The Innocent: A Coroner Jenny Cooper Crime Short
Read The Innocent: A Coroner Jenny Cooper Crime Short Online
Authors: M R Hall
M. R. HALL
ONE
Sensible, professional people weren’t meant to experience the things that Jenny Cooper often did. Sane. Sober. Rational. Those were the sort of words that ought to describe one of Her Majesty’s coroners. She held judicial office. Her job was fearlessly to examine the circumstances of unnatural deaths and deliver solid answers. She had become, hard though it was for her to believe, a figure of authority. But in unexpected moments – it could happen as easily during a testy courtroom exchange as in the silence of the night – the membrane between this world and the next became so thin, she felt that if she chose to, she could peer through it like a gauze.
Her maternal grandmother, a Welsh woman who read fortunes in tea leaves and claimed to hear a knock at her bedroom window before a friend or family member died, would have said Jenny wasn’t suffering moments of madness, but had ‘the gift’. Jenny called it an overactive imagination caused by an unsettled childhood.
And yet, try as she might to dismiss these impressions as tricks of the mind, she couldn’t help wonder why it was that she had found herself in one of the very few professions outside the priesthood that straddled the divide between life and death. Was there, as her grandmother would have insisted, a reason for everything? Jenny hadn’t
chosen
to become a coroner; the opportunity had simply presented itself at the right time. There hadn’t been many options for a burnedout family lawyer struggling with acute anxiety and surviving on tranquillizers. A job with no living clients had seemed the least testing choice.
These thoughts were in her mind because it had happened again this morning. She had woken early under the shadow of an unremembered dream. Its unformed images shrouded her like a mist that refused to disperse, even as she set off from her cottage in the Wye Valley for her office in Bristol. The early September morning smelt fresh and pure, and the valley was bathed in peach-tinted sunlight, but the uneasy feeling refused to leave her. It was as if something were profoundly, but intangibly wrong, and in the confined space of her car the sensation only intensified. Jenny told herself not to be so stupid, and in an effort to switch her attention elsewhere, filled her mind with the list of tasks that awaited her that day: a brief court hearing in which she would return a verdict in a fatal industrial accident, two recently bereaved families to meet after lunch and a consultation with the Home Office pathologist.
The tactic worked. Her mind became absorbed in her cases and a feeling of familiar and comfortable security returned. Just another stress symptom, she told herself. Too much on her plate. Back in control, she pressed down on the accelerator, eager to get to the office and on with business. She shifted down to third gear and swung her car into the steep bend at the foot of Minepit Wood.
She rounded the corner to see a huge four-wheel-drive tractor coming in the opposite direction. She moved in further towards the edge of the road, but as their two vehicles closed on each other something flickered at the margins of her vision: a small, shadowy figure stepping out from the entrance to a forest track. Jenny’s reaction was instinctive and uncon- scious. She jerked the steering wheel sharply, though the road was slick with dew. Her tyres lost purchase. The car became a bucking animal, slewing left and right and careering into the tractor’s path.
She stamped down on the break and closed her eyes, aware, in an oddly detached sort of way, that it would be for the last time.
There was a high-pitched squeal of rubber on tarmac, the deep bellow of an angry horn and a violent thwack like a pigeon hitting the windscreen.
Moments passed. Stillness. Jenny blinked. She was alive, or at least she appeared to be. She had come to a halt, unharmed, on the muddy verge at the opposite side of the road. The sound she had heard was her wing mirror being ripped from its moorings. She had avoided death by inches; by hundredths of a second. She glanced up at a patch of sky through a gap in the trees: it was the bluest, clearest blue she could recall seeing since …
‘You all right? What happened there, then?’
Jenny looked round, startled, as a man dressed in muddy overalls, who she assumed was the tractor driver, knocked on the passenger window. She pressed the switch to wind it down and struggled to find her voice.
‘The girl—’
The driver looked at her blankly. ‘Girl?’
‘She stepped in front of me.’
‘There weren’t no girl, love.’ He scratched his bearded cheek and glanced up and down the empty road. ‘Probably saw a deer in the hedge. There’s plenty of the buggers about.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll fetch a rope – tow you off this mud.’
As he turned and trudged away Jenny experienced a sensation inside her head like a spark jumping between electrodes.
And then she felt it again, only more keenly than before. It was with her: the presence. Was it a memory or something more? She couldn’t say. But she knew now what it was. The date was 7 September. Ten years to the day that Jenny had set out on another bright autumn morning that, now she thought of it, had been the start of everything.
Ten years previously
Another weekday morning. Another scramble. Jenny arrived at her office in the council building a little before eight having dumped her resentful nine-year-old son, Ross, at ‘breakfast club’. The hassled working mothers who wrestled their tired, bad-tempered kids out of their cars and into the school canteen had an understanding: they didn’t bother each other. They didn’t attempt small talk and they certainly didn’t cast judgemental glances. Jenny suspected that like her, the other breakfast club mums were loaded with guilt and could see no means of escape from their frantic routines. She salved her conscience with the thought that at least Ross was a thousand times better off than most of the kids she dealt with at work. As principal lawyer for the North Somerset Child Protection Team, she had more than three hundred live files. Each one represented a troubled child for whom her department was trying to secure a better, safer future. Most days her job felt like pushing rocks uphill, but now and then, when she succeeded in placing an innocent beyond harm’s reach, she experienced moments of unadulterated happiness. They were what kept her going. That and endless cups of bitter, instant coffee.
Jenny was scheduled to be in court at 10 a.m. to apply for an emergency care order. The previous afternoon a primary school teacher had found cigarette burns on the arms of a five-year-old boy. She suspected they had been dealt by the mother’s boyfriend. Jenny was desperate not to fail in her application. During her twelve years in practice, she had learned that men capable of stubbing out cigarettes on a child’s flesh were also capable of far worse.
She was engrossed in her papers when her boss, Elaine Stewart, arrived. Elaine was only forty-five, but looked ten years older, every case another gouge in her prematurely lined face.
‘Did you hear about Natasha Greenslade?’ Elaine asked.
Jenny looked up. Natasha was one of her longest-standing clients. She almost thought of her as a daughter. For more than six years Natasha had passed in and out of care while her chaotic, manipulative mother, Karen, ricocheted between unsuitable and dangerous boyfriends. Jenny had not long ago managed to place the intelligent and delicate fourteenyear-old girl with her favourite foster parents, Frank and Alison Bartlett. She had hoped Natasha would stay with them until she was sixteen. ‘What about her?’
‘I had a call on the way in from Detective Sergeant Murray. Apparently she’s been reported missing.’
‘When?’
‘First thing. Hasn’t she got a history of running away? I told you she would have been safer in a secure home.’
‘She’ll have gone to her mother’s. She always does. I’ll give Pete a call.’
Jenny lifted the phone and dialled Pete Murray’s direct line at The Bridewell police station. She knew his number by heart. He’d been dealing with the Greenslades’problems almost as long as she had.
‘Hi, Pete, it’s Jenny. Elaine just told me Natasha Greenslade’s missing.’
‘That’s right. The foster dad phoned. I’m just off to pay him a visit.’
‘Maybe you should try her mother’s first.’
‘I’ve already sent a squad car round. No sign.’
‘Did they speak to Karen?’
‘Yeah. Hasn’t seen her for a month.’
‘Oh. OK. Leave it a little while. I expect that’s where you’ll find her.’
Pete was silent for a moment, as if he were holding something back.
‘What is it?’ Jenny asked.
‘You remember I thought Natasha would have been better off in a secure home.’
‘You and everyone else. You don’t solve a child’s problems by locking her up.’
‘Yeah, but you keep them in one place.’
‘Goodbye, Pete.’ Jenny put down the phone, despairing of her colleagues. There was a lonely, confused teenage girl wandering the Bristol streets and all they could think about was covering their own backs.
As she went back to her work, Elaine said, ‘Maybe we should consider applying for a secure accommodation order now this has happened. We can find her somewhere gentle.’
Jenny pictured the rooms she had recently visited in Oak House, a new secure council-run home for the care system’s most difficult cases. There were tightly spaced bars at all of the windows, and the bedroom doors, locked for ten hours each night, were made of heavy steel. A prison for children who had committed no crime.
‘Like Oak House?’ Jenny said, with no hint of irony.
‘Yes. I think that would suit her very well,’ Elaine said. ‘Why don’t you see if they’ve got space?’
The court hearing was a triumph. Judge Emerson examined the photographs of the boy’s injuries and granted the emergency care order after hearing only ten minutes of argument. The child would be collected from school that afternoon by social workers and placed with a foster family. Meanwhile, the police would be paying his mother and her boyfriend a visit. Nine times out of ten the sudden loss of a child would jolt the mother into turning against the abuser. Jenny had a feeling this would be such a case. She hoped to be back in court in a few days’time with the good news that the boyfriend had been arrested and the boy was safe to go home.
Walking back to the car park through the busy heart of Bristol, Jenny’s mind was moving on to the other cases vying for her attention: the Down’s Syndrome toddler whose wellmeaning parents were failing to care for him; the pregnant thirteen-year-old who was determined to give birth; and the fifteen-year-old Pakistani girl who had voluntarily placed herself in care to prevent a forced marriage to a cousin. Each one was fraught with emotional dilemmas and knotty legal problems. She drew in a deep breath and told herself to relax, to enjoy her moment of success before fighting the next battle.
What the hell? The world wouldn’t end if she allowed herself ten minutes off. She took a short detour to the waterfront and found a café with outside tables overlooking the dock. She switched off her phone, ordered a latte, and for the first time in weeks, lifted her eyes to the sky. It was Hockney blue, so clear and unadulterated she wanted to turn the world upside down and dive in.
Jenny was back in the council building climbing the stairs to her office on the second floor when she remembered why she felt so strangely peaceful – she had forgotten to switch on her phone. She fetched it out, brought it to life and checked her voicemail. In the space of forty minutes she had collected six messages. The first was an angry tirade from the lawyer representing the family of the Pakistani girl. His clients were demanding access to their daughter as their ‘human right’. Jenny deleted it and moved on. The second message began strangely – indistinct sounds from a public place – then a familiar voice.