The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (25 page)

‘I’m going to Oslo – academic conference season, I’m afraid. I return next Tuesday.’

‘What about tonight?’ Jenny said impulsively.

She hesitated. ‘I suppose that would be all right. As long as we’re not too late – I’ve an early start.’

‘I can be with you by eight.’

‘Well, you know where to find me.’

Ninety minutes later, Jenny finally found a parking space in a city that seemed determined to repel all outsiders who arrived by car, and made her way on foot through the narrow streets of Jericho to Worcester College. Several shots of filthy service-station espresso had done little to banish the exhaustion of having spent eight hours on the road in a single day. This was the last trip she would make on this case, she promised herself, no more running around the country chasing shadows.

‘Mrs Cooper?’

The porter had spotted her from the window alongside his desk and come out of his lodge to greet her.

‘Mrs Blake will be back shortly. She’s gone for her evening run.’ He smiled, as if the notion were slightly mad. ‘Nice evening for a turn round the gardens. Down the steps to your left, and through the passage.’

Feeling that she had been offered no option, and in no mood for crossing swords with a busybody, Jenny did as he suggested. At the foot of a flight of stone steps, she passed through a narrow stone passageway that connected the quad to the gardens beyond.

She turned right, following a cinder path that led behind the terrace of medieval cottages to a large and gracefully curving lake. Willows swept the surface of the water, providing shelter for a contented colony of ducks. She wandered on around the lake’s perimeter, admiring the shifting views of the ancient college buildings, and paused to sit for a while on an ornamental stone bench dappled with lichen. How strange it must be, she thought, for a woman like Sonia Blake to live in such rarefied surroundings yet to have her mind filled with the dirty politics of troubled, faraway countries.

Stirred by the first hints of a chill evening breeze, she continued on her way. The path took her past the college playing fields and through some tasteful modern accommodation blocks, before leading her into a courtyard behind the far side of the quad. A long flight of creaking wooden stairs delivered her back almost at her destination, on the ground floor of Sonia Blake’s staircase.

It was ten minutes past the time they had agreed to meet, so Jenny carried on up the stairs to the second floor. She found Sonia Blake’s oak door slightly ajar.

‘Mrs Blake?’

Silence.

Pushing the inner door open, she peered inside. The room was much as she remembered it, strewn with books and files. Then something caught her eye: liquid was dripping from the edge of the desk; a cup had been recently knocked over and the contents spilled over loose pages and items of mail scattered about the computer monitor.

‘Mrs Blake, are you there?’

Jenny stepped through the door and called again. The dead quiet was interrupted only by the slow drip-drip of coffee onto the carpet. Approaching the desk, she dipped her finger into the small pool of brown liquid and felt that it was cold. She noticed, too, that the toppled cup had a brown ring halfway down its interior surface, as if it had been standing, half-full, for some time.

‘Mrs Blake?’

The silence remained unbroken.

She crossed the room and approached the one internal door. Her heart beat hard against the wall of her chest as she twisted the brass knob and pushed it open. It gave onto a small bedroom. The single bed was made, the wardrobe closed. To the right of the chest of drawers was another door. Jenny knocked on it and, receiving no reply, opened it to find a small passageway no more than ten feet long. At the far end was another door. She approached it, turned the handle and found that it was locked.

Retracing her steps, she became aware of the sound of a wailing siren that grew louder as it approached, then came to a stop not far away. She went to one of the windows overlooking the quad, and moments later saw police uniforms and the porter walking briskly through the cloisters in her direction. She turned away with a rising sense of dread. Something was badly wrong; she had felt it from the moment she saw the toppled cup. Acting by instinct rather than reason, she took out her phone, and switched on its camera, and took as many photographs of the room as she could before the sound of heavy boots reached the final flight of stairs.

She met the two constables on the landing. ‘Both doors were open,’ she said. ‘I came to meet Mrs Blake. Has something happened?’

They pushed past without answering her.

It was the porter who spoke, doubled over from the effort of running up the stairs. ‘A woman’s body’s been found on Port Meadow,’ he gasped. ‘They think it’s her.’

‘She’s
dead
?’

‘She always ran with her phone strapped to her arm. They checked. It was hers.’

The news sucked the breath from Jenny.

‘How?’ she whispered.

The porter shook his head. ‘That’s all they’ve told me.’

Another set of footsteps was racing up the stairwell, faster and more agile than the ones that had preceded it. Alex Forster appeared, calling out to the porter as he scaled the final flight two steps at a time.

‘What’s happened?’

One of the police officers stepped out of the room and barked at the porter. ‘Who else has got keys to this door?’

‘Just me,’ he answered.

‘Will somebody tell me what’s going on?’ Forster demanded.

The constable pulled out his radio. ‘Everyone stay over here. We’re treating this as a crime scene.’

I
N THE FIFTEEN MINUTES IT HAD
taken Detective Inspector Gregson and his team to arrive, Jenny had managed to be excused to visit the bathroom, moments she used to email the dozen photographs she had taken of the inside of Sonia Blake’s room to Alison’s account and delete all trace from her phone. She had no idea what, if anything, the pictures might contain; her only thought had been to secure the proof of what she had found. She no longer felt able to trust anyone.

Alex Forster had sat silently on the stairs, making no attempt to question the police once he had heard of the body’s discovery, or to ask Jenny what had brought her back. The porter, however, whose name was Davies, had maintained a non-stop monologue. He hadn’t seen anyone suspicious come or go, he kept repeating to the two constables, ‘The only person I let into the college was Mrs Cooper, and she went round the garden, I saw her.’

Nearly two hours later Jenny found herself dog-tired, hungry and alone in a stark office on the second floor of St Aldate’s police station. She had heard nothing more about the circumstances of Sonia Blake’s death, or even if it had been confirmed. A detective constable scarcely older than her son had taken her statement before asking her to ‘wait a moment’ while he consulted his boss over whether he could let her go home. A moment had stretched to an hour and Jenny was at the end of her tether. DI Gregson hadn’t even done her the courtesy of putting his head around the door.

She was on the verge of making a unilateral decision to walk out when Gregson finally deigned to appear. No older than thirty-five, he was one of the polished, well-spoken new breed of officer whom Jenny suspected had come up through the graduate fast track. But what he possessed in intelligence, he lacked in grace. In the few minutes she had spent in his company at the college she had got his measure as a man who went about his work with a belligerent neutrality that treated everyone with equal disdain. Alongside him was a woman no older than he was, but from the quality of her suit and the lightness of her bearing, Jenny could tell that she wasn’t a police officer.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Mrs Cooper,’ Gregson said without feeling. ‘You’ll appreciate we had to verify a few of the facts in your statement.’

‘No,’ Jenny said, ‘I don’t.’ She glanced at the woman taking a seat next to him behind the desk. ‘Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner.’

‘Ruth Webley,’ the woman said politely. ‘I work for the intelligence service – anti-terrorism.’

Jenny tried to appear unfazed.

‘You’ll probably know that our two services work closely together,’ Gregson explained. ‘Miss Blake’s death prompted an alert.’

Ruth Webley cast Gregson a glance that said she would prefer to speak for herself. ‘Obviously there are thousands of people who come to our attention in various ways,’ she explained. ‘Mrs Blake was simply someone who, in her professional career, had associated with various persons of interest to us. The fact that she appeared on our database doesn’t necessarily carry any sinister significance, but we would like to rule out the possibility that anything untoward occurred.’

‘Of course,’ Jenny said, resolving not to say a word more than she had to.

Ruth Webley waited, and when Jenny offered her nothing, smiled in a patient way that said she had suspected Jenny would be less than forthcoming. ‘I ought to begin by saying that initial indications are that Mrs Blake died from natural causes. She seems to have collapsed while out jogging. We’ve not had post-mortem results yet, but we’ve no reason to think her death itself was suspicious.’

Jenny waited for the ‘but’.

‘The situation with her room was a little odd, however,’ Webley said. ‘We’ve spoken to an occupant upstairs who passed by her door approximately thirty minutes before you say you arrived. He’s sure the outer door to her rooms was shut fast.’

‘I’ve told you how I found it.’

She referred to a copy of Jenny’s statement. ‘You also say you went inside. Why did you do that?’

‘As I said, I called her name, looked through the open door, then noticed the upended cup on her desk. It seemed odd – suspicious, I suppose.’

‘An upended cup prompted you to trespass into the room of a woman you had met only once before?’

‘Not trespass, I was concerned.’

‘Because . . . ?’

‘I assumed you would have read my statement.’

‘I have, several times. But I’d appreciate hearing it in your own words, Mrs Cooper.’

Jenny had told the detective constable only what she thought the police needed to know. She had no intention of giving Ruth Webley any more. While the coroner’s job was to root out the truth and publish it the world, she had learned from her two previous encounters with the security services that Webley’s concern would be to make sure that any inconvenient facts remained well hidden.

Choosing her words carefully, Jenny repeated the story she had told earlier. She was inquiring into the death of an aid worker named Adam Jordan, and Sonia Blake was one of the few people he had spoken to in his final days. One of Jenny’s lines of investigation was into whether his apparent suicide was linked to his work in South Sudan. During her first meeting with Sonia Blake she had established that Sonia had sought Jordan out during her research into the political situation in that country, but she had seemed too shocked by the news of his death to give all the answers Jenny would have liked. She had arranged today’s meeting to fill in the gaps. It was as straightforward as that.

Ruth Webley took careful notes throughout.

‘Mr Forster tells me that you initially made contact with Mrs Blake through him. How was that?’

Jenny had slipped. She must be more tired than she thought. Now her explanation would sound as if she had been concealing something. As casually as she could, she explained how a receipt found in Jordan’s car had led her to the nearby cafe where the waitresses helped her discover Sonia Blake’s identity through her frequent companion – Alex Forster.

Ruth Webley swept her hair back from her forehead, which Jenny saw was furrowed with frown lines. ‘You must have read a lot of significance into this meeting to go to such lengths.’ She was no fool. Far sharper than the detective.

‘I’m sure you’ve read your files, Ms Webley. It’s not the first time.’

‘What was the significance, in your mind?’

‘I had no idea.’

‘Really? You weren’t influenced by the fact his wife had no knowledge of his visit to Oxford?’

Jenny met Webley’s gaze and decided it was time to go on the offensive. ‘You’ve spoken with Mrs Jordan?’

‘Her husband worked in a sensitive field. Surely you would be more surprised if we hadn’t, Mrs Cooper?’

‘If you have information relevant to my inquiry, I’d be grateful if you would disclose it immediately, Ms Webley.’

‘Mrs Cooper, I hardly need remind you, of all people, that certain information remains privileged in the interests of national security. If there is anything that can lawfully be released to you, I assure you it will be.’

‘You’ve approached his former colleague, Harry Thorn, too. What do you suspect him of? I’m entitled to know.’

‘I’ve already answered you, Mrs Cooper.’

‘Then we have nothing more to say to each other.’ Jenny rose from her chair. She addressed DI Gregson, who remained seated. ‘I’ll see myself out, shall I?’

‘We haven’t completed our interview.’ He remained the impassive bureaucrat. Jenny would have preferred a straightforward bully.

‘Are you going to arrest me?’