The Coroner (28 page)

    She
set down the receiver and sank into the upright chair at her desk. The room was
spinning slightly. Through the haze, she tried to picture what this information
meant. Either Harry had so much gin on top of his antidepressants he
accidentally nudged himself into a coronary, or he swallowed his entire
prescription, flushed the containers down the toilet, picked up the phone to
Alison to say goodbye - perhaps even to make a declaration of love - and ran
out of courage at the last minute. As the pills began to seep into his system
he climbed the stairs, changed into his pyjamas, bade his wife goodnight and
quietly lay down to die.

    After
seven good hours' sleep Jenny decided to face the world on a single tablet,
which she snapped in half. One half with breakfast, one saved for lunch. She
toyed with taking no more with her, but wasn't ready to let go of the security
blanket just yet. Instead she zipped them away in the furthest recess of her
handbag, making it an effort to get to them.

    Her
first stop was at the offices of the Severn Vale Youth Offending Team, a dreary
1970s building that stood in the middle of a row of convenience stores, nail
bars and take-aways, only a few hundred yards from the Broadlands Estate. There
was no reply when she arrived at nine a.m. and she had drunk two cups of tepid
coffee in the greasy spoon opposite before she spotted a slouching figure that
looked like Justin unlocking the front door at gone half past.

    He
took a long time responding to the buzzer, four attempts in all.

    'Who
is that?'

    'Jenny
Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner. I've a few more questions I need to ask
you, Mr Bennett.'

    'Right
... I'm about to see a client.'

    'I'm
sure the client can wait.' .

    'Can't
we fix a more convenient time?'

    Jenny
lost patience. 'I'm conducting a major inquiry, Mr

    Bennett.
You are under a legal duty to comply. Please let me in.'

    There
was a brief pause. The door-release sounded.

    Justin's
office was as she expected. Poky, untidy and tucked away at the end of the
first-floor corridor. He sat apprehensively behind his desk in jeans and a Lil'
Kim T-shirt and tried to look busy, shuffling coffee-stained papers into a
heap.

    'What
can I do for you?'

    'I'm
trying to find out where Katy Taylor was and who she was with on the days
before her death.'

    'No
idea. I only saw her once after she came out of Portshead, on the Wednesday ...
apart from passing her in the corridor on the Friday.'

    'When
she went to her Recovery from Addiction class?'

    'That's
right.'

    'In
this building?'

    'Upstairs.
We have a meeting room.'

    'Uh
huh.' Jenny brought a legal pad out of her briefcase and turned to a blank
page. She noticed Justin looking at it, wary. 'You said in evidence you talked
about the terms of her contract on that Wednesday. Did you talk about her time
in Portshead?'

    'I
probably asked her how she managed. I don't remember our exact words.'

    She
jotted a note. 'Did she tell you she was taking drugs all the way through,
marijuana and coke? They seem to have been in plentiful supply.'

    'No.
She didn't mention that.' He crossed and uncrossed his arms, having problems
finding a comfortable position.

    'She
was here before Christmas, wasn't she, on a drugs awareness course? She was on
a supervision order that time for possession with intent to supply cannabis
resin.'

    'I
believe so.'

    'Did
you have dealings with her back then?'

    'Not
directly. I knew of her - her name came up in team meetings, that's all.'

    'Was the
fact that she might be selling sex discussed?'

    'I
think so.'

    Jenny
made a note and looked up. 'Can I see her file please? I'd like to take it with
me.'

    'What,
now?'

    'As
she's dead, I can't think you've any more use for it.'

    'I'll
have to get authority. My boss is in shortly.'

    'The
only authority you need is mine, Mr Bennett. The file please.'

    Justin
rose hesitantly from his chair and went to a filing cabinet. Jenny kept her
eyes on him, checking that he didn't try to weed out any documents. He removed
a slender wallet file and handed it over the desk. She opened the flap and took
out the handful of papers, no more than twenty separate sheets. All of them
were tick-box forms apart from a typed report written prior to her sentence.
She skimmed through it and didn't learn anything she hadn't already known.

    'Don't
you write down any personal observations?'

    'I
don't tend to, no.'

    'Why
not?'

    He
shrugged. 'It's just not how it's done.'

    Jenny
glanced through the forms. They were all designed to ensure that criteria were
met, meetings attended and appropriate actions taken. The young offender was
often referred to as the 'client'. There was the odd scribbled note, but the
accent was on keeping it all as impersonal as possible. These soulless,
bureaucratic pro-formas said this agency was more concerned with protecting
itself and its employees than its clients. One of the documents was Katy's
contract with the Youth Offending Team in which she promised to keep her curfew,
go to school, arrive punctually at meetings and attend Recovery from Addiction
classes. There was also a clause about understanding her responsibility to
society, respect for others and our laws. Fine words.

    Jenny
slotted the papers back in the file. 'Do you have any idea who Katy was
associating with when she came out?'

    'No.'

    'Didn't
you talk to her about that? You must have a lot of local knowledge.'

    'As I
tried to explain to you in court, my job is to win the young person's trust,
not to act as an authority figure.'

    'And
you earn this trust how?'

    Her
question caught Justin off balance. He stammered, 'I try to make them see me as
someone they can talk to . . . honestly.'

    'But
you don't ask questions.'

    'Building
trust is a process.'

    Jenny
wanted to say,
and meanwhile she's out on the streets getting herself
killed.
'Tell me who you think she was associating with.'

    'I
can't say. I don't know.'

    She
was fast losing patience. Even as a lawyer several steps removed from this
street-level work, she got to know personalities and reputations. Justin was
part of the neighbourhood, all he did every day was meet its most persistent
teenage criminals.

    She
held him in her gaze. 'Why are you lying to me, Justin?'

    His
cheeks flushed red and his Adam's apple rose and sank in his throat. 'I'm not.
I don't know who her friends were . . . She wasn't very open with me.'

    'Really?'
She kept her eyes on him. 'She was an associate of Danny Wills, wasn't she?
When they were younger they were at school together, they were in the same
drugs awareness class here last December, and they met again in Portshead. He
died while she was in there.'

    'She
didn't mention him.'

    'He
was one of your "clients", too, wasn't he?'

    'Yeah
...'

    'You
didn't think to say what a shame about Danny? Had she seen him at Portshead?
Was she upset?'

    'We
didn't talk about him.'

    Jenny
let him sweat for a moment. She didn't know what to make of him. Was he a liar
or just a natural-born bureaucrat already skilled in the arts of
self-preservation?

    'What
time of day did you meet with Katy on the Wednesday?'

    'At
the end of the day. Around five, I think.'

    'That
explains a lot,' Jenny said, and let him reach his own conclusion. She shut her
legal pad and opened her briefcase. 'I'll take Danny's file, too.'

    She
read through it sitting in her car, which was parked outside a bookmaker's
where old white men and jobless young West Indians seemed to be forging an
unlikely common bond. A permanent cluster stood outside smoking cigarettes,
finding plenty of things to joke about. The file didn't contain many laughs. It
was thicker than Katy's but just as impersonal. It held almost no clue as to
who Danny Wills was apart from the list of offences he had committed. No one
perusing the pages would have gleaned any insight into the mind of an unhappy
teenager who grew up without a father or any security. The good news for Justin
Bennett and his bosses was that the form marked 'Reoffending Behaviour'
wouldn't be getting any more ticks. There was no box to record a death; if they
were deft enough Danny could even make it into the annual statistics as a
success.

    What
troubled her most was the lack of personal information - the kids' interests,
friends, skills. It felt like the only public official who had made a genuine
attempt to understand him was Harry Marshall when he compiled his pre-inquest
report. What she had found this morning made her angry. Without thinking, Jenny
took out the half-tablet she had saved for later and swallowed it. Washed down
with a mouthful of Diet Coke, it made her feel a little better, but not much.

    She
watched the men outside the bookmaker's, happy low- life, all smoking, friends
together. It struck her how quickly friendships must be made in prison. A
frightened child like Katy or Danny couldn't have avoided being drawn to a
familiar face in the canteen. They must have spoken.

    She
opened her legal pad, turned to the chronology she had roughly begun to compile
in the back pages and drew circles around the significant dates:

    She
stared at it, trying to fit Marshall into the equation. Simone Wills had said
his mood had changed about three days before the inquest, about the time when
he saw his doctor. Alison had said he'd been out of sorts for a while before
then, probably up and down with symptoms; but could an event have triggered his
decision to get hold of pills? Katy Taylor was missing at the time, dead in
fact, but as far as Jenny knew her name would have been unknown to Marshall
until Monday 30 April, when her body was discovered.

    She
tried the lawyer's trick of looking at the facts from every angle, plugging in
'what ifs'. A big one loomed out at her from the page:
what if
Marshall
had found a connection between Danny and Katy between the 22nd and the 27th?
And
what if
he knew or suspected she was dead? If he had made a link, if
it was something overwhelming that he simply couldn't fight, it would explain
both the feebleness of his inquest into Danny's death and his avoidance of an
inquest into Katy's. And then there was Tara Collins. She hadn't given up
digging on either of them and was now facing spurious criminal charges. There
had to be a common factor.

    Simone
Wills had a two-year-old boy on her hip and his three- year-old sister at her
feet. She stood in the doorway with uncombed hair in the baggy top and sweat
pants she had slept in. All three of them looked in need of a wash.