The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (10 page)

‘Hysterical reporting would hardly be in anyone’s interests. We want our people getting on with the job, not wasting precious time batting away journalists. I’m assured we’ll have some answers in a day or two.’

‘And that’s why you’re here – you want me to keep the lid on things?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind, Jenny. I felt you’d understand.’

‘I’m interested to know what answers you might be expecting to find.’ She feigned ignorance. ‘I was under the impression this was a disease that could erupt anywhere and for no particular reason.’

‘That’s often the case.’ He was briefly distracted by a passing pleasure boat carrying a boisterous party of young foreign students, most of them pretty girls. ‘But sometimes, I’m told, there’s a carrier. An originating source.’

He threw the comment away in an attempt, she suspected, to prompt her into an unguarded admission.

‘All I know is what Dr Kerr, the Vale’s pathologist, has told me,’ Jenny stalled. ‘Suspected meningitis; seemingly an aggressive strain. The path’ lab’s findings point to it being drug-resistant and they’re conducting more tests.’

‘That’s all he said?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘I’ve no reason to assume he’s withholding anything from me.’

‘Jenny, Jenny . . .’ He gave her a knowing smile. ‘You’re such an awful liar, you really shouldn’t try, especially not to me, who knows you so well. If even I have heard that the Vale is alive with rumour, it can’t have escaped your notice.’

‘I’m meant to be impartial. I try not to listen.’

‘Even to your ex-husband?’

Jenny met his gaze. ‘Especially to him.’

‘The thing is,’ he continued, dismissing her denial, ‘the rumours are all complete nonsense. Absolute rubbish – and that comes from the top, from the people who have no axe to grind.’

‘In the Department of Health?’

‘You see? Such cynicism – and you’ve barely opened a file. An open mind, Jenny, that’s all I’m asking of you. Doctors are very clever people, but as prone to irrational responses as the rest of us. You know, there is a very good reason why we don’t let them run hospitals by themselves.’

She nodded, pretending that she had taken his wise counsel on board. ‘So you’d like me to do what, precisely?’

‘Respond to the facts and not the speculation, and please, no journalists. Whipping up a storm will only cost lives. We’re very good at containing outbreaks, we really are.’

She got the message: if word got out, she would be receiving more than her fair share of the blame.

‘Is that all?’ she asked, beginning to feel stirrings of guilt at being away from her desk.

‘Yes. For now.’ Moreton waved to the waitress to summon the bill, relieved to have the main business concluded. ‘Busy day ahead?’

‘Frantic. I don’t suppose you could ask people to stop dying for a week or two.’

‘I have many powers, Jenny, but that, I’m afraid, is not yet one of them.’ Moreton smiled. ‘I heard about the aid worker who jumped from the bridge – Jordan, was that the name?’

Jenny was instantly suspicious. ‘How did that reach you already?’

‘It’s not so much the dead man as his associate – Harry Thorn. He has one of those names that make our computers excited.’

The waitress appeared with the bill. Ever the cautious civil servant, Moreton counted out the precise change.

‘Yes, an old friend of mine from the Foreign Office tipped me off – Gordon Jefferies. We were at school together. He’d had a request for intel from the Department of International Development. Apparently Thorn’s outfit had been bidding for their funds, some African irrigation project or other. ID were doing the usual due diligence when it emerged Mr Thorn had a past.’

‘Should I know about it?’

‘It’s the usual sort of stuff these types get involved in – selling information, spreading rumours among the natives.’

‘Information? That sounds like a euphemism for spying. I can’t say I know much about that world.’

‘Everyone wants a piece of Africa, it seems; blessed with natural resources but cursed with violent tribalism. You don’t do any sort of business there without men on the inside. That, I’m told, is what your Mr Thorn is. Available for hire to the highest bidder.’

‘He’s
my
Mr Thorn now, is he?’

Simon smiled. ‘You were seen, Jenny – paying him a visit.’

She felt her cheeks glow with embarrassment. ‘I was going to collect my son from college. He called when I was en route. I took a statement, that’s all. He told me hardly anything.’

‘Shouldn’t your officer be doing that sort of legwork?’

‘You know how I like to do things, Simon. Besides, I was passing his front door.’

He gave her a searching look. ‘Gordon tells me he’s an incorrigible liar, Jenny. And as we both know, there is no cure for that particular chronic condition. I’m just warning you to tread carefully, that’s all.’

‘So he’s being watched? Is there some sort of parallel investigation going on?’

‘To yours? Not so far as I know. But of course anything you turn up will be of interest, let us say.’ He stood up from his chair. ‘I really ought to be getting back on the road – I’ve a one o’clock with the Secretary of State. Can I give you a lift back to the office?’

‘It’s out of your way. Go on – you’d better hurry.’

Moreton smiled, but Jenny sensed that beneath the veneer he was anything but relaxed. He was holding something back. He touched her lightly at the elbow. ‘Good to see you, Jenny. Keep me posted.’

Jenny made her way past the cathedral and across the lawns of College Green, preoccupied with unravelling Simon Moreton’s coded messages over Adam Jordan and Harry Thorn. However much he had tried to reassure her that there was no cause for alarm over a single case of meningitis, the fact of the news blackout was proof beyond doubt that in the halls of government alarm had been overtaken by full-blown fear.

Rounding the corner into Jamaica Street, Jenny resolved to get a line directly into the path’ lab. She recalled that Alison had once had a contact amongst its small team of haematologists – a technician she had got to know during her former career as a detective sergeant in CID. Jenny’s few short years as coroner had taught her one inviolable fact about large organizations: the truth seldom emerged from the top, but often did leak out of the bottom.

Jenny heard Alison hastily ending a phone call as she approached along the hallway. She entered to an uneasy atmosphere, but Alison gave her a brittle smile and handed her a thick wedge of mail before she could ask any questions.

‘Was that Mr Moreton’s car I saw you climbing into earlier?’ Alison asked.

‘Yes.’ Jenny sorted through the pile of envelopes, tossing the junk and Ministry circulars unopened into the bin. ‘He wanted to talk about the Sophie Freeman case.’ Jenny looked up, remembering how quickly events had unfolded. ‘Oh. You may not have heard.’

‘I had a call first thing, from a woman at the Health Protection Agency. She’s requested we don’t talk to the media or anyone outside the investigation.’ Alison plucked a note containing a phone number from the side of her monitor. ‘She’d like to speak to you.’

She waited for Jenny to explain the reason for Moreton’s visit.

‘Government’s nervous about causing a panic,’ Jenny said. ‘Simon’s anxious we keep our inquiry low-key.’ Jenny slipped the number into her pocket. ‘I don’t suppose you could do me a favour – that contact of yours in the Vale path’ lab, what was his name?’

‘Jim Connings? What about him?’

‘Perhaps you could ask him if there’s a story other than the official one. We won’t have heard it from him, of course.’

‘Story about what?’ Alison asked guardedly.

‘Drug-resistant infections. Staff coming under pressure to disguise them. There are a lot of well-paid people on the fifth floor who might want to keep a lid on that sort of information.’

‘I can ask him,’ Alison said, ‘but things aren’t what they were. No one’s safe.’

‘We have to try.’

‘There’s an email from DI Watling you might want to look at,’ Alison called after her. ‘He doesn’t know what happened to the figurine in Jordan’s car, but they found another couple of receipts in the junk under the seat. I’ve forwarded it to you.’

Jenny sat at her desk and ran her eye down the fifty emails that had arrived since she’d left the office. It never ended. Watling’s was near the bottom. In the kind of terse message that only a man would write, he reported no sign of the figurine and said scans of the last traces of evidence discovered in Jordan’s car were enclosed. She opened the two attachments. The first was a scan of a till receipt. The print was faded and patchy, but Jenny could just make out that it was from Blackwell’s bookshop in Broad Street, Oxford. It was dated two days before Jordan’s death: Saturday, 21 July. He had purchased a single item costing thirteen pounds, at 11.15 a.m. The second contained a scan of another receipt, this one from a cafe in New Street, Oxford, for a purchase made forty minutes later: two cups of Americano coffee and a bottle of water.

Jordan had evidently been to Oxford and met with someone. Jenny thought back to her last conversation with his widow, and couldn’t recall her having mentioned it.

Curious, she reached for her phone and looked up Karen Jordan’s number. Karen answered against the clatter of a busy hospital corridor.

‘Mrs Jordan, it’s Jenny Cooper.’

‘I know.’

‘How’s your son?’ Jenny asked, trying to let her feel she was on her side.

‘He’s fine.’ She sounded unsure. ‘Much better.’

‘The police found a few receipts in your husband’s car.’

‘You mean
our
car.’

‘Of course. May I ask you about them?’

‘You can try.’

Jenny scrolled down through her inbox and found the previous email Watling had sent her.

‘The day your husband died – Monday – he’d filled the car with petrol at somewhere called Great Shefford at a quarter to six in the evening. He also bought a sandwich and a couple of drinks.’

‘Great Shefford? Where’s that?’

‘Berkshire. It’s about ten minutes off the M4 motorway – an hour’s drive from your home.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’ She sounded confused. ‘Berkshire? He told me he was going to visit his father’s grave, with Sam – that’s the opposite direction. Are you sure?’

‘It was paid for by card – I’ll send it to you if you like. You can check it yourself.’

‘I will.’

‘Just one other thing. Two other receipts from last Saturday, the 21st. One from Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, one from a cafe along the road forty minutes later. Both cash, I think.’

Karen Jordan was silent for a moment. ‘Last Saturday? He was never in Oxford. He went to London last Saturday. He went to visit the office. He was going to talk with Harry Thorn and the others about their new project. He even called me from there.’

‘On a weekend?’

‘That’s not unusual.’

‘When I spoke to the girl at the charity – Eda, is it? – she said he’d been in last week, not two days before.’

‘Yes, he’d been there on Wednesday as well. He called me from London on Saturday at about one. He told me he was just around the corner in Oxford Street. I could hear the traffic.’

‘If these receipts did belong to him, it seems he was more likely to have been in a street in Oxford, fifty miles away.’ Jenny paused. ‘Would you like me to check with Mr Thorn or the London office?’

Karen Jordan didn’t answer.

‘Mrs Jordan?’

‘Do what you like. I don’t care.’

She rang off.

Jenny started to call her back, then stopped herself. Nothing she could say would undo the damage of letting a widow know her husband had been lying to her. She continued her search instead by calling AFAD’s London office. Eda Hincks answered, wary when she heard Jenny’s voice.

‘I’m attempting to clarify Mr Jordan’s movements in the days before his death,’ Jenny explained. ‘Last time we spoke, you said he was in the office last week. Would that have been on Wednesday?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘And did he come to your offices again last week?’

‘Not that I am aware.’

‘Mrs Jordan seems to think he may have been there on Saturday, the 21st.’

‘No. There was no meeting scheduled for that day. Hold on, I’ll double-check. Jenny heard her turning through the pages of a diary. ‘Yes, he had scheduled another meeting for this Friday, with Mr Thorn and Helena Anders – she is a consultant assisting us with a funding matter.’

Jenny said, ‘Do you know of any reason he might have been in Oxford last Saturday? Did he have friends or professional associates there?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Do you know anyone who might?’

‘I’m sorry. I can’t help you.’

Can’t or won’t? Jenny wondered.

‘One more thing – he was in Berkshire late on Monday afternoon. He bought petrol at a village called Great Shefford. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘No. I’m afraid not.’

Jenny thanked her and hoped for better luck with Harry Thorn.