The Burning (23 page)

‘I’m sure they don’t. All right, show him in,’ Jenny said reluctantly. ‘I can give him five minutes.’

She got up and took another folding chair from the pile stacked against the wall, as Alison went back to fetch her visitor.

Jenny could tell from the brisk footsteps and impatient knock that he was a London lawyer. His puffy eyes told her he’d caught the 5.30 from Paddington to Bristol rather than spend a night
away from the addictive hum of the city. His sour smile as he shook her hand told her it was a decision he was already regretting.

‘Sam Lever. Heinemann Wade. I’m instructed by the Grant family.’

He was mid-height, suntanned and no more than forty years old. Jenny marked him down as an ambitious junior partner who’d been prevailed upon to do a personal favour for Harry Grant. After
a Christmas probably spent on a Caribbean beach, he was, she imagined, feeling more than a little resentful at finding himself in a village hall in Gloucestershire.

‘Good morning.’ She gestured him to the uncomfortable chair and got straight to business. ‘You want to tell me Simon Grant and Emma Grant’s evidence isn’t relevant
to my inquest. If it’ll save you time, it’s not an argument I’m prepared to entertain.’

Lever sighed. ‘As far as I understand it, there is no evidence indicating anything other than that Mr Morgan set fire to his house and killed his stepdaughters. In which case, neither
Harry or Emma Grant nor their son can possibly have anything to add. As I see it, the only purpose of calling them would be to suggest a sexual relationship between Simon and the dead girl, Layla
Hart, which even if it were true, could have no possible bearing on the circumstances of the fire.’ He paused briefly for breath. ‘And we all know that if evidence is more prejudicial
than probative, it is not admissible. Accusing Simon Grant of having sex with an underage girl could hardly be any more prejudicial, and it’s proof of nothing.’

‘And you assume I haven’t carefully considered these factors, Mr Lever?’

‘I assumed you had come to the wrong conclusion.’

Jenny gave a patient smile. ‘Are you familiar with procedure in coroners’ inquests?’

‘I know I can go to the High Court and get these proceedings stayed while a judge determines the proper course.’

‘Well, good luck. Is that all? I’ve a few things to attend to before we start.’

Lever looked at her with incredulity. ‘This isn’t a feint. I can have counsel before a judge in the Royal Courts before lunchtime.’

Jenny had lost count of the times she had been confronted with big-city lawyers who assumed that she would roll over at the first mention of the High Court. Often she would disabuse them with
more grace then they deserved, but Lever had already riled her to the point where she could happily have reached over the desk and slapped him.

‘Mr Lever, this is not a trial. It is an inquest, an inquiry into the facts surrounding and leading up to the deaths of three people. I have no idea what this inquiry will reveal or what
evidence currently outside my knowledge may yet become relevant. I do know how much Mr Grant dislikes being in the public eye and I sympathize, but his son has been accused of, let’s face it,
a crime, and not only that, a crime that gives him a motive for having set fire to that house.’

Lever feigned outrage. ‘This is preposterous. Morgan left a full confession.’

‘A powerful point, which I’m sure the jury will consider carefully.’

‘I’ve instructed my clients not to come to court today.’

‘Then I’ll simply issue warrants for their arrest.’

Lever’s eyes widened in astonishment. ‘You’ll what? You can’t—’

Jenny reached for her copy of
Jervis
. ‘Would you like me to show you?’ She started to turn to the relevant passage. She knew the reference by heart.

Lever issued another weary sigh and pushed a hand through his uniformly black hair. ‘A DNA test, is that what you’re after? If Simon agrees to one, can we avoid all this?’

Jenny folded her hands patiently on the desk in front of her.

‘Where are we, Mr Lever?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘A simple enough question, surely.’

‘Somewhere in Gloucestershire?’ He smirked with his eyes.

‘Can you be a little more specific?’

He shrugged. ‘Oldbury?’

Jenny remained calm. ‘We are in my chambers. And through that door is my court. And not once have you addressed me in the appropriate manner.’

‘Appropriate—’

‘I don’t hear you.’

‘What exactly do you—’

‘I still don’t hear you, Mr Lever.’

Lever looked at her blankly, then slowly the penny dropped. ‘Oh, I see.
Ma’am
.’ The word almost stuck in his throat.

‘Thank you, Mr Lever. I will be asking Simon Grant if he would care to submit to a voluntary DNA test, but until we hear his evidence, I don’t feel justified in compelling him to do
so. If he thinks that a test would help clear things up quickly, that’s a matter for him. I’ll leave it with you.’

Lever pushed up from his chair.

‘On reflection, I can grant you one thing, Mr Lever.’

He looked at her doubtfully.

‘I’m prepared to treat Simon Grant as an interested party and allow you to cross-examine witnesses on his behalf.’

‘I’ll take my clients’ instructions,’ Lever said coldly, and left the room.

Jenny took a sip of coffee with a steady hand. She felt good. She was ready.

Alison knocked at one minute to ten. She entered wearing an immaculately pressed usher’s gown over her dark suit and patent shoes. Confident and composed, she showed no
outward sign of her recent trauma.

‘We’re all ready for you, Mrs Cooper.’

‘And you?’ Jenny asked.

‘Just glad to be back.’ Alison smiled. ‘I won’t let you down.’ She turned smartly out of the door.

Jenny picked up her papers and followed her through the short connecting passageway to the main body of the hall. The heat rose in her chest. She took a deep breath.

Alison went ahead of her. ‘All rise.’

Jenny stepped into the hall to be confronted by an unexpectedly large crowd. She estimated forty or fifty expectant faces looking back at her. Jurors, witnesses, lawyers and press could only
account for half of their number. The rest had to be members of the public, curious to witness another chapter in the blighted history of Blackstone Ley.

As Jenny sat behind her table facing the assembled company, she noticed Kelly Hart on the far right of the front row of seats, accompanied by a young female police officer. Kelly was dressed
plainly in jeans and a black roll-neck sweater, and showed no visible emotion. She was carrying herself with dignity, and seemed not to notice the heads in the rows behind craning to catch a
glimpse of her. Jenny gave her a nod of encouragement and turned to the three lawyers sitting behind the desks ranged opposite hers. Sam Lever had swallowed his pride and decided that Simon
Grant’s best interests would be served by his taking a full part in the proceedings after all. Jenny guessed from his sulky expression that he had been forced to accept that the High Court
wasn’t going to save his clients from the embarrassment of giving evidence in public.

The silver-haired man to Lever’s right stood and addressed her. The note Alison had left on her desk told her that he was Robert Newland QC. Jenny knew his reputation as a heavyweight
prosecutor. Although he practised from chambers in London and plied his trade largely in the Old Bailey, Newland was a local man who made frequent forays to the Crown Courts in Bristol and
Gloucester.

‘Ma’am, I appear on the instruction of the Chief Constable of the Gloucestershire Constabulary.’ He spoke with a trace of Gloucestershire accent that he no doubt felt lent him
the common touch. He gestured to the woman sitting to his left. ‘My learned friend Miss Palmer is appearing on behalf of Miss Kelly Hart, and Mr Lever is representing the interested party,
Simon Grant.’

Katherine Palmer half rose from her seat. ‘Good morning, ma’am.’ In her mid-thirties, Palmer was an ambitious criminal barrister who had earned a name for herself in Bristol by
securing a string of unlikely acquittals. One of the few women at the Bar with no qualms about defending men accused of sexual offences, she had a reputation for the skilful destruction of
vulnerable witnesses. The Legal Aid Fund didn’t pay lawyers to appear at inquests, so it was likely that Katherine Palmer was appearing without a fee. She clearly considered the cachet of
being associated with such a high-profile and newsworthy case as sufficient reward in itself.

‘Good morning, everyone.’ Chiefly for Kelly Hart’s benefit, Jenny struck a friendly, informal tone. ‘Is there any reason why we shouldn’t empanel a jury and make a
start on the evidence?’

The lawyers raised no objection, so Jenny gave Alison her cue to call forward the four women and five men who had been summoned to do their duty. Each in turn swore an oath ‘to diligently
inquire on behalf of Our Sovereign Lady the Queen’ and ‘give a true verdict according to the evidence’. Seated in two rows of chairs to Jenny’s left, at the side of the
hall, the newly empanelled jurors wore expressions ranging from mild bewilderment to outright confusion. The job of a jury in a coroner’s inquest was little understood, and it was now
Jenny’s task to explain it as simply as she could.

‘Members of the jury,’ she began, ‘you have been called here today to perform a very solemn duty. ‘On December the 27th, the bodies of three people were recovered from a
house following a fire. They were Edward Morgan, aged thirty-five, and the daughters of his partner, Miss Kelly Hart. The girls were Layla Hart, aged fourteen, and her younger sister, Amanda, aged
eleven. This inquest has one purpose: to determine the cause of those three deaths. This is not a trial. There are no competing cases for you to decide between. No one is being accused of any
crime, although the evidence may disclose that a crime was committed. This is an inquiry called to ascertain the
truth
, and your role is to listen to all the evidence and, having considered
it, to decide on the most appropriate verdict in each of the three cases. There are a number of possible verdicts open to you. Firstly, suicide, which means that the deceased deliberately took his
or her own life. Secondly, accident, which I hope speaks for itself. Thirdly, misadventure, which means that the deceased knowingly undertook a risk that resulted directly in death. Fourthly,
unlawful killing, which means the death was the result of a criminal act. Lastly, an open verdict, which is the verdict you would deliver if, having heard all the evidence, the cause of death still
remains unclear.’

Having laid out the bare bones of their legal duties, Jenny spent the next fifteen minutes summarizing the known facts of the case. She told them that Kelly and Ed Morgan had been together
nearly ten years and had a three-year-old son who remained missing and was presumed dead. She explained that Ed worked both as a forester and at Fairmeadows Farm, while Kelly had worked in the same
Bristol pub for nearly seven years, travelling into the city each day by car. Although it hadn’t been her conscious intention, the picture Jenny painted was of a hard-working family who had
been quietly living their lives without incident until tragedy struck like lightning from a clear blue sky. On reflection, it was how she felt. She was as mystified by what had happened only eleven
days before as the jurors clearly were: they hung on her every word. She concluded with a reminder that, no matter how tempting it was to jump to conclusions, they must strive at all times to keep
open minds.

Jenny called the first witness. In the makeshift courtroom, the witness box was a small trestle table and chair positioned between Jenny’s desk and the jury. Detective Sergeant Andy
Millard had been given the job of representing Gloucester CID’s investigation team. In his mid-forties, shaven-headed and heavily muscled, Millard had clearly been chosen as the detective
least likely to speak out of turn, or indeed to say anything that wasn’t in his script. He read the oath in a bass monotone, then proceeded to recount the dry facts of the fire and its
aftermath, which he read out from his notebook.

Millard told the court that a 999 call had been made at 11.46 p.m. on 28 December by Mr Graham Medway, a near neighbour. Fire crew were scrambled from Thornbury and arrived at six minutes past
midnight, by which time the building was consumed with flames. Shortly after their arrival, the propane tank at the side of the house exploded, causing further structural damage to the already
partially destroyed building. The flames were quenched in a matter of minutes, but the intensity of the heat was such that there was no hope of finding any survivors inside.

The discovery of three sets of human remains in the rubble prompted the police to instigate a full-scale inquiry. A fire-investigation report was commissioned from an independent consultant who
arrived early the next morning to take samples and survey the scene. Less than twenty-four hours later, it was confirmed that ashes and debris taken from what had been the living room and hallway
of the house contained residual traces of diesel oil. Chemical markers added to the fuel at the refinery identified the diesel as having been supplied by a BP filling station.

The mother of the children inside, Kelly Hart, had arrived home after working an evening shift in The Berkeley, a pub on Queen’s Road, central Bristol, at twenty past midnight. At first
she thought that all three of her children were inside the house. She was being comforted by officers when word arrived via the emergency-service operators that an anonymous caller had telephoned
999 to alert the police to a message that had appeared on Ed Morgan’s Facebook timeline at 11.28 p.m. Millard reached into a folder he had brought with him to the witness box and produced a
number of colour copies of a screenshot of Ed Morgan’s final message. Alison distributed them to the three lawyers and the jury.

‘
For Kelly
,’ Millard quoted very deliberately. ‘
Robbie is gone but you will never find him. We are all at peace now, but you will be in living hell, which is all a
whore like you deserves
.’