by M. R. Hall
There it was, another missing piece. Ginya: the word Sonia Blake had doodled on the scrap of paper Jenny had picked up in her room.
Jenny said, ‘Did she seem healthy?’
‘Very. She was beautiful.’
‘Frightened?’
‘A little, perhaps. I thought she was just nervous of speaking to me. Is she all right?’
‘I’m not sure.’
As Jenny spoke, she saw Lucy stoop down and pick something up that she had spotted jutting out from under the end of the bed. It was a small wooden figure attached to a leather thong.
‘Can I see that?’ Jenny said, cupping her hand over the receiver.
‘Hello?’ Kathy said. ‘Are you still there?’
Jenny was turning the doll over in her fingers. She was in no doubt: it was identical to the one that had gone missing from Adam Jordan’s car the morning after his death.
TWENTY-TWO
JENNY WAS SITTING WITH KAREN JORDAN in her garden, surrounded by the gentle, familiar sounds of a suburban weekend: cricket commentary on next door’s radio, a barking terrier, children squealing and splashing in a paddling pool. Normality a universe away from where Karen found herself adrift. Sam was emptying a big red crate of assorted toys onto the grass, examining each in turn with a calm, determined seriousness. He wasn’t a child who would grow up to take life lightly, Jenny thought, especially if he were forced to carry a burden like Sonia Blake’s, never knowing how his father had come to leave his life so violently. Karen didn’t seem to notice how intelligently her son was playing – if play was an appropriate description for such detailed observation – she seemed lost in a fog. The doctor had told her it was post-traumatic stress, she said, but the drugs he had given her were as bad as the symptoms. She felt absent. Numb. She was looking down on the world, unable to plant her feet on the ground.
Jenny asked if she felt strong enough to talk.
‘You can’t upset me,’ Karen said. ‘I’m not feeling anything.’
‘Sam seems very sharp. I’m guessing there’s a lot of his father in him.’
‘He got my nose and mouth, that’s all. Poor him. The rest is pure Adam.’
Jenny told her story gently. She began with the girl, Ayen. Karen stared at her blankly. She had never heard of her, had no idea that her husband had sponsored a young woman to come from Sudan, let alone that he’d been giving her money, their money, to feed and house her.
‘What about the village – Ginya? Does the name mean anything to you?’
Another blank. Immediately before his return, Adam had been working at a settlement called Katum, though she understood there were many by that name scattered about the bush. And the fact that a girl called her home Ginya didn’t mean that it would carry the same name on a map or in official documents. There were tribal names and official names, all of which carried a load and significance that were impossible for an outsider to appreciate, even understand.
Jenny broached the subject of Ruth Webley and the photographs of Adam next to the marijuana plantation. Karen gave an indifferent shrug.
‘So what? If you don’t make money you can only subsist, and not even the South Sudanese are content with that any more. If you know money can get you vehicles and clean water and drugs for your children, that’s what you’ll want.’
‘He didn’t object to that?’
‘Of course he did, but we’re not starving, are we? Our child doesn’t have a one in four chance of not surviving to adulthood.’
‘What I’m skirting around is whether he might have got involved in the business end of it. I’ve seen his bank records,’ Jenny confessed. ‘There seems to have been quite a lot of money—’
‘How do you think we live like this?’ Karen interrupted. ‘Adam inherited money. Most people would be glad. He was eaten up with guilt. At least he acted on his conscience.’ She glanced over at the row of expensive houses opposite. ‘Not many do.’
‘No.’ Jenny felt a surge of relief. Adam as drug dealer was a disturbing and contradictory figure she had found neither likely nor convincing.
‘What about Harry Thorn? Does his interest go beyond the pragmatic?’
‘Adam hinted that he thought it might, but he didn’t want to know about Harry’s deals on the side. It would have made things too complicated.’
‘I can see that,’ Jenny said. ‘Quite a minefield he was operating in.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Karen’s cup slipped, spilling tea down her blouse.
‘Here.’ Jenny handed her a paper tissue. ‘Was it the mention of Harry?’
‘Probably,’ Karen said, dabbing ineffectually at the stain. She made a show of pretending she cared, then let the damp tissue fall from her fingers onto the grass.
Jenny stooped to pick it up. She was losing her, pushing her too far, but she needed a little more. She waited a moment, making small talk about the exotic grasses that seemed to have grown even taller since her last visit – Adam’s little piece of Africa. He would have to sleep with the window wide open so he could hear it sway in the wind, Karen said. He would have slept outside if she had let him.
‘The village,’ Jenny said. ‘Ginya. Are you sure Adam never said anything about what happened there?’
Karen didn’t answer.
‘Mrs Jordan—?’
‘No! He didn’t tell me, all right?’
‘He might have been trying to protect you,’ Jenny said gently, ‘and Sam, of course.’
‘He was restless,’ Karen said. ‘Troubled. Even when he assured me he was fine I could feel it.’ The truth was finally coming to the surface. ‘He couldn’t smile, not with his eyes; it was if he’d put on a mask.’ She turned sharply to look at Jenny directly. ‘Was it our people who killed him?’
‘We don’t know he was killed.’
Karen screwed up her eyes and tears spilled out over her cheeks. ‘I can’t talk any more. Please don’t make me.’
Jenny glanced down at Sam. He wore a frown of deep concentration as he turned the wheels of an upturned toy car with delicate, probing fingers.
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right – with Sam I mean?’
‘Don’t worry. I shan’t jump off a bridge. Even I wanted to, I can’t, can I?’ She flicked out a hand and gripped Jenny’s wrist, her fingers clutching her tightly. ‘I just need to know. I need to know who took him from me.’
‘You will,’ Jenny said, ‘I promise – I almost forgot, I’ve something for you.’ She dipped into her handbag and pulled out the wooden figurine. ‘Ayen had left it behind in her room. If it was the same one that was in your husband’s car, it might mean she was with him the night he died. And with Sam, of course.’
Karen turned her gaze to her son, but he had already spotted the doll in her hand. For a moment he was quite still, and then he got to his feet and walked very determinedly towards the open back door of the house without looking back.
‘Sam, come back,’ Karen called after him.’ She passed the doll back to Jenny. ‘Sam!’
He ignored her, and climbed the step and went inside. Jenny wished for his sake that he’d been able to cry.
Jenny drove across country on autopilot, every bend in the road between the motorway and Oxford imprinted on her subconscious. It was to be her fifth visit in a little over a week. She had taken a pill the moment she stepped out of Karen Jordan’s front door, doubting she’d have the courage to confront Forster without chemical assistance. She was cross with herself for weakening, but she was tired – more than tired, emotionally drained. First it had been one death, then two, then three, now God knows how many. Fragments of all their stories jostled in her mind. There was no sense to it, no pattern, just a series of images that assailed her from all corners. Adam’s smashed body, Sophie’s bloated, swollen face, Sonia Blake stumbling and falling, clawing at the grass, and stick-thin bodies with rigor-mortis grins scattered in the dust. And a single young woman huddled in the shade of a solitary tree, wide terrified eyes staring out above ha
nds covering her nose and mouth. Jenny could smell the corpses, the stench rising in the scalding heat of the African sun. Christ, she was dealing with butchers. Pure evil. She felt her stomach lurch, the bile rise in her throat. She jabbed a finger at the window control, desperate for air. Deep breaths, Jenny, deep breaths.
She started violently at the sound of the phone blasting out through all the car’s speakers. She would have to learn how to operate the damn thing.
‘Hello?’
‘Ah, Mrs Cooper. Thought you’d be glad to know we won. Humiliated the buggers.’
‘Oh, good.’ Surely he hadn’t called to tell her the result of his golf match.
‘Find the girl, did you?’
‘No. She’d gone. About three days ago. The housemates don’t know where. I don’t suppose you could help.’
‘Where do you want me to start – Africa?’
It was meant as a joke, but Jenny wasn’t in the mood.
‘How about Harry Thorn?’
‘Not another trip to bloody London.’
‘The Portobello Road – you’d like it. He’s got a girlfriend who cooks breakfast naked.’
‘Now you’re going to tell me it can’t wait till Monday.’
‘I’d like to say it could, but I’m getting a little anxious about the body count. It seems Miss Deng was the sole survivor of a village wiped out by some sort of disease – that’s the story she told, anyway.’
‘Couldn’t you stay at home for a while, Mrs Cooper? It’d make me sleep easier.’
‘I don’t want you to sleep, Detective Superintendent, I want you to find Ayen.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘On my way to Oxford – does that meet with your approval?’
Williams sighed. ‘I’m not normally a superstitious man, Mrs Cooper, but I’ve got a bad feeling.’
A large and excited party of summer-school students had gathered outside the porter’s lodge. Taking advantage of the confusion, Jenny weaved through their midst, managed to avoid the gaze of Davies, the porter, and hurried through to the cloister and into the quad beyond. She searched for Forster’s name on the hand-painted boards at the foot of each staircase. His accommodation was also on the second floor. The stairs were similarly well trodden, the paintwork similarly scuffed by a thousand student trunks. Forster’s outer door, his ‘oak’, was ajar. Jenny pulled it open and knocked.
‘Who is it?’ he answered in his curt tutor’s voice.
‘Jenny Cooper.’
She could sense his alarm. There was a brief silence from his side, then slow, resigned footsteps. The figure who greeted her was pale and unshaven. He wore reading glasses that aged him ten years. Jenny glanced past him and saw that he’d been working at his desk, but had pulled the lid of his laptop closed shut.
‘What do you want?’ He made no attempt at politeness.
‘I think you might prefer not to have this conversation on the stairs.’
Reluctantly, he stood aside and let her in to his conspicuously orderly room. The furniture was modern: an angular leather sofa with matching armchairs; books meticulously arranged in height order on glass shelves; no stray paper in sight. A man adept at wiping his tracks, Jenny thought.
‘Well?’ Forster challenged.
‘I understand that you and Mrs Blake were closer than I had appreciated. You must have been aware of her complicated family history.’
‘You’ve been talking to her ex-husband.’ He grunted. ‘What of it?’
‘Given her interests, and her recent involvement with a man who died falling from a motorway bridge, I thought you might be wondering about the circumstances of her death.’
‘We know how she died. It’s a serious condition that can go undetected. Sonia was hardly one to run to a doctor over trivial symptoms, so she probably won’t have had a diagnosis.’
‘Were you still lovers – recently, I mean?’
‘Not for months. Though what concern it is of yours, I’ve no idea.’
‘It’s a long and involved story, Mr Forster, but I’ll give you the most recent instalment. The dead man was called Adam Jordan. He was a thirty-two-year-old aid worker recently returned from South Sudan. He met with Sonia and I believe they communicated online. At the beginning of June this year, they sponsored a young woman from Sudan to come to the UK on a six-month visa. It turns out she was the only survivor from a village that had been wiped out by some sort of disease.’
She studied his features for a reaction, but spotted it instead in a nervous scratching of his fingers on the lip of the desk.
‘Did she tell you about the girl?’
‘No,’ he said dismissively.
‘Jordan? Did she mention his name, tell you his story?’
‘Only the vaguest details after you came here first. Look, this really isn’t my territory. Sonia was Politics, I’m Economics – and not African economics, I might add. Strictly First World only. Our relationship, such as it was, was purely personal.’ He pulled off the reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I really have nothing to say to you. I don’t know this man, Jordan. Sonia didn’t trouble me with all the details of her work, any more than I did her with mine.’ A sideways tic of the head. He was angry and straining to contain himself.
Jenny tried to isolate what it was that was making him so defensive. He’d shared a bed with Sonia, he would have known her intimately, heard stories of her father repeated night after night. Why the attempt to shut the conversation down?
What was so threatening? She ran her eyes along the unnaturally neat shelves designed to reveal nothing, yet saying much about their owner. First World only. His was a serious and applied mind, not that of some muddle-headed idealist; an outsider from the former colonies determined to stake his place at the heart of his profession. Sonia had come to him as she had to her ex-husband, looking for a man who would bring order to her chaos; a lover and a father. He must have felt worshipped for a while, at least until he realized the full depth of her obsessions, what he had got himself into: a relationship with potential to threaten his untarnished career; and a source of gossip amongst waspish colleagues searching for his Achilles heel.
Jenny chanced her arm with the theory. ‘I’ve no wish to draw you into anything that might damage your reputation, Mr Forster. I didn’t have to talk to you in person; I could merely have summoned you to my inquest to give evidence in public.’
‘I’ve told you, Mrs Cooper, I’ve nothing more to say.’
In anger, his accent grew stronger, back to its New Zealand roots. She pictured a small town as neat as his room, his every achievement faithfully reported in the local paper; proud parents making a scrapbook of the clippings. No, there would have been no natural place in that narrative for a girlfriend or wife like Sonia Blake.
‘Let me tell you a little of what I know and see if you still feel the same, Mr Forster.’ She gave him no chance to object. ‘In the late 1960s Sonia’s father worked on a biological weapons programme for the US Army. In late 1981 an article in the Washington Post exposed the programme’s work, citing anonymous sources. A few months after it was published he was murdered in Arizona. Sonia persisted in believing he was killed by Russians. She tracked down a defector, also a military biologist, named Roman Slavsky. She kept a file on him. Immediately before he came to meet her here in Oxford, Adam Jordan bought a book Slavsky had written. Straight after her death, or perhaps even before, the contents of Sonia’s file on Slavksy went missing from her room.’
‘How do you know that?’ Forster said.
‘I came here the day after she died – you saw me. I went to her room and saw an empty file with Slavsky’s name on it.’
‘What were you doing in her room?’
‘My job. Looking for evidence.’
He shrugged. ‘I tried not to involve myself with that side of her . . .’ he hesitated, ‘with her more unconventional activities.’
It was odd, his detachment. He had been affected by Sonia’s death, Jen
ny could see it in the greyness of his face, the heavy shadows under his eyes, but from his words alone she wouldn’t have guessed it. He seemed frightened, or unable to grieve.
‘What exactly was the nature of your relationship, if you don’t mind my asking?’ Jenny said.
‘I do mind,’ Forster said.
There. He averted his face: the first sign of emotion.
‘Her ex-husband said you were lovers. If you’ll pardon me, you don’t appear to be reacting as a lover might.’
Forster stepped away from the desk. ‘My feelings are a private matter. Unless you’ve anything useful to say, I would kindly ask you to leave. I have a lot of work to do.’
‘Are you angry with her? Is that it? Was her death a culmination of events? Help me, Mr Forster – I’m in the dark here, people have died.’
For a passing moment her plea seemed to have breached his defences. He seemed about to speak, when they were interrupted by the sound of Jenny’s phone. She glanced at the screen and saw that it was Simon Moreton calling.
‘Excuse me a moment.’ She took the call. ‘Simon?’
‘Jenny,’ he said briskly. ‘Yet again, you seem to have caused something of an inter-departmental crisis. Welsh detectives charging around Bristol at your behest, I hear?’
‘I’m hearing the Jordan inquest in Chepstow. There are no suitable venues on the English side of the border.’
‘I see. Look, I’m afraid I don’t know exactly what’s going on.’ A note of urgency entered his voice. ‘This is just scraps of gossip from mates over in Vauxhall – but I get the impression you’ve strayed into some extremely sensitive territory.’
‘I’ve not strayed anywhere. I’m simply doing what the law requires.’
‘Don’t get pompous on me, Jenny, I’m trying to help. I just had a call saying our friends from south London are going to bring you in for questioning.’
‘They’ve no authority.’
‘Moot point.’
‘Simon, I’m doing nothing improper. Phone them. Tell them I’m not to be interfered with.’
‘Good in theory, not in practice,’ came Moreton’s weasel reply. ‘There are occasions when protocol is bypassed and everyone looks the other way. I sense this might be one of them. It’s up to you, but I think perhaps you ought to cooperate.’
