The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (33 page)

‘Too bloody interesting. What have those English scumbags dealt you this time?’

Blinking against the sharp sunlight, Jenny gave him the essentials of the Adam Jordan case. He betrayed no hint of alarm or surprise as she told her story. Nothing that happened in England, it seemed, could ever shock him, not even the suggestion of an innocent aid worker being murdered by government agents working to suppress details of a dirty African war. For a man whose professional life had been mostly taken up with small-town burglaries and closing-time brawls, he had an admirable ability to absorb the unexpected.

‘So in a nutshell, Mrs Cooper, you’d like me to knock on the door of MI5 and drag them all down to Chepstow police station,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘I can’t see that being too much of a problem.’

‘I was hoping you might help with tracing the girl.’

‘And how would I justify that, exactly? I can’t see that a crime has been committed in Wales.’

‘I live in Wales—’

Williams gave a tolerant smile and took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.

‘I think I may have been followed. I went to a restaurant with my son and his girlfriend. There was a man outside in a car. He was watching me.’

‘After all you’ve told me I’d be surprised if you weren’t being watched, but it still doesn’t get me over the border all the way down the M4 to bloody Berkshire, does it?’

‘There’s nothing more to be found out there. I’ve a feeling she’ll be in Bristol – that’s where he’d been withdrawing money.’

‘Last time I checked, Bristol was still in unliberated territory, Mrs Cooper. Cigarette?’

She wavered.

‘Thank you.’

She shared the flame from his battered brass lighter, recalling the first time she had seen it. It had been in the interview room at the police station nearly five years before, when Williams had arrested both her and her then boyfriend, Steve, who had had the habit of growing marijuana on his farm tucked away in the woods. Williams had been wise enough to see that the tip-off had been a malicious attempt to throw Jenny off her investigation, and days later was dragging reluctant witnesses to her impromptu courtroom in Chepstow Baptist Hall. In no small part thanks to him, the death of fourteen-year-old Danny Wills in a privately run juvenile prison had been exposed as a vicious murder.

‘You remember the Danny Wills case?’ Jenny said.

‘I remember your face when I nicked you. You were wearing a blue silk dressing gown, and not a lot else, as I recall.’

‘You told me to hold the inquest here in Chepstow so you and your team could help out. What if I were to do that again? The African girl’s a witness I need to trace – no one could object to that.’ Jenny tried to read Williams’s face.

He blew out a long, thin stream of smoke and turned to her with a look of amused resignation. ‘You always find your bloody way round everything, don’t you, Mrs Cooper?’

It was six o’clock. She was tired and tense, but it was too early to give up on the day, and the weekend loomed like a void. Driving back through the valley Jenny found herself glancing nervously in her rear-view mirror, checking for phantom followers. She hadn’t truly allowed herself to believe that she had been watched coming out of the restaurant with Ross and Sally, but Williams’s comment had unnerved her. Suddenly her rural haven didn’t feel so safe any more. She had planned to drive home and call Dr Henry Blake, Sonia Blake’s ex-husband, a man whom she had established was an immunologist working at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, but a cautionary instinct told her that might not be wise. A few simple keystrokes on a GCHQ computer and every word of her landline and mobile calls would be relayed directly to Ruth Webley.

She descended into the village of Tintern, but rather than turn left up the hillside to Melin Bach, she continued on past the abbey ruins and around the bend in the river until she arrived at the phone box that stood a little along from the Rose and Crown pub. Pulling off the road, she again checked her mirrors, but the only vehicles in view were a tractor and an old Toyota pick-up truck that belonged to a local stonemason. Save for a handful of tourists who had stopped to admire the view over the Wye, there was no one in sight.

It had been years since she had pulled open the heavy, creaking door of a red phone box. Its familiar, powerful odour – as unpleasant as ever – evoked teenage memories of being marooned at far-flung railway stations, rain beating against the scratched and broken panes; and of precious ten-pence calls to long-forgotten boyfriends, the ‘I love you’s whispered in the desperate dying seconds after the warning pips had sounded. But coins, she discovered, were no longer necessary. The phone demanded her credit card and charged her obscenely before allowing her the privilege of dialling a number.

She connected to a receptionist and asked to be put through to Dr Henry Blake. She tracked him down to an extension in the immunology department.

‘Dr Blake? It’s Jenny Cooper. Coroner for the Severn Vale.’

‘Severn Vale? I thought this was an Oxford matter.’

‘This isn’t about your ex-wife.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking it is, but I’m not the coroner dealing with her case.’ She was floundering.
Pull yourself together, Jenny.
‘I’m dealing with another death, one that occurred in my jurisdiction. I was talking to your wife before she—’

‘Hold on. Whose death are we talking about here?’

‘The name of the deceased was Adam Jordan.’

‘I’ve never heard of him. I’m sorry. I don’t think I can help you.’

‘Could we please meet, Dr Blake?’ She headed off his protest. ‘It really is most urgent.’

‘I’m very busy this week—’

‘Tonight. I can be with you in an hour and a half. I’d be grateful.’

He made no reply. In the silence, she could hear the faint click of computer keys. She guessed Blake was doing what had become second nature to her: checking the bona fides of his caller online even as their conversation was in progress.

‘My inquiry is into the death of a man who had met professionally with your wife,’ she continued. ‘He was an aid worker recently returned from South Sudan. This may mean more to you than it does to me: he had bought an out-of-print book by a Professor Roman Slavsky. Your ex-wife had a file on Slavsky in her college rooms, but after her death I found its contents to be missing.’

She heard the sound of Blake’s breath on the receiver. Her mention of Slavsky seemed to have shocked him.

‘How well do you know Oxford?’ he asked her.

‘Better than I did a fortnight ago.’

‘I’ll be at the High Street entrance to the Botanic Garden at 8.15.’

‘I’ll hurry.’

Blake rang off, and as Jenny set down the phone she saw from the corner of her eye a dark, expensive-looking car drive slowly past, the driver invisible behind its tinted glass. She waited, frozen, until it had turned the corner and disappeared from view, then hurried to her Land Rover.

The figure waiting outside the iron gates opposite Magdalen Bridge took her by surprise. She had pictured a precise and businesslike man in a suit; a younger version of her ex-husband. Blake could have been mistaken for a student: he wore jeans and a long-sleeved V-neck T-shirt that hugged his slim torso. Thick black hair flopped over his forehead.

‘Dr Blake?’ she ventured cautiously.

‘Yes.’

‘Jenny Cooper. Sorry I’m late. I always forget there’s nowhere to park in this city.’

His eyes, dark blue, scanned her with a scholar’s precision. He would be comparing her with the photographs he had seen of her online. If he had taken five minutes to read the press reports triggered by her name, he would know her whole life history, too. The Internet had made it a curse from which she would never entirely free herself.

‘Hi.’ He extended a hand. ‘Henry Blake.’

She saw in his eyes something of the deep seriousness behind his casual appearance. He was an observer, she sensed, someone whose mind never ceased making connections.

She glanced at the locked gates. ‘Oh, are we too late?’

‘I’ve a key.’ He reached into his jeans pockets. ‘I’m one of the “friends”, a trustee, actually.’ He unfastened the padlock. ‘Don’t tell any of my colleagues – they’ll think I’ve lost my edge.’ He led her through the gate and carefully locked it after them. ‘I was advising on the medicinal plants collection and discovered a premature interest in horticulture. It’s funny how things take you.’

Jenny smiled, sensing that he was nervous of her. The anxious mention of his colleagues told her he was wary of being seen with her, too. A deserted garden was one of the few safe places to meet.

They set off along the gravel path between immaculately striped lawns planted with specimen trees and shrubs towards a circular ornamental pond.

‘Are you fond of gardens?’ Blake said stiffly. Small talk didn’t seem to come naturally.

‘I’ve a patch of wilderness I occasionally try to tame,’ she answered, ‘but it doesn’t seem to like me interfering with it. I think of it that way – like it has a life of its own.’

The corners of Blake’s mouth twitched into a hint of a smile. Jenny felt him relax a little. She had been in his presence only a minute or two, and could already be sure that his marriage to Sonia would have been short on frivolity.

‘Would you like me to tell you what brought me to your ex-wife?’ Jenny asked.

Blake glanced across at her with an expression that told her he half-suspected the answer.

‘I can’t say I want to hear it, but I suppose I had better.’

For the second time in the space of a few hours, Jenny recounted the story of Adam Jordan’s violent death and his secretive trip to Oxford two days beforehand. She told him how she had arrived at the cafe in Oxford Castle and been led first to Alex Forster, then to Sonia Blake, and then to a world of which she had little or no understanding. Obeying an instinct to keep some of the pieces to herself, she stopped short of telling him about the African girl and the meeting at Great Shefford, and skipped on to her second visit to Sonia’s rooms. She described the events immediately after her death, the fragments of information she had collected the following day, and her visit to Jason Kwan at the Diamond Light Source.

Blake had been listening in silence as he paced evenly along the path, but mention of the Diamond Light Source brought him abruptly to attention.

‘Sonia visited the synchrotron? You’re sure?’

‘She’s on the visitor log.’

‘Do you have any idea why?’

‘Curiosity, Kwan said. Though I can’t put my hand on my heart and say I believe he was telling the whole truth. They’ve got some pretty stiff security policing that place. He didn’t seem altogether at ease.’

Blake shook his head. ‘I thought she’d got over all that.’

‘All what?’ Jenny asked.

He sighed heavily, as if a great burden had been placed on his shoulders. ‘Do you know about her father?’

‘I know he was a geneticist who was murdered thirty years ago. I read an article about the discovery of his remains.’

‘That was about the last straw for our marriage.’

They had arrived at a second small pond surrounded by large slabs of tiered rock carpeted with alpine plants. A nearby pine tree carried the scent of mountains in summer. Blake stopped and sat on one of the granite shelves. Jenny sat near, though not close, allowing him the space to be alone with his thoughts.

‘One thing you have to understand about Sonia is that she was driven, completely consumed, by the obsession to find out what happened to her father. She was seven years old when he vanished. One moment he was watching her play softball, the next he’d disappeared with some guy in a suit. That’s all we ever knew for certain.’ Jenny could see he was having to wring the story out of himself. ‘What you won’t read on the Internet is that straight after he went missing, his wife was given the third degree and ended up having a breakdown. Sonia lived most of her childhood with an alcoholic grandmother in New Jersey. I guess the memory of her dead father was all she had to cling on to.’

‘Who was it harassing her mother?’ Jenny asked.

‘First of all it was the company he’d worked for. It was the Wild West days in the biotech industry and his outfit was in a race for patents. Millions of dollars were at stake. It was natural enough to assume he’d vanished somewhere with the company secrets. And then came the intelligence agencies. As a young guy he’d worked for a few years in the US military. Apparently there was a lot of bioweaponry stuff being explored back in the late sixties. Not the most ethical work, but for three years’ service the Army would pay off your student loan. His dad worked in a steel mill, so it was a hard offer to resist. Anyway, he did his time at some facility in Georgia called Cornmill Creek – I don’t believe Sonia ever found out exactly what it was he was doing there – and when he vanished fifteen years later, they thought he might have been turned by the Soviets all those years ago and finally jumped ship.’

Blake picked at a loose crumb of rock and tossed it into the pond. ‘I think on some level Sonia had bought into that version. She wanted to believe he was still alive. I used to think that perhaps her studying politics had just been one huge, lifelong attempt to understand how principles could lead a man to abandon his family. When his body turned up it was more than she could handle. Turns out the most likely explanation was a rival company had simply had him killed – just business. So what do you do when the mystery you’ve built your life around solving is effectively solved?’