The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (44 page)

Jenny turned to the six women and three men of the jury, and told them that they had been summoned to decide the cause of death of Adam Patrick Jordan, aged thirty-two, whose body was found at the edge of the southbound carriageway of the M5 motorway beneath a bridge from which he appeared to have fallen. Having heard the evidence, they would be required to return a verdict of accident, misadventure (meaning that the deceased had died whilst freely undertaking a risk), suicide, unlawful killing, or, if what they heard proved inconclusive, an open verdict.

Adam Jordan had been an aid worker in the turbulent border territory of South Sudan, Jenny told them, he had helped to raise crops from the arid scrub and had saved countless lives, but that was the least remarkable thing they would hear about him. Here, in this hall, in this quiet corner of the Welsh countryside, it would fall to them, nine ordinary men and women, to listen to and assess some quite extraordinary evidence that nothing in their day-to-day lives was likely to have prepared them for. The coroner’s court, she explained, was a unique institution: it may be small and without the funds to reside in the splendour of its cousins the criminal and civil courts, but for eight hundred years coroners and their juries had provided answers to unnatural deaths, no matter how bizarre or unexpected their circumstances. This was a court made up of ordinary people, and its only duty was to the truth.

Her opening remarks concluded, she did the job that Alison would always have done, and called for the first witness: Detective Inspector Stephen Watling.

Watling cut an evasive figure, in the chair between Jenny and the jury that served for a witness box, and rattled through his evidence with the impatience of a man eager to be elsewhere. He described the discovery of Adam Jordan’s mangled body at the side of the motorway as matter-of-factly as if he had been reading a schedule of exhibits. The discovery of two-year-old Sam, wandering alone in a nearby woodland cemetery, was also relayed in the same dispassionate tone. Jordan had left no note; his phone records had revealed nothing except business and domestic calls; his wife was at a loss for an explanation; nothing he had learned suggested either a motive for suicide or evidence of foul play.

He paused, as if to gather strength, before concluding his testimony with a statement that gave a clue to his determination not to let the names in his narrative become human beings. ‘In my experience, which is more extensive than I would wish, men who kill themselves tend to do so violently and without warning. In that respect, I see nothing at all unusual in Mr Jordan’s case.’

Jenny let his words go unchallenged. He didn’t know what was to come, or how radically his version of events would be overturned.

Dr Andy Kerr was next to come forward. He opened with a description of Adam Jordan’s body when it arrived in the mortuary. As a result of a massive impact with a fast-moving vehicle, there was little remaining of the head and face above the lower jaw, and the pelvis and legs had been crushed by the wheels of several vehicles. The nature of the injuries was such that it was impossible to say whether he had landed head or feet first on the carriageway, or whether he was killed by the fall or as the result of being run over. He had had no alcohol or drugs in his system, which was unusual in male suicides: it placed him in an exclusive 10 per cent.

Jenny prompted him to tell the jury what had subsequently happened to Jordan’s body in the mortuary. He related the events of Sophie Freeman’s and Elena Lujan’s deaths and described his accidental discovery that Sophie’s vital organs, along with Jordan’s, had been removed without permission.

Sticking to her agreement with Fitzpatrick to keep mention of the activities of his officers to a minimum, Jenny steered Dr Kerr past the events of Sophie Freeman’s inquest, and asked him whether he later had cause to take further tissue samples from Jordan’s body.

‘I did,’ Dr Kerr said, in his deadpan Belfast accent.

‘And what did you find?’

‘In Mr Jordan’s stomach contents there were present meningitis bacteria of the identical strain to that which killed Miss Freeman and Miss Lujan. It’s most unusual. I can only presume that shortly before death he consumed some contaminated liquid; whether he did so voluntarily or not, I couldn’t say.’

There was a sound – a muted exclamation – from the cluster of waiting witnesses. It had come from the slender figure of Ayen Deng, who was seated between Harry Thorn and his unnaturally beautiful girlfriend. Gabra put a comforting arm around Ayen’s shoulder. Harry stared straight ahead, pretending not to have noticed Ayen’s momentary distress.

‘Thank you, Dr Kerr,’ Jenny said. ‘Unless you have any questions, Mr Brightland, I’ll call Mr Harry Thorn.’

The solicitor shook his head and returned his attention to the file in which he had been absorbed. No doubt he was performing the neat lawyer’s trick of billing two clients at once.

Thorn marched forward. He refused the Christian oath and chose instead to affirm. The lines that gave his features the appearance of cracked earth on a drought-stricken plain had been gouged even deeper by his recent ordeal at the hands of Webley’s interrogators. The defiant spirit had left him, along with his profane eloquence. He wouldn’t have smoked a joint in days, and he was moody and monosyllabic as a result. But Jenny was persistent and determined, and unrelentingly dragged the story of what had happened in Ginya out of him.

For nearly six months he and Adam had been working at a Dinka village named Anakubori, some forty miles from the newly drawn border that separated the mostly Muslim Sudan to the north from its largely Christian and animist neighbour, South Sudan. Decades of civil war had given way to an uneasy and patchy peace. The violence that persisted was mostly tribal: in the absence of civil authority, old scores and property disputes were often settled at the point of a gun. But the feared Arab militias, the ruthless, rag-tag Muslim mercenaries from across North African known as the Janjaweed, had largely vanished from the scene.

AFAD’s project involved installing a trickle-irrigation system that would enable a village of five hundred Dinka, who for centuries had scratched a Stone Age living from the dust, to feed themselves and generate an income. Three-quarters of the crop was maize, and a quarter, Thorn admitted, was marijuana that was bought by middle men who shipped it north to Egypt and Morocco.

‘I didn’t see it as a moral issue,’ Thorn said. ‘These people needed dollars for medicine and solar panels. They weren’t going to be buying Ferraris.’

‘How did Adam Jordan feel about that?’ Jenny asked.

‘He took some persuading, but that’s Africa,’ Thorn said with a shrug. ‘It attracts idealists and creates realists. Adam was still on the journey.’

Jenny would have liked to have known more about Harry Thorn’s adventures in the African drugs trade, but much as she might have tried to squeeze him, he wasn’t obliged to answer questions that might prove incriminating. Keeping instead to Adam’s story, Jenny took him back to a day in early May. Thorn had been busy negotiating with contractors who’d come from across the border to drill a new well and there was a disagreement over money. Harry was at full stretch keeping angry villagers and irate Muslim workers apart when a government water tanker and a jeep drove in. He sent Adam to deal with them. The two drivers had been dispatched to deliver the tanker to the village of Ginya, fifty miles further down the road, where the solar pump drawing water from their borehole had failed. Engineers were on the way, but the village was without water. The tanker driver was reluctant to go there, frightened that his face might be remembered from a skirmish he had fought in during the civil war. He was angling for someone else to drive the tanker the last leg and was willing to offer a day’s wages in return. Adam was keen to deliver the tanker himself, fearing that there might be a lot of thirsty and distressed people at Ginya in need of medical help, but Thorn needed him, and persuaded a local man with kin in Ginya to deliver the truck instead.

The round-trip over dirt roads took the best part of twenty-four hours. The man Thorn had sent returned in the jeep with the second of the two drivers sent by the government, happy to report that he had arrived just in time; the people had been a day and a half without water – they were thirsty and had jostled to fill their buckets – but there had been no casualties. He went to collect his payment from the first government driver who had been too frightened to make the trip to Ginya, but he was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, his colleague who had been driving the jeep took off on his own. Thorn and Adam had been too busy supervising the rebellious drilling crew to pay the disappearance much attention, but the next morning a rumour swept the village that a group of Janjaweed had been seen camping a couple of miles to the north in the bush. The boy who had stumbled on them said they had AK-47s.

Adam smelt a rat and wanted to drive back to Ginya straight away, but Harry needed him to help keep the peace in what was still a tense situation. If the Anakubori well wasn’t sunk within the following few days, they risked missing that year’s growing season altogether.

Adam made the journey to Ginya four days later. On his return he would say that he was greeted by a vision of hell. The village was a collection of large thatched huts surrounded by a wooden stockade. As he approached along the dirt road he was struck by its unnatural quietness. No swarm of excited children came running out to meet him; thirsty, emaciated livestock were wandering freely. He drove through the entrance to the stockade and into a wall of flies. There were bodies everywhere – men, women, children, babies – all of them bloated and disfigured beyond recognition. They lay in contorted positions that could only have been caused by agonizing death throes. There were no signs of violence and no damage to the buildings, which led him to wonder if they had been poisoned by the water. He went from hut to hut searching for survivors, but found none. He was heading back out of the village, having given up hope, when he saw a solitary young woman walking across the scrub from a cattle shelter that stood outside the village perimeter. It was Ayen. She told him she was the only person left alive. Adam’s assumption was right: she claimed that the water had poisoned everyone except her.

A tremor of emotion entered Thorn’s voice; a glimpse of the man he must once have been before. He paused to take a drink with an unsteady hand before continuing his story.

Adam brought Ayen back to the village, but Thorn insisted he take her straight to the hospital in the nearest city, Malakal, and that for his own safety he not come back. Thorn realized that as soon as the villagers found out what had happened, his life would be in danger, too: there were blood ties between Anakubori and Ginya, and outsiders could all too easily become scapegoats in the search for revenge. He left that night, only a few hours after Adam, and hadn’t been back since.

‘Do you know who sent that tanker?’ Jenny asked.

‘Not for certain,’ Thorn replied. ‘But during the civil war there was a notoriously bloody battle near Ginya. Nearly a hundred Janjaweed were captured and massacred. I heard stories that the Southerners decided to give them a taste of their own medicine and killed them the sharia way: buried them up to their necks and stoned them to death. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine a party coming back over the border to settle the score.’

‘Who did you tell about this incident, apart from the local police?’

‘That was it.’

‘Didn’t you think it was worthy of further inquiry – a massacre of innocent people?’

Thorn was defiant. ‘My organization has saved the lives of tens of thousands. No one wants us to succeed. No one wants to give us money. All anyone ever wants is to profit from us or use us for political ends. I don’t believe it was a mistake they came to our village. Whoever it was, whatever they represented, they wanted to destroy our work and our reputation beyond all hope of redemption. I told Adam to leave the girl in Malakal –’ he glanced over at Ayen – ‘a pretty girl, she’d find a husband, but he wouldn’t do it. He hadn’t grasped the fundamentals. We were there for the many, not the few. You start caring about this person or that person, you’re no longer an aid worker, you’re a social worker, you’re a street cleaner, not a street
builder
.’

It was an impassioned speech that shook the hall like a peel of thunder, but one that left Thorn standing stooped and hollow. He had paid a high price for his tough brand of compassion. The man who counted the value of lives in numbers had had the love burned out of him by the African sun, leaving him as pitted and dry as bones in the desert.

Jenny let him end his evidence there. The later events at AFAD’s offices were still under joint investigation by detectives from the Metropolitan Police and agents from Ruth Webley’s department, and fell outside the agreed scope of the inquest. All that Jenny knew was that Eda Hincks had been working in the office when two men of Middle Eastern appearance had burst in demanding to know the whereabouts of Ayen Deng. When she refused to talk, they had violently assaulted her, slashed both her breasts and left her for dead. Detective Superintendent Williams had found her, alive but unconscious. If he’d been fifteen minutes later, Eda Hincks would surely have been dead. In a short statement she had given from her hospital bed, Eda had confirmed that she knew nothing about the events in Ginya and had never heard of Ayen Deng.

Jenny called the young African woman sitting between Harry Thorn and Gabra forward to give evidence. Ayen Deng was slightly built, with hair knitted in tight cornrows, her eyes permanently wide and startled. With one hand grasping the Bible and with the other pressed to her chest, she spoke her oath in English that carried a strong hint of an Irish accent. When Jenny asked if she had understood the proceedings so far, Ayen said she had understood them perfectly. Until the age of twelve, she had been educated by Irish nuns, the Sisters of Charity, who had run a mission school in Ginya. They had stayed for much of the war, but when the fighting got close, the villagers had made them leave; the Janjaweed would have slaughtered white nuns like goats.