JC01 The Coroner Read online

  The Coroner

  M.R. Hall

  * * *

  * * *

  First published 2009 by Macmillan

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London NI 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from

  the British Library.

  Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex

  Printed and bound in the UK by

  CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

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  * * *

  For P, T and W

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  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  The first dead body Jenny ever saw was her grandfather's. She had watched her grandmother, sobbing into a folded handkerchief, draw the lids down over his empty eyes and then, as her mother reached out to comfort her, sharply push the proffered hand away. It was a reaction she could never forget: accusatory, vicious and utterly instinctive. And even as an eleven-year-old child, she had sensed in this moment, and in the exchange of looks that followed, a bitter and shameful history that would rest and settle behind the older woman's features until, seven years later, she too shuddered unwillingly from her body in the same bed.

  When, at the graveside, she stood behind her father as the coffin was lowered awkwardly into the ground, she was aware that the silence of the adults around her contained the poison of something so dreadful, so real, it gripped her throat and stopped up her tears.

  It would be many years later, when she was well into troubled adulthood, that the sensations of these two scenes crystallized into an understanding: that in the presence of death, human beings are at their most vulnerable to truth, and that in the presence of truth, they are at their most vulnerable to death.

  It was this insight, gained the night her ex-husband greeted her with divorce papers, which had stopped her driving off a cliff or tumbling under an express train. Perhaps, just perhaps, she managed to convince herself, the morbid thoughts that had dogged her were no more than signposts on a dangerous and precipitous road which she might yet navigate to safety.

  Six months on she was still a long way from her destination, but far closer than she had been that night, when only a flash of memory, given meaning by far too much wine, brought her back from the brink. To look at her now, no one would know that anything had ever been wrong. On this bright June morning, the first of her new career, she appeared to be in the prime of her life.

  * * *

  CHAPTER ONE

  TEEN TERROR FOUND HANGED

  Danny Wills, aged 14, was found hanging by a bed sheet from the bars of his bedroom window in Portshead Farm Secure Training Centre. The discovery was made by Mr Jan Smirski, a maintenance worker at the privately run facility, who had come to investigate a blocked toilet.

  Mixed-race Wills had served only ten days of a four-month detention and training order imposed by Severn Vale Youth Court. Police were called to the scene but DI Alan Tate told reporters that he had no grounds to suspect foul play.

  The son of 29-year-old Simone Wills, Danny was the oldest of six siblings, none of whom, according to close neighbours, share a father.

  His criminal record comprised drugs, public order and violent offences. His imprisonment followed a conviction for the violent theft of a bottle of vodka from Ali's Off-Licence on the Broadlands Estate, Southmead. During the robbery, Wills threatened the proprietor, Mr Ali Khan, with a hunting knife, threatening to 'cut [his] Paki heart out'. At the time of the offence he was in breach of anti-social behaviour and curfew orders imposed only two weeks earlier for possession of crack cocaine.

  Stephen Shah of Southmead Residents' Action today said that Wills was 'a well-known teen terror and a menace whose death should stand as a lesson to all young hooligans'.

  Bristol Evening Post

  Danny Wills's short stain of a life had come to an end shortly before dawn on a glorious spring morning: Saturday 14 April. He was, perhaps by fated coincidence, aged fourteen years and as many days, earning him the dubious honour of being the youngest prison fatality of modern times.

  No one - apart from his mother and the oldest of his three sisters - shed a tear at his passing.

  Danny's six-and-a-half-stone corpse was wrapped in white plastic and lay on a gurney in a corridor of the mortuary of Severn Vale District Hospital over the weekend.

  At eight o'clock on Monday morning, a consultant pathologist, Dr Nick Peterson, a lean, marathon-running forty-five- year-old, glanced at the bruises rising vertically from the throat and decided it was suicide, but protocol required a full autopsy nonetheless.

  Later that afternoon, Peterson's brief report landed on the desk of Harry Marshall, Severn Vale District Coroner. It read:

  I

  Disease or condition

  directly leading to death (a) Asphyxiation due to

  strangulation

  Antecedent causes (b) None

  II

  Other significant

  conditions contributing to

  the death but NOT related

  to the disease or condition

  causing it None

  Morbid conditions present

  but in the pathologist's

  view NOT contributing to

  death None

  Is any further laboratory

  examination to be made

  which may affect the cause

  of death? No

  Comments

  This fourteen-year-old male was found in his locked room at a secure training centre, hanging by a noose improvised from a bed sheet. Vertical bruises on his neck, absence of fracture to the hyoid bone and localized necrosis in the brain are consistent with suicide.

  Harry, a world-wearied man of fifty-eight who struggled with his weight, mild angina and the financial burden of four teenage daughters, duly opened an inquest on Tuesday 17 April which he immediately adjourned pending further enquiries. He sat again two weeks later on 30 April, and, over the course
of a day, took evidence from several staff employed at the secure training centre. Having heard their mutually corroborative accounts, he recommended to the eight-member jury that they return a verdict of suicide.

  On the second day of the inquest, they obliged. On Wednesday 2 May Harry decided not to hold an inquest into the death of fifteen-year-old drug user Katy Taylor and instead signed a death certificate confirming that she died as the result of an overdose of intravenously administered heroin. This was to be his last significant act as Her Majesty's Coroner. Thirty-six hours later, on waking from an unusually restful night's sleep, his wife found him lying stone cold next to her. The family doctor, a long-standing friend, was happy to attribute his death to natural causes - a coronary - thereby sparing him the indignity of a postmortem.

  Harry was cremated a week later, on the same day and in the same crematorium as Danny Wills. The operative charged with sweeping ashes and bone fragments from the retort of the furnace into the cremulator for fine grinding was, as usual, less than conscientious; the urns handed to the respective families contained the mingled remains of several deceased. Harry's urn was emptied in a corner of a Gloucestershire field where he and his wife had once courted. In a touching impromptu ceremony, each of his daughters read aloud from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Gray and Keats.

  Danny's remains were scattered in the crematorium's Garden of Remembrance. The marble plaque set among the rose bushes read 'Beauty for Ashes', but in deference to every religion except that which had provided these words of comfort and inspiration, the Bible reference had been chiselled out.

  Harry would have smiled at that, would have shaken his head and wondered at the small, mean minds who decreed what portion of the truth others should know.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jenny Cooper, an attractive but not quite beautiful woman in her early forties, sat wearing her determined, resistant face opposite Dr James Allen. The community psychiatrist must have been at least ten years her junior, Jenny guessed, and was trying hard not to be intimidated by her. How many professional women could he encounter here at the small modern hospital in Chepstow - a one-horse town by anybody's measure?

  'You've experienced no panic attacks for the last month?' The young doctor turned through the many pages of Jenny's notes.

  'No.'

  He wrote down her reply. 'Have any threatened?'

  'What do you mean?'

  He looked up with a patient smile. Noticing the neatness of his parting and his carefully knotted tie, Jenny wondered what it was about himself that he was suppressing.

  'Have you encountered any situations which have triggered panic symptoms?'

  She scanned back over the last few weeks and months: the tension of the job interviews, the elation of being appointed coroner, the impulsive decision to buy a home in the country, the exhaustion of moving without any help, the overwhelming guilt at acting so decisively in her own interests.

  'I suppose - ' she hesitated - 'the time I feel most anxious is when I phone my son.'

  'Because . . . ?'

  'The prospect of his father answering.'

  Dr Allen nodded, as if this was all well within his infinite experience.

  'Can you be any more specific? Can you isolate exactly what it is that you fear?'

  Jenny glanced out of the ground-floor window at the patch of garden, the green, sterile neatness defeating its purpose.

  'He judges me . . . Even though it was his affairs that ended our marriage, his insistence that I keep up my career while trying to be a mother, his decision to fight for custody. He still judges me.'

  'What is his judgement?'

  'That I'm a selfish failure.'

  'Has he actually said that to you?'

  'He doesn't have to.'

  'You say he encouraged you in your career ... Is this a judgement you're passing on yourself?'

  'I thought this was psychiatry, not psychoanalysis.'

  'Losing custody of your son is bound to have stirred up all sorts of difficult emotions.'

  'I didn't lose him, I consented to him living at his father's.'

  'But it's what he wanted, though, wasn't it? Your illness shook his trust in you.'

  She shot him a look intended to signal that was far enough. She didn't need a thirty-year-old quack to tell her why her nerves were shot, she just needed a repeat temazepam prescription.

  Dr Allen regarded her thoughtfully, seeing her as a case - she could tell - to be cracked.

  'You don't think that by taking this position as a coroner you're in danger of overstretching yourself?'

  Jenny swallowed the words she would like to have hurled at him and forced a tolerant smile.

  'I have taken this position because it's predictable, safe, salaried. There's no boss. I answer to no one.'

  'Except the dead . . . and their families.'

  'After fifteen years in childcare law the dead will be a welcome relief.'

  Her answer seemed to interest him. He leaned forward with an earnest expression, ready to explore it further. Jenny cut in: 'Look, the symptoms are easing all the time. I can work, I can function, and mild medication is helping me to regain control. I appreciate your concern, but I think you'll agree I'm doing everything to get my life back on the rails.' She glanced at her watch. 'And I really do have to get to work now.'

  Dr Allen sat back in his seat, disappointed at her reaction. 'If you gave it a chance, I'm convinced we could make some progress, perhaps remove any danger of you having another breakdown.'

  'It wasn't a breakdown.'

  'Episode, then. An inability to cope.'

  Jenny met his gaze, realizing that young and gauche as he was, he was enjoying the power he had over her.

  'Of course I don't want that to happen again,' she said. 'I'd love to continue this discussion another time, you've been very helpful, but I really do have to leave. It's my first day at the office.'

  Assured of another date, he reached for his diary. 'I've a clinic here a fortnight Friday - how about five-thirty, so we can take as long as we need?'

  Jenny smiled and pushed her dark brown hair back from her face. 'That sounds perfect.'

  As he wrote in the appointment he said, 'You won't mind if I ask you a couple more questions, just so we've covered ourselves?'

  'Fire away.'

  'Have you deliberately purged or vomited recently?'

  'You've been thorough.'

  He handed her an appointment card, waiting for her answer.

  'Occasionally.'

  'Any particular reason?'

  She shrugged. 'Because I don't like feeling fat.'

  He glanced involuntarily at her legs, reddening slightly as he realized she had spotted him. 'But you're very slim.'

  'Thank you. It's obviously working.'

  He looked down at his notebook, covering his embarrassment. 'Have you taken any non-prescription drugs?'

  'No.' She reached for her shiny new leather briefcase. 'Are we finished now? I promise not to sue.'

  'One final thing. I read in the notes from your meetings with Dr Travis that you have a twelve-month gap in your childhood memory - between the ages of four and five.'

  'His notes should also record the fact that between the ages of five and thirty-five I was relatively happy.'

  Dr Allen folded his hands patiently on his lap. 'I look forward to having you as a patient, Mrs Cooper, but you should know that the tough defences you have built for yourself have to come down eventually. Better you choose the time than it chooses you.'

  Jenny gave the slightest nod, feeling her heart beginning to thump, a pressure building on either side of her head, her field of vision fading at the edges. She stood up quickly, summoning sufficient anger at her weakness to push the rising sensation of panic away. Trying to sound casual but businesslike, she said, 'I'm sure we'll get on very well together. May I have my prescription now?'

  The doctor looked at her. He reached for his pen. She sensed him reading her s
ymptoms, too polite to comment.

  Jenny picked up the pills from the dispensary and popped two with a mouthful of Diet Sprite as soon as she climbed into her car, telling herself it was only first-day jitters she was feeling. Waiting for the medication to hit, she checked her make-up in the vanity mirror and for once was mildly encouraged by what she saw. Not bad, on the outside at least; wearing better than her mother was at her age . . .

  After only seconds she felt the pills begin to work their magic, relaxing her muscles and blood vessels, a warmth spreading through her like a glass of Chardonnay on an empty stomach. She turned the key in the ignition and drove her ageing Golf out of the car park.

  With Tina Turner blasting from the stereo, she crawled through the queue of traffic to the roundabout on the edge of town, joined the eastbound M4 motorway and pressed her foot to the floor. Driving into the sun, she flew across the three-mile sweep of the old Severn Bridge at eighty miles per hour. The twin towers, from which the bridge was implausibly suspended by nothing more than steel cables a few inches thick, seemed to her magnificent: symbols of unbreakable strength and promise. Glancing out over the bright blue water stretching to a misty horizon, she tried to look on the positive side. In the space of a year she had endured an emotional collapse which forced her to leave her job, survived a bitter divorce, lost custody of her teenage son and managed to start afresh with a new home and career. She was bruised but not broken. And determined more than ever that what she had endured would serve only to make her stronger.

  Jockeying through the traffic into central Bristol, she felt invincible. What could that psychiatrist know? What had he ever survived?

  To hell with him. If she ever needed pills again, she'd get them from the internet.

  Her new office was in a fading Georgian town house in Jamaica Street, a turning off the southern end of Whiteladies Road. Having struggled to find a parking space nearby, she approached it for the first time on foot. It couldn't be called grand. Three doors from the junction with the main road, it stood between a scruffy Asian convenience store and an even more down-at-heel newsagent's on the corner. She arrived at the front door and looked at the two brass plates. The first and second floors were occupied by an architect's practice, Planter and Co.; the ground floor was hers: HM Coroner, Severn Vale District.