The Coroner, page 32
'Am I not innocent until proven guilty?'
'Of course, but we both know that judicial officers can't continue to function while they're the subject of criminal charges.'
'If you spoke to the families of Danny Wills and Katy Taylor I don't think either of them would have a problem with me continuing.'
'The Ministry would have a problem, Jenny, even in these enlightened times. I'm calling to tell you that the decision has been taken to suspend you on full pay pending the resolution of your case.'
The words floated through her.
'What happens to the inquests?'
'They'll be adjourned. Obviously if you're found guilty of an offence another coroner will deal with them in due course.'
'If I'm acquitted?'
'We're rather hoping you might take some time to consider your options while you're away from the office. Should you decide that perhaps the Coroner Service isn't for you, I'm sure we'd assist with the appropriate references.'
'You make sacking me sound like an act of kindness.'
'I appreciate it must be a very difficult time for you.'
'Actually I feel quite calm, now I know who the bad guys are.'
There was a pause before Moreton responded. 'I'm sending you a confirmatory email with a hard copy in the post. We'd like you to leave the office by six p.m.'
She tried to make progress with the paperwork, her pride telling her to leave a tidy desk behind her, not to give whoever sat here next the pleasure of saying she ran a sloppy office. On the other side of the door she could hear Alison on the phone, speaking in hushed tones to scandalized colleagues in other coroner's offices wanting to know the lurid details. To her credit, she was loyal, saying it was all a fabrication, that a friend of hers might have smoked something but she wouldn't have known. After hearing it a few times, Jenny almost believed it herself.
She worked through the day's reports in a semi-trance, writing out nine death certificates, which she handed to Alison. She made a neat pile of the five current cases requiring inquest, but none of them a full jury hearing, and tidied her files in the Danny Wills and Katy Taylor cases, leaving a brief explanatory note with each. The only thing she hadn't dealt with was the accounts. Alison said not to worry, she'd sort them out somehow.
At six o'clock Jenny packed her briefcase and stepped out of her office to say goodbye, but Alison had already gone, her chair tucked under the desk. She went out of the main door and closed it shut behind her. She turned the key in the lock and posted it back through the letter box. No word of farewell, no note, just a heavy silence and a sense of unresolved sadness which hung in the air like a fog.
David's call came as she was clearing the tolls on the approach to the Severn Bridge. Her hands-free connected to the stereo and his voice barked at her through four speakers. 'Deborah just showed me the paper. Well done. Ross isn't home yet, but I expect he'll have heard the good news. You're not his pusher, are you'
'Grow up, David.'
'I'm serious. Nothing about you could surprise me.'
'Well, you can relax. I'm not your problem any more.'
'You're still my son's problem.'
'Your son.'
'I'm clearly the only one of us capable of taking responsibility.'
'The dope was nothing to do with me.'
'That's fine, then, it's just your hippie boyfriend I've got to worry about.'
'He's a damn sight more intelligent than that pea-brained piece of arse you've got running round your kitchen.'
'I didn't call to trade insults with you, Jenny - there's nothing I could say that would do your behaviour justice - but while he's in my care, I will not have you around my son.'
'Oh, really? Well, in case you hadn't noticed, he's not a child any more. He's nearly sixteen years old and can make his own decisions.'
'He did that some time ago, or are you still too stoned to remember?'
Jenny looked out over water, a pillar of light breaking through a gap in the clouds to the west.
David shouted, 'What I'd really like from you, but I suppose it's too much to ask, is the slightest hint of apology.'
She pushed the red button on the phone, cutting him off, and watched the shaft of sunlight narrow to a sliver and then disappear.
Ross didn't answer his phone and she didn't blame him. It wasn't that she'd been a bad mother; she had tried to be the very best she could. What she was was a person who didn't have it in her to be as selfless as everyone wanted her to be. To have got it right she would have had to sacrifice her career and stay at home to keep David's house beautiful, cook him meals, have sex with him when he wanted and find a sporty hobby he would have approved of, like tennis or horseriding. Coming back in her jodhpurs, making love in the shower before putting on a healthy dinner and helping Ross with all the homework from his pushy private school. She tried to imagine it, how she would feel as queen of a perfect home. Suffocated. Desperate. Murderous. The words that came weren't good ones. They proved her point: she had too many emotions of her own to be able to put other people first. The unforgivable thing was that she had known it all along, since before she married. She should have stopped the train then and jumped off, but she had been eager to get romance, marriage and all the rest out of the way so she could proceed with her life. Even on her wedding day she wasn't in the moment, it was always what next? How long till I get pregnant? How soon can I get back to work?
Sixteen years on and she was a broken down, pill-dependent failure of a mother who was about to lose the one thing she hadn't been prepared to sacrifice. It wasn't a spectacular career, but being made a coroner at forty-two was something to be proud of.
She had parked in a lay-by in the thick of the woods a mile or so before Tintern. There was a track to the right which led down to the River Wye. You could easily lose yourself on the way, wander off into the trees where no one could see, crawl into a thicket of holly and briars. Or go down to the water and wait for high tide, take the pills there and slide out to sea. With luck they'd never find you. The last trace a footprint on a muddy bank washed away by the rain.
It had taken three temazepam to achieve the muzzy feeling, not anger or panic, more removed than that. The picture in her mind was of a kite tugging at its string in a strong breeze. There was a strange and unexpected vitality to the sensation, the act of release something to do. Her hand found its way into her bag and her fingers closed around the beta blockers. A bottle of those, her heart and lungs would gently relax and she could drift away.
She brought out the container and pressed slowly down on the cap: twist and release. A bottle of sparkling water in the glove box, maybe dissolve them in it first and then drink it, the bubbles helping to make it work faster. No, better to put the pills in your mouth and rinse them down. The choice was frustrating. She wanted the solution to be elegant. Effortless.
A Subaru pulled off the road ahead of her. An outdoorsy couple in their early thirties emerged in matching walking boots, rainproofs tied around their waists. He looked like a professional, a dentist Jenny guessed, from the neat smiles they both had. As they walked past, she holding his hand, he looked in and met Jenny's eyes, holding them for a moment as if he knew. As they turned down the track, he glanced back over his shoulder, sensing something.
Shit. Just the kind who'd get involved.
She shot the woman a smile and turned the key in the ignition. Turning out of the lay-by and heading back to Melin Bach, she thought, what's the hurry, why not have a nice glass of wine first?
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The telephone's persistent ringing entered her incoherent dreams and dragged her back to consciousness. She was bunched up on the sofa with a vicious crick in her neck. Light leaked around the closed curtains. On the rug covering the flagstone floor were two empty bottles of red and a wine glass with an inch still in the bottom, next to it two neat rows of pills, their empty containers and an untouched tumbler of water. She stared at them, her eyes slowly coming into focus, dimly recalling the ritual of laying them out late the previous night, remembering how she had done it: imagining herself as a child counting out sweets; then crawling on to the sofa to savour her final glass.
Aching, she swung her feet on to the floor, becoming aware of a dull sensation like waking up to grief or the loss of a lover. Slowly the pieces of the previous day reassembled themselves: her arrest, her suspension, David's call, and the urge to escape, which had seduced her away from anger. Her body was a lead weight, her mind even heavier.
The phone persisted, the caller determined to rouse her. She heaved herself across the room and lifted the cordless receiver, pushing her tangled hair back from her face.
'Hello.' Her voice was thick and croaky.
'Mrs Cooper?'
She cleared her throat. 'Yes.'
'Professor Lloyd, Newport General. I tried calling Mrs Trent but she's not answering her phone.'
Jenny glanced at her watch and saw that it wasn't yet eight. 'Oh-'
Lloyd paused, as if embarrassed. 'I heard about what happened yesterday, but I didn't know who else to call. I've had some more thoughts about Katy Taylor, you see.'
He waited for Jenny to respond, putting the onus on her. She tried to think, her head throbbing now with every heartbeat as the undigested alcohol started to recirculate through her system.
'I've been suspended from my post. I'm not sure there's much point talking to me.'
Another pregnant silence, then: 'But is it justified, Mrs Cooper?'
There was a knowingness in Lloyd's tone. It jolted her like a slap on the face, snapping her reluctant mind back into her complaining body. It was her turn to consider her words carefully.
She said, 'You're a Home Office pathologist, Professor. You know the system better than I do.'
'Quite. Perhaps we could meet and talk, seeing as you've time on your hands.'
'What for?'
'Perhaps that had better wait. What do you say?'
The memory of her dream of dark rooms and ghosts dripped back into her consciousness as she drove up over the hill, taking the winding road to Usk and from there the dual carriageway to Newport. The images were sketchy - dark inchoate figures with a brooding menace in an even darker space - but they stuck like a stubborn stain. She felt the texture of the wheel beneath her fingers, flicked the wipers when a shower scattered the windscreen, but her nose was filled with the smell of damp brick and mouldering plaster, and despite her breakfast-time pills her pulse thumped in anticipation of an unseen predator. The jagged entrance to the secret room of her nightmares had opened a little wider, what lay within tantalizingly close. Part of her wanted to stop everything and journey into it, try to isolate and capture the monster, but still the fear was too great, her instinct to medicate and push it all from view stronger than her need to know.
Once off the country roads with their high, containing hedges and safely surrounded by other vehicles, she allowed herself to recall the events of the previous evening. Her memory of them seemed more remote than her intervening dreams. She saw herself in the lay-by, a pale figure in a nondescript car fingering a bottle of pills, tempted by the prospect of release yet strangely removed from the source of her pain. The unreality of the images told her that this was how it happened: how the suicidal managed to cross the threshold. Sitting cross-legged on the rug, counting out the beta blockers, the thought of leaving had been as comforting as the smell of church incense on a winter's evening. The word death hadn't figured, only peace.
She arrived at her destination still locked in a waking dream. She walked from her car towards the Celtic Manor, the large hotel resort set incongruously at the edge of the M4 on the outskirts of Newport, without feeling her feet on the ground. Her voice was someone else's as she asked directions from the reception clerk to the Forum cafe. She told herself it was a combination of her medication and a deep hangover, but as she passed a happy party of hotel guests on their way to the golf course and saw in their smiles something forbidding, she knew it was more. Many times Dr Travis had told her that the psychotic would project their disturbed emotions on to others - that madness could be averted only by confronting those feelings before they became fully disassociated from the self and all means of conscious control.
Searching for the health club coffee bar, humming inanely to the muzak, she accepted that at last, after all these years, she was finally entering the end game; the moment she had always dreaded had arrived. She had perhaps a few days to summon the courage to plunge into the dark place inside her. And if she couldn't. . . last night had shown her the route she might take; or which might take her.
Professor Lloyd was seated at a coffee table next to the glass screen overlooking the hotel pool. He smiled brightly as she approached and rose to shake her hand.
'So glad you could make it, Mrs Cooper.' He gestured her to the low-slung chair opposite his, wicker with tartan cushions. There was a pot of tea with two cups waiting. 'This is the closest I've got to a club, I'm afraid, but it does the job. I often steal away here on a rainy afternoon.'
Jenny glanced approvingly at the calming decor. 'Good for you.'
She lowered herself into the chair, which forced the occupant to recline. Professor Lloyd stretched out opposite, maintaining a view of the cafe entrance, his body relaxed but his eyes alert. She gave a noncommittal smile, happy for him to take the lead. With no badge of office, she was only here for curiosity's sake, after all.
'Well then, Mrs Cooper, I've been reading all about you, and hearing the odd word on the grapevine. Two controversial inquests in your first fortnight. . .'
'I didn't go looking for them.'
'I'm sure you didn't.' He shook his head. 'No, I'm sure. Would you like some tea?'
'Please.'
He carefully lifted the pot and poured her a cup, considering his angle of approach as he stirred in the milk. He hesitated with the wet spoon, then laid it on a paper napkin. 'I hate a drip on my saucer, don't you?'
'Detest it.'
Jenny sipped the tepid liquid. He watched her, as if searching for some clue in her expression. 'I understand both inquests are currently adjourned.'
'Again, not my choice.'
'No, so I gather.' He took a drink from his own cup, buying a final moment before committing himself. 'My thoughts about Katy, you see, were to a certain extent prompted by what I read of your death-in-custody case - Danny Mills?'
'Wills.'
'Yes. The poor boy who hanged himself while Katy was in the same institution.' He gave her a look of innocent enquiry. 'You don't think there's any reason to suppose their deaths were connected in any way?'
Jenny became aware of the feel of the cup in her hands, the smell of chlorine in the air, her drifting spirit returning to her body as Professor Lloyd's words concentrated her attention.
'Why do you think there was a connection?'
He brought his two hands together and rested them on his chin, as if in prayer. 'Before I go any further, Mrs Cooper, perhaps you could tell me what happened to you, or what you think happened to you. I hate to give credence to conspiracy theories, but I'm a man not far off his pension, with grown-up children who shouldn't be still sadly dependent on him.'
'Why should I trust you? You could be part of this for all I know.'
'Part of what?'
'The reason my boyfriend and I were arrested the day after I discovered there was a connection.'
'Do you know if there was a tip-off?'
'There was more than that, there was a set-up. I have reason to suspect the company that runs Portshead Farm Secure Training Centre has form for this sort of thing. They may hold prisoners but they certainly don't take them.'
Professor Lloyd brought his hands up to cover his nose and eyes. If he wasn't a good actor he was carrying out a serious and painful calculation. After a long moment of reflection, he began to speak quietly, while looking steadily at Jenny. 'Then you'll understand that what I'm telling you is off the record, at least for the time being. This meeting never happened.'
'Whatever you want. There's nothing I can do anyway. Whoever they appoint after me is going to bury both cases so deep they'll never see daylight again.' She shrugged and took another sip of her tea.
Lloyd nodded, coming to a decision. 'What I have to say is rather speculative in any event, but may be of interest.' He glanced towards the door to satisfy himself he had an audience of only one. 'I've done a little reading. The literature on ruptures of the glenohumeral ligament confirms that such injuries usually arise from the arm being forced up behind the back, but it seems this mostly happens in the case of arrest or where C and R methods are used in custodial institutions.'
