The Redeemed (21 page)

Dressed in a
crisp charcoal suit with a purple silk tie, Detective Inspector Vernon Goodison
strolled to the witness chair with the air of a man only too happy to help.
Jenny immediately marked him down as one of the new breed of media-savvy
detectives, outwardly benign and aware that every word they uttered in public
and published by the press would be forever recorded on the internet. Jenny
watched the jury respond warmly to his trust-me smile.

With impressive
fluency, Goodison recounted how he received a call early on the morning of
Monday, 10 May to say that Eva Donaldson's body had been discovered by her
cleaner. Together with four scene-of-crime officers, he had arrived twenty
minutes later. The paramedics had had the good sense to realize she was
irretrievably dead and had left the scene virtually undisturbed. Alison handed
the jury copies of various police photographs showing the body lying on the
kitchen floor, and views to and from the front door through the hallway. Jenny
saw several of them flinch at the pin-sharp images: Eva curled up like a baby,
her silky blonde hair trailing in a huge, sticky pool of coagulated blood.

Goodison
confirmed that there was no sign of forced entry to the property, nor any
indication that it had been ransacked. An extensive search had been made for
the murder weapon - presumed to be a knife with a blade approximately seven
inches long - but none had been found.

Jenny said, 'You
must have seen many murder scenes in your career, Inspector. What was your
initial assessment?'

'I thought it
was a domestic,' Goodison said, 'a row with a boyfriend that had got
overheated. But there again you take care only to respond to the evidence.'

'Was there
evidence that anyone had been in the house with her?'

'Nothing that we
could find. None of the neighbours had heard anything. There was a bottle of
wine open on the counter, only one glass.'

'Where did you
and your team conclude the stabbing had taken place?'

Goodison held up
the photograph that was taken from just outside the front door. 'It's exactly
twenty-seven feet from the threshold to where she was lying. There was no
evidence of blood in the hallway, but some spots were found just inside the
kitchen here. It's possible they could have sprayed out from across the room,
but my best guess is it happened here, near the kitchen door. If I was forced
to speculate, I'd say she was backing away from someone who'd come through the
front door.'

'And there were
no signs of sexual assault?'

'No.'

'Did that strike
you as odd?'

Goodison said,
'When he got to the house, I don't believe Craven had the courage to go through
with what he intended. She opened the door to him, he forced his way in,
stabbed her and ran.'

'Not pausing to
steal anything?'

'There was no evidence
of that. Nothing of interest was recovered from his bedsit.'

'But there were
items missing from Miss Donaldson's house you might have expected to find: a
personal computer, a mobile phone.'

Goodison smiled
patiently, as if to congratulate Jenny on spotting the obvious. 'We were
informed by Miss Donaldson's employers that they had advised her to cease
electronic communications in February of this year. We think she may have
disposed of her laptop computer altogether. We do believe she possessed a mobile
phone, though she hadn't retained a regular contract for more than a year.'

'Was it
recovered?'

'No. But there
are several possibilities. Craven may have taken it, or even an opportunist
thief. Miss Donaldson may have mislaid it. We simply can't say.'

'Did you
discover her phone number?'

'Yes. I'll have
one of my officers provide it if you wish.' He nodded to Fraser Knight and his
team. The police solicitor made a note.

Jenny said, 'You
didn't recover the murder weapon either?'

'No. That was
slightly more troubling. Craven said in interview that he threw it in some
bushes, but he couldn't remember where. It's seven miles from Miss Donaldson's
home to his address, and he claims to have covered the entire distance on foot.
We did all we could within our resources.' He turned to the jury. 'Obviously
once Craven had confessed and his DNA was confirmed at the scene, our efforts
were better spent elsewhere.'

The power of a
taped confession was such, Jenny soon realized, that only the most cynical and
experienced of lawyers could resist its allure. As the film played on an old-
fashioned television monitor, Jenny observed the jurors frown and shake their
heads as Craven told his story about going to visit Eva to help her with her
good works, and claimed that she had touched him, saying, 'Fuck me for the
devil.' She studied their faces as Goodison teased out his final admission:
'And that's when I picked up a knife from the counter and stuck it in her,
right there, in the chest.'

They shuddered,
appalled at the casualness of his delivery. His obvious lies and vagueness Over
detail only confirmed the impression of guilt. He was the perfect embodiment of
the inexplicable face of evil.

'Did you collect
the doormat before or after this interview?' Jenny asked Goodison when the
film was over.

'We already had
it bagged up. It was sent for analysis after Craven said he had urinated on
it.'

She cut to the
chase. 'I appreciate you had a confession from a man a psychiatrist deemed sane
enough to be telling the truth, but once he had said those words, did you consider
any other possible explanation for Miss Donaldson's death?'

'No, ma'am,'
Goodison answered. 'There was no need.'

'Did you ever
doubt the reliability of his confession?'

Goodison
considered his answer carefully. 'He clearly wasn't as sane as you or I, but
this was a man who had killed before, and once we had his DNA on the doormat
there was no question.'

Jenny gestured
to Alison and handed her a copy of the list of people Goodison's team had
spoken to at the Mission Church of God. Alison passed it to Goodison, who
pulled a pair of designer reading glasses from his breast pocket and took his
time fully digesting it.

'One of your
officers recorded the names of people your team spoke to informally. I presume
these conversations happened on Monday, 10 and Tuesday, 11 May before Craven
presented himself at the police station.'

'I would presume
so,' Goodison said.

'Do any records
of these conversations exist?'

'It's unlikely
unless anything of interest was said, in which case we would have taken a
statement.'

'Did any
suspects emerge?'

'No,' Goodison
said confidently.

You liar
,
Jenny thought to herself, but let nothing show on her face. 'Who compiled this
list?'

'That would have
been Detective Constable Stokes,' Goodison replied. 'He was coordinating the
inquiry team.'

Jenny turned to
Alison. 'Ask DC Stokes to come to court this afternoon.'

Goodison glanced
at Fraser Knight, who remained inscrutable, his only gesture a slight,
disinterested raising of his chin. Jenny knew it would be no use her pressing
the point any further with this detective. He would bluff and obfuscate all
morning.

She changed the
subject. 'The time code on the interview tape says you commenced at four
thirty-five p.m. According to the duty sergeant's log, Craven presented himself
at the police station at two minutes past midday. Did you or your officers have
any informal conversations with him during the intervening four hours?'

'Only a brief
one,' Goodison said. 'He wanted to talk straight away. I asked him to keep it
for the interview. It took four hours for his solicitor to arrive.'

Jenny made a
note to check what Craven had to say on the subject.

'One last point:
Craven said he picked up the knife from the kitchen counter. Did you check the
cutlery drawers to see if there was a seven-inch carving knife missing? Was
there an incomplete set, perhaps?'

Goodison said,
'You know as well as I do, ma'am, without concrete proof that a knife was
missing, evidence that one
may
have been missing wouldn't have been let anywhere near a criminal court.'

'Was there or
wasn't there a knife missing? You must have a view.'

Out of the
corner of her eye, Jenny saw Fraser Knight give the tiniest shake of his head.

Goodison said,
'No, ma'am. I don't.'

Fraser Knight
offered no cross-examination of his man, calculating that while Jenny might
have revealed her suspicions, the jury needed no reminding of them. Sullivan
preferred the head-on approach, and set to with the energy of a boxer stepping
up to the mark.

'I think what's
being suggested to you, albeit in code, Inspector, is that you had a quiet word
with Mr Craven before his interview to make sure he remembered his lines.'

'No,' Goodison
said, with a faint smile. 'It's absolutely out of the question.'

'Maybe I'm
reading a little too much into the subtext,' Sullivan said, 'but we might as
well air it. In the back of some people's minds might be the thought that
Craven urinated on the doormat of a former female porn star, but that he didn't
actually kill her. Is it possible that he left his deposit hours, or even days
before she died?'

Goodison said,
'This is a man who had spent his entire adult life in prison and had only
recently been released.' He looked towards Father Starr. 'I know there are some
who believe he'd experienced a genuine religious conversion, but in my view
this was a psychopath capable of murder and deceit; a man beyond redemption.'

'Thank you,
Inspector,' Sullivan said, as if with relief that the truth had at last been
heard. 'You have been most helpful.'

Ruth Markham,
the lawyer representing Kenneth Donaldson, took up the baton, greeting the
detective with a polite, unchallenging smile.

'Can you confirm
for us please, Inspector, that your inquiries didn't reveal any other suspect
with a motive for murdering Miss Donaldson?'

. 'I can.'

'And can you
also confirm that her home address was in fact listed on
contact-a-celebrity.com, as Craven claimed?'

'It was.'

'Thank you,
Inspector. That is all.'

His
cross-examination over, Goodison stepped down from the witness box without
having suffered a single uncomfortable moment. Jenny began to wonder if her
suspicion of him had been misplaced.

She took the
uncontentious witnesses next, and dealt swiftly with two scene-of-crime
officers and a senior forensic scientist, Dr Jordan, who had tested the doormat
and the various scrapings and tissue samples taken from Eva's body. There was
no evidence of foreign DNA under Eva's nails, Jordan confirmed, nor any traces
on the swabs taken from her lips, cheeks, eyelids and the backs of her hands.
If there had been a physical struggle he would have expected the attacker's
saliva to have sprayed onto the victim's skin; its absence suggested their
contact was extremely brief. He produced a photograph of the doormat which had
successfully trapped the small number of epithelial cells present in urine. He
attempted to explain the finer points of mitochondrial DNA amplification to a
glazed jury, but with no evidence to contradict his findings, Jenny saved him the
effort. She was satisfied that Dr Jordan had proved beyond doubt that some base
male instinct had caused Paul Craven to urinate on the threshold of Eva
Donaldson's home. The only question in her mind was what had happened next.

Father Starr's
expression grew darker and more censorious as the morning drew on; Jenny
deliberately avoided his accusing gaze as Alison read aloud the original
post-mortem report filed by the Home Office pathologist, Dr Aden Thomas. Starr
had expected her to confront and challenge aggressively, to test each witness
to the limit and upbraid them for not having exhausted every possible
explanation for Eva's death. Justice was something his spiritual brothers had
frequently died for, she could imagine him saying, and here she was letting
partial truth pass unchallenged. But there was a limit to how far she could
question the integrity of witnesses, a barrier of convention beyond which she
simply could not go, even for a priest.

As Alison
recited the final sentences, the flaking double doors at the back hall creaked
open. Michael and Christine Turnbull entered, followed by Lennox Strong. Heads
turned and even jaded members of the press smiled in acknowledgement of the
famous couple. Jenny noted Kenneth Donaldson's nod of greeting and their
smiles in return.

A knot of
tension formed in the pit of Jenny's stomach at the prospect of what she now
had to do.

She called for
Dr Andrew Kerr to come forward.

The pathologist
was not yet a confident public performer. He was capable of spending entire
winter evenings alone in the mortuary, but giving evidence to a room full of
people was an ordeal she knew he dreaded. Jenny would have to lead him by the
hand.

'Dr Kerr,
recently you examined Miss Donaldson's body and carried out a review of the
findings of the first post-mortem carried out by the Home Office pathologist,
Dr Aden Thomas.'

'That's
correct.'

'Did you agree
with Thomas's conclusion?'

'Yes,' Dr Kerr
said cautiously. 'Broadly.'

'We've seen the
photographs of the single stab wound. You do accept that was the cause of
death.'

'It was. But
with respect to Dr Thomas, he didn't comment on either the angle of the wound
or the force needed to inflict it.' He glanced at the restive lawyers. 'The
blade penetrated to a distance of six and a half inches and pierced the aorta.
Blood pressure would have collapsed in seconds. The victim would have been
unconscious in moments, dead in a minute or two at the most.' He brushed his
face nervously with his hand. 'But to force a blade, even that of a slender
carving knife, right through the chest wall, would take considerable force.'

'Can you
quantify that for us?' Jenny asked.

'An average
person's full strength.' He paused to take a gulp of water, wilting under the
sceptical glares of lawyers sitting less than six feet away from him. 'And the
blade went in almost exactly horizontally, whereas most aggressive knife wounds
are either angled upwards or downwards —’

'Because?'

'I'll show you.'
He took a pen from his jacket pocket and held it in a clenched fist. 'You're
either stabbing down from the top of the chest, or up from beneath the ribcage.
And it's hard to kill someone with a knife. That's why you read that victims
have been stabbed twenty or more times. The attacker doesn't often get the
penetration to deliver a fatal blow.'

Ed Prince leaned
forward and whispered urgently in Sullivan's ear. Sullivan frowned and gave a
dismissive shake of his head. He wasn't impressed so far.

Jenny said, 'Are
you able to say precisely how this wound was inflicted?'

'Not precisely,
but I can draw certain reasonable conclusions.'

'Such as?'

'It was either a
lucky blow or the killer acted very deliberately, aiming the knife horizontally
so as to pierce the ribs with a single deep strike.' He rubbed a finger around
the inside of his shirt collar. 'What it doesn't look like is a frenzied,
emotional attack such as you might see following a rape, for example; it feels
too calculated for that.'

The lawyers
frowned. The police solicitor tapped Fraser Knight urgently on the shoulder and
handed him a note.

Jenny said, 'Why
do you think Dr Thomas failed to raise these points?'

'Each
pathologist tends to draw their own frame of reference. He obviously didn't see
it as his job to speculate.' He shrugged. 'Times change. I was taught
differently.'

Jenny watched
two women in the front row of the jury look again at their shared photograph of
Eva's body. They were starting to think, to imagine different possibilities.

Bracing herself,
Jenny said, 'Was there anything else about the body which you noticed that Dr
Thomas hadn't remarked on?'

'It's not of any
forensic value,' Dr Kerr said, eager to get to the end of his ordeal, 'but I
noticed that there were two tattoos on the body. The first was a butterfly
design just above the base of the spine, and the second two words tattooed just
above the pubic bone on the left side of the mid-line.'

'Can you say
when she had these tattoos done?'

'The one on her
back had been there for some time, years perhaps. The one on her front was very
fresh, perhaps only a few weeks old.'

Jenny nodded to
Alison, who handed out two photographs showing the front and back of Eva's
body to the jury and to the lawyers. Inset on each was a close-up of the
corresponding tattoo.

'Did you take
these photographs, Dr Kerr?'

'I did. Early
last week.'

Sullivan rose
abruptly to his feet. 'Can I ask you, ma'am, why these photographs weren't
disclosed to the interested parties before this hearing?'

Jenny glanced at
Kenneth Donaldson, who was in whispered conversation with one of Ed Prince's
assistants.

'There's no
legal requirement for a coroner to disclose in advance, Mr Sullivan.'

'There's a right
to see a post-mortem report in advance,' Sullivan snapped back.

'And copies were
sent to your instructing solicitors.'

'It contained no
mention of these tattoos.'

Praying that
Andy Kerr would hold his nerve, Jenny said, 'Perhaps Dr Kerr didn't consider
them relevant. And I fail to see what difference disclosure of this detail
would have made.'

'Ma'am, I wish
to raise a matter of law in the absence of the jury.'

'No, Mr
Sullivan. There is no reason for this evidence to be withdrawn, and there is
certainly no reason for its existence to be suppressed.'

Sullivan jabbed
the air with his forefinger, 'Ma'am, there are extremely important issues of
public interest that need to be addressed with a full consideration of the
law.'

'You
misunderstand the nature of a coroner's court, Mr Sullivan. I am not an arbiter
between competing cases, I decide what evidence I consider relevant. If you
have a complaint you make it to the High Court.'

'Then I request
an immediate adjournment.'

'Out of the
question.'

Prince's second
assistant hurried to the door, phone in hand. Jenny had no doubt that within
the hour a London QC would be in front of a judge pleading for an injunction to
prevent reporting of the existence of Eva's dubious body art.

Jenny turned to
the jury. ' "Daddy's girl" is what the tattoo says.'

Kenneth
Donaldson fixed her with an expression of icy contempt.

Ignoring Sullivan,
who remained stubbornly on his feet, she continued, 'In a moment you'll be
hearing from the artist who drew it.'

In a matter of
seconds, half the twenty or so reporters in the room had dashed from their
seats and hurried for the exit to phone the revelation through to their
editors. In a tight race against a possible injunction they could have their
story on the internet in minutes and spread out across the social networks and
blogs seconds later. Even if a High Court judge could be persuaded on spurious
grounds to rule that the public had no right to know, it would be already too
late to put the genie back in the bottle, and the lawyers knew it.

Calmly, Jenny
said, 'You can sit down now, Mr Sullivan.'

The frustrated
prosecutor slammed into his chair and turned to plot his revenge with a furious
Ed Prince. Jenny didn't dare look at the Turnbulls and Lennox Strong, but she
did catch a glimpse of Father Starr: for a fleeting moment he was smiling.

Jenny turned to
Dr Kerr. 'Is there anything else you wish to add, Dr Kerr?'

'No, ma'am,' he
said apprehensively.

Fraser Knight
rose to his full imposing height and fixed the young pathologist with a look of
disappointment tinged with disbelief. 'How long have you been a fully qualified
pathologist, Dr Kerr?'

'Thirteen
months.'

'I see. And Dr
Aden Thomas?'

Dr Kerr reddened
with embarrassment. 'I've only met him once or twice—'

'Thirty-two
years,' Fraser Knight said. He looked down at his legal pad and cast a
disapproving eye over its contents. 'You have seen fit to "speculate"
- your word - in a way in which he didn't.' He delivered his question while
looking at the jury: 'Do you think that in his thirty-two years of practice he
may have learned that it's not a wise, let alone a scientific, thing to do?'

'I've no idea.'

'No,' Knight
said, with an indulgent smile. 'Nor do you know the state of mind of Miss
Donaldson's killer, or the exact manner in which he held the knife, or the
exact sequence of events leading to her murder.'

'No,' Dr Kerr
admitted.

'From the
evidence gleaned from her body, all you can say for certain is that she was
killed by a single, powerful stab wound.'

'Yes, but—' Dr
Kerr hesitated in mid-sentence, losing courage.

'So you would
accept, therefore, that your speculation does not help us to establish any key
fact. It is only speculation.'

With an
apologetic glance to Jenny, Dr Kerr answered, 'Yes,' his authority all but
destroyed.

Sullivan asked
only one question of the witness: 'You have no factual evidence whatever, do
you, for suggesting that anyone other than Paul Craven murdered Eva Donaldson?'

'No, I don't.'

Sullivan gave a
theatrical sigh and threw the jury a look that said he pitied them for having
their time so needlessly wasted.