The Coroner, page 5
Jenny stuck her foot over the threshold. 'I just want to talk to her for a minute. It's important.'
'Piss off.'
He kicked out at her foot with his bare toes, misfired and caught them on the corner of the jamb. 'Shit.'
Jenny suppressed the urge to smile.
'Who is it, Ali?' The woman's voice called through from the back. Jenny saw her shape appear in the doorway at the far end of the hall, stick thin, a joint in her hand.
Ali, rubbing his stubbed toes on the back of his bare calf, said, 'Bitch here for you says she's the coroner.'
Jenny called through, 'I just need a few minutes, Mrs Wills. Sorry to disturb you at home.'
Simone disappeared for a moment, then came back down the hall minus whatever she had been smoking, stepping over the kids. She yelled at Ali, 'Get those two upstairs and changed.' He backed off, giving Jenny a look that said he wouldn't forget.
Simone stepped out on to the doorstep in bare feet beneath her frayed jeans saying, 'You can't come in now. It's a mess.' She glanced up and down the street, checking for who might be watching. She had dark rings around her eyes but still managed to be pretty, a vulnerable look about her. Built like a bird, the loose flap of skin showing over her belt the only sign she had borne six children. 'What do you want?'
'You heard Mr Marshall died shortly after the inquest?'
'Yeah. Can't say I'm that sad about it.'
Jenny watched her run nervy fingers through her hennaed hair. 'I picked up the answerphone messages you left him. Didn't he call you back?'
Simone shook her head. 'Didn't want to know me, did he? Before the inquest it was all promises, then nothing. I never even got to speak in court.'
'What would you have said?'
'Like I kept telling him - I phoned the centre the day Danny went down. I called five times to tell them he wasn't right. He'd never been inside before. I knew he couldn't take it.'
'That was in your statement, at least. Did Mr Marshall put it to the director when she gave evidence?'
'Yeah. She said she never knew about the calls, her secretary must have taken them.'
'Is that who you spoke to?'
'I guess.'
'Did she say that even if she had received your calls Danny wouldn't have been treated any differently?'
'Yeah. She was a bitch. A real hard fucking bitch.' Simone ran her eyes over Jenny's suit. 'Dressed like you. What do you want anyway?'
Jenny said, 'Would you like to talk somewhere more comfortable, Mrs Wills? I'll buy you coffee. Why don't you put on some shoes?'
Simone chose a coffee chain in the mall at Cribbs Causeway. Jenny followed her along the walkways and up escalators, thinking she could have found her way around the shopping centre blindfold. Simone looked at all the shop windows, checking out the new season's clothes in Next and some coloured plastic orbs in the Gadget Shop she said were the iPod speakers Ali wanted. He wasn't exactly her partner she said, more of a friend she was still getting to know, though she wasn't sure how much he liked kids.
Being in the mall seemed to relax her. Stopping to take in a display outside Knickerbox, she said she felt like a different person whenever she got away on her own - free.
Jenny bought them cappuccinos and muffins in Soho Coffee, a cafe decorated to look like it belonged in Manhattan. They sat opposite one another at a table beneath a poster of the Empire State Building, Simone sucking the froth off her coffee with a spoon.
She told Jenny that Danny was her oldest. His dad was a Trinidadian guy from St Pauls she went out with when she was fifteen. Getting pregnant was the reason she left home and went to live in a flat on her own. She'd tried to bring him up right, but different men kept letting her down, nothing in her life ever seemed to get set and Danny didn't cope well with change. He'd calmed down for a while when she got married to the father of her fourth, but Jason, her now ex-husband, got hooked on crack and was in and out of prison. With no man around, Danny fell in with boys on the estate who were always out thieving. By the time he was nine he was too strong for her to stop him going out of the door. Trapped at home with the young ones, what could she do?
Most of the times Danny went to court it was for stupid things. He wasn't a wicked boy, he was just out to impress the other kids. It was either that or get beaten up by them. His problem was he always got scared when he got arrested and would put his hand up to anything to get bail. The police took advantage: half his record was for things he hadn't done.
When the court tagged him, she remembered him starting to fret that the other kids were calling him gay for staying at home. He came back from school with a black eye and two cracked teeth and wouldn't leave his room all evening. That's when he cut off the tag. He was arrested next morning.
He was scared shitless spending a weekend in the police station - though he'd never admit it - but once he'd got bail he was OK again: a couple of nights inside had earned him respect. Simone had hoped the shock would bring him to his senses. Justin, his case worker from the Youth Offending Team, talked about community service or a supervision order, maybe spending Saturdays on a mechanics course, but the magistrates wanted him assessed for custody. Danny's brief said it was just to scare him. It worked - that's when the real change in him happened.
'What kind of change?'
'He went quiet, wouldn't talk to Ali or me, kept fighting with his younger brothers. He was smoking a lot, couldn't stop him, but I saw he'd been burning himself.'
'With cigarettes?'
'Yeah. Scabs all up the inside of his arms.'
'Did you speak to him about it?'
'I tried. He hit me. Never done that before. Ali weighed in and he smacked him, too. Nearly broke his nose. That was the night before he was sentenced - had to threaten him with the police to stop him breaking his curfew again. He was crazy, but I guess he was afraid.'
'Of what?'
Simone looked down at the table and pushed some spilled grains of sugar around with a teaspoon. 'What no one got was that Danny was just a little kid. He'd fight and curse, but I know all he wanted was for things to be right . . . And I never gave him that.' She lifted her dark green eyes. 'He knew he couldn't handle going away. The thought of it terrified him.'
'You were his mother, what did you think would happen to him?'
Simone drew a careful circle in the sugar. 'What would you think?'
'You were there in court when he was sentenced?'
'Course.' She set the spoon down on her saucer. 'But he never said a word to me. I tried to see him before they put him in the van, but they said I wasn't allowed.' She paused and rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm. 'I knew there was something wrong with him. I knew he'd try to hurt himself . . . I just knew.'
Jenny handed her a clean napkin and waited while she blew her nose, thinking about the director of Portshead Farm, Elaine Lewis, telling her secretary she didn't take calls from mothers. She imagined an unmarried woman on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder, the secure training centre her testing ground: make it run under budget for two years, get promotion, then try to knock out a baby before the hormones dried up.
When Simone stopped sniffling Jenny asked whether she saw or spoke to Danny during his time at Portshead Farm.
'They wouldn't let me the first weekend, they said he was being assessed. So I fixed to go the next Saturday afternoon, the 14th. Justin said normally kids could make phone calls home, but getting a phone card was a privilege you had to earn - that's why Danny couldn't call that week.'
'So you had no contact at all?'
Simone shook her head.
'Did Danny know you were coming on the Saturday?'
'I don't know. No one could say ... I don't think he'd've done it on the Friday night if he did know.'
'Why do you say that?'
She twisted the napkin in her fingers. 'It's a feeling. I can't explain it. Like he wouldn't have done it if he hadn't felt so alone.'
'A mother's instinct?'
'If you had kids you'd know what I mean.'
Jenny said, 'I have a teenage son,' but didn't add that he had chosen to live with his father.
Moving on, she asked when Mr Marshall had first got in contact. Simone said it was late Saturday morning, only about an hour after two policemen came to the house to tell her that Danny was dead. She couldn't remember much about it except that he'd said something about a post-mortem. She didn't get to see his body at the hospital mortuary until Monday morning. They hadn't even dressed him in his own clothes: he was in the crappy blue tracksuit they must have given him at Portshead.
It was some time on the Tuesday when she met with Marshall in his office. He gave the impression he was very sorry, made her a cup of coffee himself and asked her lots of questions about Danny's past, how come he'd ended up in custody. Marshall said Portshead Farm should have taken very special care of a boy that young and he wouldn't rest until he knew every single detail of what had happened, from the moment he was sentenced until the moment he died.
'Did you meet with him again before the inquest?'
'No, but he called me several times, said he was making progress.'
'Did he give you any details?'
'He said it would all come out at the inquest. He promised me he'd get justice for Danny.'
'He used those words?'
'Yeah. "J promise." And he said I could give evidence about the phone calls.'
'Then what?'
'You tell me. Didn't hear from him again.'
'Any idea why?'
Simone's gaze drifted off across the cafe to the shops beyond. 'The papers started writing things about me, said I was a bad mother. Reporters were phoning the house with all sorts of lies. One of them asked was it true Danny was a crack baby. Another one said I was lying about my age and I'd got pregnant with him when I was thirteen. They were just making it up.'
'When exactly did these calls start coming?'
'The middle of that week.'
'But Marshall wouldn't have known about them.'
Simone shrugged.
It made no sense. Why get enthused about a case, then back off so dramatically?
Jenny said, 'A journalist named Tara Collins called my office today. She seemed to be on your side.' . Simone lightened a little. 'She's OK. At least she came and talked to me.'
'She thinks the inquest left a lot of questions unanswered.'
'It was all over in a day and a half. Didn't answer anything.'
Jenny sat back in her chair and studied Simone's tired face, blotches showing under the harsh fluorescent light. A welfare-dependent, dope-smoking mother of six whose idea of a good time was a shopping mall. But something about this young woman had touched her. At the very least she deserved some closure, some peace of mind.
'Simone, I'd like you to think hard about this - do you think the jury were right to return a verdict of suicide?'
She looked puzzled by the question. 'What else would it have been?'
'You see, the job of the coroner is to determine the cause of death, and once a verdict has been given you need a very good reason, usually new evidence, to reopen a case. Even then you need the High Court's permission. If there was something badly wrong with the way Mr Marshall handled the case or if some important new facts turned up, of course I'd do everything I could.'
'So you're not going to do anything?'
'You told me you thought Danny killed himself. What else do you want to know?'
'Why he was left alone. Why they wouldn't let him talk to his mother. Why he was kept in a cell for three days with no clothes. Why they didn't listen to me when I told them what would happen . . .'
All perfectly good questions, which, Jenny didn't doubt, the transcript of the inquest would show Marshall had asked. She needed fresh evidence but had no excuse for spending time and money going to look for it. All she had was a bad smell and a local journalist in search of a story.
Jenny said, 'I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll go through Danny's file and make a list of every question that Mr Marshall should have asked but didn't. We'll take it from there.'
Simone gave her a look of weary indifference. She pushed up from the table. 'Whatever.'
Jenny wound down the car windows and let the warm wind blow through her hair as she crossed the bridge into Wales. Leaving the expanse of the estuary behind her and driving along the narrow road that snaked seven miles through the forested gorge from Chepstow to Tintern, she felt the rush of being enveloped by nature at its zenith. July and August were mellowing and fading months; June was the pinnacle of life. Through breaks in the trees she caught glimpses of the woodland canopy on the opposite side of the valley, an undulating sea of every shade of green.
Driving away from her responsibilities for the night, she felt light and liberated. Simone Wills and all the dead people were safely on the other side of three miles of water in another country. Another world.
Shutting the door at the end of the day was something she'd worked on with Dr Travis. He'd told her that, in common with so many women, she was a perfectionist who couldn't rest until everything around her was in order. When work was a daily round of chaos, loose ends and uncertainties, it was only a matter of time before a personality like hers would collapse under the pressure. He taught her techniques to help deal with professional guilt. She had learned to accept that she was neither indispensable nor responsible for the outcome of every case.
But despite all her efforts, the deep-seated unease that seeped up from her subconscious refused to vanish. Divorce hadn't cured her, nor had removing herself from the stress of family law. She could take away the anxiety with pills or retreat to lush countryside, but the root of her problem - though mostly buried - stuck fast.
Trying to concentrate on the moment as Dr Travis had taught her, she rounded the corner into Tintern to see the ruined abbey casting a majestic shadow over the meadow. Although only the shell of the building remained, its elegance and permanence, its resilience nearly five hundred years after Henry VIII sent his troops to destroy it, never failed to inspire her. Not even the tourist coaches and cars that swarmed around it on summer weekends could diminish its beauty. If it could endure against all the odds, so could she.
Taking in the view, the splendour of the landscape, its history and vitality, Jenny momentarily felt the kind of peace and lightness she remembered from her teens. A high no pills came close to giving.
She turned left at the Royal George Hotel and drove the final mile up the switchback single-track lane lined with ancient hedgerows to Melin Bach, Welsh for 'little mill', the two-bedroom stone cottage she had bought impulsively at auction and moved into only a fortnight ago. The previous owner was an eighty-five-year-old woman, Miss Preece, who had lived there all her life and who had changed little since her father died decades before.
The cottage was fronted by an overgrown garden in which hollyhocks, leggy lavender bushes and overgrown roses vied with the weeds and foot-high grass which she had yet to tackle. The low drystone wall which separated it from the lane was in need of repair, and her parking spot - the entrance to an old cart track which led round to the back - was so rutted and full of nettles that she could barely get across it in heels without twisting an ankle or being stung.
It was perfect. Untamed and full of possibilities.
At the rear of the house there was a quarter-acre of overgrown lawn, the remains of a vegetable garden and a roofless stone shed backing on to a brook which had once been the saw mill. Until the early 1950s, a neighbour had told her, Miss Preece's father had earned his living working a water wheel- driven bench saw, turning oak and beech butts from surrounding woodlands into roughly milled timber. Shire horses hauled in wagons along the track and drank from the stream. The iron rings where they were tethered could still be seen rusting in the crumbling mortar of the mill walls. Put a spade in the ground anywhere nearby and you'd turn up old horseshoes, some of them ten inches across.
Jenny's vision was to bring it back to what it once was. To tame the weeds, grow her own food and maybe rebuild the mill and water wheel to power the house. She already had a pile of books next to her bed with titles like Living Off-Line and The Smallholder's Guide to Electrical Generation. Once she had got the place straight, she saw herself living two distinct lives: one in the city, surrounded by people and their travails, and the other here, in peace and fruitful labour.
Whether she would ever share this life with anyone, what the ultimate point to it was, were issues for later. She was in recovery from a failed marriage and a crashed career and was trying to wean herself off medication. She would take it a step at a time, enjoy the achievements of each day and hold on to the belief that eventually the fragments of her life would rearrange themselves into a picture that made sense.
