughter couldn’t have done any more for him. She was devoted. Frankly, I don’t know how she put up with all his travelling, coming and going as he pleased.’
She folded her hands on her lap: a vision of the respectable bourgeois life Adam Jordan had been determined not to have. And yet the tension between the two worlds must have tugged at every fibre of his being. He returned from his African adventures to this solid, respectable house. Nowhere could have been more comfortably middle class and insulated from the horrors of the world than suburban Bath. And only yesterday Karen had told her about his plans for the future: he had been thinking responsibly; he was planning to come home to work behind a desk.
‘Do you have any idea why he might have killed himself, Mrs King – if that is indeed what he did?’
‘There’s some doubt about that?’
‘Until there’s a verdict, there’s always doubt.’
Mrs King nodded, considered the earlier question for a moment, then surprised Jenny with the insightfulness of her answer. ‘I can only think that the mind of an alternative type like Adam must be a very confused place. If you define yourself by all the things you reject, but yet you’re still attached to many of them, I’d call that a recipe for self-hatred, wouldn’t you?’ She saw the contradiction in his make-up as clearly as Jenny did. ‘There was a mischievous side to him, but I didn’t often see him having good, honest fun. Yes . . .’ She appeared to cast her mind back over the many occasions on which he had disappointed her. ‘You know, I think deep down he was haunted by the fact that the people he was trying to help didn’t . . .’ She struggled to find the right words. ‘He was too bright not to see the futility of a situation. He must have known he was on a hiding to nothing.’
Jenny thought of what Karen had told her in her office about Adam’s image of grains of sand in the desert: he had found his place in eternity, perhaps, but not in life. Failing to fit the mould in his own country, he had gone in search of self among the unfortunates of the world, only to find another kind of rejection.
‘None of this excuses suicide, of course,’ Claire King said. A note of bitterness entered her voice for the first time. ‘I’m afraid that for all the pious talk he was far too caught up in his own wants. Karen won’t have it, but if a man’s being unfaithful, what more proof do you need?’
‘Unfaithful?’
‘Yes.’ She seemed surprised. Hasn’t Karen mentioned it to you? He’d been taking cash out of their savings account every week since he came back from Africa. I told her – there’s no other rational explanation. He was obviously seeing someone.’
Jenny left the Jordans’ house without having found the book, and with even more questions about Adam Jordan’s final days. Typing Claire King’s name into her smartphone, she learned that she and her husband were the joint directors of a company that owned and managed a large portfolio of property in and around the city of Bath. A string of mentions in the local press confirmed that they were pillars of the community: patrons of several charities and active in the local Conservative Association. Her suspicions were correct. Adam couldn’t have married into a family less likely to appreciate his efforts. Returning from an aborted project in South Sudan, he might have been feeling particularly judged. But depressed enough to leave his two-year-old son and jump from a bridge? It didn’t add up. And nor, Jenny felt, did taking cash from their account to conduct an affair.
She returned to the office to find Alison brimming with manic efficiency, and a small mountain of death reports that had accumulated in her in-tray.
‘Someone from Dr Verma’s office called,’ Alison said busily. ‘They’ve established that Elena Lujan lived above the Recife with about eight other girls and a junior manager. So far they’ve managed to trace six of them. None of them is showing symptoms, and they’re all being tested. They’ve also confirmed she had the same strain as Sophie Freeman, but haven’t been able to establish any common link between them. Apparently they asked Mr Freeman the obvious question, but he’s denied visiting the Recife or knowing Miss Lujan. They’re widening the search, hoping to find someone who might have overlapped with them both. CID told me they kept a hidden camera in reception – I expect they’re having fun with that.’
‘The HPA’s being very cooperative all of a sudden.’
‘I expect they’ve decided to keep their enemy close,’ Alison said. ‘But they are the experts. I don’t see why you shouldn’t trust them.’
Jenny toyed with the idea of letting Alison in on what Dr Kerr had told her the previous afternoon, but decided against it: her former colleagues in CID never missed an opportunity to fish for information, and when it came to keeping secrets from them, Alison had a poor record.
‘How did you get on with Mrs Jordan?’ Alison asked. ‘I heard about the break-in. No arrests yet, I suppose?’
‘No.’ Jenny decided to keep the darker theories that were forming in her mind to herself. ‘Nice house, middle of the afternoon – it was just her bad luck she arrived home when she did.’
Alison nodded, though her expression said she detected that Jenny wasn’t telling the whole story.
‘I spoke with Adam Jordan’s mother-in-law. She thinks he may have been quite troubled underneath.’
‘That hardly counts as a revelation.’
‘She also told me that he’d been sneaking cash out of a joint account every week since he came home. She thinks he was up to something.’
‘Sex, you mean?’
‘That’s what she thinks. Though she’s no real evidence of it, as far as I know.’
‘He was a man. What more do you need?’
‘I’ve asked her to get Mrs Jordan to forward the details when she’s able. Maybe you could chase up his phone records while we’re waiting?’
‘You seem to be going to an awful lot of trouble for a suicide, Mrs Cooper. Do you think this is wise?’
Jenny stared at the unforgiving heap of paperwork on her desk. Six new deaths – mostly routine, but those were always the ones that caught you out – screamed for attention. She tried to switch her focus from Adam Jordan, Sophie Freeman and the dead Spanish girl, but a new thought had crept in to haunt her. What if there was a connection between Adam Jordan and Elena Lujan? He had spent months in the meningitis belt of Africa. It wasn’t beyond the bou
nds of possibility that he had become a carrier and passed the disease on. Perhaps he had somehow become aware of the fact? And if he had visited Elena at the Recife, might it explain the phone call from the man with the unplaceable accent? Could there be other cases as yet unreported? Had Jordan become an unwitting angel of death? And the more she thought about the burglary at the Jordans’ home, the more likely it seemed that it was related to Jordan’s secretive activities.
She fired off an email requesting Dr Kerr to take samples from Jordan’s body. She wanted every conceivable test. Then from the thin file of papers forwarded from the police, she extracted the list of effects found in Jordan’s pockets. Among them had been a bank card. She had intended to wait for Mrs Jordan to forward his statements herself, but Jenny doubted she would be in any hurry to have her mother’s suspicions confirmed. She called up the pro-forma she kept on her hard drive, filled in a request for production of evidence, and sent it off to the legal section at the bank’s head office.
Adam Jordan didn’t strike Jenny as the sort of man who would have been visiting a prostitute, but if that was the case, it naturally followed that he would have sought to hide the fact. But it still left Jenny with no clue why he had lied about his trip to Oxford. She gave herself ten minutes to indulge her curiosity before turning to her other neglected cases. She ran several searches on Sonia Blake, playing with different keywords, and began to form the impression from comments made about her in the press that she was a controversial figure in her field.
Most of her work, it seemed, had been on the subject of covert, proxy wars in various developing parts of the world, principally Africa and Central America. But far from following the usual academic line that it was immoral for Western governments to pursue their interests through mercenaries and militias, at a London conference the previous summer Sonia Blake had proposed that there were times when playing dirty was entirely necessary to pursue just ends. What was moral about standing by while competing factions slaughtered each other in pursuit of mineral wealth in the Congo, she argued. In her view it was far better to pay a private army to put the violent factions down. ‘To be squeamish about the means of achieving just ends is to pretend that it’s possible to live on a high moral plane separate from the parts and aspects of humanity you happen to despise,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘It is not. We are all part of the same species, the same mechanism; what threatens a part, threatens the whole.’
She had discussed the case of aid workers who had been complicit in the shipment of arms hidden in consignments of grain to democratic factions in Somalia. ‘Their crime was to support a just outcome rather than to be principled spectators to a massacre,’ she had said. ‘Sometimes it’s impossible to be a decent human being and not have blood on your hands. History shows us that the forces of evil are always present, always probing for every weakness like a virus invading the body. On this earth there can never be any such thing as peace, only temporary victory in a relentless, never-ending sequence of conflicts.’
It struck Jenny as odd that Adam Jordan had chosen to correspond with Sonia Blake, unless it had been to take her to task. What little she knew of his philosophy seemed entirely at odds with the woman’s vision of perpetual war. Perhaps it was a reflection of just how negative his state of mind had become; he had after all been forced to abandon an irrigation project for fear of being caught up in tribal conflict.
Jenny typed Sonia Blake’s name into a search engine and selected the ‘images’ option, just as Adam Jordan must have done from his tent in South Sudan, curious to see what image of her he would have first encountered. Scattered amongst the host of people around the world sharing the same name were photographs of her from various academic publications and conference bulletins. Most often she was photographed speaking from a platform, gesturing imploringly as she spoke, but down towards the foot of the page Jenny’s eye was caught by a very different picture. It was a headshot of a slightly younger Sonia Blake next to a man, which looked as if it had been taken in the late 1970s. Jenny clicked on it and found that it was attached to a report from an Arizona newspaper, the East Valley Tribune, published some six years ago. The headline read: Wilderness Remains Were Murdered Scientist. Daughter Demands Police Inquiry.
Jenny read on. Sonia Blake’s father, Roy Emmett Hudson, was a pioneering geneticist who had gone missing in March 1982 from Scottsdale, Arizona. He was last seen watching a baseball game at his daughter’s elementary school. Many theories had been advanced during the intervening years to explain his disappearance, including the allegation that he had defected to the Soviet bloc. But a quarter of a century later, hikers had discovered his skeletal remains in mountains some thirty miles from his home. He had been shot once through the base of the skull. His daughter and several former colleagues at Genix Inc., the major global company whose fortunes had been made on the back of his research, had called on the Arizona State Police to launch a murder inquiry. The local police chief, Mr Jackson Slater, was quoted as saying that ‘with no witnesses or DNA it would be easier finding bear tracks in a dust storm’. Sonia Blake maintained that the most likely explanation was that her father had been murdered by rivals in a cut-throat race for patents in the early years of the biotech industry. ‘Most of those people are still around,’ Sonia had told the newspaper. ‘Someone knows who ordered my father’s killing and I urge the State to offer immunity to any witness who’ll testify.’
Jenny keyed in ‘Roy Emmett Hudson’ and beyond the article she had just read, found nothing. Not one single mention.
THIRTEEN
IT WAS LATE IN THE AFTERNOON when Alison appeared in the doorway and made the surprising announcement that Jenny’s ex-husband was in reception asking if he could see her. As far as Jenny could recall, David had never once set foot inside her office, preferring to meet on neutral ground. For a man whose territorial instinct and sense of pride were deeply bound together, entering her professional domain meant a large step down. She had to assume he was desperate.
‘Jenny. Sorry to intrude.’
He closed the door behind him, checked it was firmly shut, and cast a furtive glance around the room as he edged into a seat. She had seldom seen him so jumpy.
‘It’s not Ross—?’
‘No. He’s fine. Well, I assume he is. He seems to be out most of the time. Wouldn’t that be nice—’ He stopped himself extemporizing on the theme. Jenny allowed herself an inward smile: his four short words told her that Debbie’s oppressive domesticity was at last beginning to grate.
‘This is an early finish for you, isn’t it?’ Jenny ventured.
‘I had to reschedule some of the list – there’s a team of microbiologists going over the theatres. That’s why I’m here.’ He ran a nervous hand over his temple. ‘These people aren’t HPA – I know all their staff – but no one seems prepared to tell us who they are or what the hell it is they’re looking for. Word’s got out of course – I’m already getting panicked calls from the cardiologists who refer my private patients.’
‘Sounds like a sensible precaution,’ Jenny said.
‘By whom?’ David demanded. ‘And why the secrecy?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Jenny answered truthfully.
‘Ed Freeman tells me there’s been another meningitis death – a prostitute.’
‘That’s right. So far it’s the only other case I’m aware of.’
‘Had she been in the hospital? Is that what this is about? Are they looking for a carrier in the Vale?’
Jenny said, ‘I’d like to know as much as you would.’
‘Come on, Jenny – you must have some idea. I have patients whose lives are at risk from the slightest infection. What am I meant to tell them?’
Jenny thought of what Dr Kerr had told her during their most recent meeting. It was tempting to feed the rumour in amongst the senior medical staff, but she had given him her word.
‘I adjourned my inquest because I was only getting half the truth. It sounds to me as if you
r bosses have brought in an expensive private company to sweep the hospital. They want to be able to look squarely into the news cameras and say hand-on-heart they did everything they could. It’s the only way they can appear competent.’
‘And pass the blame on to Ed.’
‘He’s tested negative.’
‘Maybe, but is that conclusive? And even if it is, do you honestly think that’s the story they’re going to tell? The man’s already at breaking point. And his wife’s hardly the most understanding when it comes to that sort of thing.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jenny asked.
David agonized for a moment, perhaps fearing that he had already said too much. ‘Between ourselves, he has been known to stray. But from what he’s confided in me, Fiona more or less abandoned interest in that side of things after their youngest was born, so she can hardly lay all the blame at his door.’
Jenny interrupted him. ‘You think he might have visited this girl?’
‘It’s not impossible. But I’d hate to see him blamed . . .’
Jenny tried to unscramble David’s confused messages. ‘Who are you here for, David – you or Ed?’
‘I can’t deny a degree of self-interest, but mostly for Ed of course. I’m frightened for him, Jenny. He’s too good a man to be able to live with the thought that . . . You know what I’m saying.’
‘He’s suicidal?’
‘Getting there. But for God’s sake, don’t repeat that. He’ll never work again.’
‘David, I think I trust you, and hard as it might be, you’re going to have to trust me. If there’s something to be found, I’ll find it.’
David said, ‘You’ll be lied to, Jenny. Remember – no one knows how to bend the truth like a doctor.’
It was Fiona Freeman who answered the phone. She was quiet, but able to talk, unlike her husband, evidently. It took only a brief exchange to detect that all was not well between them. Jenny told her the adjournment would continue for a few more days while Elena Lujan’s case and possible sources of infection were being investigated.
