The Coroner (18 page)

    During
the worst times, while David had slept soundly next to her, she would reach for
her leather-bound confirmation Bible and look for words to send her peacefully
to sleep. It would always fall open at Matthew 7:14:
strait is the gate and
narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
She would close her eyes and pray in earnest, for the first time since she was
a child, that she would find the narrow way and be delivered from her
suffering. Divorce had brought some relief, leaving her job a little more,
certainly enough that she hadn't felt the need to pray for several months now,
but almost without conscious thought, she had gravitated to a new career that
dealt only with the sum of all her fears. Sitting at a dead man's desk, dealing
only with the dead, she dared to ask herself whether those prayers were somehow
in the process of being answered; whether she had been led to this place for a
purpose.

    With
an effort, she forced her mind back to the present and composed a series of
emails on her laptop, requesting postmortems for the recently deceased. It was
strangely comforting to reduce these horrors to a series of administrative
tasks. It gave her back a sense of control. Perhaps, she thought, all people
who dealt in death were in fact secretly terrified by it.

    She
had cleared her desk sufficiently even to contemplate the accounts when Alison
returned. She had been speaking to a trusted undertaker, Mr Dawes, about the
practicalities of exhuming a body. It was a very uncommon procedure which he
had performed only twice in his thirty-year career. The form was to do it at
night, after the cemetery gates were shut. The police usually liked to be
present, although there was no necessity for it, and some relatives liked to be
nearby. Having a clergyman to hand was also considered advisable. Dawes and his
men would arrange for a mechanical excavator to dig most of the way down but
the final few feet of soil would be removed manually. If everything went to
plan the coffin could be out of the ground within an hour. The undertakers
would then transport it to the hospital mortuary in Newport.

    Keeping
it businesslike, Jenny asked what sort of condition the remains would be in.
Alison said Katy was buried in a solid coffin which would hardly have
deteriorated at all in just over a month. The body itself would have further
degraded, but most of the tissue would still be available for examination. As
modern coffins were pretty much airtight, decomposition took many months. Dawes
had told her that it could take up to ten years for a corpse to skeletonize.

    Jenny
instructed her to make the necessary arrangements and returned to her computer
to draft the warrant ordering the exhumation to take place the following night.

    Alison
said, 'You're absolutely sure you want to go ahead?'

    Jenny
opened her copy of Jervis and turned to the index, looking for 'exhumation'. 'It's
not a question of wanting to, I don't have any choice. I didn't directly accuse
Swainton or Peterson of negligence, but that's what it amounts to.'

    'It
does seem very soon in your career to be doing something as drastic as digging
up a body.'

    Jenny
found the page she wanted and looked up. There was more than concern on
Alison's face; she looked troubled, perplexed. 'You said to me that something
happened to Harry Marshall in his final weeks, those were your words. The last
act he performed as coroner was writing a death certificate in this case when
he should have held an inquest. Think about what that means.'

    'He
obviously wasn't feeling well. It could have been a mistake . . . Maybe he
couldn't face holding another inquest?'

    'The
night he died he called you at nearly midnight. I didn't like to say anything,
but years ago something like that happened to me. I had a university friend
who'd been depressed and took her own life. She knew I was worried about her,
but hours before she did it she told me she was OK, on the mend.'

    'You
don't know that's what happened.' There was a note of panic in Alison's voice.

    'No.
But if he did know he was going to die, he did everything bar leaving an explicit
instruction to ensure that his successor took the case up. He signed a death
certificate which couldn't pass without question and he locked the file away in
his drawer. Even if he thought he would be back at work the next morning, what
was the file doing in there? Who was he keeping it from?'

    'Not
from me.'

    'Right.
And no one else has access to this office, do they?'

    Alison
shook her head.

    'So
unless there's something more you think I ought to know, I'll continue to apply
the law and see where it leads.'

    There
was no reply on the Taylors' number but somewhere on the file Jenny found a
note of Andy's mobile. He answered it against the background roar of heavy
machinery, saying he'd come to work the late shift out on some groundworks at
Sharpness. When Jenny asked if she could see him or his wife in person he said
she could come and meet him on site, he had a break at seven p.m.

    Jenny
found her way across an unfamiliar part of the south Gloucestershire countryside
and picked up temporary signs that directed her along lanes beside the estuary
to the construction site. It was situated within sight of the concrete
sarcophagus which was the former Berkeley nuclear power station. The evening
was overcast and the air hung heavy with mist and faint drizzle. A brooding sky
merged with the murky grey water of the Severn racing out to sea on a low tide.

    She
crept along a section of unmade road and arrived at a Portakabin serving as
site reception next to a ten-foot-high wire fence adorned with signs warning
that the area was patrolled by dogs and security guards. On the other side of
the wire, bulldozers were creating a roadway, no doubt destined for the
anticipated Berkeley II. Permission had yet to be granted for a new nuclear
power plant at the site, but local opinion was in no doubt that it was on its
way. Jenny's view on the issue was straightforward: if they were so safe, why
not build them in the middle of London?

    A
security guard in hard hat and reflective jerkin directed her to park on a
muddy patch of gravel and summoned Andy Taylor to the gate via his
walkie-talkie. Jenny climbed out of the car and looked out at the river while
she waited for him. Although it was June the wind was cold; her light mac did little
to keep her warm or the rain from cutting through to her skin. She took a
perverse pleasure in huddling in a minor gale watching a flock of geese flying
upstream in perfect formation, a feat of grace and beauty unmatched by human
beings.

    Andy
Taylor drove up to the site entrance in a pick-up truck and stepped out of the
cab wearing Wellington boots and an orange fluorescent jacket over suit
trousers, shirt and tie. He walked along the inside perimeter of the wire and
stopped near to Jenny, the fence between them.

    'If I
go past the gate I have to sign out and back in again. Causes problems.'

    'Fine.'
She could tell he was keen to get whatever needed to be said out of the way,
his eyes darting over to the Portakabin as if their meeting was somehow
illicit. 'I wish there was some other way of doing this, Mr Taylor . . .'

    He
looked at her with a face of stone. A gust of chilly wind whipped across their
faces. 'When's it happening?'

    'Tomorrow
night. Eleven p.m. You're entitled to be there if you wish.'

    He
shook his head. 'For God's sake, don't tell my wife. I'll deal with her.' He
turned back towards the truck.

    Jenny
said, 'She blames herself, doesn't she? Any mother would.'

    Andy
stopped and spun sharply back round to face her, raw emotion now shining in his
face. 'We worked all the hours God sent to get a house near a good school,
Claire doing nights, whatever it took. And what happened? Our thirteen-
year-old daughter got screwed and screwed and drugs pushed at her until she was
dead. My wife does
not
blame herself. We blame the teachers, the police,
the politicians, every last Goddamned one of those self-righteous bastards who
spend their lives telling other people what's best for them but can't tell
right from wrong. That's who we blame.'

    He
wrenched open the door of the truck, jumped in and took off in a shower of mud
and grit.

    The
rain picked up and heavier, darker storm clouds descended. The sky split with
lightning and traffic inched at snail's pace across the Severn Bridge, warning
signs flashing in the semi-darkness. Jenny gripped the steering wheel with both
hands, rigid with tension. Halfway across she hit a bank of fog. The crawling
train of cars ahead of her disappeared into nothingness. She flicked on the
radio and tried to distract herself with music, but the banal tunes weren't
enough to dislodge her mounting panic. Her heart raced, every breath was an
effort, the road swam in front of her eyes. Convinced she would be swept off
the bridge and hurled into the boiling river below, it was all she could do to
keep creeping forwards, but somehow she clung on and made it to the far side.

    Climbing
the slip road from the motorway, she broke through to the light and her
claustrophobic symptoms began to ease. She was flooded with relief that she
hadn't succumbed to a full-blown panic attack, but despaired that the prospect
had returned to haunt her. Dr Travis would have said it was a sign of excessive
stress. She felt it more as a kind of psychic disturbance which had begun that
morning before the inquest convened. It was as if, over the course of the day,
she had been shaken by a mental earthquake which had opened up dark, bottomless
cracks large enough to swallow her.

    She
tried to make sense of it. At the heart of her anxiety was something dreadful
but vaguely familiar. It carried a mood of complete despair. She held the word
'despair', as Dr Travis had taught her. What image came to mind?

    It
was Katy. The photograph of her sitting balled up in the bushes. It resonated
with a state she remembered from her own adolescence, of storming out of the
house and walking aimlessly for miles and miles, her rage and insecurity
distilling into numbness and an overwhelming desire for release.

    It
felt self-indulgent to equate her own juvenile emotions with the dead child's,
but it caused Jenny to question whether, if someone had approached her in that
state and offered her a syringe full of heroin, she would have taken it
willingly.

    The answer
was no. Even in her bleakest moments, the spark of life had always been strong
in her. Instinctively, she felt Katy was the same. Despite her wildness, she
was well dressed, energetic, ferocious. Something told her, and it was nothing
more than a gut feeling, that Katy wasn't ready to die.

    The
atmosphere around her, and around Danny Wills, was of heavy but not inevitable
tragedy.

    That's
what she was feeling: the horror and injustice of life cut short. Isolating
this thought, she felt an overwhelming pang of loneliness. The valley, hanging
with low, dark clouds, had become forbidding and ominous, the oak woods a place
where restless souls wandered in confusion. She put her foot down harder on the
accelerator. Alone on the twisting road, every shape in the hedgerow was now a
threatening presence, every shadow a ghost. She glanced at a flicker in the
rear-view mirror, half expecting to see a figure in the back seat, ready to
feel powerful fingers tightening around her neck. The imaginary presence grew
so strong she glanced over her shoulder to check for him; when he wasn't there
she felt sure he had ducked beneath her seat. She reached around with her left
hand and felt the empty space. She knew it was paranoia, her imagination
playing tricks, but that didn't make it any less real. She slammed the steering
wheel with her fist in frustration: she was forty-two years old and as haunted
by invisible spectres as an infant.

    As
she rounded the corner into Tintern, her phantoms retreated, leaving her feeling
drained and stupid. She swung left up the hill towards home, trying to cram her
mind with some reassuringly trivial thoughts. Was there food in the fridge?
What needed doing in the garden? No. Damn. She had meant to call in at the
supermarket in Chepstow. All she had at home were some tins, pasta and a limp
lettuce. And she was out of red wine. Tonight was not a night she could manage
without a drink.

    With
alcohol on her mind and contemplating the twelve- mile round trip to the
supermarket, she slowed to pass the cars parked in the lane outside the Apple
Tree. Normally she would never have considered going into a pub by herself, but
among the vehicles she recognized Steve's Land Rover. If he was there she could
just about face going up to the bar to buy a bottle of wine to take home. And
right now her need was outweighing her shyness.