by M. R. Hall
Alison glanced down at her hands. ‘He didn’t really want to talk about him.’
‘You didn’t discuss the charges against him?’
‘I did try,’ Alison said, with a trace of self-pity. ‘I don’t doubt he acted in good faith. He’s not like that.’
‘Meaning what – the witness who came forward had been set up? He doesn’t believe it’s a coincidence it happened when it did, just as McAvoy was starting to dig?’
‘I don’t know, Mrs Cooper. I honestly don’t.’
‘I do,’ Jenny said.
‘There are all sorts of possibilities,’ Alison protested. ‘Have you ever thought that Mrs Jamal might have informed on her son? Think about it – she tips off the police that she’s worried he’s involved with extremists and the next thing she knows he’s vanished.’
‘And eight years later she sprinkles herself with radioactive dust and jumps out of the window?’
‘No. Nazim’s associates came for her and made it look like suicide.’
‘Is that what Pironi believes?’
‘It’s as good a theory as any.’
They fell into moody silence, Alison nursing her hurt at Pironi’s fallibility and Jenny brooding and wishing she had a ready target at which to hurl her anger. It was cheap aftershave she could smell on Alison. Pironi had been sweating it out of his pores as he shot his meagre bolt.
‘I should be going,’ Alison said.
‘Hold on,’ Jenny said. ‘What was the story with McAvoy this afternoon?’
‘He was behaving strangely, apparently. Dave said he started talking to himself, like a drunk, except he didn’t smell of alcohol for once. I don’t think he would have made much of a witness.’
‘What was he saying?’
Alison shook her head. ‘Dave tried to talk to him but he couldn’t get any sense. He kept muttering something about the devil and an American.’
TWENTY-FIVE
JENNY WAITED UNTIL ALISON HAD driven out of the car park, then took the jelly beans from her handbag and swallowed a prophylactic dose three hours before they were due to knock her out for the night.
What had happened to McAvoy? He couldn’t be going mad. He was stronger than that. He’d made a career out of his resilience to the insanity of others, weaving in and out of the minds of criminals and policemen, playing off their delusions. He couldn’t have let her down, not now. His strange behaviour had been a feint, a tactic to unnerve the opposition.
He had mentioned an American. Was it the caller who’d threatened to put him in a casket? Did McAvoy know more about this man than he’d let on? He’d held back on other things, Sarah Levin in particular, and now Jenny thought about it, Levin had an American connection of her own – Professor Brightman had mentioned that she’d been a Stevenson scholar at Harvard. That much could be dismissed as a minor coincidence, but when her relationship with Anna Rose was factored in, it became a solid connection.
There were uncanny similarities between the two young women: like Sarah Levin before her, Anna Rose had had an Asian boyfriend, she too was very beautiful. But there were also significant differences. From what Jenny had learned of her, Anna Rose was a markedly different personality from her mentor. She was feisty and intelligent, but naive and unformed, still in search of herself. Her adoptive parents had been surprised at her gaining a place on the graduate scheme at Maybury, as if they had never conceived of her as a professional woman, as if there had to be a catch. Jenny pictured the Crosbys’ faces when she’d first seen them in the morgue: their aura of dread tempered with resignation. Alive or dead, Anna Rose had already seemed lost to them.
And then it came to her. A single face among the many who had been to view the Jane Doe that day. The man was tall, lean, in his fifties, with a tanned, weathered face. She’d noticed his accent: transatlantic. He said he was a businessman whose missing stepdaughter had been travelling in Europe, last seen in Bristol. He’d not flinched as he’d stepped up to the open drawer and looked down on the dead face. She had been intrigued. A mischievous voice in her own head had said, ‘He’s used to death.’
Jenny flicked on the overhead light and reached for her phone and the tatty address book, spilling frayed pages, in which she had written the Crosbys’ home number. She dialled it; there was no reply. She flicked forwards, dropping valuable fragments of paper into the footwell, and found Mike Stevens’s number squeezed into a corner of a cardboard divider. After several rings an answer machine activated. She started to leave a message.
‘Hello. Mrs Cooper?’ his voice cut in abruptly. He sounded agitated.
‘Yes. Don’t worry, it’s not bad news.’
‘Right—’
‘I was just calling to ask you something. It may sound irrelevant and it most probably is, but do you know if Anna Rose had anything to do with an American, an older man, in his fifties?’
He fell silent.
‘Mr Stevens?’
‘Do you know who this man is?’
‘No . . . do you?’
She heard him breathing, fast and shallow.
‘Where are you calling from?’
Mike Stevens lived in a former labourer’s cottage at the end of a low, stone-built terrace on the outskirts of Stroud, a gentrified south Gloucestershire market town of the sort with health-food and bespoke kitchen stores. He answered the door on the security chain, getting a clear look at Jenny’s face before he would let her in. Immediately she’d crossed the threshold he double-locked it behind them.
‘Are you all right?’ Jenny said.
He gave a non-committal shrug and motioned her inside.
The front door opened straight onto a snug sitting room furnished with an elderly suite and tasteless patterned carpet.
‘I rent the place,’ he said by way of apology.
He was wearing the suit trousers and shirt he would have worn to work. Although the house was cold, beads of sweat glinted on his forehead. Jenny kept her coat on and took a seat on the sofa.
Mike sat in a hard-backed chair opposite her, his face tense and drawn. ‘What can I do for you?’ he said.
Jenny said, ‘When you came to the mortuary ten days ago with the Crosbys, there was a man, tall, suit and tie. He was American—’
Mike closed his eyes briefly, then blinked. ‘Jesus . . .’ It came out in a whisper.
‘What?’
He looked at her with wide, frightened eyes.
‘What is it, Mike?’ Jenny said insistently. ‘It’s important. It could be connected with an inquest I’m conducting.’
‘What inquest? Who died?’
‘Two Asian boys disappeared. It was eight years ago. They were both first-year students at Bristol. One of them was studying physics.’
She waited while he sat looking straight through her for a moment, processing this information. Eventually he said, ‘Someone came here last night . . . I’ve spent all day trying to work out where I’d seen him before.’
‘The American?’
He nodded and held his head in his hands, fighting off tears.
‘What is it, Mike?’
‘I woke up in the night . . . I was woken . . . with a knee in my chest and a gun at my head.’
It was Jenny’s turn to fall silent.
‘This man . . . he had an American accent. He said, “Tell me where the fuck she is or you end up in a casket.” I said I didn’t know . . . He punched me hard, here.’ He tugged open his shirt and revealed a violent black bruise that spread across the entire upper portion of his ribs. ‘I couldn’t breathe. I thought he was going to kill me.’
Jenny thanked God for her pills. A fierce heat broke out across her chest and neck, but she could still think and reason.
‘What did he do then?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Tell me. Please.’
He looked away and focused on a spot on the ceiling, gathering strength. ‘He held my nose . . . and he urinated in my mouth, until I choked.’ His eyes were
suddenly shot through with red veins. ‘Then he left.’
‘Did he say anything more?’
Mike shook his head.
‘Have you told anyone?’
‘I was going to call the police tonight but I didn’t want to use the phone . . . I was trying to figure it out . . . Who the hell is he?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s talk about Anna Rose for a minute. Do you have any idea where she is?’
‘No.’
‘How was she behaving before she went?’
‘She seemed fine, just her usual self . . . a little quiet, maybe.’
‘Since when?’
‘About a month ago, I suppose.’
‘What about this Asian guy her parents saw her with last autumn? Salim someone.’
‘He was just a college friend. A post-grad of some sort.’
‘You know him?’
‘I’ve asked around.’
‘Spoken to him?’
‘Left a few messages on his mobile.’
‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘I tried calling the university. They won’t give out personal information.’
‘I’ll talk to them.’ Jenny made a note to call. ‘You know I spoke to you before about whether she could have got hold of radioactive material.’
‘Yes. What was that about?’
‘Long story, but traces of caesium 137 turned up in an apartment in Bristol.’ She gave a brief account of Mrs Jamal’s struggle to achieve an inquest, and her sudden and violent death. ‘It looks like the caesium could have been brought in on someone who was contaminated.’
‘Anna Rose spent her entire time in an office. She wouldn’t have clearance to go anywhere near anything hazardous.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Completely. It’s out of the question.’
‘You sound angry. Why does that question make you angry?’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘Yes you do.’
He looked down at the ugly patterned carpet. ‘It’s not possible, there’s so much security . . . But she was so . . .’ He trailed off, unwilling to complete the thought.
‘So what?’
‘So . . . innocent, I suppose. And every man in the place fancied her. You couldn’t not.’
‘Are you saying she played up to it?’
‘Occasionally.’
Jenny’s mind raced ahead, putting together what he couldn’t bring himself to say. ‘You’re frightened she could have been talked into something, used by someone?’
He shrugged. ‘Of course, I’ve thought about it – I haven’t thought about much else.’
‘Any theories?’
‘I’ve been hoping she’d call. She said she loved me, I believed her.’
‘Do you think she’s alive?’
It took him a moment. He said, ‘She’s been picking up messages, or at least her phone has . . . I’d have told the police only I wanted to speak to her first.’
‘Do her parents know?’
A pause. He shook his head.
‘Can I have the number?’ She rummaged in her bag for her address book. ‘Who else has got it?’
‘I don’t know. It’s a phone I gave her on my contract – so we could keep in touch.’
She handed him the pen and watched him print the numbers in an even, meticulous hand. He was dependable, not bad-looking but no prize. She pictured his family as teachers or civil servants, people who lived within tightly drawn, reassuring boundaries. She could understand why Anna Rose might have been attracted to him – he was safe – but the young woman he’d described wouldn’t stay for long and he knew it. He’d ridden his luck, even splashed out on an extra phone, but this was the moment at which he was finally being forced to let the fantasy go. Wherever she was, Anna Rose wasn’t coming back to him.
Jenny glanced over at a framed photograph hanging on the wall above the television: Mike in lab coat posing with a glass trophy, Graduate Trainee of the Year 2004, written at the bottom in gold type. She noticed a now familiar object clipped to his breast pocket.
Jenny said, ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a dosimeter in the house?’
He looked up abruptly. She saw the alarm in his eyes and knew that she had assumed correctly: he hadn’t been to work today. The fustiness in the room was the smell of prolonged confinement.
‘You noticed it before you left this morning?’ she said. ‘He was contaminated . . . and you couldn’t go to work because it would have been detected on you. There are radiation monitors everywhere, right?’
He nodded dumbly.
‘How bad is it?’ Jenny said, feeling a return of the panic she’d experienced in court earlier that day.
‘Two hundred milliSieverts . . . it was in his urine.’
Jenny said, ‘Should we be here?’
Mike said, ‘Downstairs is safe enough. I wouldn’t go upstairs . . . I don’t know what to do.’
‘You’ve no idea what connection this man might have with Anna Rose?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘You’ll have to call the police.’
‘I should have done it this morning.’
‘You’ve done nothing wrong. You’ll be fine.’ She attempted a smile. ‘Just do one thing for me – leave it an hour before you make the call. I need to go somewhere and I don’t want to be snagged up with the police all night.’
His eyes darted to the telephone sitting on the sideboard. ‘An hour?’
Jenny said, ‘Please, Mike. I’m going to try to find Anna Rose, OK? I’d like to talk to her before they do.’
‘How? Where are you going to go?’
‘Do you want to come with me?’
He thought about it for a moment, then shook his head.
‘If I get anywhere I’ll call you.’
He nodded, seeming a little more confident now he’d settled on a course of action. Jenny knew she had half an hour at the most. He’d last ten minutes before picking up the phone and telling the police everything.
Jenny drove in the direction of the Severn Bridge along minor roads, checking her mirror for phantom pursuers. Heavy rain flecked with sleet pounded the windscreen. She dialled Mc-Avoy’s number repeatedly without success. He was switched off. Beyond her reach. She toyed with contacting Alison and asking her to take another statement from Sarah Levin, but an instinct told her it would be futile, that whatever story Sarah had yet to tell would remain locked down until something far bigger gave way.
She waited fifteen minutes in the empty reception area of Chepstow police station for Detective Sergeant Owen Williams to make his way from the pub, from where she had dislodged him with her enigmatic call. He greeted her with a fond, resigned smile as he peeled off his wet coat.
‘Mrs Cooper. Never a dull moment with you, is there?’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just one of those I can’t trust with the boys across the water.’
‘I can only help if it’s on my patch.’
‘Elements are.’
‘Just so long as I can tick the box.’ He checked the time. ‘Not going to take long, is it? I haven’t stood my round yet.’
‘I’ll talk quickly.’
She followed him through the security door to his office, a ten-by-ten cubicle lined with steel shelves laden with dusty box files. His computer sat on a separate desk protected by a plastic cover. The machine had the feel of an object which was unveiled on special occasions only. While Williams spread his coat carefully along the radiator, Jenny gave him a potted history of recent developments in her investigation. He hadn’t heard about Mrs Jamal’s death and was shocked, but not surprised, that he hadn’t been informed of the presence of a radioactive substance at the scene: his office was only a dozen miles from the centre of Bristol, but as far as the English police were concerned it might as well have been on the far side of the world. They treated their Welsh colleagues with indifference bordering on contempt, and the feeling was mutual.
He listened quietly, strok
ing his thick, greying moustache as she summarized the evidence which had led to her search for Anna Rose. He was barely aware of her disappearance, let alone her connection with a nuclear-power plant that stood directly across the estuary from his station.
‘Two miles from here that bloody place is,’ Williams said. ‘And you know where the tide brings the crap that comes out of it – right up the mouth of the Wye on the Welsh side, here. They deny it, of course. Lying bastards.’
‘Her boyfriend gave me a mobile number she’s been using. He thinks she may have been picking up messages.’
‘Where from? There’s nothing I can do if she’s in England.’
‘Think of it this way: the last time Nazim and Rafi were seen they were heading over the bridge into Wales. There’s already evidence that would justify a criminal investigation into kidnap, and Anna Rose is a potential witness.’
‘I see . . .’ He was warming to the idea.
‘All I need is for you to get onto the phone company and find out the last known location of that number.’
‘How soon do you want it?’
‘Now?’
‘You’re joking? You can’t just magic this stuff up, Mrs Cooper. You have to pay. These companies make you sell the farm for an expedited search – it’d be five grand if it’s a penny. I can’t authorize that sort of money.’
‘Well, who can?’
‘I could try the Super, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.’
‘Then we’ll put it through my office.’
‘Can I have that in writing?’
‘You can have it in blood, if you like.’
Williams looked at her with avuncular concern. ‘Mrs Cooper, you know I don’t mind sticking my neck out for you from time to time, but only as long as we’re on the right side of the line. This girl’s phone number and her whereabouts could be classed as information connected with an act of terrorism, in which case it’s a serious offence not to disclose it to the appropriate authorities.’
‘You are the appropriate authority.’
‘And I have to obey the protocols – refer it up the chain of command. What I’m saying – can I call you Jenny? – is that, no matter how much I’d love to steal a march on those English crooks, this one can’t be a secret.’
