The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (36 page)

‘Ayen’s not here,’ the girl said uncertainly. ‘She left about three days ago.’

‘Left for where?’ Jenny said.

‘No one knows. She just took her stuff and left. You can see her room – it’s empty.’

‘Would you mind?’

The girl shook her head, too frightened of a coroner to refuse.

They climbed eight flights of steps, arriving at a mansard level under the roof. The girl, who said her name was Lucy, opened the single door off the landing and let Jenny into a room barely big enough to hold the single bed and cheap wardrobe. The mattress was bare, no case on the pillow, blankets neatly folded.

‘Did you know her at all?’ Jenny asked.

‘Only a little. She spent a lot of time up here by herself.’ There was something reticent in her tone, a trace of guilt perhaps.

Jenny waited for her to offer more.

‘What do you want to know?’ Lucy said, looping her hair nervously behind her ear.

‘Anything you can tell me. She was seen with a man who died. I’m inquiring into his death.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m not talking about a crime. But she might be a useful witness. I need to find her if I can.’

Lucy started to gabble. ‘I didn’t really talk to her that much. She didn’t seem to want to. Some of the others tried. I know my friend Kathy spoke to her a few times, but she’s over at her boyfriend’s this weekend. She didn’t know if it was all made up or what. I mean, she wasn’t even studying. Kathy said she was probably pretending to be an asylum seeker.’

‘Slow down,’ Jenny said calmly. ‘There’s no problem, I just need to know what she said.’

Lucy took a breath. ‘She told Kathy she came from this village in Sudan where everyone died. She said she was the only person left alive. All her family had died, all her friends. Everyone.’

‘Did she say when this happened?’

‘I don’t know.’

Jenny tried to appear to take the information in her stride, eager to keep the girl’s confidence. ‘Was there anything else? How did everyone die? Did she say the name of the place?’

‘Some sort of disease, I think. You can ask Kathy, I’ll give you her number. That’s all I know. Honestly.’

Jenny brought out her phone. ‘Why don’t we give Kathy a ring?’

Jenny’s call, made on speakerphone, was answered by a teenage girl who sounded as if she must still be in bed, fending off a playful boyfriend.

‘Sorry. Sorry about that,’ Kathy said, stifling giggles. ‘Who is this again?’

‘Jenny Cooper.’

‘Do I know you?’

‘She’s the coroner,’ Lucy butted in. ‘It’s serious, Kathy. It’s about Ayen. Someone’s died.’

‘Died? Who?’

‘A friend of Ayen’s,’ Jenny said. She finally had Kathy’s attention. ‘I need you to tell me everything you know about her.’

Kathy repeated what Lucy had told her, adding little to the narrative.

Jenny pressed for details of the deaths in the village. What had they died of? How many? But Kathy insisted that Ayen had said nothing more than she had already told her. It had been as much as she could do to get her to talk at all.

‘Can I ask what prompted you to do that?’ Jenny said.

‘I felt sorry for her. She was always hiding away in her room. I thought she must be lonely.’

Jenny urged her to think hard and recall whether she had said anything else, however slight or irrelevant.

‘Something about a man who had helped her – Alan? Adam?’

‘Adam. Adam Jordan. What did she say about him?

‘That he helped her get out of Sudan.’ She paused. ‘Yeah, that’s it. I remember now – the place she came from was called Ginya.’ She pronounced it with a hard ‘g’, the ‘y’ almost silent.

There it was, another missing piece.
Ginya
: the word Sonia Blake had doodled on the scrap of paper Jenny had picked up in her room.

Jenny said, ‘Did she seem healthy?’

‘Very. She was beautiful.’

‘Frightened?’

‘A little, perhaps. I thought she was just nervous of speaking to me. Is she all right?’

‘I’m not sure.’

As Jenny spoke, she saw Lucy stoop down and pick something up that she had spotted jutting out from under the end of the bed. It was a small wooden figure attached to a leather thong.

‘Can I see that?’ Jenny said, cupping her hand over the receiver.

‘Hello?’ Kathy said. ‘Are you still there?’

Jenny was turning the doll over in her fingers. She was in no doubt: it was identical to the one that had gone missing from Adam Jordan’s car the morning after his death.

J
ENNY WAS SITTING WITH
K
AREN
J
ORDAN
in her garden, surrounded by the gentle, familiar sounds of a suburban weekend: cricket commentary on next door’s radio, a barking terrier, children squealing and splashing in a paddling pool. Normality a universe away from where Karen found herself adrift. Sam was emptying a big red crate of assorted toys onto the grass, examining each in turn with a calm, determined seriousness. He wasn’t a child who would grow up to take life lightly, Jenny thought, especially if he were forced to carry a burden like Sonia Blake’s, never knowing how his father had come to leave his life so violently. Karen didn’t seem to notice how intelligently her son was playing – if play was an appropriate description for such detailed observation – she seemed lost in a fog. The doctor had told her it was post-traumatic stress, she said, but the drugs he had given her were as bad as the symptoms. She felt absent. Numb. She was looking down on the world, unable to plant her feet on the ground.

Jenny asked if she felt strong enough to talk.

‘You can’t upset me,’ Karen said. ‘I’m not feeling anything.’

‘Sam seems very sharp. I’m guessing there’s a lot of his father in him.’

‘He got my nose and mouth, that’s all. Poor him. The rest is pure Adam.’

Jenny told her story gently. She began with the girl, Ayen. Karen stared at her blankly. She had never heard of her, had no idea that her husband had sponsored a young woman to come from Sudan, let alone that he’d been giving her money,
their
money, to feed and house her.

‘What about the village – Ginya? Does the name mean anything to you?’

Another blank. Immediately before his return, Adam had been working at a settlement called Katum, though she understood there were many by that name scattered about the bush. And the fact that a girl called her home Ginya didn’t mean that it would carry the same name on a map or in official documents. There were tribal names and official names, all of which carried a load and significance that were impossible for an outsider to appreciate, even understand.

Jenny broached the subject of Ruth Webley and the photographs of Adam next to the marijuana plantation. Karen gave an indifferent shrug.

‘So what? If you don’t make money you can only subsist, and not even the South Sudanese are content with that any more. If you know money can get you vehicles and clean water and drugs for your children, that’s what you’ll want.’

‘He didn’t object to that?’

‘Of course he did, but we’re not starving, are we? Our child doesn’t have a one in four chance of not surviving to adulthood.’

‘What I’m skirting around is whether he might have got involved in the business end of it. I’ve seen his bank records,’ Jenny confessed. ‘There seems to have been quite a lot of money—’

‘How do you think we live like this?’ Karen interrupted. ‘Adam inherited money. Most people would be glad. He was eaten up with guilt. At least he acted on his conscience.’ She glanced over at the row of expensive houses opposite. ‘Not many do.’

‘No.’ Jenny felt a surge of relief. Adam as drug dealer was a disturbing and contradictory figure she had found neither likely nor convincing.

‘What about Harry Thorn? Does his interest go beyond the pragmatic?’

‘Adam hinted that he thought it might, but he didn’t want to know about Harry’s deals on the side. It would have made things too complicated.’

‘I can see that,’ Jenny said. ‘Quite a minefield he was operating in.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Karen’s cup slipped, spilling tea down her blouse.

‘Here.’ Jenny handed her a paper tissue. ‘Was it the mention of Harry?’

‘Probably,’ Karen said, dabbing ineffectually at the stain. She made a show of pretending she cared, then let the damp tissue fall from her fingers onto the grass.

Jenny stooped to pick it up. She was losing her, pushing her too far, but she needed a little more. She waited a moment, making small talk about the exotic grasses that seemed to have grown even taller since her last visit – Adam’s little piece of Africa. He would have to sleep with the window wide open so he could hear it sway in the wind, Karen said. He would have slept outside if she had let him.

‘The village,’ Jenny said. ‘Ginya. Are you sure Adam never said anything about what happened there?’

Karen didn’t answer.

‘Mrs Jordan—?’

‘No! He didn’t tell me, all right?’

‘He might have been trying to protect you,’ Jenny said gently, ‘and Sam, of course.’

‘He was restless,’ Karen said. ‘Troubled. Even when he assured me he was fine I could feel it.’ The truth was finally coming to the surface. ‘He couldn’t smile, not with his eyes; it was if he’d put on a mask.’ She turned sharply to look at Jenny directly. ‘Was it our people who killed him?’

‘We don’t know he was killed.’

Karen screwed up her eyes and tears spilled out over her cheeks. ‘I can’t talk any more. Please don’t make me.’

Jenny glanced down at Sam. He wore a frown of deep concentration as he turned the wheels of an upturned toy car with delicate, probing fingers.

‘Are you sure you’ll be all right – with Sam I mean?’

‘Don’t worry. I shan’t jump off a bridge. Even I wanted to, I can’t, can I?’ She flicked out a hand and gripped Jenny’s wrist, her fingers clutching her tightly. ‘I just need to know. I need to know who took him from me.’

‘You will,’ Jenny said, ‘I promise – I almost forgot, I’ve something for you.’ She dipped into her handbag and pulled out the wooden figurine. ‘Ayen had left it behind in her room. If it was the same one that was in your husband’s car, it might mean she was with him the night he died. And with Sam, of course.’

Karen turned her gaze to her son, but he had already spotted the doll in her hand. For a moment he was quite still, and then he got to his feet and walked very determinedly towards the open back door of the house without looking back.

‘Sam, come back,’ Karen called after him.’ She passed the doll back to Jenny. ‘Sam!’

He ignored her, and climbed the step and went inside. Jenny wished for his sake that he’d been able to cry.

Jenny drove across country on autopilot, every bend in the road between the motorway and Oxford imprinted on her subconscious. It was to be her fifth visit in a little over a week. She had taken a pill the moment she stepped out of Karen Jordan’s front door, doubting she’d have the courage to confront Forster without chemical assistance. She was cross with herself for weakening, but she was tired – more than tired,
emotionally drained
. First it had been one death, then two, then three, now God knows how many. Fragments of all their stories jostled in her mind. There was no sense to it, no pattern, just a series of images that assailed her from all corners. Adam’s smashed body, Sophie’s bloated, swollen face, Sonia Blake stumbling and falling, clawing at the grass, and stick-thin bodies with rigor-mortis grins scattered in the dust. And a single young woman huddled in the shade of a solitary tree, wide terrified eyes staring out above hands covering her nose and mouth. Jenny could smell the corpses, the stench rising in the scalding heat of the African sun. Christ, she was dealing with butchers. Pure evil. She felt her stomach lurch, the bile rise in her throat. She jabbed a finger at the window control, desperate for air.
Deep breaths, Jenny
,
deep breaths.

She started violently at the sound of the phone blasting out through all the car’s speakers. She would have to learn how to operate the damn thing.

‘Hello?’

‘Ah, Mrs Cooper. Thought you’d be glad to know we won. Humiliated the buggers.’

‘Oh, good.’ Surely he hadn’t called to tell her the result of his golf match.

‘Find the girl, did you?’

‘No. She’d gone. About three days ago. The housemates don’t know where. I don’t suppose you could help.’

‘Where do you want me to start – Africa?’

It was meant as a joke, but Jenny wasn’t in the mood.

‘How about Harry Thorn?’

‘Not another trip to bloody London.’

‘The Portobello Road – you’d like it. He’s got a girlfriend who cooks breakfast naked.’

‘Now you’re going to tell me it can’t wait till Monday.’

‘I’d like to say it could, but I’m getting a little anxious about the body count. It seems Miss Deng was the sole survivor of a village wiped out by some sort of disease – that’s the story she told, anyway.’