The Coroner, page 8
'He wasn't very happy about the investigation either. It certainly looked like she might have been with someone when she died, but there was no evidence of force or assault, and the fact that she was already using meant that proving her death wasn't an accident was going to be virtually impossible. If there was even a hint of a struggle it would have been a different story.'
Jenny swallowed a pill with a mouthful of water, sure that Alison had noticed the tremor in her hands. 'What does this detective think should have been done?'
'For one thing they had evidence she was on the game, so any punters she'd been with could have been nicked for sex with a minor. Then there was the fact that there was no spoon, lighter or ligature found with the body - all things that might have had someone's dabs on them. All they found was a syringe with her prints on it.'
'So we're pretty sure she wasn't alone?'
'The scene could have been disturbed by someone after she died and before the body was discovered, but my friend's pretty sure there was a man involved. Who knows, he could even have been a dealer who traded her drugs for sex - out- of-the-way place like that.'
Jenny felt the temazepam seep into her system and her heart start to slow. Her rational mind began to regain control. 'Suspected underage sex, possible manslaughter. What more does it take to get an investigation going?'
'It's still technically an open file.'
'Meaning?'
'They'll investigate further if evidence comes to light, but no one's being paid to go looking for it.'
Jenny said, 'I met her parents this morning. I don't get the feeling they'd have put any pressure on for a big investigation. The way Katy had been going for the last couple of years, I think they were half expecting it.'
'I heard she'd been inside for a few months. Same place as Danny Wills, wasn't it?'
'Not that much of a coincidence, considering it's the only secure training centre this side of the city.'
'Still,' Alison said, 'makes you wonder.'
They exchanged a look.
'I know. But what, exactly?'
Alison shrugged. 'Drugs, pimps, gangs ... All the scum that prey on kids like that. They were both from the same part of town - you can bet there's some connection.'
'And it was Detective Superintendent Swainton who made the decision not to look further?'
Alison nodded.
'And it was purely about resources?'
'That would be the obvious reason.'
She was clearly insinuating something that Jenny was meant to get, but didn't. Another police trait: assuming other people thought as deviously as you did.
'Could there be any other?'
'Not that I can think of. Unless he was afraid of upsetting another investigation ... or if he'd been sat on for some reason.'
'Why would anyone have sat on him?'
Alison shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. 'If the person she was with was an important informer, for example, or someone prominent.'
'Is that what you've been told? Don't tell me she was having sex with an MP.'
'No. No one's said anything like that, apart from the idle gossip that goes round. He probably had more work on than his officers could cope with.'
Jenny could see the conflict in her, the loyal detective versus the decent, homely woman as troubled by Katy Taylor's solitary death and the inadequate police response as she was. Alison probably had children, most likely grown up by now, but their teens can't have been that long ago. Another thought struck her: yesterday she had defended the sainted Marshall to the hilt, now she was intimating that he'd been part of something shady. It would have taken more than idle gossip to knock him off his pedestal.
'Then I suppose,' Jenny said, 'that if for whatever reason the police didn't go after whoever was with Katy, Mr Marshall must have been persuaded to do the same?'
Alison stood very still, then, without warning, her eyes filled with tears. Holding herself rigid, she said, 'I loved Harry Marshall, Mrs Cooper, not as a lover, but for three years he was the best friend I'd ever had. Something happened to him in those final weeks . . . He was in a fury over the Danny Wills case. I'd never seen him like it. He said he was going to shake the citadel to its foundations. But when I came back from leave he was so depressed he'd hardly speak to me.' She paused, collecting herself. 'Then on the Thursday night the phone rang at home. I answered, but the caller hung up. I checked - it was Harry's home number. He never called me from home. I should have phoned back, but I didn't like to - it was nearly midnight . . . And the next morning, he was dead.'
The floodgates finally opened. Jenny guided Alison to a chair and handed her tissues as six weeks of silent suffering gave way to wails of grief.
* * *
CHAPTER SIX
Driving home at the end of only the second day of her new career Jenny felt the first twinges of nostalgia for family law. Courts were traumatic but had the virtue of being impersonal. Her relationship with Alison was already becoming uncomfortably intimate. And while she was watching her officer weep for her lover who never was, she had realized that there was now no question of replacing her, at least not in the short term. Not only had she inherited a tangled mess of dubious cases, it was left to her to deal with the emotional fallout.
The story of her life: everybody's needs before her own. Surrounded by powerful personalities - her parents, her husband, numerous bosses and judges over the years - the real Jenny Cooper had yet to step forward. Forty-two years old and still no territory to call her own.
The train of self-pitying thoughts persisted all the way home and she pulled up to Melin Bach with a dull headache and a nagging anxiety which would only be cured by a large glass of wine. She was almost at the front door before she realized that the front garden was transformed. The weeds had gone, the grass was mown and the foxgloves and hollyhocks either side of the porch now stood in freshly dug borders. Lavender and peonies she hadn't known were there had emerged from the jungle. She dropped her briefcase and wandered around to the back along the cart track, now tamed and tidy, and found a lawn, a little rough but mown in stripes, stretching from the back of the house to the stream. A path of evenly spaced flagstones set into the turf had been uncovered, leading from the kitchen door to the stream's edge; and by the stone wall bordering the field going downhill to the left of the house, rosemary, sage and thyme bushes had emerged from a thicket of briars and nettles.
She stood for a long moment and took in her new domain, now seeing it as a working place where generations of women had walked the path to the stream in all weathers to fetch water and wash clothes, and with callused hands had gathered herbs on summer evenings like this. She pictured a mother standing with an aching back and heavy woollen skirts thinking of the freedom she might have enjoyed a distant twenty miles away in the city, never imagining that her homestead would one day be a refuge for a woman who had been given freedoms she could never have dreamed of.
On the scrub-top table was a note weighed down by a rusty horseshoe. It read: 'Got a bit carried away and worked till seven. Hope it doesn't look too drastic. Steve.' Too coy to mention payment, but he was letting her know that he'd worked more hours than she'd left money for. She had cash in her purse but he hadn't left his address. 'Catbrook way' was all he'd said, and no telephone.
Why not see if she could find him? It was a nice evening and she had yet to explore the tangle of lanes which wound through the woods on the west side of the valley. It would be an adventure. She decided to leave the wine until later and keep good relations with the gardener.
She put on a white linen blouse with her jeans and faded blue canvas trainers, checking in the bedroom mirror that she didn't look too citified. She changed her mind about the trainers three times before settling on a pair of Caterpillar work boots she'd bought before the move, picturing herself digging vegetables and chopping logs. They were pristine, straight out of the box, but the solid weight of them on her feet felt right, grounded. As a final touch, she bunched her hair in a black elastic. She checked her reflection: rural but businesslike, not trying to look sexy but still feminine. No less self- conscious now than when she was sixteen.
She drove off up the hill, the single-track lane following the stream up the steep-sided valley lined with dense oak and beech. Here and there she passed cottages set in small clearings at the side of the road, but none scruffy or bohemian enough to belong to a thirty-five-year-old backwoodsman. She spotted several rough tracks that looked like they might lead to dwellings deeper in the woods, but all too rutted to risk negotiating in her Golf. Emerging at the other side of the small forest she circled back across the reed- and gorse-strewn heath and trawled the rectangle of lanes around the hamlets of Whitelye and Botany Bay: she was only three miles from home as the crow flies but had travelled nearly fifteen.
She considered knocking on someone's door to ask for directions, and even pulled up outside a ramshackle-looking farmstead with a sign advertising eggs and local honey, but was gripped by a shyness which prevented her from stepping out of the car. It was the same affliction that since her 'episode' had often seized her before going to a dinner or cocktail party: a dread not of meeting other people, but provoked by the thought of doing so. When it struck, without a drink or a pill, she couldn't get outside of herself. Even the most insignificant of small talk became an ordeal; when she spoke her own voice would echo in her head as if she was hearing herself from a great distance, her cheeks would burn, her diaphragm tighten and her heart pound. With Dr Travis's help she had learned to control these symptoms by consciously relaxing, but it was the fact that the simplest of encounters could prove so difficult which infuriated her. It made her feel so foolish, such a child.
Angry with herself, she started off down the lane back towards the north end of Tintern. As her self-critical thoughts escalated into a torrent of rage she picked up speed. With the high hedges and verges bursting with waist-high grass and cow parsley, the chances of seeing oncoming traffic were zero. It was an old Ford tractor towing a load of freshly cut silage that met her coming around a hairpin. The tractor driver saw her first and pulled sharply into the gateway of a field. Jenny rounded the bend and was faced with an implausibly narrow gap between the hedge and the trailer. Instinct took over. She jerked the wheel sharp left, smacked her wing mirror on the trailer as she skimmed by with inches to spare and fish-tailed to a halt, her left wheels jammed in a ditch hidden by the long grass on the verge.
She sat, dazed for a moment, aware that the car was leaning and stuck. There was a knock on the driver's window. She turned, startled, to see a ruddy-faced old farmer smiling in at her, several of his teeth missing. She lowered the window.
'In a hurry, were you, love?'
'I'm sorry—'
'Lucky I saw you coming.'
'I don't know what happened. I must have been miles away.' She felt a sudden urge to cry but fought hard against it. 'Is your trailer all right?'
'He's fine.' The old boy glanced over her car. 'Looks like you might have got away with it, too. I've got a rope in the back - I'll tug you out.'
'I'm so sorry . . .'
The farmer grinned, only four brown teeth in the whole of his mouth. 'You're Mrs Cooper, aren't you? I've heard you're one to look out for. Still, you won't be doing that again, eh?'
Fifteen minutes later and having suffered no more than a broken mirror and wounded pride, Jenny drove carefully up the track lined with silver birch leading to Ty Argel, where, the good-natured farmer had assured her, she would find Steve 'still skulking in the woods'. She rounded a bend and pulled up outside a small farmhouse. There was a dirt yard in front in which stood his elderly Land Rover, assorted tools, building materials and a handful of chickens. Jenny climbed out, glad of her boots, and was met by an exuberant sheepdog running towards her, barking loudly. Dogs were one thing Jenny wasn't frightened by. Her grandparents had owned three of them. Patting her thighs, she said, 'Come on, then. There's a good girl.' The dog, sensing a friend, jumped up and planted two dirty paws on her shirt. Jenny pushed her down and ruffled the fur on her head, making the kind of baby noises all dogs love.
'He's a boy. Alfie.' Steve appeared from the stone barn at the far side of the yard, an axe in his hand. He dropped his roll-up and ground it underfoot as he walked over.
'He's very friendly.'
Alfie rolled on his back, feet in the air. A sign of complete trust.
'Unless you're the postman. Can't stand anyone official, can you, Alf? Just like his owner.' Steve crouched down and joined Jenny in stroking the dog's belly. He was in bliss.
Steve glanced at her boots. 'Come dressed for work, I see? I've got five ton of logs in there need splitting.'
Jenny smiled, noticing his smell: sweat and rolling tobacco, strong but not offensive. 'I figured I owed you some overtime. The garden looks great, by the way.'
'You should have seen it years ago when Joan Preece was still fit. It was beautiful, but sort of natural.'
'Hopefully it will be again.'
'The thing about gardens, they take a lot of attention. Don't touch them for weeks at a time they get resentful.'
Jenny pulled some notes out of her jeans pocket. 'I'm sure I'll need some regular help, if you're interested.'
'Sounds dangerously like a job to me.'
'I'll leave it up to you.' She offered the money.
He stood up from stroking the dog. 'If you're sure?'
'I didn't come all the way over here and drive into a ditch to stroke your dog, nice as he is.'
Steve smiled and stuffed the money into his hip pocket. 'Cheers.' He ran his eyes over the Golf, scratches all along the nearside. 'I can see you've been giving the hedge a trim. What happened?'
'Nearly ran into a tractor up the lane. Luckily he was decent about it and towed me out of the ditch.'
'Wasn't an old lad with no teeth?'
'Could be. Said his name was Rhodri something.'
'Glendower. That's him. Keep your doors shut tonight - he's got a real thing for the ladies.'
'I could hardly contain myself.'
'Since his wife died he's had most of the women up this valley. Promises them all half his farm.' He smiled. 'Let me get you a beer. I'll show you round.'
He fetched two bottles from the pantry - he didn't have a fridge, he said - and gave her a tour of the homestead. It comprised twelve acres of mostly coppiced woodland in which he cut logs and grew a variety of trees which he sold to a commercial nursery. At the back of the house was a vegetable garden where he raised produce which he supplied to local shops. He didn't offer to show Jenny inside, saying he was still working on the house, but from the glimpses she caught through the downstairs windows she saw a tidy but stark interior: solid floors and wooden furniture he might have made himself.
Leading her between the rows of produce, he rolled another cigarette - somewhat guiltily, she noticed, hiding from her whatever he had in his tobacco tin - and told her about some of the local characters. There was Dick Howell, an alcoholic accountant who lost his job, his wife, then took to living in the back of his estate car while he drank what was left of the money he had stolen from his clients. He'd camped out in Steve's barn for a while, then went to live with a woman old enough to be his mother. And there was Andy the carpenter, a young guy who went to do a job for a couple who had just moved down from London and never left; two years later the three of them were still sharing the same house. Some nights they'd all come to the pub together.
Listening to him talk, she found herself weighing him like a lawyer would a witness, thinking, was his calmness genuine or did it come from what he smoked?
She said, 'So what's your story?'
Steve stopped by the crooked wooden gate leading from the vegetable garden to the yard and took a slow pull on his beer. 'It's not the life I planned, that's for sure.'
Jenny leaned back against the fence. 'And what was that?'
'I was at architectural college in Bristol. Bought this place in my fourth year with money my dad left me. Had big plans for it. Then I met a girl . . .' He set his bottle on the gatepost and started to roll a third cigarette, a pained expression on his face. 'She was an art student. Talented, but mad. We fell in love, moved out here and fought like hell.' He broke off to strike a match and took a deep draw. 'Couple of years of that and I'd sort of let the studying go. She got high and threw herself in the river a couple of times, then took off with some bloke she met in rehab in Cardiff. Last I heard she was out in Thailand or somewhere.'
'What was her name?'
'Sarah Jane. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? He tugged his T-shirt down across his left shoulder revealing a jagged scar that ran almost to his neck. 'Did that with the kitchen knife. Could've killed me. Had the best sex ever the next day.'
