The Burning (16 page)

Michael had been the last to drive the Land Rover and had left the seat so far back Jenny could barely reach the pedals. As she reached down to adjust her position, her fingers closed around
something cold and glassy. She brought up Michael’s phone. It must have slipped from his trouser pocket under the seat. She went to stow it in the glovebox, but acting on an impulse that she
realized was shameful even as she surrendered to it, she flicked to his call log to check if it really had been his boss who had kept him talking for so long the previous day. It contained only
five entries, all of them unanswered incoming calls dialled that morning from the Bristol office of Michael’s employers. She guessed he had been attempting to call his phone before taking off
for Zurich. But why scrub out yesterday’s records? And why not call her to find out if he had left the phone in the cottage.

Jenny scrolled through his contacts – of which there were very few, because Michael had only a handful of friends – and found two numbers with the ‘41’ Swiss dialling
code. The first was entered under ‘Office – Zurich’, the second under ‘Menzingen’. She hesitated, doing battle with her conscience, then dialled the latter. After
several, long continuous rings the phone was answered by a young woman: ‘
Hallo, Gasthoff Sonne
.’

Jenny rang off without replying. She knew very little German, but enough to know she had reached a hotel reception. She relaxed, remembering now that Michael had mentioned that he had found a
guesthouse in a village called Menzingen a short drive from Zurich, where he could stay overnight in considerably more hospitable surroundings than those offered by the airport hotels.

Starting down the lane to Tintern, Jenny scolded herself. She’d only made up her mind to live with the man thirty minutes before, and she was already spying on him. She made a mental note
to check that impulse. If he had issues to work on, so did she.

Jenny arrived at the Vale to find an almost empty car park dotted with grimy heaps of snow. Operating on a skeleton staff for the New Year holiday, the hospital complex was
unnaturally empty. Bracing herself against the pitiless cold, she hurried the few short yards from her car to the door of the mortuary. As she waited to be buzzed through, she glanced up at the
windows of the main hospital building – a blunt, six-storey concrete cube – and had the unwelcome thought that inside there would be a handful of patients who on any other day would
live to see tomorrow, but who today would slip away for want of attention by the few overstretched staff unlucky enough to be on duty. New Year’s Day was possibly the worst day of the year on
which to be a hospital patient, a fact confirmed by the traffic jam of gurneys inside the mortuary’s main corridor. At the far end, a hospital orderly was emerging from the subterranean
passage which led to the hospital basement, wheeling in yet another. Jenny glanced away as she tripped past the new arrivals, no amount of exposure to the dead ever having inured her to the bleak
sense of finality she felt on seeing the contours of a human body beneath a faded-green hospital sheet. She knocked on the swing doors of the autopsy room and pushed hastily through them.

Dr Jasmine Hope looked up from her work at the dissection bench with a mild, self-conscious smile. The body of a young woman with long black hair – Jenny glimpsed it briefly and felt her
stomach turn over – lay opened from neck to navel on the table. Pathologists, in Jenny’s observation, fell into two distinct categories: extroverts who gloried in a bloody gallows
humour, and introverts too shy, or perhaps too painfully aware of the fragility of life, to tolerate working with living patients. Dr Hope, she believed, fell squarely into the latter category.

‘Mrs Cooper.’

Her eyes darted uncertainly around the room, as if she were wishing someone might materialize to rescue her from this unexpected encounter.

‘Hi. I spoke to your technician earlier this morning – about the case of Burden?’

‘Oh, yes. Dr Kerr’s case.’

‘I understand there was some information for me.’ Jenny realized she would have to push this along. ‘Is there any chance you could look out the file?’

‘The file. Certainly. Yes.’ She set down her scalpel and reluctantly removed the bloody latex gloves from her hands. ‘You come with me to the office?’

Jenny followed her across the corridor to the office, feeling the nausea which had stirred in the autopsy room steadily rising. The straight lines of the white walls began to swim in front of
her eyes. She took a deep breath, telling herself it was purely a psychological reaction.
Pull yourself together, Jenny, you’re a coroner, for goodness’ sake. This is what you
do
. For a moment, at least, the unpleasant sensation abated.

Dr Kerr’s spartan office had felt confined when he was its sole occupant, but now that a second, smaller desk had been placed under the window, it was uncomfortably cramped. When both he
and Dr Hope were working in it together, it would have made for an intimate atmosphere. Neither would have been able to draw breath without the other being aware of it. Dr Hope went to her
colleague’s computer, entered his confidential password and brought up the case notes for Daniel Burden.

‘Would you like to see?’

Jenny stepped to the other side of the desk as Dr Hope opened the file containing the post-mortem report.

‘Yes, this is it.’

She pointed to the very first line of the report:

‘Mr Burden was born a female,’ Dr Hope said. ‘She changed her sex to male as a young adult.’

‘I see,’ Jenny said, surprised, but not shocked. Those who committed suicide invariably did so out of hopelessness or loneliness, and more usually a combination of the two. In the
absence of a note, this information seemed to point to the answers her inquiry would be looking for.

Jenny scrolled down through the brief description of Burden’s injuries. It was a familiar form of words, rendered in Dr Kerr’s typically economical prose, that concluded in the
sentence: ‘
Vertical lesions behind jawbone either side of neck and skull consistent with death by hanging
.’ Then, in the
Comments
section at the foot of the report, he had
written:

Jenny remembered the shoes she had seen at Burden’s flat. She had thought at the time that they had seemed unusually small for a man. The overly muscular body and
prematurely balding scalp made sense, too: she wouldn’t have been surprised to find that Burden had been taking more than the prescribed amount of testosterone. The male hormone, now
relatively easy to manufacture and produced chiefly in laboratories in Pakistan, was widely (though illegally) available online. She had dealt with the suicides of a number of male bodybuilders
who, besides having abused steroids, had in some cases many times the normal amount of testosterone in their bloodstreams. Aside from building muscle, testosterone could also induce violent and
occasionally self-destructive urges.

Dr Hope opened a second file containing several photographs of Burden’s remains taken prior to autopsy. The torso was that of a man, stocky and muscled, but the genitals remained those of
a woman. The sight of a body caught somewhere in the space between male and female made Jenny feel strangely empty, as if she were momentarily experiencing some of the sense of displacement that
must have engulfed him before he had taken his life.

‘Is this what Dr Kerr wanted to talk to me about – the fact that he’d stopped short of full reconstruction?’

‘I expect he was thinking of the family,’ Dr Hope said, ‘how much detail to include in the report.’

‘I think perhaps he’s being a little over-sensitive,’ Jenny said. ‘Tell him I’d like everything of relevance included. It’s up to the family whether they
choose to read it or not. I don’t believe in holding relevant information back.’

Dr Hope nodded and clicked out of the file. ‘I will. Is there anything else?’

Jenny considered whether she ought to view the body, if only to check that, post-autopsy, it had been restored to a state in which relatives could view it without undue distress (it took time
and attention to disguise stitches around a skull devoid of hair). She decided that an email reminder would achieve the same end. She had no desire to see another corpse today. ‘No.
That’s all. Thank you.’ Jenny turned to the door and felt the return of the nausea, only this time it was even more acute. She held onto the back of a chair.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Cooper?’

‘It sometimes happens when I visit here,’ Jenny said. ‘It’ll pass.’

Dr Hope gave an unexpected and sympathetic smile. ‘Not only you. Here. Come with me.’ She looped her arm through Jenny’s and led her out through the door. ‘Don’t
look right. Keep your eyes on that exit sign up ahead.’

Jenny did as she said, touched by her thoughtfulness.

‘You’ve known Andy Kerr a long time?’ Dr Hope asked, as if to distract her from the line of corpses in the corridor.

‘Nearly five years.’

‘He’s a good man, I think. I’d like to work here permanently if I can.’

‘I’m sure he’d like that, too,’ Jenny said, unable to resist a little matchmaking.

Quietly registering her comment, Dr Hope walked with her through the door at the end of the corridor and into the vestibule. ‘You look pale,’ she said as they parted. ‘Maybe
you should see your doctor?’

‘On New Year’s Day?’

‘Then take it easy,’ she chided gently. ‘It’s meant to be a holiday.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Jenny assured her, and stepped gratefully outside.

The cold air in her lungs had a miraculous healing effect. By the time she reached her car, the dizziness and nausea had all but left her. It was a relief to feel well again, but her sudden
recovery confirmed Jenny’s fear that the cause of her symptoms lay in her mind. Driving through a city whose inhabitants had yet to emerge from behind closed doors, she berated herself for
the weakness that had allowed vestiges of her old illness to return. She had allowed herself to believe that the neuroses that had plagued her for so many years belonged firmly to her past, but the
arrival of paranoid thoughts and psychosomatic nausea on the same morning seemed to be telling her that she wasn’t quite as cured as she had thought.

She tried to apply logic in isolating the cause. Was it just her fear of over sharing her life with Michael, or was there something else, something that was nagging on a deeper level still? She
searched and questioned, but the answer refused to reveal itself. Instead she was left with a vague and ominous feeling that she was failing to see something obvious. She was aware of its
malevolent presence and had entered the cool of its shadow, yet for the moment, at least, whatever
it
was remained stubbornly out of sight and beyond her grasp.

‘Perhaps I’m doomed always to be slightly crazy,’ Jenny said out loud to herself, and then turned up the radio until she could no longer hear herself think.

DI R
YAN CLIMBED OUT OF
his waiting car as Jenny pulled up opposite Kelly’s flat. Joining him on the pavement, she noticed he was wearing a
different but equally well-put-together outfit beneath his black ski jacket – cashmere sweater, designer jeans and tan leather boots. She felt like taking his picture to show Michael how it
was done.

‘Another nice day for it,’ Ryan said dryly. ‘I appreciate your coming.’

‘Have you told her anything more?’ Jenny asked. ‘She didn’t even ask me why we wanted to see her.’

Ryan shook his head. ‘I thought it would probably be best if she heard it from you –’ he hesitated, as if concerned that he was being presumptuous – ‘unless
you’d prefer me to do it.’

‘You can be my wing-man,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ve broken plenty of bad news in this job, but I’ll admit, never anything quite like this.’

‘Me neither,’ Ryan said. He turned to the block of flats with a look of grim resignation.

The safe apartment in which Kelly was being temporarily housed at police expense until the council found her somewhere permanent was on the second floor at the end of an L-shaped corridor. The
building was eerily silent and anonymous, a place that it would be hard to call home. Kelly came to the door barefoot, dressed in a thigh-length white T-shirt over tracksuit bottoms, her thick
black hair pushed back behind her ears. Jenny couldn’t help but notice that even without make-up, and shattered with grief, she managed to be arrestingly beautiful. She mumbled a hello and
took them along a short passageway. A cheap plain sofa, two matching chairs and a television were the only objects in a sitting room with bare white walls. There was nothing of Kelly in evidence,
not a single book or magazine or even a box of Kleenex. She sat on one of the chairs, knees pressed together, her hands clutched anxiously on her lap. Her large eyes were fixed and staring, as if
she were still frozen in shock.

‘How are you feeling this morning?’ Jenny said, as she sat on the other chair, leaving Ryan to occupy the sofa.

Kelly shrugged. ‘Not feeling anything,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of strange.’

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t want pills.’ She pushed back the stray strands of hair that had fallen forwards over her face and looked Jenny in the eyes. ‘I know you
haven’t come to tell me good news.’

‘It’s not about Robbie,’ DI Ryan interjected. ‘We’re still looking.’

Kelly nodded, visibly relieved.

‘I’d like to open an inquest next week,’ Jenny said, ‘but before that happens, I thought – well, DI Ryan and I both thought – that you ought to hear what
we’ve discovered about what went on inside the house.’