Losing patience, she said, 'Tell me about an occasion, any occasion, when you've seen members of staff forcibly restrain an inmate.'

  Hogg, dressed in his brown uniform, his thin tie done up tight to his collar, didn't appear fazed. 'It happens now and again, someone kicks off, they've got to be brought under control.'

  'Tell me what you have seen, a typical incident.'

  Hogg scratched his acne-scarred neck, which was red with shaving burn. 'They just keep the kid up against the wall or whatever, wait till he calms down.'

  'Have you seen inmates pushed to the floor, officers kneeling on their backs, hands forced up to their necks?'

  He gave a noncommittal shake of his head. 'Can't say that I have, ma'am.'

  'Never?'

  'No.'

  Jenny, at boiling point, paused for a moment to calm down. 'Mr Hogg, I'll accept that for a man who spends his life looking at CCTV monitors you are extremely unobservant, but surely you can tell me the name of one officer you have seen using a forcible restraint technique on a trainee.'

  'Sorry.'

  'How long have you worked at Portshead Farm?'

  'Three years.'

  'And you can't give me the name of one single officer?'

  'Not so that I could be sure, no.'

  Her patience gave way. 'You're lying to this court, aren't you?'

  'No, ma'am.'

  'What you're asking us to believe is so incredible it simply cannot be true.'

  'No.'

  'And if you've lied about one thing, nothing else you have told us can be trusted either, can it? We can't believe you when you say the camera was down in the male house unit.'

  'It was.'

  'Or that Kevin Stewart made regular thirty-minute checks on all occupants of the unit throughout the night.'

  'He did.'

  Hartley rose to his feet. 'Ma'am, merely in a spirit of assistance to the court, I would remind you of the coroner's obligation to avoid any appearance of bias.'

  'Mr Hartley, I would like to remind this witness that he has sworn to tell the whole truth, something I am quite satisfied he has failed utterly to do.'

  Hartley exchanged a surprised glance with his fellow counsel and sat back in his seat to add another heading to his swelling grounds of appeal.

  Jenny turned to the witness. 'I have no further interest in you, Mr Hogg, other than to order you to pay a fine of five hundred pounds for contempt in failing to attend court this morning.'

  'Five hundred? I can't afford that.'

  'Then you'll go to prison for five days.' She turned to the constable who had brought him to court. 'Make sure Mr Hogg doesn't go anywhere. I'll deal with him at the end of the day.'

  It was Golding's turn to interrupt in the spirit of assistance. 'Ma'am, shouldn't Mr Hogg at least have been given the opportunity to seek legal representation before being sentenced to imprisonment?'

  'Are you offering, Mr Golding?'

  He looked over at the security guard. 'Well, I—'

  'I can assure you, I intend to be even-handed. All the witnesses who failed to answer their summons will receive the same punishment.' She turned to Hartley. 'Except Mrs Lewis, of course.'

  Golding sat back down and conferred with Pamela Sharpe, who picked up a textbook, flicking urgently to the relevant law. Their solicitors rushed to the back of the hall to reassure Grantham and Peterson they wouldn't be going to prison. The constable stepped forward and led Hogg, complaining loudly, to the side of the room.

  Ignoring his protests and fired up by her show of strength, Jenny ordered Kevin Stewart to the witness chair.

  The Scot was even more intransigent than Hogg. His explanation for not answering his summons was that he assumed there had been a mistake - he had said everything he had to say last week. He denied being involved in any use of forcible restraint on Danny and had no knowledge of any occasion on which he had been brought physically to heel.

  'Are you telling me that in the six days Danny was in the house unit, you don't recall him having been physically restrained once?'

  'Not on my shifts.'

  'So it could have happened during the day when you weren't there?'

  'I wouldn't know.'

  'No record is kept if there is a violent altercation with a trainee?'

  'Not unless it's something serious.'

  'Danny had major bruising and a patch of his hair ripped out.'

  'No one said anything to me. And he never gave me any trouble.'

  'Mr Stewart, we have evidence from the pathologist that at some time shortly before his death, Danny was involved in a violent struggle which bore all the hallmarks of him being subjected to control and restraint procedures. Are you asking me to believe you have no knowledge of that?'

  'Yes, I am.'

  'There was no gossip in the house unit, no talk about it?'

  'None that I heard.'

  'Your colleagues on the earlier shift didn't tell you to keep an eye out for him because they'd had trouble?'

  'No, ma'am.'

  Jenny glanced at the jury and sensed they were with her, suspicious of Stewart's evasiveness, asking themselves what he was hiding.

  'How often do you have to use forcible restraint?'

  'Every week or so. Not that often.'

  'And would you force a trainee face down on the floor and push his arms up his back?'

  'Very rarely.'

  'But it happens.'

  'If there's no other way, you have to.'

  'If it's that rare, it's all the more surprising that no one mentioned it to you. It's just the kind of thing you'd talk about with colleagues, isn't it?'

  Stewart looked straight at the jury and answered with the same emotionless matter-of-factness he'd shown in the witness box the week before. 'I don't know how Danny got those injuries. Perhaps he'd had a run in with staff I didn't know about, perhaps it was with some of the other boys. All I know is that he was fine at lights out, and as far as I was aware nothing untoward happened after that time.'

  Jenny said, 'Dr Peterson says that it's possible Danny was unconscious or only partially conscious when the sheet went around his neck.'

  'He's wrong.'

  'And we're not to read anything suspicious into the fact that the camera wasn't working in the corridor?'

  'You can read into it what you like. It was nothing to do with me.'

  'Don't be insolent, Mr Stewart, we are dealing with a child's death.'

  He folded his hands on the table in front of him, not offering any apology. More so than for the halfwit Hogg, she felt contempt for this man. He was not obstructive out of stupidity, but out of calculated self-interest. She could have balled up her fists and hit him hard in the face until he bled; she could have thrashed him senseless and dug her nails into his eyeballs until he spilled his dirty secrets.

  Instead she forced herself to keep her voice level. 'Do you feel any remorse at all for what happened to Danny Wills?'

  'I'm sorry he hanged himself, of course.'

  'Then why haven't you offered a single word of assistance? Why haven't you offered any suggestion of who might have inflicted those injuries?'

  'I don't know who.'

  'Mr Stewart, you work in that institution. You knew all the staff and all the male trainees at the time of Danny's death. Either you have made a personal decision deliberately to withhold information from this inquest or you have been instructed by your employers to do so. Which is it?'

  Hartley objected. 'Ma'am, I resent the implication of that question. No evidence whatsoever has been offered that suggests my clients have sought to suppress relevant information.'

  'What other conclusion can I draw, Mr Hartley? This witness clearly isn't being completely honest and nor was Mr Hogg. And Mrs Lewis was so intent on avoiding this inquiry she left the country. It doesn't take a highly educated legal mind to realize that your clients are terrified of anything approximating the truth being heard in this court.'

  'Are you sure you meant to express yourself in quite that way, ma'am?'

  Kevin Stewart laughed, only a short derisory burst, but enough to snap her last strands of self-control. She railed at Hartley. 'I am sick of hearing your sneering, sarcastic tone. I have no doubt that you were personally involved in the decision to allow Mrs Lewis to flee the court's jurisdiction and I will be asking the police to investigate. I will also be asking them to look into who instructed Mr Hogg and Mr Stewart not to cooperate with this inquest. Your clients may think that enough money spent on organized obfuscation can get them the outcome they want, but I will not, I shall not allow that to happen.'

  Her outburst rang around the courtroom. In the silence that followed, Hartley tapped the tips of his fingers together, then closed his notebook and replaced the cap on his fountain pen. He looked up with a pained, regretful expression.

  'I'm afraid, ma'am, that your remarks leave me with no option other than to go to a higher court to seek an order quashing whatever verdict this inquest may arrive at, if indeed it proceeds that far. The erratic nature of your conduct of this case, your clear indications of bias, not to mention the bizarre events of last week, leave me with no other option.'

  He picked up his file and, followed by his solicitor, made his way through the astonished public gallery towards the door. Golding and Pamela Sharpe exchanged a look. Pamela rose uncertainly to her feet. 'Mr Golding and I also share my learned friend Mr Hartley's sentiments, but will remain in the interests of our clients.'

  Jenny gazed out over the sea of stunned faces. She had given the journalists their moment of drama and the evening headlines had already been written: Lawyers Walk Out on Drugs Shame Coroner. Moreton would pick up the first stories on his email this evening and read another slew in the morning. The call would come before she sat at ten a.m. She'd had her chance and she'd blown it. She wanted to apologize to Simone Wills, who was looking across at her with a perplexed expression: she'd like to say she'd tried her best, but deep down she knew she hadn't.

  She turned to the witness Kevin Stewart, who was picking idly at his nails, but words wouldn't come. The edges of her vision started to cloud and pressure mounted on her temples; the low babble of chatter in the room was drowned out by the rushing of blood in her ears. She plunged her hand into her pocket, searching for the mints, but her fingers refused to close around the tube. She saw Arvel moving swiftly from her left and guessed he was coming to catch her as she fell, but he strode past and up between the rows of seats and went to a woman, a blonde older woman, and exchanged urgent, whispered words. It was Alison. And as Arvel turned Jenny saw Tara at her shoulder and between them a slender, straw-haired youth with a seraphic face. The boy.

  Arvel hurried back to Jenny's desk, almost at a jog. 'A Mrs Alison Trent, your officer. Apparently, she has a witness for you, Mr Mark Clayton.'

  As quickly as the wave of panic rose, it subsided again. Jenny felt her feet on solid ground and the band around her diaphragm loosen. She reached for water, forced a mouthful down and found her voice.

  'Stand down, Mr Stewart. But don't leave the room.'

  He pushed up from the chair and strolled to the back with a dismissive shake of the head.

  'I call Mr Mark Clayton.'

  The blond boy, no more than eighteen or nineteen, turned to Alison, who urged him forward, a hand in the small of his back like a protective mother. Tara stood behind them, her face dancing with excitement.

  Clayton came nervously to the front, Arvel steering him to the witness chair and standing close by as he stumbled through the oath, his eyes wide and frightened.

  Jenny said, 'You are Mark Clayton?'

  'I am.'

  He gave his age - eighteen - and his address in the south of the city with a soft accent, more Somerset than Bristol. She could tell he'd never stood in a witness box before: he had none of the swagger of the seasoned delinquent.

  With no notes to question him from, no rehearsed plan, no idea what it was he had to say, she had only Alison's stoical frown to reassure her that whatever it might be was for the best.

  'Could you please tell us what connection, if any, you have with the deceased, Danny Wills?'

  Clayton glanced at Alison, as if taking her cue from her, and turned self-consciously to the jury. 'I was ... I was a friend of the coroner, Mr Harry Marshall.'

  Jenny said, 'When you say friend?'

  'Yeah . . . Well, actually it was more than that, you know . . . I met him about three months ago, saw him every couple of weeks.'

  There was a surge of energy through the room. The journalists looked up in unison, the most cynical eyes agog.

  She trod carefully. 'Was this a romantic friendship?'

  'Kind of ... I met him online.' Another glance to Alison. 'He'd pay me.'

  'Harry Marshall, the coroner who was investigating Danny Wills's death, paid you once a fortnight to have sex with him?'

  'Yes.'

  She caught sight of Williams lowering his head in sadness for what would now greet Mary Marshall and her daughters, but there could be no going back. She asked Arvel to bring the envelope to the witness chair and invited Clayton to open it. He pulled out the photographs.

  'Can you tell us please what those are?'

  Clayton seemed surprised, disgusted even, at what he saw. 'They're pictures of me and Harry in a hotel room.'

  'Is there a date on them?'

  'Yes -25 April.'

  'Where were you?'

  'In the Novotel in Bristol. It's where we always went.'

  'Were you aware that photographs were being taken?'

  'No . .. Neither of us was.'

  'There's a note attached to the photographs. Can you read what it says?'

  Jenny glanced over at where Frank Grantham had been sitting, but he was no longer there.

  'It says, Dear Frank, Your friend. H.'

  'Is there a date?'

  'Yes - 3 May.'

  Jenny turned to the jury. 'You'll remember that Mr Marshall mailed those photographs to Mr Grantham on the morning of the 3rd and died later that day.' She addressed Clayton again. 'What do you know about them?'

  'Harry called me on my mobile, I think on the Friday before and said he was sorry, but there was a chance some pictures of us together might appear in the press. He said someone had sent copies to his office. He didn't know how it had happened.'

  'How did he sound?'

  'Upset. . . very.'

  'Did he mention anything to you about his work?'

  'Not that time. It was only a short call ... I was angry.'

  'About the pictures?'

  'What else? Yeah.'

  'You said, Not that time—''

  'He called me once more, the next week, the Thursday. To be honest I didn't want to know, but he kept calling, wouldn't leave it, so I picked up ...'

  'What time?'

  'I don't know exactly. Late in the evening, may even have been past midnight.'

  Jenny glanced over at Alison, thinking of the call she had received from Harry, the call that might have stopped him had she found the courage to ring back.

  'What did he say?'

  'He sounded quiet, not upset, just sort of sad . . . He said he wasn't well. And that if anything happened to him, I was to tell his office that the man he was looking for was called Sean Loughlin and he was a nurse at Portshead Farm. He said, Sean Loughlin killed Danny Wills and I wasn't brave enough to prove it. That was it.'

  'Why didn't you call his office, Mr Clayton?'

  'I didn't want to have anything more to do with him. It was just business, you know. And when his wife started calling me, that was all I needed.'

  Williams had sent a note suggesting an adjournment when she'd finished with Clayton, but didn't say why. Later he would tell her how in that half-hour, with the news crews whipping themselves into a frenzy outside on the pavement, the real story was happening in the alley at the back of the hall, where he had his constables bring Stewart and Hogg. With the same look in his eye that appeared when he talked about outdoing the English, he told her how he'd offered a deal to the first one who talked. Hogg turned out to be quicker than he looked, sticking his hand up like a schoolboy. Stewart swung a punch at him, then tried to bolt, but ended up cuffed in the van parked at the other end of the alley, where they already had Frank Grantham. Williams told her Grantham was the worst, kept saying, 'Do you know who I am?' He had given him an answer, but it wasn't repeatable in polite company.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42