The Innocent: A Coroner Jenny Cooper Crime Short Read online

  Jenny carried these thoughts with her during the drive across the Downs, wearing thin and brown at the end of a dry spell that had lasted nearly a month. Descending the hill, she entered the bustling street-life of Whiteladies Road: crowded cafes and music throbbing out of a reggae record store, kids with waist-length dreadlocks dancing outside on the pavement and bemused old women stopping to watch.

  The Georgian terrace in Jamaica Street where Jenny had her modest, two-room ground-floor offices was drenched in unaccustomed sunlight that showed up the cracking paint on the window frames and the rivulets in the ancient panes of glass. There was a faded grandeur about the slowly crumbling sandstone facade that might even inspire a level of awe in the casual visitor, but beyond the front step, the building she shared with three other sets of offices on the upper floors was tired and uncared-for. A worn carpet covered creaky boards in the hallway, and unclaimed junk mail spilled from a shelf which none of the tenants ever cleared. Jenny made her way along the passage to the heavy oak door that bore a dull brass plaque that read simply, ‘Coroner’.

  The reception area – the inviolable domain that belonged to Alison, her officer – was deserted. The magazines set out for visitors were neatly ordered. Jenny’s bundle of messages and overnight death reports were precisely clipped together and sitting squarely in a brand-new wire tray. The papers that usually cluttered Alison’s desk had been filed. Gone too was the array of sticky notes that invariably decorated the surround of Alison’s computer monitor, along with the postcards and photographs that had covered the noticeboard behind her chair. Alison had done more than merely tidy. It felt like a purge. Jenny instinctively scanned the desk for some clue – there was always a reason for her officer having one of her irregular clear-outs; it was her way of imposing order on churning emotions – but all personal traces had been swept away.

  Unsure whether the fresh sensation of unease she felt steal over her had been carried with her from the hospital or stirred by the unquiet atmosphere left in Alison’s wake, Jenny moved through into the comforting disorder of her office on the far side of the connecting door. Files were stacked in heaps either side of the desk, books and papers covered every surface and much of the floor. It had been a more than usually hectic summer and Jenny sensed it was about to get busier.

  A computer groaning with unread emails was waiting for her. Much of the mail was made up of the tedious circulars and bulletins that were spewed out daily by the Ministry of Justice, but one email was from DI Watling’s station at Gloucester. Attached to the cursory message were scans of the papers in their file: statements from the traffic officers who had found Adam Jordan’s body, several photographs of it lying in situ, a statement from the female officer who had discovered his child wandering in the memorial woodlands, and two photographs of Jordan’s car as it was found, an elderly black Saab parked on a grass verge. Jenny noticed that the passenger door was open, there was a child seat in the back and what appeared to be a small wooden figurine hanging from the rear-view mirror. The final document was a scan of two petrol receipts found stuffed in the Saab’s cupholder, one several days old from a Texaco garage in Bristol, the other bearing yesterday’s date from a filling station in Great Shefford, Berkshire. The time code showed it was paid for at 5.45 p.m., along with a sandwich and several soft drinks.

  Jenny clicked back to the photographs of the inside of the car and increased their size. There was very little to see. She homed in on the figurine and saw that it was a slender female form carved in dark wood, naked from the waist up. Recalling the one piece of useful piece of information Karen Jordan had managed to give her, she ran a search on AFAD. The Aid Agency’s website popped up at the head of the list. Jenny opened it and surfed through its pages, learning that it was an organization operating chiefly in South Sudan, Ethiopia and Chad. Partnered with a host of environmental charities that shared the ‘small is beautiful’philosophy, it seemed to concentrate its efforts on digging wells and setting up sustainable agriculture programmes in areas that had been ravaged by drought and famine. All the photographs were of Africans working for themselves; barely a white face featured. She searched the site for Jordan’s name, but AFAD didn’t appear to be an organization keen on personalities. Jenny quickly gained the impression that one worked for AFAD as you might for a church: for a higher purpose.

  The agency had an office in central London and a contact number was listed. Professional etiquette dictated that it was largely the job of the coroner’s officer to gather evidence, but in a small provincial outpost like Jenny’s, the load tended to be shared a little more evenly than it would have been in better-funded jurisdictions. Jenny didn’t need an excuse, however; she was impatient for an insight into Adam Jordan.

  The phone was answered by an earnest-sounding young woman with an accent Jenny guessed to be Dutch.

  Introducing herself, Jenny asked to speak to whoever was in charge.

  ‘You can speak with me,’ the girl said, ‘we all share responsibility.’

  ‘I see. And your name is—?’

  ‘Eda. Eda Hincks.’

  Jenny hesitated. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about Adam Jordan—’

  ‘We have,’ the young woman interjected. ‘We are all very shocked.’

  ‘The police are satisfied it was a suicide, but I now have to carry out my own inquiry. I appreciate it’s very soon after the event, but would you be able to provide a statement for me?’

  ‘I have no idea what happened.’

  ‘I’d appreciate just a little background. The nature of his work, any personal details that you think may be relevant, or observations on his state of mind. Anything that might help me understand what was going on in his life.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Eda replied. ‘Adam was here last week. He was perfectly fine. It’s such a shock …’ She tailed off.

  Jenny said, ‘You don’t feel there’s anything immediately obvious I should know about?’

  ‘No. He always seemed so happy. That’s what we thought.’

  ‘You knew him well?’

  ‘Professionally, yes. Not so much socially.’

  ‘Did he have a close colleague, someone he’d been working with abroad? His wife said he’d recently come back from Africa.’

  ‘Yes—’ Eda sounded hesitant.

  ‘I assume he wasn’t working alone?’

  ‘No. He was in South Sudan with Harry. Harry Thorn.’

  ‘May I have Mr Thorn’s details?’

  ‘I can give you his number, but I couldn’t say for certain where he is. He’s out of the office at the moment.’

  ‘The number will be fine.’

  Eda read it out to her, and then explained that he and Adam had recently completed a four-month tour of duty working on a trickle-irrigation project. They’d turned parched scrub into maize fields using buried pipes that dripfed stored rainwater into the soil. It was a huge success, she seemed keen to emphasize; Adam had been delighted with it.

  Jenny ended the call feeling that there was a subtext to Eda’s account that she had failed to grasp. It was as if she had been apologizing for something. She tried Thorn’s number– a mobile phone – but it was switched off with no voicemail.

  Forced to wait for answers, Jenny turned to the pile of other cases that sat accusingly on the corner of her desk. July, along with January, was the most popular month for death. Pneumonia took the old in winter; in summer it was heart attacks and infection. But it wasn’t only the old and sick that accounted for the rise. July was the month when the sunshine tricked the unwary into feeling invincible: they fell from ladders, crashed their motorbikes, tumbled drunk from balconies and drowned in rivers. Senseless, random deaths of the kind to which Jenny had never reconciled herself.

  She was studying a photograph of a young woman’s body – an evening of heavy drinking had caused the rupture of an undetected stomach ulcer, from which she had bled to death in her sleep – when she heard Alison’s familiar footstep
s pass her window and stop at the front door. Jenny listened to her movements. She heard Alison hang up her raincoat and step through to the kitchenette to make tea. She seemed to open and close the cupboard doors with a forced measuredness that told Jenny she was working hard to keep whatever she was suppressing firmly under control.

  Her concentration disturbed by the tension, Jenny was eager to dispel it. She got up from her desk and went through to find Alison returning to her desk.

  ‘Good morning, Alison,’ Jenny said brightly.

  ‘Afternoon, I think, Mrs Cooper. Nearly one o’clock.’ Far from appearing depressed, Alison looked convincingly cheerful. Her face glowed with natural tan after a recent holiday in Cyprus, making her eyes appear startlingly white. Slim, tastefully dressed, she couldn’t have looked more vital or any less like the former detective she was.

  ‘Was it worth the trip?’ Jenny asked. ‘I didn’t get much joy out of Mrs Jordan. She was in no fit state for anything.’

  ‘Not much to see at the motorway. He was found about thirty yards from the bridge. He must have been swept along. Probably a lorry.’ She settled at her desk, surveying its tidy surfaces with a smile of satisfaction. ‘Did you notice I’d had a clear-out?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny said. ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘You don’t realize how much rubbish you’ve built up until you come to get rid of it.’

  Jenny waited for the subtext to emerge, but Alison changed the subject and slotted a USB stick into her computer. ‘I got some good photographs of Jordan’s car, though – got there just before the police took it away.’

  She called the first image up on to the screen: an unremarkable shot of the abandoned Saab.

  ‘Should I be seeing something significant?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Where he left it, for one thing. He hadn’t gone as far as the car park. There’s a snaking driveway off the lane. He’d pulled up on the verge.’

  ‘What’s in the field behind it? It looks like an orchard.’

  ‘It’s been planted with young trees – each one’s a natural burial plot.’

  ‘Is that where the child was found?’

  ‘That was several fields away. It’s a large site. I think he must have wandered. The passenger door was left open – maybe to let air in. He might have managed to undo his seatbelt and climb out.’

  ‘But he’s tiny—’

  ‘The child seat was found with the buckle undone – look.’ She clicked to an image showing the child seat in perfect detail, the restraints hanging over its sides.

  ‘Or Jordan took the child with him out into the field, then went off alone,’ Jenny speculated.

  ‘Possibly.’ Alison was dubious. ‘It’s odd, though. You’d think he would either have made sure the kid was safe or have taken him with him. Look, he left his keys in the ignition.’

  Jenny scanned another picture of the front seats. On the passenger side were a sandwich wrapper, an empty carton of juice and two crumpled plastic water bottles. Suicidal, but not so thoughtless as to toss his rubbish out of the window.

  ‘I forgot to ask his wife where home is,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Bath,’ Alison replied. ‘I think Watling said she’s a postgrad at the university.’

  She clicked to the final photograph: a wider angle of the whole interior.

  Jenny studied it, aware of something feeling out of place. ‘There was an object hanging from the rear-view mirror – it was there on the police photographs.’

  Alison scrolled back through her pictures. ‘Was there? I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Hold on.’

  Jenny walked back into her office and called up the email from Gloucester CID. She opened the pictures taken by the police photographer, time-coded at 9.48 a.m. Hanging from the rear-view mirror was a wooden figurine. ‘Look – here it is.’

  Joining her, Alison peered at the monitor. ‘No, I didn’t see anything like that. Perhaps the police took it? It’s possible.’

  Before Alison could come up with an alternative explanation, the phone rang on her desk. While she hurried out to reception to answer it, Jenny zoomed in further on the figurine until, blurring at the edges, it filled half her screen. Close up it looked crude, something whittled at the fireside rather than a precious object. It hung from a rough leather thong attached to a small metal loop screwed into the crown of the skull.

  ‘It’s Mrs Jordan, for you,’ Alison called through. ‘She sounds a bit fraught. Shall I deal with her?’

  ‘I’ll take it.’ Jenny picked up the handset on her desk. ‘Mrs Jordan?’

  Karen Jordan responded in a dull yet determined, heavily medicated voice. ‘I want to see my husband.’

  ‘There’s no hurry. An identification can wait until tomorrow. Or perhaps he has another close relative—’

  ‘I want to see him now,’ Mrs Jordan said. ‘I have a right.’

  Jenny was in no position to dispute that.

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘At the hospital. Where else would I be?’

  ‘I can you meet you at the mortuary at two o’clock.’

  ‘Fine.’ She rang off.

  Jenny put down the phone to see Alison at the doorway. ‘You don’t have to do that, Mrs Cooper. I’ll go.’

  ‘I’d like to speak to her anyway.’

  ‘You’ve got more than enough to see to.’ Alison nodded at the untidy heap on Jenny’s desk. There was a hint of desperation in her offer, as if she couldn’t bear to be left in the office alone.

  ‘She’s expecting me. She’s very fragile.’

  Alison nodded, smiling so widely it threatened to crack her face, and turned back to her desk.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Jenny asked.

  She glanced back. ‘Perfectly, thank you, Mrs Cooper.’

  They both knew it wasn’t true.

  Karen Jordan was waiting alone outside the entrance to the mortuary, her pretty face as grey as winter. Jenny drove past in the Land Rover and parked behind the building, out of sight. She knocked at the service entrance that was used largely by undertakers and was shielded from the hospital car park by a pair of painted metal screens. It was a tawdry spot, littered with broken plastic cups and cigarette ends that the caretakers and cleaners seemed to have forgotten existed. The junior technician who opened the door looked surprised to see her there.

  She skipped the explanation. ‘I need to see Dr Kerr.’

  ‘He’s in his office.’

  Jenny stepped through into the loading bay, passing several bagged bodies stacked on the floor awaiting collection, and continued on into the main corridor. Andy Kerr came to the door of his office wiping crumbs from his mouth. How he could eat lunch at his desk with cadavers lying on the other side of the door was beyond her understanding.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Cooper. I was just about to call you.’

  She closed the door behind her, shutting out the worst of the mortuary’s nauseating aroma.

  ‘Did you find anything? His wife’s outside – I wanted to check.’

  ‘Nothing. That’s the oddity. No alcohol in the blood, no sign of drugs in the stomach. I got hold of his medical records, but apart from some harmless anti-malarials, he’s had nothing prescribed in five years. No depression either, as far as I can tell.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Massive crushing injuries, and multiple haemorrhages. I’d say there’s more than a sporting chance he struck a vehicle before he hit the road.’

  ‘Had he eaten?’

  ‘A few hours before – maybe three. All that was in his stomach was water.’

  Jenny pictured the empty bottles on the passenger seat. ‘How much water?’

  ‘A cupful. It’s hard to say. It can take time to be absorbed after death.’

  ‘He’d walked a mile and a half from his car. There were two empty 300ml water bottles in it. Does that make sense?’

  ‘That seems about right.’

  Biologically perhaps, but Jenny wondered about
a sober man who calmly drank water before hurling himself from a road bridge. The two actions seemed incompatible somehow.

  ‘He was an aid worker. He’d spent a lot of time in Africa, apparently. Might that make you look for something out of the ordinary?’

  Dr Kerr shook his head. ‘Forensically, all I found was trauma. Injuries aside, he was a perfectly healthy specimen.’ He gave an apologetic shrug. ‘The boys have tidied him the best they could.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jenny said. ‘I know you’re crowded, but if you don’t mind, I shan’t be releasing the body for burial just yet. Not until I have some answers.’

  He gave a resigned smile. ‘What possible difference could one more make?’

  Jenny led Mrs Jordan in from the main entrance. The long walk down the corridor to the refrigeration unit took them past trolleys stacked two, sometimes three deep. At times such as this, when the mortuary was overwhelmed, the technicians employed what they called a carousel, giving each body that was more than a day old a turn in the fridge until it chilled down to below five degrees. Mrs Jordan passed them without a sideways glance, the light stolen from her eyes by sedating drugs.

  They arrived at the fridge. Joe, the junior technician Jenny had met at the door, slid open a tray on the bottom stack of three and gave Jenny a look, awaiting her instruction.

  Jenny turned to Mrs Jordan. ‘I’m afraid you won’t be able to identify your husband facially. I’d like to ask you to do it from his hands, if that’s possible.’