by M. R. Hall
Jenny said, ‘As far as we know, they were just two young university students. They went missing, the police couldn’t trace them and it’s my job to find out if they’re alive or dead. And if they are dead, how they died.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Madog rubbed his temples.
McAvoy gave him a moment, glanced at Jenny, then said, ‘Someone else has spoken to you about this, haven’t they? You’re among friends now, Frank, we’ll start with that, shall we?’
Madog looked up at Jenny. ‘What happens with this information?’
‘It helps me to find the truth. And if there’s criminality involved, it may be used to assist a prosecution.’
‘You are the coroner?’
‘You’ve seen Mrs Cooper’s picture in the Post, Frank. Check out her website – she hasn’t even had herself airbrushed.’
Madog nodded. ‘OK. Only your friend told me he was a detective. That’s the only reason I spoke to him. He threatened to charge me if I didn’t.’
McAvoy said, ‘I apologize posthumously on his behalf. He was good to his wife and kids.’
Jenny opened the legal pad she had waiting in front of her, ‘All right, Mr Madog – when you’re ready.’
‘It was like I told your man way back when – I saw a black Toyota, two white fellas in the front, about eleven o’clock at night. One of them, the driver, was kind of thickset with a shaved head. The passenger had a ponytail.’
‘What age were they?’ Jenny said.
‘Thirties . . . And the two lads in the back were both Asians. Bearded, but young looking – teenagers almost.’
‘What made you notice them?’
‘I suppose they seemed scared. One of them looked at me with these big brown eyes almost like he was trying to say something.’
‘Did anyone in the car speak to you?’
‘Nothing. Not a word. That’s another thing – you usually get a thank you. I make a point of being cheerful to the customers . . .’ He paused to recall. ‘No, this fella had a face like thunder. A real tough nut.’ He swallowed, anxious. ‘But it was the other one who came after me.’
Jenny glanced up. ‘What?’
‘About a week later. I was leaving the house with my granddaughter. Six years old she was at the time. I was taking her home to her mammy’s on a Saturday afternoon. We’d got in the car outside the house and this fella with the ponytail knocked on the passenger window. I wound down the window and he leaned in, smiling, and said, “Anyone asks, you never saw us.” Then he brings out this can of orange paint and sprays it all over my granddaughter’s hair. She was screaming. He didn’t stop . . .’ Madog shook his head. ‘I had to wash it out with turpentine. Took all morning.’
‘You didn’t report this to the police?’ Jenny said.
Madog said, ‘If you’d’ve been there you wouldn’t ask that. I’m telling you, he was spraying that paint and smiling.’
‘But did you tell all this to Mr Dean?’
‘Not the paint bit. I swear to God, to this day even my daughter still doesn’t know.’
‘This man must have really scared you,’ Jenny said.
‘Yeah, he was like a . . . like—’
‘The devil in disguise?’ McAvoy said.
‘You shouldn’t take that kind of crap from people,’ McAvoy said. ‘You’re the coroner, for God’s sake – more powers than a High Court judge.’
‘Hardly.’
‘Look ’em up. If you’d got the balls you’d use them.’
Jenny glanced across at him as she swung the Golf back up the slip road to the service station. He was good-looking in a battered kind of way, but not a man you’d trust to mind your handbag. There was something of the con artist about him: the suit was good, but you couldn’t be sure if that wasn’t all there was to him.
‘So what are you going to do? This guy with the ponytail sounds like an evil son of a bitch. A real professional, thought all the psychology through. Spray paint on a kiddy’s head – sweet Jesus.’
‘I’ll get my officer to take Madog’s statement and call him as a witness.’
‘And what are the jury going to do with that? You’ve got to find this Toyota surely, and the ponytail fella.’
‘A black Toyota? There must be thousands of them.’
‘You’d be surprised. Probably only a few hundred the same model. Break them down geographically. There aren’t many places you’d be going over the old Severn Bridge to get to – all the road does is head up the border country.’ He slammed his hand on the dash for emphasis. ‘You’ve got to find out who these people are, not give them a chance to get away by wheeling Madog into court before you’ve tracked them down. I’ll give you a hand, it’s got my blood up again.’
Jenny thought about it. His passion was infectious. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t hurt. Most of the jury didn’t look in any hurry to get back to their day jobs.’
‘That’s the way.’ He grinned. ‘Good girl.’
Jenny turned into the near-empty car park, her mind swimming with questions about who the men in the front of the Toyota might have been. But could she even be sure Madog was telling the truth? She glanced at McAvoy again and realized she didn’t know what to believe in his presence, he seemed to alter reality around him. She wouldn’t be able to think straight until she’d got away. She pulled up next to his car.
‘Buy you a coffee?’ he said.
‘I’d better not. Work, you know—’
‘I took you for a free spirit, Mrs Cooper.’
There was suddenly an atmosphere between them. The way he was looking at her with smiling, perceptive eyes, he seemed to know her, to reach under her skin. She felt hot and mildly panicked.
‘Another time. I’ll be in touch . . . And thanks.’
McAvoy nodded as if he understood the many reasons for her reticence entirely. He reached for the door handle, then paused. ‘Oh, I forgot to mention it to you – standing in the inquest yesterday, I remembered Mrs Jamal once saying she suspected Nazim had a girlfriend.’
‘She knew about Dani James?’
‘No, I think she was talking about earlier, months before that.’
‘She hasn’t said anything to me.’
‘Ask her.’ He smiled, said, ‘God bless,’ and stepped out into the freezing wind.
Alison was still smarting from the premature adjournment of the inquest. Jenny guessed that she’d had Pironi on the phone asking what the hell was going on, and that in the conflict of loyalties Pironi had won. She had evidently spent her first two hours at work tidying: her office was immaculate apart from the overspilling tray on the corner of her desk reserved for Jenny’s messages and mail.
Sorting the critical items from the merely urgent, Jenny ignored her officer’s frostiness and told her about her trip to the toll plaza with McAvoy. Alison listened, unimpressed, as Jenny announced that she had decided to make finding the Toyota and its occupants a priority before resuming the inquest.
‘And when might that happen?’ Alison said.
‘I thought we’d agreed Monday.’
‘Have you any idea how long it takes to get any joy out of the vehicle licensing people at Swansea? It’s like Stalin’s Kremlin.’
‘I was thinking we might go through the police – they’re hooked up to the Swansea computers, aren’t they?’
‘They’re snowed under already. Believe me, I’ve used up all my favours, Mrs Cooper, and more. It’s got so even my ex-colleagues are dodging my calls.’
‘It’s probably best Bristol CID don’t know about this one, seeing as they were so closely involved in the original investigation.’ She could sense Alison’s hackles rising. ‘I’ll call DS Williams over in Chepstow, see if I can’t persuade him to give us a hand.’
‘I’m sure he will,’ Alison said with feeling. ‘He’ll leap at any chance to do down the English police.’
‘Who said anything about doing them down?’
Alison looked up from her computer screen. ‘I told you what I think
of Alec McAvoy. He went to prison for fixing witnesses – he made a career out of it. You can’t expect me to believe someone he suddenly pulls out of a hat.’
‘Madog seemed very sincere to me.’
‘Do you really believe he wouldn’t have gone to the police if what he told you was true?’
‘What possible interest could McAvoy have in interfering with this inquest?’
‘Do you want my honest opinion, Mrs Cooper?’
‘Fire away.’
Alison unleashed. ‘Before he was struck off he was cock of the walk, the flashiest, richest criminal lawyer in town. He didn’t only think he was above the law, he thought he was the law. When we caught him out he happened to be representing the missing boys’ families. It suited his purposes to say his arrest was political – they were his only clients who weren’t hardened villains with form longer than a donkey’s dick, as we used to say. Now he’s using this inquest. Think about it: he’ll dredge up evidence to support his claim that he was the victim of a conspiracy, get the media behind him, and before you know it the Law Society will be pressured into letting him back on the roll.’ Alison looked at her imploringly. ‘He’s a clever man, Mrs Cooper, but rotten to the core. He doesn’t give a damn what happened to those boys – this is someone who built his reputation representing gangsters, rapists, murderers.’
‘All right,’ Jenny said. ‘Point taken. But I have to check the car story. And I need you to take a formal statement from Madog.’
She retreated to her office with renewed doubts about McAvoy. Alison’s outburst began to explain some of the unease she’d felt in his company. There was something about his powerful aura that frightened her. It wasn’t just the uneasy fragility of a disgraced man clinging to tattered shreds of dignity, it was his cast of mind, the unnerving sense that there was a part of his humanity missing. The business with the bollards and the truck: he was reckless, inviting trouble and not giving a damn for the consequences. But when he’d looked at her . . . there’d been an eruption of heat in her chest and a sensation that shot straight down between her legs. It almost shamed her to admit it.
Burying these thoughts, she reached for her address book and turned up the numbers of DS Owen Williams, her contact across the border. She caught him during his mid-morning break. They’d spoken maybe three or four times since the Danny Wills case and on each occasion he’d been delighted to hear from her. He listened carefully as she explained that a witness ‘had come to light’, neglecting to mention McAvoy, and asked whether he could help trace all black Toyota MPVs that may have been in the vicinity of the Severn Bridge on a June night eight years ago.
‘I’d be ab-so-lutely delighted,’ Williams said in his exaggerated Welsh lilt. ‘Anything to help my favourite coroner, especially – as I presume – you can’t trust the Bristol police not to do an honest job for you.’
‘Some of the officers involved in the original investigation are still in place.’
‘You don’t have to tell me any more, Mrs Cooper. You know I’d trust a Bangkok brothel keeper sooner than any one of those English bastards.’
Jenny had barely put the receiver down when the phone rang and Alison came on the line saying she had Mrs Jamal on hold.
‘OK, put her through.’
Jenny braced herself. She was greeted by the sound of inconsolable sobs.
‘Mrs Jamal? This is Mrs Cooper. What can I do for you?’
The sobbing continued, Mrs Jamal unable to speak except to mumble something that sounded like, ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t know.’
Jenny wanted to ask about McAvoy’s memory of her mentioning a girlfriend, but the moment wasn’t right. She seemed simply to need to have her grief heard and acknowledged.
Jenny offered what few words of comfort she could and heard herself say, ‘I promise, I won’t rest until I’ve lifted every stone to find out what happened to your son.’
With the sharpening of her symptoms over recent days, Jenny was beginning to dread the long hours between office and sleep with no alcohol or tranquillizing drug to soothe the mental sores. As the adrenalin subsided, the intangible fear ascended as surely as if the two were balanced on a pair of old-fashioned scales. Her desire not to let Ross see how she was feeling intensified the pain. She had staked her relationship with him on a promise that she could cope; that what she wanted more than anything else was to have him share her home until he went away to university. It hadn’t been easy for him to move out of his father’s house – David’s disapproval had been largely silent, but all the more crushing for it – and his decision to trust her left her feeling that their cohabitation was a long, drawn-out test of her ability as a mother and of the truth of her recovery from emotional collapse.
She pulled up outside Melin Bach and sat in the darkness summoning strength. She knew she could hold it together, at a push, but she lacked the energy to be light or joyful. Her weakness infuriated her. She’d been better off with tranquillizers; at least they’d allowed the illusion of control. Part of her wished she could just go inside and go straight to bed, sleep through it and wake to her pills next morning, but there was dinner to cook, conversations to be had. Suddenly she felt as if she had an impossible mountain to climb. She reached for her beta blockers, snapped one in half with her teeth and swallowed.
Thank God for drugs. Thank God.
The tightness in her chest had already begun to loosen a little as she entered the house. She opened the living-room door to find Ross and Steve sitting side by side on the sofa eating sandwiches.
‘Oh, hi.’ Steve levered himself to his feet. ‘Called by on my way down to the pub – got waylaid.’
Jenny turned to Ross, whose eyes were glued to the screen. ‘I guess you won’t be wanting any dinner.’
‘No thanks. I’m going to Karen’s.’
‘On a Tuesday?’
‘Why not?’
She couldn’t think of a reason that wouldn’t make her sound like the kind of mother she’d already sworn to him she wasn’t. She compromised. ‘All right, just make sure you’re back by eleven. You don’t want to be exhausted tomorrow.’ She headed for the kitchen.
Steve said, ‘Can I do anything?’
Jenny said, ‘No. I’m fine.’
She was searching through the dregs in the fridge – it seemed to empty as soon as she’d filled it – when she heard Steve come in behind her. He set his empty plate on the counter and put an arm around her waist.
‘Rough day?’
She wished he’d stop touching her. It was one more thing to deal with. ‘No more than usual.’
Ross called out from the living room: ‘See you.’
Steve was silent for a moment, his hand on the small of her back while she rummaged for a three-day-old lettuce, a tomato and a scrap of cheese. The front door opened and closed. They were alone.
‘You’re tense,’ Steve said.
‘Just tired.’
She slipped away from him and grabbed a plate from the cupboard, feeling self-conscious with him watching her fix her meagre supper.
‘Ross mentioned you’d been fraught lately.’
‘Oh, did he?’
‘It’s tough on your own.’
There was no answer to that. She tipped the last of a bottle of French dressing onto her plate and looked at the half-dead salad with no enthusiasm. She wasn’t even hungry.
Steve stepped up close behind her, brought both hands around her middle and held her until she relaxed enough to lean into him. She felt the hard contours of his body through her clothes.
‘You never ask me for anything,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re not on your own, Jenny . . .’ He kissed her neck. ‘I’m here.’
She turned to face him and let him kiss her face and eyes and mouth, trying to submit to the moment, to let their closeness overwhelm her and push the intruding, chaotic thoughts from her mind. She let him take her hand and lead her upstairs; without speaking a word, she went with him to her bed and for a short w
hile managed to lose herself.
Afterwards, she huddled close to him. The bedroom radiator never managed more than a tepid heat and there was hardness to the cold tonight, their breath almost visible in the frigid air. She slipped in and out of a restless doze, a carousel of faces passing in front of her eyes.
She vaguely heard Steve say, ‘Are you awake?’
She forced her eyes open. ‘Sorry . . .’
He pushed the hair gently back from her face. ‘You were murmuring.’
‘Anything interesting?’
‘Couldn’t make it out.’
In his concerned smile Jenny saw a different man from the one she’d met the previous June. He was gentler, more straightforward, less mysterious. This familiarity made her strangely sad: their bursts of excitement together were still intense, but briefer, his touch wasn’t as electric, the heightened thrill had gone. And he wanted to know her when she didn’t even know herself.
Steve said, ‘I think you need a good night’s sleep.’ He kissed her forehead, slid out from under the duvet and pulled on his clothes.
‘I’ll call you,’ he said and quietly let himself out.
Jenny listened guiltily to his footfalls on the stairs. He was a good man, she was fond of him, yet when they had been making love she had fantasized for a moment that she was with someone else. And it had unsettled her: it was as if the constant tug she felt towards the darker corners of her subconscious had found another weakness to work on. The one pure thing she had was being corrupted.
Frightened by the places her imagination wanted to take her, she summoned the will to haul herself out of bed and find her journal. She would write down the thoughts that were preying on her in the hope that bringing them to light would exorcise them. But as she wrote: When I felt his touch on my belly, I closed my eyes and let it be Alec McAvoy, a surge of excitement passed through her.
It was the same sensation she had felt the first time she set eyes on Steve: she had known, profoundly and without question, what would happen next.
TWELVE
DS WILLIAMS HAD MOVED QUICKLY. Jenny arrived in the office to find an emailed list of nearly five hundred black Toyota MPVs registered in the UK during 2002 together with their owners’ addresses. She passed them on to Alison and asked her to pick out any registered either in the Bristol area or a fifty-mile-wide corridor to the north. It was an arbitrary approach, but they had to start somewhere. Also in her inbox was a message from another detective sergeant, Sean Murphy, to let her know that the inquiries into the missing Jane Doe and the fire at the Meditect lab were now being treated as one and the same investigation. Alison said the word inside the force was that there were no leads as yet, but that the CID was working on the theory that the dead girl had been about to inform on an organized criminal gang, possibly people traffickers.
