Jenny Cooper 02 - The Disappeared

by M. R. Hall

  Alarmed, she said, ‘You’re a witness, Mr McAvoy. I can’t talk to you before you give evidence.’

  His face creased into a smile that managed to be both boyish and menacing. Trying to avoid the blue eyes which looked straight into her, she noticed his hair was starting to kink at the back where it needed a cut, and that he wore a dark green silk paisley scarf inside his upturned coat collar.

  ‘I don’t think you can afford not to talk to me.’

  ‘Look, this really isn’t—’

  ‘I’d have got to you before, but you kicked off faster than I expected. I’ve been up to my neck in a trial.’ He brought a battered soft pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and offered it to her. ‘Something to warm you up.’

  ‘You know the rules . . .’

  ‘Fuck ’em. Anyway, I thought these things were different from criminal trials. You’re a coroner, you can talk to who you like.’

  He tapped out a cigarette, struck a match in cupped hands and leaned back against the wall. He took a slow, full draw and slowly exhaled, letting the breeze carry the smoke from his lips.

  ‘Did Mrs Jamal tell you that I was solicitor for both families for four months?’

  Annoyed, Jenny said, ‘I’d rather you kept what you’ve got to say for the witness box.’

  She got up and tossed her half-eaten chocolate bar into a rusting wire waste bin. The damp on the bench had soaked through to her skin.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. It’d only screw it up, put those bastards so far out of reach you’ll never get to the truth.’ He took another draw and glanced lazily towards her, ‘Maybe you don’t care either way.’

  ‘Which bastards are we talking about, precisely?’

  ‘I don’t know. They put me away before I got the chance to find out.’ He gave a hint of a smile. ‘Would you like to hear about it?’

  ‘How about writing a statement and handing it to my officer? That’s the usual practice.’

  ‘Screw that. This case has already cost me one marriage and a perfectly good career.’ He strolled across the weedy concrete slabs towards the pig-wire fence bordering the field. ‘Are those seagulls? We’re miles from the bloody sea.’

  ‘The estuary’s almost the sea.’

  ‘I suppose . . . Look at them, kicking the other ones out of the way.’ He stared out at the field. ‘They pecked that poor girl’s guts out, didn’t they? That’s what I read in the paper.’

  ‘Then it must be true.’

  ‘Didn’t dare look that far down myself . . . Heard anything about where the body went?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Madness. What’s anyone going to do with it? You always see on the TV – the bad guys dig a hole in the woods. Have you ever tried putting a spade in the ground where there are trees? It’s all roots. It’d be as easy to get through concrete.’ He sucked hard on the cigarette and flicked the butt over into the field margin. ‘It’s not as if I don’t know villains, but that’s a new one on me . . . right out of the morgue.’

  He stood and watched the tractor stop at the end of the row, lift its gear and turn around. A sudden change in the wind carried the sound of the birds to them: a raucous, vibrant, strangely beautiful cacophony.

  McAvoy smiled. ‘“I could scale the blue air, I could plough the high hills, Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer, To heal your many ills . . . My Dark Rosaleen” . . . My God. Where did that come from?’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘Schoolmaster for a father – drilled all sorts of stuff into me.’ He turned, walked several steps towards Jenny and stopped. ‘I thought you weren’t going to talk to me, Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘Mrs Jamal said you went to prison.’

  ‘I had that pleasure.’

  ‘What was your offence?’

  ‘Being a nuisance. My record says perverting the course of justice. Cops set me up with an undercover wearing a wire. Spliced it all together, made it sound like the alibi she was offering my client was all my idea.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that it wouldn’t’ve happened eventually. Show them up too may times they’ll skewer you in the end.’

  ‘You were a criminal defence solicitor, right?’

  ‘Solicitor advocate. I wasn’t going to trust any bastard barristers to do my talking for me. Couldn’t fight sleep most of them.’

  ‘And Mrs Jamal came to you after her son disappeared?’

  ‘She and the Hassans both. October ’02. The cops had stopped answering their calls. Hired me to rattle their cage. Three months later I was behind bars. Didn’t even get bail.’

  ‘And you don’t want to talk about this in evidence?’ Jenny said.

  ‘Look, I applaud your efforts getting this thing on so quickly, but let’s be realistic for a moment. You’d think that with all their resources they could have found out the truth by now if they’d wanted to. No offence, Mrs Cooper, but in my humble opinion they’re pimping you out. An honest woman like you wouldn’t want that, surely?’

  ‘You’ve a charming way of putting things.’

  ‘Tell you what – why don’t you call off this afternoon and talk to me instead?’

  She looked at him, astonished. Arrogant prick, telling to tell her how to run her inquest.

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ll see you inside.’

  She headed for the back door of the building.

  ‘You won’t. And if you send me a summons I’ll stand mute. I’ve got sod all to lose, and now it’s come round again I think I’ve probably got more interest in finding out what happened than you have.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes, really. You see, I’m a man with not a few past sins that still need atoning for, Mrs Cooper – my alleged offence not one of them, by the way. So there’s no way I’m going to put my hand on the Holy Bible and swear to tell you the whole truth when this inquest you’re conducting’s a fucking sham.’

  She fought an involuntary urge to hit him, hard.

  McAvoy said, ‘I’m hungry. I’ll be down the road at that bird place. Took the ex-wife there once, I recall – pink flamingos.’

  ‘This had better be good.’

  She found him in a corner of the restaurant by the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a large, shallow pond in which a flock of flamingos huddled against the cold. On a dismal February afternoon the large dining room was almost empty.

  McAvoy pushed aside his empty plate and reached for his coffee. ‘You want something?’

  ‘Just to know what the hell this is about.’

  ‘What d’you tell the jury?’

  ‘That they could have the afternoon off.’

  ‘You’ll be popular. How’s Mrs Jamal?’

  ‘She followed me all the way to my car insisting that Dani James was a whore who’d been put up to blacken her son’s name.’

  ‘Have her arrested for contempt. Can you imagine anyone barracking a Crown Court judge like that?’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  McAvoy said, ‘She always was a pain, poor woman. I expect she’s right round the bloody bend by now.’

  ‘She has her moments.’ Jenny’s eyes skipped around the room, checking no one was watching them. The tension of a court day had worn her medication thin. It wasn’t yet three o’clock and she was feeling jumpy and raw.

  ‘She should be grateful the poor wee bastard had a shag before he went. She’d have had him hanging off her teat until he was forty.’ He nodded out of the window towards a clutch of chilly looking flamingos. ‘D’you know they still don’t know why those things stand on one leg. One of the great unsolved mysteries of science.’

  ‘I heard it was so they still had one left if they got bitten by a crocodile.’ She fetched a legal pad out of her case. ‘Can we get on now?’

  ‘I’m not making a statement.’

  ‘Fine, we’ll call it notes.’ She uncapped her fountain pen. ‘But this was your idea, remember?’

  He grunted as if he’d rather forget. ‘We can deal with Simon Donovan for a start. The cops were all over him from April ’
02 in a fraud investigation. He was a personal accountant back then: used clients’ tax cheques to buy rental property and borrowed off the equity to pay the Inland Revenue. In a rising market it worked like a dream until he bought six flats off plan that never went up. One of my partners was defending his co-defendant, a mortgage broker. It was set down for trial in August. Next thing he knows Donovan’s a witness for the prosecution against four of his tax-evading clients and he’s made his statement about the missing boys. All the charges against him and the broker were dropped.’

  ‘So he cut a clever deal on his case – why would IDing the boys be part of it?’

  ‘Have you any idea how lazy coppers are? I’ve known them piss in a pint pot to save a walk to the gents.’

  ‘Donovan just happened to be down at the station in the right frame of mind?’

  ‘More than likely. Plus they’d have been desperate to get it off their patch. Get a statement putting them in London and it was someone else’s problem.’

  ‘What about the Security Services?’

  ‘The police hate them – they make them do things.’

  ‘You really think they’d give them a false statement?’

  McAvoy grinned. ‘What are you, born again every morning? I thought you’d bloodied your knuckles as a lawyer.’

  ‘I was mostly involved with childcare proceedings.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing you shouldn’t know about the shitty side of human nature. What you’ve got to remember about cops, Mrs Cooper, is that lying gets to be a way of life. They start off gilding the lily when they write up their first arrests and end up framing innocent lawyers.’

  Jenny made a note, though she wasn’t hopeful that it would be of much help. Neither Donovan nor the police were likely to admit to fabricating evidence, and Donovan’s ID statement was disconnected enough from the fraud charges not to be obviously linked.

  ‘Tell me about your involvement in this case,’ Jenny said.

  McAvoy told her that Mrs Jamal and Mr and Mrs Hassan – shopkeepers from Birmingham – came to see him early in the October. They’d had moderately regular contact with the police in the first few weeks after their son’s disappearance, but by early autumn it had tailed off. They’d written to MPs and councillors for help, but were referred back to the police, who wouldn’t even pay for a missing poster. They had come to him in desperation. He wrote to the police and four weeks later obtained copies of the witness statements they’d taken. He picked up on Dani James’s sighting of the possible intruder and wrote again asking what they were doing to follow it up. He never received a reply.

  In December both families received their letters from DS Owens stating that the investigation was being shelved. McAvoy wrote back to protest and got nowhere. Over the Christmas holiday Mrs Jamal took to phoning him all hours of the day and night, obviously having some kind of breakdown; then at the start of the new year the Hassans wrote to say they had decided to end their retainer.

  ‘Any idea why?’ Jenny said.

  ‘They were conservative people. Their boy had been gone six months. The way they saw it, he’d either deserted his family or he was up to no good.’

  ‘And Mrs Jamal?’

  She detected a trace of guilt in McAvoy’s expression. ‘To be honest, I was trying to avoid her. I like to give the benefit of the doubt, but even I was beginning to think they’d hopped off to a training camp somewhere.’ He stared out of the window at the pond, as if confronting a painful memory. ‘That’s what I told her . . . She threw a fit, accused me of collaborating with all the forces of darkness, so I offered to get a private investigator onto it. She had five hundred pounds. It scarcely bought us two days, but this guy I knew – dead now – knocked on some doors down in St Pauls. He found a little old lady who said she’d spotted a black people carrier sitting outside her house on the night of the 28th. It was right along from the bus stop the boys used to get back to college, about two hundred yards from Anwar Ali’s place. There were two white men in the front. From her description it sounded like a Toyota. It was late in the evening and she thought they looked suspicious. She was picking up the phone to call the police when she heard it take off.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘More or less. I phoned the bus depot and tried to find out whether the police had spoken to any of their drivers who might have spotted them that night. I was told they couldn’t discuss it. I tried to be reasonable, assured them there was no legal reason why they couldn’t, but it was a stone wall. I went back to the police to ask them what their problem was and got the same response. A week later a pretty girl came into my office saying she might be able to help out a client of mine who was up for armed robbery at the time. I took her alibi statement. Next morning I was dragged bollock naked from my bed and didn’t see the outside of a cell for two-and-a-half years.’

  ‘You believe the two things are connected?’

  ‘I’ll admit there were lots of reasons the cops wanted me out of the way. The fact I’d got two guys off a murder charge and had a DI nicked for perjury the previous year were two of them. In fact, for the best part of six months that’s what I thought it was all about.’

  It was McAvoy’s turn to sweep the room with his eyes. Only when he was satisfied that none of their elderly companions were undercover detectives did he turn his gaze back to Jenny.

  ‘Two things changed my mind. First, I remembered something. A couple of nights before I was arrested I’d been out with a client; we were both drunk as hell. I got a call on my mobile, my private number, and this American-sounding voice said, “What do you know?” I was that lashed I could hardly make him out. He said it again, “What do you know, Mr McAvoy?” No threats, nothing. I took him for a crank and rang off.’

  ‘And you remembered this when?’

  ‘Sometime in the middle of ’03. Lying on my bunk waiting for my room-mate to finish his business on the potty.’

  ‘Nice. What was the second thing?’

  ‘This phone call starts going round in my mind – you get like that inside. The Law Society’s struck me off, my wife’s fucking somebody else, I want to know what the hell’s going on. I phoned the investigator again – Billy Dean his name was – and said could he have a scout around, try and get a lead on this call or the Toyota. Fine. He tried to trace the call first but had no joy – the incoming number was one of those unregistered pay and gos. He had more luck on the Toyota, though. If you think about it, there are only half a dozen major roads out of Bristol. Two of them go over the Severn. Billy talked to some guys in the toll booths and found a fella on the old Severn crossing who actually remembered seeing a black MPV, two stocky white guys in the front, two Asian boys in the back.’

  ‘A year later?’

  ‘It was an unusual sight, the man said. You don’t get many dark skins heading over into Monmouthshire. He was from Chepstow – one Chinese takeaway and a French polisher.’

  ‘Haven’t they got cameras there that read the number plates?’

  ‘All data’s scrubbed after four weeks. The one time Big Brother might have been some use.’

  ‘Did you follow any of this up?’

  McAvoy shook his head. ‘I put it out of my mind. Billy took a stroke, and the blessed Father O’Riordan helped reconcile me to my fate. The spirit seemed to be moving against it.’

  ‘Mrs Jamal didn’t tell me any of this.’

  ‘I didn’t trouble her. What would she have done, except go even nuttier? Wasn’t even anything solid. To tell you the truth, I’d almost convinced myself it was nothing until I heard about your inquest.’

  ‘What changed your mind?’

  ‘Now you’re asking.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I suppose you could say I felt the spirit moving the other way. My client with the missing daughter for one thing, and thinking back again – whether those poor families wouldn’t have found some peace if they hadn’t fetched up with an unholy bastard like me.’

  ‘Right.’ She glanced over her not
es – there weren’t many of them. ‘Your bid for redemption consists of an untraceable phone call – possibly, possibly not, relevant – and a fleeting glimpse into a car, nearly eight years ago, by a toll booth operator.’

  ‘I still remember the guy’s name: Frank Madog.’

  Jenny wrote it down. ‘I’ll see if we can get him along to give evidence.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. Why don’t you adjourn for a few days and talk to him, see if it goes anywhere? I can make the approach, if you like.’

  ‘I see.’ She closed her notebook. ‘Any particular reason you feel entitled to tell me how to run my inquest?’

  ‘Yes,’ McAvoy said. ‘I had a call at home this weekend. Yesterday morning, ten a.m. – caught me sober. It was like a robot, through one of those voice distorters. I assume it was a man’s voice, “Tell me what you know, McAvoy, or you’re a dead man.”’

  ‘Know about what?’ Jenny said, with a note of scepticism.

  ‘That’s what I asked. He said, and this is actually what the man said, in this robot voice: “I wouldn’t even take a shit in the cheap casket you’re going to hell in.” “Casket”, not “coffin”. Who says that this side of the Atlantic?’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I hung up.’

  She nodded with what she hoped was a neutral expression, an insistent voice in her head telling her to walk away now without a backward glance.

  McAvoy said, ‘Before you get into any of this, there’s something else you should know.’

  ‘I might as well hear it all.’

  ‘Your officer, Alison Trent – she was one of the CID that put me away.’ He gave a forgiving shrug. ‘So, do you want me to get in touch with Madog?’

  She heard Alison’s raised voice as she opened the front door to her office. It sounded as if she was on the telephone.

  ‘Of course she’s welcome, she’s my daughter, I just don’t see why she has to bring her.’

  Jenny stopped outside the outer office door, guilty at eavesdropping, but it didn’t feel right to interrupt mid-conversation. And she was curious.

  ‘How many times have I got to say this? It’s not her I disapprove of, it’s the situation . . . Because I don’t believe it’s real, that’s why. She’s had plenty of boyfriends for goodness sake.’ Alison sighed loudly. ‘Fine. You deal with it your way, I’ll cope with it mine. Just don’t expect me to welcome her with open arms. Whatever else you might accuse me of, you can’t call me a hypocrite.’ She slammed down the receiver and thumped over to the kitchenette.