The Redeemed (2 page)

Jenny spent the remainder of her commute to work on the
phone, the recently acquired hands-free turning the once private space of her
car into an office. Government fraud officers had broken into a disused
industrial unit and discovered the crudely embalmed bodies of five elderly
Asians whose various pensions and allowances were still being claimed by their
relatives. The last thing the police wanted was to get involved in what they
called an 'all Indian', and they were trying to offload the legwork onto the coroner's
office. Jenny was dealing with the crane collapse - six phone calls from
victims' lawyers before nine a.m. - and told the Detective Superintendent in
charge to forget it. She had barely hung up when Alison called with the news
that a nine-year-old girl had been declared dead on arrival at the Vale from
suspected alcohol poisoning. Jenny sent her to witness the autopsy and take
statements from the ambulance crew and A & E team. The thought of a
pre-pubescent body stretched out in the morgue filled her with overwhelming and
irrational dread. Child deaths were one thing she had yet to learn to cope
with. She tried not to think why that might be.

She approached her office at 14 Jamaica Street to find a man
standing on the pavement outside. He was snake- hipped with short dark hair and
olive skin, dressed in a dark suit that emphasized the narrowness of his limbs.
He turned sharply at the sound of her footsteps as if startled, and she saw
that he was a priest: he wore a black clerical shirt of the Roman style, a thin
collar tight to his neck showing only a narrow band of white beneath his Adam's
apple. She noticed his eyes were jet black, his slender features as smooth as
polished walnut.

'Can I help you?' Jenny said. 'I'm Mrs Cooper. The coroner.'

A look of relief came over the priest's face. 'Ah, Mrs
Cooper. I am so sorry to trouble you. Father Lucas Starr. I was hoping to make
an appointment to discuss a case.' He spoke with an accent she couldn't place.
She would have said Spanish but couldn't be sure.

'Have you tried phoning? We are in the book.' She stepped
past him and unlocked the door.

'It's a matter of some urgency,' he said calmly, but in a way
which held her attention. 'Of life and death, you might say.'

Jenny glanced at her watch: it was nearly ten and she had a
hundred things that would demand her attention the moment she walked through
the door.

'Look, I'm really very busy this morning. How about at the
end of the day?'

The priest formed his right hand into a fist and enclosed it
with his left palm, the subconscious gesture somewhere between a threat and a
prayer. 'If you could only spare me ten minutes, Mrs Cooper. Your response
might make all the difference to the man with whose welfare I am concerned.'

'Ten? You're sure?'

'You have my word.'

She took him through the dimly lit, windowless hallway that
led to her ground-floor offices. There was a vague smell of damp; the cheap
wallpaper the landlord had recently pasted up was already starting to peel at
the corners. Ignoring the heap of mail waiting for her on Alison's desk, Jenny
ushered the priest through the heavy oak door to her room. He waited for her to
be seated behind her desk before he sat in the chair opposite, his back
straight as a board, hands crossed precisely on his lap.

Jenny said, 'I'm listening, Father . . . What should I call
you?'

'Father Starr is fine.'

Jenny nodded. 'You're a Catholic priest, I presume?'

'Yes,' he said, with a trace of hesitation. 'Not a parish
priest, a Jesuit in formation to be precise. I'm nearing the end of a five-year
ministry as a prison chaplain. One final year of tertianship and I become a
brother, God willing.'

'I had no idea it took that long.'

'Start to finish, seventeen years, sometimes more.' He smiled
softly. 'They don't let just anybody in.'

She placed him at about forty, but somehow his age didn't
seem to define him. She was curious about his accent, though: she detected
traces of American; no, Latin American - that was it. 'You said you were
concerned for someone's welfare.'

'Yes, please let me explain. This relates to the death of a
young woman named Eva Donaldson. I understand you are about to make the formal
certification of the cause of death?'

Jenny glanced at the file bound with white ribbon sitting on
top of one of three disorderly heaps on her desk.

'Eva Donaldson, the actress?'

Jenny had skimmed the Eva Donaldson file and picked up bits
and pieces from news reports over the couple of months since the young woman's
death, but hadn't stopped to consider the full story of her transformation
from art student to adult movie star, to religious convert and full-time campaigner
for Decency, a pressure group advocating a ban on internet pornography.

'The same. The man to whom I am ministering is named Paul
Craven. He confessed to killing her.'

'I remember. He pleaded guilty to her murder.'

'You are correct, but he was not in his right mind. Paul
Craven did not kill Eva Donaldson and he should not be spending the rest of his
life in prison. I fear that unless the truth is told his life may not be very
long.' A look of pain briefly passed across the priest's face. 'He is a
sensitive and a troubled man, and a deeply religious man also. He had been out
of prison for only a few days, having spent twenty- one years, all of his adult
life, in jail.'

'Before we go any further,' Jenny said, 'you have got to
understand - I'm a coroner. I determine cause of death. If you've evidence that
could overturn the finding of a criminal court, the correct course is to
instruct a lawyer to mount an appeal.'

Father Starr gave a patient nod. 'If we had a year or two,
maybe, but Mr Craven doesn't have that long. There is a struggle within him
that I sense he is losing.'

The phone rang. Jenny looked at it and pressed the divert
button. 'All right, fifteen minutes. Then I really have to get on.'

Father Starr reminded Jenny of the highlights of Eva's
career, telling her that she had been something of an inspirational figure to
him and the prisoners he ministered to in Telhurst, a long-term prison in south
Gloucestershire. At twenty she dropped out of art school and started acting in
pornographic films. At twenty-five she was at the peak of her career when a
road accident left her with permanent scars that disfigured one side of her
face. The production company she was contracted to spat her out and sued her
for loss of revenue, arguing that the drugs she had taken caused her to lose
control of the car. They won. The pills she took to rev her up for a shoot cost
her three hundred thousand in cash, her country house and her career.

Eva entered a downward spiral of drink, drugs and self-
loathing. Later, she would tell audiences how she was on the verge of taking
her own life - actually walking to the pharmacy to collect the painkillers she
planned to wash down with the vodka she had ready in her bag - when she
overheard a young woman telling a friend how the church she had joined had
given her a permanent high. Eva caught the name of it as she pushed on the
pharmacy door: the Mission Church of God.

Back then, nearly three years ago, the worshippers met in a
disused bingo hall. The pastor was an inspirational young American named Bobby
DeMont, who from nothing had built the mother church in Washington DC to be one
of the biggest single congregations in the USA, over thirty-five thousand
strong. That night Eva claimed she saw the light of God shine. It was in Bobby
DeMont's eyes as he spoke, and in the faces of the young men and women around
her as they heard the unadulterated truth for the first time in their lives.

Not only did the church give her back her will to live,
through it she was introduced to its chief benefactor, Michael, now Lord
Turnbull. At forty-one years of age Turnbull had sold his software company for
two hundred million dollars, but his conscience was troubled. As a young
idealist, he had pioneered video-streaming software in the hope of putting the
lie-peddling media multinationals out of business. What, in fact, he
inadvertently provided was the means for the pornography business to reach into
every home with a computer, making a lot of disgusting people exceedingly rich.
A year later Turnbull had been struggling to hold down a consultancy to a
lobbying company in Washington while suffering from increasingly crippling
depression. Dependent on alcohol and pills, he had started to fantasize about
jumping from his penthouse balcony when he chanced on an item on the local news
about a spate of miraculous healings that had taken place at the Mission Church
of God. Desperate, and with nothing to lose, the multi-millionaire sobered up
and took himself to an evening service. When Bobby DeMont called on all those
who hadn't yet pledged their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ to do so right now,
Michael Turnbull obeyed. He would later describe to television viewers around
the world the feeling when Bobby first laid his hands on him as like being
giddy with wine and madly in love, only many times stronger.

Born again, Michael donated generously to the church and
hatched the idea of starting a sister church in his home city of Bristol. Fired
up with the idea of taking the gospel back to a country that had brought so
many evangelists to the US, Bobby DeMont himself came to England for the first
few months to sow the seeds. Within a year the congregation had grown to a
thousand members and Michael Turnbull had established a lobby group, Decency,
to try to undo some of the damage he had inflicted on the world. When he heard
Eva Donaldson had become a member of the church, he immediately recruited her
to the cause. For the remaining year of her life she became the public face of
the campaign: her scarred beauty a symbol of the ugliness of pornography; her
first-hand testimony of being abused for profit a stain on the conscience of
every man who heard her.

The world's media and politicians were stunned by the level
of public enthusiasm for Decency's cause. Liberals poured scorn on what they
dismissed as an old-fashioned moral backlash, but facing down her critics in
what would become her most famous network television interview, Eva Donaldson
said, 'Do you think it's right that images of me having sex with men and women
I barely knew, committing acts I sometimes had to drug myself to perform, are
available to your child at the click of a mouse?' She left her opponents
floundering.

Jenny reminded her visitor of the time. His fifteen minutes
were up.

'I'm giving you the history, Mrs Cooper,' Father Starr said,
'to emphasize how many people there were with a motive to silence her.'

'But hasn't she been made a martyr? I've read there's a good
chance the Decency Bill they've been agitating for might actually become law.'

The priest leaned forward in his chair. 'Look at the
circumstances of her murder. There were no signs of forced entry, indicating
she opened her door to a caller. She was stabbed once, in the kitchen, with a
weapon which has never been recovered. There was no evidence of sexual
violation. At the time of her death Mr Craven was residing in a bedsit in
Redland, over seven miles from her home. Read the transcript of his police
interview - he couldn't state her address or even describe the route he would
have taken to it.'

'I've not read the whole file,' Jenny said, 'but I do recall
that Craven gave himself up at a police station, confessed freely, and that his
DNA was found in the grounds of Miss Donaldson's house.'

'The DNA is unreliable. They say he urinated on the doorstep.
I have spoken to experts who say there are very few cells excreted in urine.'

'Then it sounds as if you've grounds for appeal. An
uncorroborated confession by a man in a fragile state of mind isn't usually
sufficient for a conviction.'

'The psychiatrists say there's nothing wrong with him. I know
otherwise, but what notice would the courts take of a priest?'

'Surely Craven's had good lawyers representing him. What do
they think?'

'He told them he was guilty. Now he insists he isn't, they
are professionally embarrassed and he has to instruct new ones. But without
some evidence, some lead, he won't get legal aid. I understand that leaves him
at the mercy of the Criminal Appeal Cases Review Commission. Who knows when
they might get to his case - months, years?'

'Look,' Jenny said, 'where there's been a conviction a
coroner is entitled to investigate the circumstances of the death, but the law
states that I mustn't return a verdict which undermines a finding of the
criminal court, and that includes a guilty plea.'

'I've informed myself on the point,' Father Starr said. 'But
as I understand it, you would be acting perfectly lawfully in investigating the
circumstances of Miss Donaldson's death. And if you were to discover evidence
exonerating Mr Craven, it would be grounds for an appeal.'

Jenny smiled. 'I can't fault your optimism, Father. But is
that all you've got? Tell me what makes you so sure Craven didn't kill her.'

The priest studied her, carefully weighing his words. 'When
he was a vulnerable and disturbed teenager Paul Craven killed a young woman. I
have now known him for five years. I know him more intimately than any other
human being: I am his confessor. I have seen him turn to God and I have seen
God change and redeem him. I ask you to believe me when I say I can divine
whether he's lying about such a profound matter as whether he committed
murder.'