by M. R. Hall
'I didn't imagine a birth certificate.'
'No. I paid to download a copy, and one of the death certificate too.'
Jenny threw back the sheet and swung out of bed. 'Show me.'
He retrieved a piece of paper from the floor. It was a printout of a scanned copy of a death certificate issued by the North Somerset District Registry. Beneath the section containing her uncle and aunt's names, the informant was cited as C. R. Benedict, North Somerset District Coroner. In the box titled 'cause of death' was the single typewritten word, 'accident'.
'Her death was accidental,' Steve said. 'You can forget what your father said.'
'That could mean anything. I just returned an open verdict in a case where the man clearly killed himself.'
Steve said, 'We know the coroner dealt with it. There must be files there somewhere.'
'I can hardly ask for them, can I?'
'I could.'
'No. Someone will find out.'
'There must have been something in the local papers. I'll look them up. There's no danger in that.'
Jenny snatched her handbag from the sofa and tipped it upside down. 'Where are my pills? What have you done with them?'
'In the car. I'll fetch them in a minute, but first we're going to make a deal.'
'What are you, my mother?'
'Jenny, stop it.'
She turned, ready to bite his head off. Steve got in first.
'You came to me when you were in trouble. You know how I feel about you, now how about some trust?'
'Does your father have lucid moments?'
'Rarely.'
'And the rest of the time?'
'He's like a child. He has tantrums, strange outbursts, throws things at the TV.'
'And are there periods when he is wholly unresponsive?'
'Yes. The nurses say he'll stare at the same spot on the wall all afternoon.'
Dr Allen nodded calmly, noting this down. If he resented giving up his Saturday afternoon he was hiding it well. He seemed more at home here in his consulting room in the Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff than in the borrowed room in Chepstow. His other-worldliness fitted perfectly with the grand Edwardian building surrounded by parkland. Jenny found it intimidating. Making her way along vast corridors, passing semi-catatonic women drifting aimlessly in their nightdresses, she was struck with the fear that she could become one of them. She had wanted to turn and run, but Steve had gripped her arm and steered her to their destination, insisting she do it for Ross if not for herself.
'A patient with Alzheimer's as advanced as your father's is not a reliable witness of anything, Jenny,' Dr Allen said. 'The brain is disintegrating. The connections it makes are broken and nonsensical. I appreciate it's difficult, but you must treat his accusation as nonsense.'
'But now I know she existed. We were virtually the same age. No one ever mentioned her.'
'It's not unusual for families to draw a veil of silence over a tragic event.'
'They weren't silent about much else.'
The young psychiatrist put his notebook aside and looked up with a bright, optimistic expression. 'The good news is that we've been pursuing exactly the right course. There is an event in your past which I'm sure we can now expose, and that opens the way to recovery.'
'I can sense a "but" on the way.'
'It's like any medical treatment. There's always a likelihood of short-term pain.'
'How much?'
'I couldn't predict, exactly.'
'I can't stop work, not now.'
'A week or two, surely—'
'And what would it say on my sick note? How many times do I have to tell you? When I'm working, I'm fine.'
'It's up to you, of course, but if you're hallucinating, even mildly-'
'It was a trick of the light.'
Dr Allen sat back in his chair and frowned. 'Let me put it this way. When a patient starts to see things, it tells me that we may have crossed the threshold from anxiety neurosis into something a little more serious.'
'It was one minor incident. It was late. I was exhausted.'
'There are other signs: delusional beliefs, difficulties in social interaction — '
Jenny gave a dismissive shrug. 'I don't have any of those.'
He gave her a searching look. 'You told me you genuinely believed the man and child your partner saw outside your house were ghosts.'
'I was frightened they might be. There's a difference. They were probably just a father and daughter out for a walk. Perhaps he's related to the old woman who used to live in my house; people are always doing that, going back to look at a place—'
Dr Allen held up his hand. 'Calm down. Of course there will be a logical explanation, but think objectively for a moment. You're dealing with a number of cases all at once; how would the parties feel about your involvement if they knew of your state of mind?'
Jenny thought of Paul Craven and Father Starr, and of the worshippers spread-eagled in ecstasy on the floor of the Mission Church of God. Compared with them, she was relatively sane. 'I think they'd take their chances.'
'If you insist. But you do understand that I am obliged to record my advice on your notes.'
In his quiet way he was telling her that this was a point of no return. If she came unstuck, if for any reason the Ministry of Justice ever requested a report on her mental health, the record would state that she had willingly ignored doctor's orders. Her dismissal would be a formality: inability in the discharge of duty.
Jenny said, 'Of course. Are we going to do the regression now?'
As Dr Allen talked her down she sank with little resistance into a state of near-unconscious torpor, neither sleeping nor waking. His voice grew steadily more distant as Jenny descended deeper into the caverns of her subconscious. She found herself in a warm, dark space and followed a pinprick of light that slowly widened into a street scene. Neat rows of pre-war semi-detached houses in a seaside town.
'Tell me where you are, Jenny.' Dr Allen's voice came to her as if from the far distance.
'In the street where we lived when I was a child, in Weston. I can see the houses, the sun shining on them. One of them is painted white with a green roof. I can smell a bonfire, leaves burning.'
'Good. And how are you feeling?'
Jenny tried to isolate the sensation she was experiencing. 'Odd.'
'In what way?'
'I'm not sure.'
'Do you know how old are you?'
'Small. I'm wearing the buckled shoes, the blue ones that Nan bought me.'
'What's happening?'
Jenny drifted for a moment. 'They sent me out. There are men in the house . . . their car's parked outside.'
'Who are these men?'
'I don't know.'
'Did you see them?'
Jenny flinched, balling up her fingers into fists.
'What? What is it?'
'The shouting again. It's my mother. I can't bear it.'
'Stay with it, Jenny, stay there. What's she shouting?'
Her chin lolled from one side of her chest to the other, her face creasing with pain.
'Tell me, Jenny. Tell me what's she saying.'
'"Don't take him! Don't take him!" There are people coming out of their doors. The woman from next door, she's pulling me to her, not letting me see.'
'See what?'
'It's my fault. It is. It's my fault.'
'What's your fault, Jenny?'
'What they're doing to Dad, what's happening to him. The policemen are taking him away.'
Steve turned off the main road and threaded through single- track lanes. Overgrown hedgerows brushed the sides of the car. The dipping sun danced off the wings of a million insects. Jenny closed her eyes and felt the warm evening air playing over her face, neither of them saying a word. He pulled up at the entrance to a forestry track and led her along a winding path through thickets of birch and hazel, emerging into a meadow that wrapped around an oxbow bend in the River Usk. They waded through the lo
ng grass and sat at the edge of the water, where fat turquoise dragonflies, more brilliant than peacocks, came to sip in the shallows.
In no hurry, he waited for her to speak first, happy to smoke a cigarette and gaze at the two swans on the opposite bank elegantly preening themselves after a lazy afternoon swim.
When the heaviness of the hospital began to lift, Jenny found her voice and told him what had happened in Dr Allen's consulting room. She had regressed before, retrieved many snatches of buried memory, but nothing had been as vivid as today. There was sharp detail: the gaudy orange flowers on the neighbour's dress, the click of the detectives' shoes on the pavement, the raw fear in her mother's voice.
Steve said, 'And that was it, just that scene?'
'It's like that. It's as if I can only bear to take so much at once.' Jenny wiped her eyes, the tears stinging her cheeks. 'Maybe I'm making it up, putting together pieces that don't belong together.'
'What did the doctor say?'
'He seemed pleased. I'm seeing him again next week.'
Steve tossed aside the blade of grass he'd been picking at and tenderly touched her face. 'This is good, Jenny. You've started to open the door. You're going to get free of all this.'
She looked at him dubiously. 'I don't know why you're still here. Your last crazy girlfriend cost you ten years.'
He let his hand drop down to hold hers and kissed both her eyelids in turn. 'You know why.'
'You're betting a lot on me. I hope you know what you're doing.'
'What do you mean?'
'You don't believe I did it, do you?'
'You were just a witness to something upsetting, that's all. A very long time ago.' He drew her closer. 'Don't let it poison your whole life, Jenny. Try thinking about where you are now.'
He kissed her lightly, and with no demand, in a way that took her back to more innocent times. She wished she could stay there for ever.
Chapter 9
Monday morning greeted her with the small mountain of death reports that a weekend in high summer inevitably generates. Hot weather, even more than cold, was the undertaker's friend. In addition to the usual post-operative deaths were numerous suspected coronaries, a gory motorcycle accident and a drowning. The police had emailed photographs of the body of a teenage boy stretched out at the side of a reservoir. There were livid bruises on his chest from desperate attempts at resuscitation. Even after handling over twelve hundred cases, the sight of those who had been torn from life in an unexpected instant never failed to appal her. It was less the physical spectacle than the injustice of it; the inability of the deceased to prepare, to say goodbye to loved ones and make their peace.
She had come to appreciate that a death faced with foreknowledge and a clear conscience was a rare privilege granted only to the few.
Jenny hurried through the hospital reports, certified the cause of death in the cases in which post-mortems had already been completed and by mid-morning finally summoned the courage to call the family of the drowned boy. She spoke briefly to a hung-over-sounding man who said he was the mother's boyfriend. In the background a woman yelled obscenities at screaming younger children, their voices competing with a blaring television. The atmosphere of aggressive chaos hit her like a shock wave. She could understand why the fourteen-year-old might have swallowed a bottle of cheap vodka and gone for a swim. The mother refused to come to the phone and conversation fizzled to an inconclusive end.
Turning to the boxes sent by Paul Craven's lawyers, Jenny skimmed through the papers the police had seized from Eva's house. There were domestic bills, bank and credit-card statements, correspondence with her mortgage and pension companies and documents relating to her work on behalf of Decency. It didn't take an accountant to work out that Eva had been in financial trouble. Decency paid her a salary of three thousand pounds a month plus travel expenses, but she had refinanced her house twice in as many years and was paying eighteen hundred pounds each month in mortgage payments. Her current account was forty-five thousand in the red and between half a dozen credit cards she had racked up another thirty-five thousand pounds' worth of debt. Jenny found a letter marked 'COPY' dated the previous November, in which Eva had written to Michael Turn- bull c/o Decency's London office requesting an increase in salary to reflect her importance to the campaign. There was no evidence of a reply.
Despite their volume, the papers cast little light on Eva's personal life or state of mind. Jenny flicked back to the sheaf of itemized telephone bills to check for frequently called numbers, but on close examination Eva appeared to have made only one or two calls each day from her home number, some days none at all. There were no bills for a mobile phone. She checked the statement made by DC Sarah Munroe, the exhibits officer, and noted that no mobile phone records had been seized, nor even a handset. Buried in the credit-card statements she had spotted a payment for a laptop computer Eva had purchased the previous August, but it was absent from DC Munroe's list of items seized. It was apparent that not everything she would have expected the police to have taken had been recorded, let alone copied and forwarded to Craven's lawyers.
Jenny flicked back through Eva's work papers, searching for some hint of a clue. Most of them had been generated by the Decency campaign office: strategy papers, statistical information for use in interviews (one in three men in the UK has a pornography habit, one in six an addiction), and minutes of meetings with ministers and civil servants. The few personal letters were from campaign supporters or church groups requesting Eva to come and talk to them. Only one item, caught up in the middle of briefing papers for an appearance on television news, gave an insight into the side of Eva's life that most interested Jenny. It was from her solicitors, Reed Falkirk & Co., writing to inform her that having reviewed her contracts with GlamourX Ltd, counsel had confirmed that she had a good claim for unpaid royalties for Latex Lesbians Parts i to 4 and all six films in the Lil' Miss series. The solicitors awaited her instructions, reminding her that they would require ten thousand pounds to be paid on account of their fees. The letter had been written in mid-March, just under two months before her death. Jenny checked her bank statements and realized there were none on the file after January.
DI Vernon Goodison was a hard man to get hold of. It took three separate calls to track him down to a CID office in Trinity Road police station, and impatient threats to a junior detective to extract his mobile number.
'Jenny Cooper, here. Severn Vale District Coroner. I understand you led the investigation into the murder of Eva Donaldson.'
'Ah, the infamous Mrs Cooper.' She could picture his patronizing smile. 'I was the interviewing officer. DI Wallace was heading up the investigation.'
'It's your signature certifying that the unused material handed to Craven's solicitors was complete.'
'I think I remember that.'
'There appear to be documents missing.'
'Then I suggest you contact the solicitors. We had no reason to hold on to anything.'
'They're missing from your lists. You can't tell me you didn't find mobile phone bills or bank statements after January. It looks as if the deceased had a computer, but there's no mention of you having seized one.'
'Have another look at the exhibits list. Have you got a copy?'
'Fire away.'
'Top of the second sheet, as I recall.'
Jenny turned the page and read, 'Item: document shredder.'
Goodison said, 'A woman with a bit of a past, you might say. Wouldn't want things falling into the wrong hands I expect. You can understand why.'
Jenny said, 'How far did you dig?'
'We don't spend money for prurience alone, Mrs Cooper. Once we'd established Craven was our man, we moved on.'
'What happened to the computer?'
'As far as I know, we never found one. You know as well as I do it'd be the first thing in the bag.'
'Did you check her email server?'
'We searched her one known address. There should be a statement in th
e file covering that. She was a scrupulous woman, liked to cover her tracks. I suppose she had plenty to cover.'
Jenny opened the file containing the prosecution statements. She must have missed it the first time she skimmed through. A single paragraph from DC Anya Singh recorded the fact that a search had been made of Eva's only known email account and that it had been closed down at the request of Eva herself on 12 February. There was no surviving record of her previous email correspondence on the operator's server.
'Did you find out why she closed the account?'
'No. The best guess is that she was doing a spot of housekeeping before this bill came before Parliament. You can imagine the kind of press attention she would have attracted.'
'And ditched the computer for safe measure?'
'Put it beyond reach, that's for sure.'
Jenny instinctively mistrusted the DI and had to remind herself to remain objective, to remember that the police had no interest in gleaning the whole truth, only in gathering sufficient evidence for a conviction. Once they had a confession, details such as Eva's tattoo or why she might have dumped her computer would be of no concern to them.
But she couldn't resist a final dig. 'I read your interview with Craven. Seems like you had to tease it out of him.'
Goodison laughed. 'Not at all, Mrs Cooper. He couldn't wait to put his hands up. He was good as gold.'
No money. No phone. No computer. A contractual dispute with an adult movie company and a new tattoo two weeks before she died. Eva had been in a mess and Jenny felt a sudden and profound shift in her feelings towards her. She wasn't a porn star or an evangelist, she was a lonely and frightened young woman whose short life was heading for disaster. If she didn't try to understand her, no one ever would. But why Eva more than a drowned boy or the innocent victims of a crane collapse? Jenny didn't have an answer, only a powerful feeling that if she were to turn her back on Eva now, she wouldn't be able to live with herself.
Alison bustled in with coffee from their local Brazilian cafe balanced on top of a tray of mail. Ever since the good- looking new waiter had greeted her as 'my pretty lady' she had been making daily trips.
