Authors: M.R. Hall
It took another pill to propel Jenny through the door of the
mortuary. The evening was hot and the Vale's creaking air- conditioning battled
to keep the temperature to anything less than mildly suffocating. The still air
was heavy with the smell of disinfectant and human decay. An outbreak of summer
flu had claimed the lives of tens of elderly patients in the space of two days,
overwhelming the refrigerators. Gurneys loaded with bodies awaiting collection
by overstretched undertakers were parked two abreast in the corridor.
Sidestepping around them, Jenny wondered why she found the sight of twenty
corpses less alarming than being intimately confronted with one. Perhaps being
in the presence of so many bodies at once could make one feel a grim sense of
biological triumph at having so far escaped the winnowing.
She grabbed a mask, gloves and surgical gown from the station
outside the slap doors to the autopsy room, braced herself, then stepped inside
to find Andy Kerr stooped over an array of internal organs at the steel counter
to the side of the table. She barely recognized the body as the one she had
seen in the photographs. The flesh was a waxy yellow and seemed to have
dehydrated and shrunk. The cheek and jaw bones jutted through tightly drawn
skin, the hands were clawed and shrivelled. Avoiding looking directly at the
face, Jenny came alongside Andy as he peered at a section of tissue through a
magnifying glass.
'Do I get a gold star?' he asked. 'I had my first date in
weeks lined up for tonight.'
'I'm sorry. I had to promise her father I'd release the body
tomorrow.'
'Life as a porn star doesn't do much for young arteries,
that's for sure. I've seen sixty-year-olds in better nick.'
'Alcohol?'
'And cigarettes. She may have found God but he didn't curb
her bad habits. I'd say she got through forty a day. There was even a small
clot forming on the left lung - could have caused her a lot of problems.'
'I didn't see that in the first p-m report.'
'The Home Office pathologist was looking for the immediate
cause of death, that's what he found.' Andy put down the section of what Jenny
recognized as heart muscle. 'Having said that, there's one thing about the
stab wound I've noticed that he didn't comment on - it comes in almost
horizontally.'
'Meaning what?'
He picked up a scalpel to demonstrate. 'If you're going to
stab someone, the most natural way is either to come downwards with the blade
coming out of the bottom of your fist, or upwards. To get it in horizontally
requires a less natural motion.' He tried several variations, each requiring
the wrist to be awkwardly bent.
Unconvinced, Jenny said, 'I can imagine holding it that way.'
'My tutor at King's wrote the textbook on stab wounds - it's
not the norm, believe me.'
Jenny glanced back at the body. 'Are there any marks, signs
of a struggle?'
'Nothing obvious. There may have been some minor contusions I
might not be able to pick up this long after.'
'Any chance the first p-m might have missed any third- party
DNA?'
Andy shook his head. 'All the nails were scraped; the lab
tests came back negative. I don't think there was a struggle. She didn't even
have any blood on her hands.'
Jenny tried to picture Craven arriving at Eva's front door.
From what she'd read about the layout of the house it was more than twenty-five
feet from the doorstep to where Eva's body was found.
'Could she have walked backwards into the kitchen after she'd
been stabbed?'
Andy picked up another section of heart. 'Look.' He pointed a
gloved finger. 'There's an inch-and-a-half gash in the aorta. Blood would have
been shooting out of there at full pressure the moment the knife was pulled
out.'
'So if she was stabbed by the front door, you'd expect to see
blood there, right?'
'Almost definitely.'
Perhaps if Craven hadn't produced the knife immediately, Eva
might have backed away from the door and into the kitchen, tried to talk to
him, calm him down. But surely there would have been more signs of struggle?
She recalled the police photographs: a heavy glass measuring jug on the counter
right next to Eva's body. Why didn't she pick it up and smash it in his face?
'We're sure there was no sexual assault?'
'I'm guided by the findings of the original examination. She
was menstruating. Tampon and ST were still in place.'
So what
? Jenny thought.
If a man was sufficiently psychotic to seek out a porn star and execute her,
surely he wasn't going to leave without an attempt to get what he came for.
Craven's first murder had been a frenzied attack; Eva's killer struck once and
ran.
Jenny said, 'Can you think of any reason I shouldn't release
the body? I don't want to be told in a week's time there are other tests we
should have run.'
'I've got all the tissues samples I need. Do you want any
more photographs?'
'If you like. I don't suppose they'll add much.'
'There is one thing that didn't show up on the ones that were
taken the first time.' He turned to the autopsy table. 'What do you make of
this?' He pointed to a small tattoo on the left-hand side of her bikini-waxed
crotch, just below where her pubic hairline would have been. Written in copperplate
script, Jenny couldn't make it out without looking closer than she wanted to.
'What does it say?'
Andy smiled at her over his mask. 'Uh, uh. This is one you've
got to see for yourself.'
Jenny steeled herself and leaned in for a closer look. The
tattoo said:
Daddy's girl.
'That's something for the old man to be proud of,' Andy said.
'Maybe the decent thing would be to let it go un- mentioned.'
Jenny looked at it again.
'It's real,' Andy said. 'I checked. She's got another one at
the base of her spine, a little butterfly.'
The two words were small enough for you to miss them at a
fleeting glance, but once you'd noticed they were all you could see. The
pictures Jenny had seen of Eva on the internet flashed before her eyes, most of
them featuring her in close-up gynaecological detail. Surely she would have
noticed the tattoo?
Jenny said, 'How recent would you say it was?'
'Hmm. I don't know if there's any way of telling. It takes a
number of years for the ink to start spreading.' He reached for a magnifying
glass and studied it for a long moment. 'Actually, you know what, there's been
some recent scabbing, I can see where the skin's been abraded. I think there's
a chance she had it done not long before she died.'
'Months, weeks?'
'If that was scabbing from the tattoo, I'd say within her
last month. Interesting choice for a devout Christian, don't you think?'
Jenny looked away, feeling suddenly queasy. 'Do me a favour -
don't mention this in your report. Some things are better left for court.'
Many phone calls
and much
cajoling later, Alison had succeeded in calling in a
long-overdue favour from the administrator of Short Street Courts and secured
the use of their smallest, stuffiest courtroom for Friday morning. Jenny didn't
mind that it was windowless and painted the same dull institutional green as
prison corridors, she just wanted the Alan Jacobs case dealt with and another
burden lifted from her shoulders. The previous day had been spent cooped up in
her office attacking her backlog of paperwork. She had made progress, but only
by ignoring everything and everyone else. Repeated messages from Father Starr
and several concerned text messages from Steve had gone unanswered. She had
even managed to miss her Wednesday night call with Ross. It was now officially
undeniable: being professionally competent meant being a bad mother.
As well as sending Alison out to round up witnesses and
gather statements for the Jacobs inquest, Jenny asked her to make enquiries
about Eva Donaldson's tattoo. Since seeing it she'd scoured the internet for
images of Eva and couldn't find a single one in which it appeared. She'd
tracked down her last known contribution to the adult genre:
Devils Bi Night.
The butterfly on her back was much in evidence, but there
was no
Daddy's girl
. A trawl through
her bank statements and credit-card transactions failed to cast any light,
leaving Alison to work through every tattoo parlour in the Bristol Yellow
Pages. She drew a blank. The artists who answered their phones either couldn't
recall or wouldn't discuss their clients on principle. Resigned to a longer
search than she had anticipated, Jenny wrote to Kenneth Donaldson telling him
that she would have to break her promise to release the body, only saying
obliquely that further tests might prove necessary.
The call made, Jenny pushed Eva temporarily from her mind and
turned to Alan Jacobs.
She was determined that the inquest would be a discreet,
low-key affair. A finding of suicide was a virtual inevitability; she didn't
want it to be any more painful for Mrs Jacobs than absolutely necessary. As the
death couldn't be said to have occurred in circumstances with implications for
the health or safety of the public at large, it would be conducted without a
jury. Jenny would consider the evidence and reach her verdict alone.
She entered from the cramped, windowless office behind the
courtroom and took her place on the judicial seat. On the rare occasions on
which she held an inquest in a dedicated court rather than one of the
draughty, far-flung village halls to which she was normally consigned, she had
mixed feelings about her elevated status. A coroner wasn't like a judge
arbitrating from on high, she was a judicial officer with the role, unique in
the British justice system, of asking whatever questions were required to
determine the true facts of an unnatural death. Drawing the truth out of a
witness was best achieved through striking up a rapport, which was far harder
in a space designed to inspire fear and awe.
There were two lawyers present: Daniel Randall, a genial,
silver-haired solicitor, represented Mrs Jacobs, and Suzanne Hayter, an austere
young barrister with scraped-back hair and small, rimless glasses, appeared for
the Severn Vale Health Trust. Immediately behind her sat an in-house solicitor
named Harry Gordon, whom Jenny recognized as the Trust's chief litigator. In
his two years in post he had earned an awesome reputation for fighting every
negligence claim and slashing their damages bill by two-thirds. The rows behind
the lawyers were filled almost to capacity with witnesses and members of the
Jacobs family. Ceri Jacobs sat at their fore alongside her mother, both women
in identical black two-piece suits. Determinedly in control of her emotions,
the widow fixed her cool, expectant gaze on Jenny and seemed to demand an answer
that would fly in the face of the facts she was about to hear.
Jenny began by explaining to the family that the purpose of
the hearing was simply to call evidence that would assist in determining the
cause of death. There was a range of possible verdicts including accident,
suicide, unlawful killing, misadventure (meaning that the deceased took a risk
which resulted in unintended fatal consequences) or, where there was no
conclusive evidence as to the immediate cause of death, an open verdict. Addressing
the waiting witnesses, Jenny reminded them that they would be giving evidence
on oath, and that failure to answer truthfully was a criminal offence
punishable by imprisonment. Family members exchanged glances, an elderly priest
sitting at the back of the room frowned gravely, Ceri Jacobs stiffened. Jenny
felt for them all, but unlike some coroners, she was not inclined to massage
the truth to save people's feelings. Her inquests were conducted strictly in
the public interest.
Mrs Jacobs was the first witness to be called forward.
Composed, dignified, and displaying no outward sign of nervousness, she placed
her hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth. Repeating what she had told
Jenny during her visit to her home, she said that she had enjoyed six happy
years of marriage to Alan, during which time he had showed himself to be a
loving husband and father and a deeply committed psychiatric nurse. Unprompted,
she produced a number of letters from former patients and requested permission
to read sections aloud. Jenny granted it. In a letter dated the previous
February, Chris, an eighteen-year-old drug addict with a history of suicide
attempts, wrote to thank her late husband: 'for showing me that life is the
most precious thing there is, no matter how hard it gets. You've taught me
there's always something better to hope for and I'll always, always remember
that. Thank you, Big Al. You're the reason I'm still here.'
'It was the successes that gave him the strength to deal with
the failures,' Ceri Jacobs said. 'You couldn't find a nurse more devoted to his
patients.'
'Did this dedication take a personal toll?' Jenny asked. 'Did
your husband show any signs of depression?'
'He was low sometimes, it was inevitable. But he was never
moody or bad-tempered.' She was adamant. 'I've seen depressed people. I would
have known.'