The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (20 page)

She gestured Jenny to one of the leather armchairs.

‘How is she?’ Claire King asked. ‘She called to say you were coming, but she sounded dreadful.’

‘There’s nothing that won’t mend, but I’d say she was lucky.’

Claire King shook her head, as if to expel unwanted thoughts.

‘I’ve looked for the book she mentioned, but I can’t find anything.’ She nodded towards the shelves that covered most of one wall. ‘Is there any significance to it? I thought you’d be more interested in anything Adam had written down.’

‘He bought it a few days before he died. There was a receipt in his car.’

‘I see. So it has some relevance?’

‘Perhaps.’ Jenny trod gently. ‘The hours and days preceding a suicide often hold a clue. I get the impression that he might have been a more complex man than he appeared on the surface.’

Mrs King looked at her critically. Jenny noticed that her clothes, though unfussy, were of the most expensive kind: Bond Street, not Bath. Her perfect hair and age-defying complexion would also have come with a hefty price tag. She wasn’t the kind of woman, Jenny imagined, who would have readily chosen a man in Adam Jordan’s line of business for a son-in-law.

‘Is that a polite way of suggesting he had some sort of mental condition?’ Mrs King asked. ‘Have you found something in his medical records? Karen must have a right to know.’

‘There’s no evidence of any illness,’ Jenny said. ‘Your daughter would be the first to hear if there were.’

Claire King glanced over at some photographs lined up on a shelf. There were several of Adam and Karen together in a small African village, and one of him holding a newborn Sam to his naked chest. He had an untamed beard and narrow, bony shoulders, like a figure blown in from a previous age.

‘Did you know Adam well?’ Jenny asked.

‘Well?’ She seemed embarrassed by the question. ‘I couldn’t say I understood him, particularly.’

‘Something of a free spirit?’

‘He was certainly that.’

Jenny gave her a look to show her that she understood her mixed feelings perfectly.

‘He came from a good family, well-educated, money, but I’ll admit there was something . . .’ She looked again at the photograph. ‘He just didn’t seem to engage with reality the same way as other people do.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I suppose it was hard to understand what drove him. I’m not even sure Karen truly did. But do you know who he reminded me of?’ Over the hurdle now, she was warming to her theme. ‘He was like one of those people you meet growing up that you knew were never going to make it past thirty. He wasn’t a drinker or a drug-taker – quite the reverse – but he’d take stupid risks as if he couldn’t see the consequences. Bringing a six-month-old child to an African village with no doctor, for example. It’s almost as if he felt a need to tempt fate.’

Jenny was intrigued. She had thought of him as an idealist, but not as reckless. And now the word was in her mind, she saw a death wish behind the smile, a buried grief subconsciously pulling him back to its source, keeping him balanced precariously on the edge.

‘I understand that he lost his mother when he was at university. And of course, he’d gone to visit his father’s grave—’

‘Are you suggesting he was more attached to them than to his own wife and child?’ Mrs King said. ‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘Because . . . ?’

‘My daughter couldn’t have done any more for him. She was devoted. Frankly, I don’t know how she put up with all his travelling, coming and going as he pleased.’

She folded her hands on her lap: a vision of the respectable bourgeois life Adam Jordan had been determined not to have. And yet the tension between the two worlds must have tugged at every fibre of his being. He returned from his African adventures to this solid, respectable house. Nowhere could have been more comfortably middle class and insulated from the horrors of the world than suburban Bath. And only yesterday Karen had told her about his plans for the future: he
had
been thinking responsibly; he was planning to come home to work behind a desk.

‘Do you have any idea why he might have killed himself, Mrs King – if that is indeed what he did?’

‘There’s some doubt about that?’

‘Until there’s a verdict, there’s always doubt.’

Mrs King nodded, considered the earlier question for a moment, then surprised Jenny with the insightfulness of her answer. ‘I can only think that the mind of an alternative type like Adam must be a very confused place. If you define yourself by all the things you reject, but yet you’re still attached to many of them, I’d call that a recipe for self-hatred, wouldn’t you?’ She saw the contradiction in his make-up as clearly as Jenny did. ‘There was a mischievous side to him, but I didn’t often see him having good, honest fun. Yes . . .’ She appeared to cast her mind back over the many occasions on which he had disappointed her. ‘You know, I think deep down he was haunted by the fact that the people he was trying to help didn’t . . .’ She struggled to find the right words. ‘He was too bright not to see the futility of a situation. He must have known he was on a hiding to nothing.’

Jenny thought of what Karen had told her in her office about Adam’s image of grains of sand in the desert: he had found his place in eternity, perhaps, but not in life. Failing to fit the mould in his own country, he had gone in search of self among the unfortunates of the world, only to find another kind of rejection.

‘None of this excuses suicide, of course,’ Claire King said. A note of bitterness entered her voice for the first time. ‘I’m afraid that for all the pious talk he was far too caught up in his own wants. Karen won’t have it, but if a man’s being unfaithful, what more proof do you need?’

‘Unfaithful?’

‘Yes.’ She seemed surprised. Hasn’t Karen mentioned it to you? He’d been taking cash out of their savings account every week since he came back from Africa. I told her – there’s no other rational explanation. He was obviously seeing someone.’

Jenny left the Jordans’ house without having found the book, and with even more questions about Adam Jordan’s final days. Typing Claire King’s name into her smartphone, she learned that she and her husband were the joint directors of a company that owned and managed a large portfolio of property in and around the city of Bath. A string of mentions in the local press confirmed that they were pillars of the community: patrons of several charities and active in the local Conservative Association. Her suspicions were correct. Adam couldn’t have married into a family less likely to appreciate his efforts. Returning from an aborted project in South Sudan, he might have been feeling particularly judged. But depressed enough to leave his two-year-old son and jump from a bridge? It didn’t add up. And nor, Jenny felt, did taking cash from their account to conduct an affair.

She returned to the office to find Alison brimming with manic efficiency, and a small mountain of death reports that had accumulated in her in-tray.

‘Someone from Dr Verma’s office called,’ Alison said busily. ‘They’ve established that Elena Lujan lived above the Recife with about eight other girls and a junior manager. So far they’ve managed to trace six of them. None of them is showing symptoms, and they’re all being tested. They’ve also confirmed she had the same strain as Sophie Freeman, but haven’t been able to establish any common link between them. Apparently they asked Mr Freeman the obvious question, but he’s denied visiting the Recife or knowing Miss Lujan. They’re widening the search, hoping to find someone who might have overlapped with them both. CID told me they kept a hidden camera in reception – I expect they’re having fun with that.’

‘The HPA’s being very cooperative all of a sudden.’

‘I expect they’ve decided to keep their enemy close,’ Alison said. ‘But they are the experts. I don’t see why you shouldn’t trust them.’

Jenny toyed with the idea of letting Alison in on what Dr Kerr had told her the previous afternoon, but decided against it: her former colleagues in CID never missed an opportunity to fish for information, and when it came to keeping secrets from them, Alison had a poor record.

‘How did you get on with Mrs Jordan?’ Alison asked. ‘I heard about the break-in. No arrests yet, I suppose?’

‘No.’ Jenny decided to keep the darker theories that were forming in her mind to herself. ‘Nice house, middle of the afternoon – it was just her bad luck she arrived home when she did.’

Alison nodded, though her expression said she detected that Jenny wasn’t telling the whole story.

‘I spoke with Adam Jordan’s mother-in-law. She thinks he may have been quite troubled underneath.’

‘That hardly counts as a revelation.’

‘She also told me that he’d been sneaking cash out of a joint account every week since he came home. She thinks he was up to something.’

‘Sex, you mean?’

‘That’s what she thinks. Though she’s no real evidence of it, as far as I know.’

‘He was a man. What more do you need?’

‘I’ve asked her to get Mrs Jordan to forward the details when she’s able. Maybe you could chase up his phone records while we’re waiting?’

‘You seem to be going to an awful lot of trouble for a suicide, Mrs Cooper. Do you think this is wise?’

Jenny stared at the unforgiving heap of paperwork on her desk. Six new deaths – mostly routine, but those were always the ones that caught you out – screamed for attention. She tried to switch her focus from Adam Jordan, Sophie Freeman and the dead Spanish girl, but a new thought had crept in to haunt her. What if there was a connection between Adam Jordan and Elena Lujan? He had spent months in the meningitis belt of Africa. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that he had become a carrier and passed the disease on. Perhaps he had somehow become aware of the fact? And if he had visited Elena at the Recife, might it explain the phone call from the man with the unplaceable accent? Could there be other cases as yet unreported? Had Jordan become an unwitting angel of death? And the more she thought about the burglary at the Jordans’ home, the more likely it seemed that it was related to Jordan’s secretive activities.

She fired off an email requesting Dr Kerr to take samples from Jordan’s body. She wanted every conceivable test. Then from the thin file of papers forwarded from the police, she extracted the list of effects found in Jordan’s pockets. Among them had been a bank card. She had intended to wait for Mrs Jordan to forward his statements herself, but Jenny doubted she would be in any hurry to have her mother’s suspicions confirmed. She called up the pro-forma she kept on her hard drive, filled in a request for production of evidence, and sent it off to the legal section at the bank’s head office.

Adam Jordan didn’t strike Jenny as the sort of man who would have been visiting a prostitute, but if that was the case, it naturally followed that he would have sought to hide the fact. But it still left Jenny with no clue why he had lied about his trip to Oxford. She gave herself ten minutes to indulge her curiosity before turning to her other neglected cases. She ran several searches on Sonia Blake, playing with different keywords, and began to form the impression from comments made about her in the press that she was a controversial figure in her field.

Most of her work, it seemed, had been on the subject of covert, proxy wars in various developing parts of the world, principally Africa and Central America. But far from following the usual academic line that it was immoral for Western governments to pursue their interests through mercenaries and militias, at a London conference the previous summer Sonia Blake had proposed that there were times when playing dirty was entirely necessary to pursue just ends. What was moral about standing by while competing factions slaughtered each other in pursuit of mineral wealth in the Congo, she argued. In her view it was far better to pay a private army to put the violent factions down. ‘To be squeamish about the means of achieving just ends is to pretend that it’s possible to live on a high moral plane separate from the parts and aspects of humanity you happen to despise,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘It is not. We are all part of the same species, the same mechanism; what threatens a part, threatens the whole.’

She had discussed the case of aid workers who had been complicit in the shipment of arms hidden in consignments of grain to democratic factions in Somalia. ‘Their crime was to support a just outcome rather than to be principled spectators to a massacre,’ she had said. ‘Sometimes it’s impossible to be a decent human being and not have blood on your hands. History shows us that the forces of evil are always present, always probing for every weakness like a virus invading the body. On this earth there can never be any such thing as peace, only temporary victory in a relentless, never-ending sequence of conflicts.’

It struck Jenny as odd that Adam Jordan had chosen to correspond with Sonia Blake, unless it had been to take her to task. What little she knew of his philosophy seemed entirely at odds with the woman’s vision of perpetual war. Perhaps it was a reflection of just how negative his state of mind had become; he had after all been forced to abandon an irrigation project for fear of being caught up in tribal conflict.

Jenny typed Sonia Blake’s name into a search engine and selected the ‘images’ option, just as Adam Jordan must have done from his tent in South Sudan, curious to see what image of her he would have first encountered. Scattered amongst the host of people around the world sharing the same name were photographs of her from various academic publications and conference bulletins. Most often she was photographed speaking from a platform, gesturing imploringly as she spoke, but down towards the foot of the page Jenny’s eye was caught by a very different picture. It was a headshot of a slightly younger Sonia Blake next to a man, which looked as if it had been taken in the late 1970s. Jenny clicked on it and found that it was attached to a report from an Arizona newspaper, the
East Valley Tribune
, published some six years ago. The headline read:
Wilderness Remains Were Murdered Scientist. Daughter Demands Police Inquiry
.