by M. R. Hall
Jenny would have been justified in getting up from the table and leaving the room without another word. She was being manipulated and so was Mrs Patterson. Some disasters were simply too big, their ramifications too far-reaching to allow the whole truth to emerge and Galbraith and his employers knew it as well as she did.
But it was already too late. She had been touched by a mother’s grief and pushed beyond the point at which she could forgive herself for walking away, and secretly she was more than a little to curious to know what else Mrs Patterson and her lawyers would unearth that otherwise might remain suppressed.
‘I have no objection to you being represented at my inquest into Mr Brogan’s death,’ Jenny said. ‘You are a legitimately interested party. But I must warn you now, there may be no answers and, if there are, they may not be the ones you want to hear.’
‘I’ll take my chances, Mrs Cooper,’ Mrs Patterson said. ‘It’s not as if I have anything more left to lose.’
NINE
OPENING HER INQUEST ONLY a week after Flight 189 came down had seemed the best way to catch evidence before it was buried, but Jenny had seriously underestimated the obstacles that would be placed in her path. The first warning shots had come in off-the-record phone calls from Simon Moreton, a Director in the Ministry of Justice, and her superior insofar as a coroner could be said to have one.
Despite all that she had got away with in the past, he warned her, she wouldn’t be repeating the experience. A wise coroner, he suggested, would recognize that this was one of the rare occasions that required all public officials to pull in the same direction. It was civil service code for ‘back off now or expect consequences’. When she reminded him that the law required a coroner fearlessly and independently to inquire after the truth, she was met with silence.
When Moreton’s pleading failed, his superior, the politely imperious Sir Oliver Prentice, requested her to postpone ‘to allow the media to calm down’. She responded with a request of her own: where in the Coroner’s Rules did it require her to time her inquiry according to the level of press hysteria? Then there were no more phone calls, merely a two-line email informing her that counsel had been instructed to keep a watching brief at her inquest on behalf of Sir James Kendall’s inquiry. Determined to make life difficult for her, Sir James Kendall declined to release traffic camera footage from the Severn Bridge, curtly informing her that she had no right to evidence already lawfully in his possession. Nor would he hand over statements taken from rescue workers or the farmer, Roberts, who, as far as she was aware, remained the closest anyone had to an eye-witness. Meanwhile, Kendall’s carefully managed inquiry ground on slowly and in silence. The only news that had emerged from his office was that the autopsies were complete and that the process of reassembling the wreckage of the aircraft was under way at the AAIB’s hangars at Farnborough in Hampshire.
When the Courts Service claimed there was no courtroom available within a fifty-mile radius, Jenny’s patience snapped. As a calculated act of revenge, she chose the remotest and most inaccessible venue within her jurisdiction in which to conduct her proceedings. If they wanted to keep tabs on her, she was going to make sure they suffered for it.
The village of Sharpness, situated twenty-five miles northeast of the centre of Bristol, was once a flourishing deep-water port crammed with cargo ships. Later eclipsed by the container port at Avonmouth, it had declined to a sleepy dormitory midway between the cities of Bristol and Gloucester. The tired-looking docks saw one or two ships each week, but the atmosphere was of a settlement that had been left marooned by time.
The village hall was a single-storey brick building that could have been built in any of the post-war decades. Jenny followed Alison into the echoing interior, feeling a perverse delight at bringing such momentous events to a place that still bore the stubs of Christmas streamers. The rooms were cold and a faint smell of damp hung in the air. With no sign of the helper they had been promised, Jenny and Alison took off their coats and set out the chairs and tables themselves. It was a long way from the air-conditioned comfort of the modern court buildings many coroners enjoyed, yet there was something profoundly pleasing in such basic surroundings; the truth was so much harder to disguise when there was no ceremony or ornament for it to hide behind.
Jenny hunkered down in the small committee room at the back of the building where, boosted by several cups of coffee, she attempted to focus on the task ahead. There was no avoiding the fact that her inquiry was limited to determining Gerry Brogan’s immediate cause of death; she wasn’t expected nor was she legally permitted to stray into the territory that had been marked out for Sir James Kendall. If she crossed the line, she faced the prospect of a higher court summarily halting proceedings and handing them over to another, more compliant colleague. In the few years she had been in her post, the law had gradually shifted to exert unprecedented levels of political control over the office of coroner, which for eight hundred years had managed to remain almost entirely free from outside interference. It was a fact that infuriated her, and she was determined to do all in her power to roll back the tide.
Alison’s familiar knock sounded on the door at precisely ten minutes to ten. As she stepped inside, Jenny heard a hubbub of voices from the hall along the short corridor.
‘We’ve got more than enough lawyers, Mrs Cooper, but I don’t think Mr Ransome’s going to be showing his face, and there’s a message from DCI Molyneux asking to be excused attendance unless it’s absolutely necessary.’
‘It is. Tell him to be here after lunch or I’ll issue a summons. Is Brogan’s girlfriend here?’
‘Just arrived. I feel sorry for her, poor girl. She’d just walked through the door when Mrs Patterson cornered her and started asking about terrorists. I had to ask her to leave her alone.’ She handed Jenny the witness list. ‘Corton’s here, and Mr Hennessy from Dublin.’
‘Good. Who told you about Ransome? His lawyer?’
‘Mr Hartley. You must remember him from the Danny Wills case a couple of years back?’
Jenny’s heart sank. Giles Hartley was the Queen’s Counsel who had represented the private company that owned a prison in which the fourteen-year-old boy had been murdered by a member of staff. When the truth had begun to surface, Hartley had personally seen to it that the facility’s director fled to safety in the USA, where she still lived, a fugitive from justice as far as Jenny was concerned.
‘I think he’ll be making an application for Mr Ransome to be excused from appearing,’ Alison said.
‘He can try.’ Jenny ran her eye over the list, deciding in what order to take the witnesses. She decided on the least contentious first, if only to keep the Pattersons’ lawyers from revealing their hand too soon. ‘All right. Give me a moment, I’ll be right with you.’
Alison gave her a concerned look. ‘You won’t let Mrs Patterson bully you, Mrs Cooper? There’s no reason this shouldn’t be open and shut.’
‘No,’ Jenny said. But even as the word passed her lips, she felt her diaphragm tighten and her heart begin to pick up speed. As Alison left, closing the door behind her, she was gripped by the same claustrophobic sensation she felt buckling into the seat of an aeroplane ready for take-off. Only today she was at the controls.
‘All rise.’ Alison’s voice brought the room to silence.
Jenny entered from the back of the hall and passed along the aisle between half a dozen rows of chairs containing witnesses and journalists. Occupying the seats at the front was a small army of lawyers. As she reached her desk and turned to face them, she felt severely outnumbered and more than a little intimidated.
As the assembled company resumed their seats, Giles Hartley QC remained standing. A tall man with an imposing aristocratic demeanour, he spoke in a precise, genteel manner designed to make any opposition appear pitiably unreasonable. ‘Ma’am, I represent Ransome Airways. My learned colleague Miss Rachel Hemmings represents Mr and Mrs Patterson, Mr Leonard Crowthorne appears for the Commissione
r of the Somerset Constabulary and Mr Rufus Bannerman QC is representing the interests of Sir James Kendall’s inquiry.’
Jenny looked along the line of barristers in the front row. Rachel Hemmings possessed the only face that couldn’t be called intimidating. An attractive, though tough-looking woman in her late thirties, Jenny had heard she was earning a fearsome reputation in the family courts. Crowthorne was a big bully of a man, who had become Bristol CID’s favourite prosecutor, and Bannerman was his opposite, a thin, bookish type with the expression of one permanently pained by others’ failure to see things as clearly as he did. Hartley and Bannerman, the senior men, each had pretty female juniors at their sides, and all the barristers had at least one instructing solicitor sitting in the row behind.
Nick Galbraith sat slightly apart from his colleagues in the second row alongside Mr and Mrs Patterson. He looked content, safe in the expectation of a large cheque for his firm whatever the outcome of the hearing. The Pattersons, by contrast, appeared uncomfortable in each other’s presence, their body language that of two very separate and self-contained individuals.
‘Before we begin, ma’am, I would like to address the issue of your request for Mr Ransome’s attendance,’ Hartley said.
‘There is no issue,’ Jenny said. ‘I expect to hear from him.’
She saw Mrs Patterson nod in approval.
‘I need hardly remind you, ma’am, that your terms of reference do not extend to any investigation into the cause of the downing of Flight 189. That being the case, I cannot see any reason why Mr Ransome’s testimony, such as it might be, would be of any assistance to you.’
‘Mr Hartley –’ Jenny strained to remain patient – ‘Mr Brogan was sailing a yacht which appears to have been sunk when an aeroplane owned by your client ploughed into it. Unless you are arguing that a man who fires a gun has no responsibility for the bullet once it has left the barrel, Mr Ransome is not only a relevant witness, but my inquiry could not possibly proceed without him.’
‘Ma’am, as far as I can ascertain from the few documents you have chosen to disclose, Mr Brogan was alive for some time after my client’s aeroplane came down—’
‘Your client will attend, Mr Hartley.’
‘Ma’am, I’m afraid that—’
‘I’ll spell it out, shall I?’ She lifted her eyes to the journalists seated behind the lawyers. ‘If Mr Ransome fails to answer his summons voluntarily, he will find himself doing so involuntarily.’ She turned her gaze to Crowthorne. ‘The same goes for Detective Chief Inspector Molyneux.’
Hartley exchanged a glance with Bannerman. ‘Your comments have been duly noted, ma’am.’ He smiled thinly and lowered himself into his chair.
Jenny addressed the lawyers collectively: ‘Is there anything else?’
She watched Bannerman, Sir James Kendall’s representative, touch his index fingers thoughtfully to his lips, then decide to bide his time.
‘Very well.’ She turned to Alison. ‘We’ll have the jury, please, Usher.’
Jenny drew in a breath and offered a silent prayer for strength. She would need all she could muster.
Alison left the hall and returned from the large meeting room with the nine citizens who had been summoned to form the coroner’s jury. There were six mostly middle-aged women, one man nearing seventy and two much younger men, one black and well dressed, the other white, shaven-headed and tattooed. She seated them in two rows at the side of the room and took each one through the ordeal of reading the juror’s oath aloud to the packed and impatient hall. Some were visibly nervous, others merely confused by their call to immediate public duty in an obscure corner of the countryside.
‘Let me make one thing clear,’ Jenny said to them at the start of her opening remarks. ‘This is neither a criminal nor a civil court. No one is on trial. You are not being asked to determine guilt or innocence, or even liability. You have one task, which is to determine the cause of death of a thirty-eight-year-old man named Gerry Fergus Brogan.
‘A little over a week ago, Mr Brogan was sailing a yacht named the Irish Mist on the Severn estuary, approximately twenty miles to the south-west of here. At around one o’clock in the afternoon his body was found washed up on the beach on the English side of the old Severn Bridge. Not far from his corpse lay the body of a ten-year-old American girl named Amy Patterson. She was wearing a lifejacket and had been a passenger in an airliner that had come down in the estuary a little over three hours earlier. The following day, the wreckage of the yacht Mr Brogan had been sailing was found close to the sunken remains of the aircraft. It appears the plane struck it as it crash-landed. Having heard all the relevant evidence, I will ask you to determine Mr Brogan’s cause of death. The most common verdicts are accident, misadventure, suicide, unlawful killing or an open verdict – meaning that the cause of death remains unknown.
‘Please try to remember that we are not concerned with deciding between competing cases. Our task is purely and simply to unearth the truth, or as much of it as we can.’ The lawyers traded subtle glances, amused at Jenny’s hopeful idealism. Ignoring them, she held the jury firmly in her gaze. ‘It is a duty unique to the coroner’s court and I expect you to perform it to the best of your ability.’
Maria Canavan was the first to come forward to the chair positioned in the no-man’s-land between Jenny and the lawyers that would serve as the witness box. She was slightly built, with long red hair that fell across her freckled face. Her voice barely carried as she stumbled through the words of the oath.
Jenny spoke to her gently, leading her by the hand through the preliminaries. She was twenty-six years old and worked as a part-time secretary for Hennessy’s, a yacht brokerage which operated from offices at Dublin Harbour. She had another job as a waitress in a seafood restaurant on the quay, which was where she had met Gerry Brogan almost exactly a year ago. He told her he had been crewing on yachts in the Caribbean since the late nineties and had come back to Ireland intending to set up in business on his own. He had talked about starting an ocean-going sailing school, but was looking for work while he was studying for his instructor’s licence. It was she who had introduced him to Mr Hennessy and got him work delivering yachts to customers around Europe.
‘When did this friendship turn into a relationship?’ Jenny asked.
‘It was after he started working at Hennessy’s.’ She spoke in little more than a whisper. ‘We just sort of got friendly, you know.’
‘Did you live together?’
‘That was later, last November time. He’d been staying on his boat down at Bray. It was tough in the winter, so I said he should move in to my place. I’ve a little flat in Rathmines.’
‘And did you know much about his personal history at this time?’
‘Only what I’ve just told you. And I knew he grew up in Blackrock up near the border there.’
‘He didn’t tell you he had a number of criminal convictions?’
Maria Canavan shook her head.
Jenny motioned to Alison, who handed her a copy of Brogan’s criminal record and distributed several more among the jury and lawyers.
‘His first recorded offence was one of theft from a shop in Waterford, County Kilkenny. He was fourteen years old. There’s another for violent assault when he was twenty-two, also in Waterford, for which he was sentenced to twenty months in prison. Aged thirty-one he was convicted in Dublin for the possession of 800 grams of cocaine with intent to supply. He went to prison for three years.’
Maria Canavan stared blankly at the piece of paper in her hand.
Jenny moved on. ‘I’ve spoken to an officer in the Garda, an Inspector Padraig Murphy. He tells me that Mr Brogan was suspected of helping to sail IRA guns across to Scotland during the late 1990s. He wasn’t charged with any offence, but it seems his name was one of those mentioned by intelligence sources.’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Maria said. ‘But I do know his references from Antigua were all good. He’d worked on the
same yacht for six years. An American owned it, a banker. Gerry skippered it for him during the summer and took care of charters over the winter. It was a legitimate business.’
‘Did his employer say why he left?’
‘Gerry had told him the same thing as he told me – he wanted to make a life in his home country.’
Where his connections were. Where there was money to be made from his old friends, Jenny thought to herself, but there seemed little point pushing the witness into territory she knew nothing about. Gerry Brogan had a murky history; he was a man whom the Garda had marked down as involved in the criminal rather than the political activities of the IRA. There were hundreds like him across Ireland, Murphy had said during their ten-minute telephone conversation; and a lot of them had made hay during the early years of the peace process, around the turn of the century, when former paramilitaries were given an easy ride by the police on politicians’ orders. It was more than likely that Brogan had skipped off to the West Indies only when he felt he could ride his luck no more.
‘Did he ever mention his family?’ Jenny asked.
‘Not much. Only that his parents had both died when he was younger.’
Jenny addressed the jury. ‘I have received information from the Irish authorities that Mr Brogan was taken into the care of the social services when he was nine years old and spent a number of years in a children’s home in Waterford. His mother’s name is recorded as Mrs Annie Brogan, but thus far attempts to locate her have proved unsuccessful.’ She looked back at Maria Canavan. ‘Did he talk to you about his early years?’
‘He told me he came from Blackrock in County Louth.’ She seemed puzzled. ‘Maybe he had friends there? He knew the town, right enough. We made a trip there once.’
It was one of the ports closest to the Northern Irish border. Inspector Murphy had been reluctant to discuss details, but Jenny suspected Brogan had operated from there before he left the country. A little research had taught her there was a long tradition of smuggling illicit arms and goods in and out of Ireland through its many isolated harbours. In the 1970s and ’80s, weapons supplied to Irish Republicans by Libya had been brought in that way.
