The Innocent: A Coroner Jenny Cooper Crime Short Read online

  THE INNOCENT

  M. R. HALL

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  The Chosen Dead

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  ONE

  Sensible, professional people weren’t meant to experience the things that Jenny Cooper often did. Sane. Sober. Rational. Those were the sort of words that ought to describe one of Her Majesty’s coroners. She held judicial office. Her job was fearlessly to examine the circumstances of unnatural deaths and deliver solid answers. She had become, hard though it was for her to believe, a figure of authority. But in unexpected moments – it could happen as easily during a testy courtroom exchange as in the silence of the night – the membrane between this world and the next became so thin, she felt that if she chose to, she could peer through it like a gauze.

  Her maternal grandmother, a Welsh woman who read fortunes in tea leaves and claimed to hear a knock at her bedroom window before a friend or family member died, would have said Jenny wasn’t suffering moments of madness, but had ‘the gift’. Jenny called it an overactive imagination caused by an unsettled childhood.

  And yet, try as she might to dismiss these impressions as tricks of the mind, she couldn’t help wonder why it was that she had found herself in one of the very few professions outside the priesthood that straddled the divide between life and death. Was there, as her grandmother would have insisted, a reason for everything? Jenny hadn’t chosen to become a coroner; the opportunity had simply presented itself at the right time. There hadn’t been many options for a burnedout family lawyer struggling with acute anxiety and surviving on tranquillizers. A job with no living clients had seemed the least testing choice.

  These thoughts were in her mind because it had happened again this morning. She had woken early under the shadow of an unremembered dream. Its unformed images shrouded her like a mist that refused to disperse, even as she set off from her cottage in the Wye Valley for her office in Bristol. The early September morning smelt fresh and pure, and the valley was bathed in peach-tinted sunlight, but the uneasy feeling refused to leave her. It was as if something were profoundly, but intangibly wrong, and in the confined space of her car the sensation only intensified. Jenny told herself not to be so stupid, and in an effort to switch her attention elsewhere, filled her mind with the list of tasks that awaited her that day: a brief court hearing in which she would return a verdict in a fatal industrial accident, two recently bereaved families to meet after lunch and a consultation with the Home Office pathologist.

  The tactic worked. Her mind became absorbed in her cases and a feeling of familiar and comfortable security returned. Just another stress symptom, she told herself. Too much on her plate. Back in control, she pressed down on the accelerator, eager to get to the office and on with business. She shifted down to third gear and swung her car into the steep bend at the foot of Minepit Wood.

  She rounded the corner to see a huge four-wheel-drive tractor coming in the opposite direction. She moved in further towards the edge of the road, but as their two vehicles closed on each other something flickered at the margins of her vision: a small, shadowy figure stepping out from the entrance to a forest track. Jenny’s reaction was instinctive and uncon- scious. She jerked the steering wheel sharply, though the road was slick with dew. Her tyres lost purchase. The car became a bucking animal, slewing left and right and careering into the tractor’s path.

  She stamped down on the break and closed her eyes, aware, in an oddly detached sort of way, that it would be for the last time.

  There was a high-pitched squeal of rubber on tarmac, the deep bellow of an angry horn and a violent thwack like a pigeon hitting the windscreen.

  Moments passed. Stillness. Jenny blinked. She was alive, or at least she appeared to be. She had come to a halt, unharmed, on the muddy verge at the opposite side of the road. The sound she had heard was her wing mirror being ripped from its moorings. She had avoided death by inches; by hundredths of a second. She glanced up at a patch of sky through a gap in the trees: it was the bluest, clearest blue she could recall seeing since …

  ‘You all right? What happened there, then?’

  Jenny looked round, startled, as a man dressed in muddy overalls, who she assumed was the tractor driver, knocked on the passenger window. She pressed the switch to wind it down and struggled to find her voice.

  ‘The girl—’

  The driver looked at her blankly. ‘Girl?’

  ‘She stepped in front of me.’

  ‘There weren’t no girl, love.’ He scratched his bearded cheek and glanced up and down the empty road. ‘Probably saw a deer in the hedge. There’s plenty of the buggers about.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll fetch a rope – tow you off this mud.’

  As he turned and trudged away Jenny experienced a sensation inside her head like a spark jumping between electrodes.

  And then she felt it again, only more keenly than before. It was with her: the presence. Was it a memory or something more? She couldn’t say. But she knew now what it was. The date was 7 September. Ten years to the day that Jenny had set out on another bright autumn morning that, now she thought of it, had been the start of everything.

  TWO

  Ten years previously

  Another weekday morning. Another scramble. Jenny arrived at her office in the council building a little before eight having dumped her resentful nine-year-old son, Ross, at ‘breakfast club’. The hassled working mothers who wrestled their tired, bad-tempered kids out of their cars and into the school canteen had an understanding: they didn’t bother each other. They didn’t attempt small talk and they certainly didn’t cast judgemental glances. Jenny suspected that like her, the other breakfast club mums were loaded with guilt and could see no means of escape from their frantic routines. She salved her conscience with the thought that at least Ross was a thousand times better off than most of the kids she dealt with at work. As principal lawyer for the North Somerset Child Protection Team, she had more than three hundred live files. Each one represented a troubled child for whom her department was trying to secure a better, safer future. Most days her job felt like pushing rocks uphill, but now and then, when she succeeded in placing an innocent beyond harm’s reach, she experienced moments of unadulterated happiness. They were what kept her going. That and endless cups of bitter, instant coffee.

  Jenny was scheduled to be in court at 10 a.m. to apply for an emergency care order. The previous afternoon a primary school teacher had found cigarette burns on the arms of a five-year-old boy. She suspected they had been dealt by the mother’s boyfriend. Jenny was desperate not to fail in her application. During her twelve years in practice, she had learned that men capable of stubbing out cigarettes on a child’s flesh were also capable of far worse.

  She was engrossed in her papers when her boss, Elaine Stewart, arrived. Elaine was only forty-five, but looked ten years older, every case another gouge in her prematurely lined face.

  ‘Did you hear about Natasha Greenslade?’ Elaine asked.

  Jenny looked up. Natasha was one of her longest-standing clients. She almost thought of her as a daughter. For more than six years Natasha had passed in and out of care while her chaotic, manipulative mother, Karen, ricocheted between unsuitable and dangerous boyfriends. Jenny had not long ago managed to place the intelligent and delicate fourteenyear-ol
d girl with her favourite foster parents, Frank and Alison Bartlett. She had hoped Natasha would stay with them until she was sixteen. ‘What about her?’

  ‘I had a call on the way in from Detective Sergeant Murray. Apparently she’s been reported missing.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘First thing. Hasn’t she got a history of running away? I told you she would have been safer in a secure home.’

  ‘She’ll have gone to her mother’s. She always does. I’ll give Pete a call.’

  Jenny lifted the phone and dialled Pete Murray’s direct line at The Bridewell police station. She knew his number by heart. He’d been dealing with the Greenslades’problems almost as long as she had.

  ‘Hi, Pete, it’s Jenny. Elaine just told me Natasha Greenslade’s missing.’

  ‘That’s right. The foster dad phoned. I’m just off to pay him a visit.’

  ‘Maybe you should try her mother’s first.’

  ‘I’ve already sent a squad car round. No sign.’

  ‘Did they speak to Karen?’

  ‘Yeah. Hasn’t seen her for a month.’

  ‘Oh. OK. Leave it a little while. I expect that’s where you’ll find her.’

  Pete was silent for a moment, as if he were holding something back.

  ‘What is it?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘You remember I thought Natasha would have been better off in a secure home.’

  ‘You and everyone else. You don’t solve a child’s problems by locking her up.’

  ‘Yeah, but you keep them in one place.’

  ‘Goodbye, Pete.’ Jenny put down the phone, despairing of her colleagues. There was a lonely, confused teenage girl wandering the Bristol streets and all they could think about was covering their own backs.

  As she went back to her work, Elaine said, ‘Maybe we should consider applying for a secure accommodation order now this has happened. We can find her somewhere gentle.’

  Jenny pictured the rooms she had recently visited in Oak House, a new secure council-run home for the care system’s most difficult cases. There were tightly spaced bars at all of the windows, and the bedroom doors, locked for ten hours each night, were made of heavy steel. A prison for children who had committed no crime.

  ‘Like Oak House?’ Jenny said, with no hint of irony.

  ‘Yes. I think that would suit her very well,’ Elaine said. ‘Why don’t you see if they’ve got space?’

  The court hearing was a triumph. Judge Emerson examined the photographs of the boy’s injuries and granted the emergency care order after hearing only ten minutes of argument. The child would be collected from school that afternoon by social workers and placed with a foster family. Meanwhile, the police would be paying his mother and her boyfriend a visit. Nine times out of ten the sudden loss of a child would jolt the mother into turning against the abuser. Jenny had a feeling this would be such a case. She hoped to be back in court in a few days’time with the good news that the boyfriend had been arrested and the boy was safe to go home.

  Walking back to the car park through the busy heart of Bristol, Jenny’s mind was moving on to the other cases vying for her attention: the Down’s Syndrome toddler whose wellmeaning parents were failing to care for him; the pregnant thirteen-year-old who was determined to give birth; and the fifteen-year-old Pakistani girl who had voluntarily placed herself in care to prevent a forced marriage to a cousin. Each one was fraught with emotional dilemmas and knotty legal problems. She drew in a deep breath and told herself to relax, to enjoy her moment of success before fighting the next battle.

  What the hell? The world wouldn’t end if she allowed herself ten minutes off. She took a short detour to the waterfront and found a café with outside tables overlooking the dock. She switched off her phone, ordered a latte, and for the first time in weeks, lifted her eyes to the sky. It was Hockney blue, so clear and unadulterated she wanted to turn the world upside down and dive in.

  THREE

  Jenny was back in the council building climbing the stairs to her office on the second floor when she remembered why she felt so strangely peaceful – she had forgotten to switch on her phone. She fetched it out, brought it to life and checked her voicemail. In the space of forty minutes she had collected six messages. The first was an angry tirade from the lawyer representing the family of the Pakistani girl. His clients were demanding access to their daughter as their ‘human right’. Jenny deleted it and moved on. The second message began strangely – indistinct sounds from a public place – then a familiar voice.

  She spoke quietly. ‘Jenny? Jenny, it’s Natasha.’ A pause. ‘It’s OK—’ She fell silent. Jenny listened hard to the background noises and made out a tannoy announcement: ‘The 11.48 service to Plymouth—’ Natasha hung up. Not a mobile phone, but an old-fashioned handset rattling into a cradle.

  She’d been calling from a payphone, at a station. The foster parents’home was in Stoke Gifford, less than a mile from Bristol Parkway.

  Skipping the rest of her messages, Jenny called Detective Sergeant Murray.

  He answered from inside a moving squad car. ‘Jenny?’

  ‘I had a message from Natasha Greenslade on my voicemail. I think she might have been at Parkway.’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Pete?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He sounded serious and distracted. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said, “Jenny, it’s Natasha,” then, “It’s OK.”’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Yes. Why? What’s wrong?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘A young female went under a train at Parkway about thirty minutes ago.’

  Jenny felt her heart smash against her ribs.

  ‘When did she call you?’

  ‘About then.’

  ‘Right. I’ll let you know.’

  Jenny stood in the middle of the corridor clutching her phone, remembering the last conversation she’d had with Natasha. It was in a conference room outside the Bristol Family Court, shortly after the order had been made for her be placed in foster care. They’d had a moment alone together before the girl’s social worker joined them. Natasha had been daunted by the prospect of going to live with a new family. Her biggest problem, Jenny had grown to understand, was that she felt deeply ashamed of her mother. Their roles had reversed: Natasha felt responsible for Karen’s drinking, promiscuity and minor criminality. And it was far easier for her to carry her burden alone and in secret, than to live with a family whose normality would only serve to highlight the chaos of her own life.

  Intuiting Natasha’s troubled thoughts, Jenny had said, ‘The Bartletts are good people. They don’t judge anyone. You can talk to them about anything you like, or you can keep things private. It’s up to you. The main thing is, every day at their home will be the same as any other. You can relax there. I promise – you’ll be very happy with them.’

  Natasha had nodded, then looked up at her with pale blue eyes and given a hint of a smile. ‘I wish I could have had a mum like you.’

  Jenny had to swallow hard to stop her eyes filling with tears. ‘Look, here’s my number,’ she had said. She had torn a scrap of paper from her legal pad and written it down. ‘If you’ve a problem, whatever it is, you can call me and I’ll do what I can to help.’

  Natasha had held the number tightly in her clenched fist, like something precious. ‘Thanks. I will.’

  Jenny had been staring at the papers on her desk for more than an hour, unable to absorb a word, when Elaine emerged from her glass-walled office and made her way across the open-plan workspace towards her. She was frowning; Jenny knew it was bad news.

  ‘The police have recovered a body. They think it’s Natasha, but they’re not sure. Her mother is refusing to come and identify it.’

  Jenny fought hard not to show her emotion, reminding herself she was a professional. They lost one or two kids every year. Sometimes more. Given their clientele, it was inevitable.

  ‘There’s her grandfather,’ Jenny s
aid. ‘He’s all right. I know she’s had contact with him recently.’

  Elaine gathered her cardigan tightly around herself. ‘The police would rather not involve the family if they can help it – it’s a bit of a mess, as you can imagine. They’ve asked if you would go.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Everyone else who’s worked with her is busy.’

  ‘Is this my punishment for not having her locked up?’

  ‘These things happen, Jenny. It can’t be helped. They’d like you there as soon as possible, if you don’t mind.’

  FOUR

  The thought of visiting a mortuary filled Jenny with dread. The only dead body she had seen had been her grandmother’s when Jenny was twelve, and then only a glimpse of her face and the chalk-white skin of her bony hands. She arrived at the old Victorian mortuary at Frenchay Hospital and was met with the heavy smell of disinfectant and decay leaking through the door and polluting the air outside. She pressed the intercom.

  ‘Hello?’ a disembodied voice crackled back at her.

  ‘Jenny Cooper. I’m here for the identification.’

  ‘Come in.’

  Jenny entered a gloomy tiled corridor with a vaulted ceiling. The architects had attempted to conjure the atmosphere of a church, but had created a crypt. There were no windows that Jenny could see, just a line of gurneys – there had to be at least half a dozen of them – each one holding a body wrapped in dazzling white plastic.

  Jenny’s legs felt suddenly weak, as if they might fold beneath her.

  A short, slight male dressed in a waist-length white coat buttoned tight across his narrow chest emerged through swing doors to her right.

  ‘Mrs Cooper?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Joe, the technician.’ He was a man of sixty but moved with the speed and lightness of a flyweight boxer. He smiled as he approached her, not kindly, Jenny felt, but with a morbid sense of mischief. ‘The police officer’s already here. Do you want to come through?’