The Redeemed (3 page)

'Then why did he confess?'

'I think it's best that you ask him that. It's not possible
to judge a man until you have met, don't you think?'

'I can certainly send my officer to take a statement—'

'Please,' Father Starr interjected, gesturing with his hands,
'I ask this one thing of you, that you interview him in person. Then, I
guarantee, you will understand.'

He was a hard man to resist, and someone Jenny already felt
she would like to know more about. 'And if I say I can't?'

'I shan't beg you, Mrs Cooper.' He got up from his chair.
'Thank you for your time. You have been most generous.' He produced a card from
his jacket pocket and placed it in front of her. 'I'll leave you to decide
what's right.'

She should have started working through her phone messages
or reading her mail, but the priest's plea lingered like a watchful presence.
It demanded that she make a decision on whether to rubber-stamp the Crown
Court's verdict in line with usual procedure, or to risk the ire of her
overseers in the Ministry of Justice and conduct an inquest of her own.

She reached for the court file and began skimming through its
pages.

There was a statement from Eva Donaldson's domestic help, who
had arrived in the morning to find her employer's body on the kitchen floor of
her modest home in Winterbourne Down, a village just outside the northern
margins of the city; statements from the several detectives who were called to
the scene; a list of items that were removed from the house; a forensics report
on the DNA sample recovered from the doormat; and a report by the Home Office
pathologist. A bundle of photographs showed the body at the scene. Eva was
curled into a foetal position surrounded by a huge pool of congealed blood. Two
shots of the body on the slab showed a single stab wound to her chest midway between
her breasts and her shoulder-length blonde hair. The final photograph was a
close-up of her heart sitting in a kidney dish. A flagged pin marked the stab
wound, which had penetrated her upper right ventricle, making death a rapid
certainty.

Jenny stuffed the pictures into the back of the file and
flicked through the transcript of Craven's police interview.

He wasn't much of a talker. The DI conducting the interrogation,
Goodison, had had to tease him along. When eventually he found his tongue,
Craven said he kept seeing Eva on the television news talking about her past in
blue movies and how she had found God. He had found God, too, which was what
gave him the idea of going to talk to her on his release. When the detective
asked how he'd found her address, he said he had got it from
contact-a-celebrity.com while he was still in prison. Jenny arrived at a
section of the interview that had been highlighted:

DI G: You say you walked all the way to her house,

[suspect nods]

DI G: What did you do when you got there, Paul?

PC: Hung around for a while, then rang the bell.

DI G: What did you do while you hung around?

[suspect shrugs]

DI G: Come on, Paul, you can remember that. What did you do?
Look through the window, check out the house, go to the toilet, what?

[long pause]

PC: I think I went to the toilet, had a leak.

DI G: Where?

PC: Don't remember. No. Don't remember.

DI G: By the house?

PC:
Yeah, that's
it, by the house.

DI G: Then what?

PC:
Like I said, I
rang the doorbell.

DI G: What happened next?

PC: She came to the door. She said, 'Who are you?' I said,
'I'm Paul, like the apostle, and I think God told me to come and talk to you
about all the good work you're doing, because I want to give my life to good
works too.' And she said, 'Oh, well you'd better come in and tell me more.'
[long pause] I followed her into the house, into the kitchen, then she turned
to me with this strange look on her face, and she put her hand on me [suspect
indicates his chest] and she said, 'You don't have to say anything, Paul, I
know what you want and I want it too.' And she moved her hand downwards, you
know, down there [suspect indicates his groin area] and I said, 'No, that's not
right, please don't do that to me,' but she took no notice. I said, 'Eva, that's
a sin.' She said [pause] I can't say what she said.

DI G: It's not a problem, Paul. Just tell me what she said,
[suspect covers face with hands]

DI G: Come on, Paul. Let's hear it.

[pause]

PC: She said, [sobbing] she said, 'Fuck me for the devil.'

And that's when I picked up a knife from the counter and stuck
it in her, right there, in the chest.

DI G: How many times?

[suspect shakes his head]

DI G: What did you do then?

PC: I ran out of that house. I ran away from there.

DI G: What did you do with the knife?

PC: Threw it away.

DI G: Where? Where did you throw it?

[suspect shakes his head, breaking down into tears]

The last document in the file was a report from the court-
appointed psychiatrist, Dr Helen Graham, who said she had examined Craven on
three separate occasions during his remand. In her opinion he was suffering
from a mild personality disorder which gave him 'a sometimes tenuous grasp on
reality and a tendency to fixate on abstract, often religious ideas', but
there had been no evidence of violence in his character during his long prison
term. He had attended classes conducted by female teachers and been in contact
with a female parole officer without any suggestion of inappropriate
behaviour. He wasn't clinically insane, and in her view there was no evidence
to support any suggestion that he was suffering from diminished responsibility
or a temporary psychological illness. During their three sessions Craven had
refused to discuss the circumstances of the alleged offence, but on one
occasion did express remorse for what he had done. Dr Graham concluded that
there was no reason to question the validity of Craven's confession and
expressed the opinion that the stress of release had caused him to commit a
crime very similar to that for which he had originally been imprisoned.

Stapled inside the back cover of the file was a copy of
Craven's criminal record and a handwritten statement of the facts of his first
murder. At eighteen, he had met a twenty- three-year-old nurse named Grace
Akingbade at a Bristol nightclub. Late in the evening they were seen leaving
together. Grace's body was found in her room in a hospital accommodation block
the following afternoon. She had been beaten and strangled but there was no
evidence of sexual molestation. Craven was arrested the same day and made a
full confession. His explanation for the killing was that the young woman had
mocked him when he had failed to perform sexually.

Jenny finished reading and made up her mind that there was
nothing to investigate. If Craven wanted to protest his innocence he would have
to do what everyone else did and find a criminal lawyer to fight his battles
for him. There were far more deserving cases on her desk.

She looked up with a start as Alison thumped through the door
and dumped a fresh heap of papers in front of her.

'Are you all right, Mrs Cooper?'

'You shocked me.'

'Fun as it was watching an autopsy on a nine-year-old, I
thought I'd better tear myself away.'

Jenny noticed that she was wearing shiny red lipstick and had
brushed her dyed blonde hair forward over her cheeks. 'It suits you,' she said,
her heart still pulsing hard against her ribs.

'Thank you,' Alison said with self-conscious abruptness and
swiftly changed the subject. 'The pathologist confirmed death by alcohol
poisoning so social services have asked the police to look at criminal
negligence. I doubt it'll end with charges, but at least it's off our plate for
the time being. We've had an anonymous email from a man who claims he was one
of the gang which erected the crane and says they were using sub-standard
bolts, and Dr Kerr just emailed an interim report on Alan Jacobs - it's not
looking too pretty. Oh, and there's been a fatal RTA on the Portway I should
probably go and have a look at.'

She turned abruptly to the door.

Jenny sensed there was more to Alison's agitation than her
caseload. 'Is everything all right?'

'I've had more relaxing mornings.'

'Is it Terry again?'

'Terry?' Alison said, as if her husband was the furthest
thing from her mind. 'He's no trouble to me now he's in Spain.'

'Another
holiday?'

'I don't know what you call it,' Alison said, 'but I suppose
you might as well know before you hear gossip. He's been seeing some woman he
met out there last time.'

'I'm sorry. I'd no idea—'

'Neither did I till last Thursday. But I told him if there
was something he wanted to get out of his system I'd rather he did it out of my
sight.'

Jenny knew there had been arguments, mostly over her husband
Terry's desire to sell up and retire to a Spanish condo while he was still
young enough to get round the golf course, but she had no idea relations had
turned this sour. 'So, where does that leave the two of you?'

'I haven't a clue, but I'm damned if he's going to have all
the fun.' The phone rang in the outer office. 'That'll be traffic wanting to
know if I'm coming to see the body.' 'Couldn't we make do with their
photographs?' 'I'd rather get out if you don't mind, Mrs Cooper. I'm afraid I
can't tolerate my own company at the moment.'

She left, thumping the door shut behind her. It seemed only a
few weeks ago that she'd been wrestling with feelings for DI Pironi and had
spent three days in self-pitying silence having stood him up on a dinner date.
Veering between church- going piety and guilt-ridden desire, Alison spent weeks
on end as moody as a teenager.

Jenny picked up Dr Kerr's single-page interim report and
prepared herself for the worst. It didn't disappoint:

Rectal examination showed fresh and semi-healed abrasions
consistent with intercourse on more than one occasion; swabs show presence of
semen deposited in the hours immediately preceding death. Minor lesions on both
forearms appear to have been made by human fingernails. Tissue samples from
affected sites have been submitted for analysis.

While the immediate cause of death is an overdose of
phenobarbital, it is not possible to say with certainty whether consumption was
voluntary
.

Jenny thought of Mrs Jacobs and tried to imagine her reaction
as DI Wallace broke the news of her husband's final hours. She pictured her
face set in a stony mask of denial.

How would she cope? Would she even understand? No. If Jenny
had gained one insight into human nature through being a coroner, it was that
two people could inhabit the same space for years and in all meaningful
respects remain distant strangers.

She placed the report on the arbitrary pile at the right side
of her desk which she had started with Paul Craven's court file, and was struck
by the thought that only weeks and a handful of miles apart sex, drugs and God
- a trinity of life's most potent forces - had colluded in the untimely deaths
of both Alan Jacobs and Eva Donaldson. The thought seemed to open a door to an
untravelled corner of her subconscious. She found herself in a dark and downward-sloping
tunnel. And in the gloom behind her the door slammed shut.