The Coroner (5 page)

    'Sure.'

    Peterson
led her along the corridor. As he walked, he pulled off his scrubs, revealing a
neat-fitting polo shirt, and tossed them along with the mask into a laundry
bin. He was slim for a man of his age, but vain, Jenny suspected. He arrived at
a door with corpses parked either side of it and held it open. 'After you.'
Jenny glanced uneasily at the bodies. Peterson said, 'Best patients in the NHS
- been waiting for hours and not a cheep out of them.'

    She
managed a faint smile and stepped into his modest office. There was a window on
to the hospital car park, shelves laden with textbooks, box files and several
indistinct objects floating in jars of formaldehyde. Peterson stepped over to a
stainless-steel wash-hand basin and proceeded to scrub his hands vigorously
with strong-smelling liquid soap.

    'Have
a seat.' He nodded towards a single chair next to the desk. 'Just taken over
the reins?'

    'First
day at the office.' She glanced around the room, her eye caught by the only
picture on the wall: a framed postcard picturing a dead weasel slumped over a
tiny desk, a miniature revolver in his paw, 'if you can call it that. I get the
impression my predecessor had let things slide a little.'

    Peterson
rinsed the suds from his skin and shut off the tap. 'I don't know, Harry
Marshall seemed a capable sort to me - not that I saw him very often.' He
tugged a paper towel out of a dispenser. 'Always found him a pleasure to deal
with.'

    'Not
one to get hung up on formalities.'

    He
balled up the wet paper towel and tossed it into the bin, a vaguely amused look
on his face. 'That sounded a little loaded.'

    'Merely
an observation. At the beginning of last month you conducted a post-mortem on a
fifteen-year-old girl, Katy Taylor. We're well into June and my office hasn't
received a report from you.'

    'You'll
have to jog my memory.'

    'Small
blonde girl. Suspected heroin overdose.'

    'I
remember. Yes - partially decomposed. What we call a stinker.'

    'Really.'

    'I
informed Marshall of my findings over the phone.'

    'Which
were?'

    'She
mainlined some close-to-pure heroin. I must get a couple like it every month.'

    'Was
there any possibility of suicide?'

    'You
can never rule it out.'

    'Then
Marshall was obliged by law to conduct an inquest. Any idea why he didn't?'

    'I'm
just a pathologist. I tell the coroner the cause of death and that's where my
responsibility ends.'

    'My officer
says you seldom produce a report within three weeks of post-mortem.'

    Peterson
smiled patiently. 'Mrs Cooper, Jenny - I share a secretary with five other
consultants, all of whose patients are still drawing breath. I'd love to get
reports out to your office more quickly, but there's a better chance of one of
those stiffs out there getting a hard-on.'

    Jenny
fixed him with the look she would give an evasive witness. 'Why don't you type
them yourself?'

    'Find
me another three hours in the day and I'd be glad to.'

    'In
future I won't be signing death certificates without sight of a written
report.'

    'Then
I suggest you take it up with the managers of this place. God knows, I've
tried.' He glanced at his watch. 'Talking of which, I've got a meeting with the
bastards any minute. I'm going to have to leave you.'

    'I'm
serious, Dr Peterson. That means bodies won't be released to undertakers for
burial.'

    
'What
?'
Peterson let out a laugh. 'Do you want to see my fridges? They're stuffed in
three deep as it is.'

    Jenny
rose from her chair. 'Then why don't you try storing them out in the car park?'
She gave him a disarming smile. 'My guess is you'll have a secretary in no
time. I look forward to reading the report.'

    Alison
had left a note saying, 'Gone to fetch more stuff from the station', and four
death report forms, all of them patients at the Vale. Jenny ate a take-out
salad at her desk and studied the new cases. The first was the homeless man who
had died from suspected liver failure in a cubicle in A&E. She didn't know
much medicine yet, but she knew enough to realize he would have left this world
in agonizing pain, probably on a trolley waiting for overstretched junior
doctors to decide which one of them would draw the short straw. The second was
a woman in her seventies who had been admitted with emphysema and promptly
contracted a hospital infection. The third was a male, sixty, dead on arrival
having suffered a suspected heart attack, and the fourth an unmarried Pakistani
girl of nineteen who had haemorrhaged while giving birth in a public park.

    She
imagined them all stacked up on top of one another in Peterson's fridge and
felt a momentary sense of dread.

    Her
desk phone rang, a welcome interruption.

    'Jenny
Cooper.'

    A
confident young woman said, 'Tara Collins,
Bristol Evening Post.
Are you
the new coroner for Severn Vale?'

    'Yes?'

    'Hi.
I wrote a piece a few weeks back about a boy who died in custody, Danny Wills.
Your predecessor handled the inquest.'

    'Uh-huh.'
Jenny tried to sound noncommittal, wary of reporters even though in family law
she had had few dealings with them.

    'Marshall
died three days after the jury returned a verdict of suicide.'

    'So I
understand.'

    There
was a brief pause on the line. 'His GP wrote out a death certificate stating
cause of death as a coronary, but as far as I can make out no post-mortem was
performed.'

    Jenny
sensed she was being drawn into something. 'I'm afraid I don't know any more than
you do, but if the GP was satisfied as to his cause of death—'

    'How
could he have been? Marshall only had mild angina. He had an ECG in February.'

    'What
exactly is it that you want, Ms Collins?'

    'Don't
you think it strange that only three days after conducting an inquest into the
death of a fourteen-year-old prisoner in a privately run prison, the coroner
died suddenly and didn't even undergo a post-mortem?'

    'I've
just taken over here. I don't know much about the Wills case - only what I read
in your paper, which wasn't exactly sympathetic to the boy, as I recall.'

    'My
copy got subbed ...' Tara Collins trailed off.

    Jenny
waited for her to continue.

    'Marshall
was a busy man before the inquest. He was taking statements from the staff at
Portshead, the prison escort service, the Youth Offending Team, and then he
pushed the whole thing through in a day. He only called four live witnesses and
went back on his promise to let the boy's mother give evidence.'

    It
was Jenny's turn to pause for thought, acutely aware that anything she said was
in danger of appearing in this evening's paper. She tried to change the
subject. 'How do you know about his ECG?'

    'A
source. I can't tell you who.'

    'And
his discussions with the family?'

    'I've
been in close contact with Mrs Wills since Danny died. Marshall promised her no
stone would be left unturned. He was giving her regular updates until three
days before the full hearing. Then he went silent. Never spoke to her again.'

    'Well,
I suppose there could be any number of explanations. I'd have to look at the
file before forming a view, but if the family are dissatisfied with the inquest
the normal course is to seek legal advice.'

    'There's
no legal aid for inquests and bugger all chance of getting any to challenge the
outcome of one.'

    'Mr
Marshall's death was very unfortunate,' Jenny said, straining to remain
patient. 'I'm sorry for his family and even more so for the family of Danny
Wills, but my job is to make sure that as of now this office is run in a
modern, efficient and open manner. I want to make sure that in future families
feel fully satisfied by the inquest process.'

    'Did
you read that from a script, Mrs Cooper? It sounded like it.'

    Jenny
bristled. 'Do you want me to respond, Ms Collins, or are you simply trying to
make a point?'

    The
journalist was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again she had her emotions
back under control. 'I apologize . . . But having covered Danny's case, it
seems to me that the truth never made it into the open. Not by a long way. And
then there's Marshall's death . . .'

    'What
about it?'

    'Doesn't
it strike you as rather more than coincidental?'

    'Given
that it was due to natural causes, no.'

    'His
behaviour leading up to the inquest was pretty peculiar.'

    'Never
having met him, I couldn't possibly comment.'

    'So
you won't be looking at the Wills case again?'

    'It's
been dealt with. I have no power to do so.'

    'What
about Section 13 of the Coroner's Act 1988? You can ask the High Court for
permission to let you hold a fresh inquest.'

    Jenny
felt the muscles in her throat tighten. She swallowed, resisting a powerful
urge to slam down the receiver. 'Since you've been researching the law, you'll
know that only happens where there's compelling new evidence.'

    'If
you look for it, you might find it. Goodbye, Mrs Cooper.'

    Jenny
slowly lowered the receiver on to the cradle, adrenalin coursing through her
veins. Half a day into the job and a journalist was already trying to catch her
out. Family lawyers had to cope with weeping mothers and violent fathers in
court, but the press were excluded. No case she'd conducted had ever attracted
an inch of newsprint. Dealing with the media was another thing she'd have to
learn on the job. Tara Collins was obviously working an angle, so she'd have to
be ready for her and on top of the facts. She found the Danny Wills file and
started to read.

    The
Form of Inquisition recorded the jury's verdict of suicide. In the narrative
section, the foreman had written: 'Between 2 and 4 a.m. the deceased tore a
strip from his bed sheet, tied one end to the bars of the window and, standing
on a chair, tied the other end around his neck, then kicked the chair away,
causing death by strangulation.'

    There
were statements from the maintenance man who discovered the body, the two
secure care officers who were on duty in the house unit that night, a security
guard who testified to the continuing malfunction of the CCTV system in the
unit, the medical staff who examined Danny on his admission, the director of
Portshead Farm and the case worker from the Youth Offending Team who had dealt
with him before he was sentenced. A copy of the staff rosters for the week
leading up to Danny's death had been carefully gone through: there were
personal phone numbers next to each name and ticks, she assumed, Marshall had
made as he worked through them.

    Near
the back of the file was an aerial photograph and detailed plan of the secure
training centre which Marshall had annotated. It was a small prison in an
exposed field on the South Gloucestershire side of the Severn estuary, midway
between the Severn Bridge and Oldbury nuclear power station, four miles to the
east.

    Portshead
Farm consisted of five buildings positioned around a central yard area and a
playing field. The entire complex was surrounded by a twelve-foot concrete wall
topped with razor wire and surveillance cameras. At the entrance were the
reception and medical centre in which new inmates were examined and, if
necessary, housed in one of several observation cells before being certified
fit for transfer to one of the two single-sex house units. The fourth building
contained classrooms in which trainees underwent a crude form of education. The
fifth, nearest the playing field, was the canteen, which doubled as a
gymnasium.

    The
centre was equipped to hold up to a hundred trainees between the ages of twelve
and seventeen. While child custody had virtually ceased to exist in some parts
of Europe, Britain's appetite for incarcerating children was increasing. Over
four thousand were currently imprisoned, nearly five times the number of its
nearest rival, France.