The Burning (26 page)

‘I see. That’s all, Officer.’

With that, Jenny called the lunch adjournment. Whether he had been telling the whole truth she couldn’t be certain, but she left the hall with the feeling that she had touched on the
beginnings of something. The question was where to look next.

While Alison shepherded the jury and remaining witnesses to the pub along the lane for their lunch, Jenny sat alone in the cramped committee room, struggling to eat a sandwich
snatched from a convenience-store shelf early that morning. The brief surge of elation she had experienced an hour earlier, when she had thought she was on the cusp of a breakthrough, had bled
away, leaving her with a feeling of anticlimax and frustration. She had several witnesses yet to call, but her gut told her that the only one likely to offer genuine insight was Kelly Hart. The
challenge would be finding a way to dig beneath the surface. If anyone had known the inner workings of Ed Morgan’s mind it was her, but in their conversations to date, Kelly had left Jenny
with the impression that she had felt so comfortable with Ed almost because she had remained unaware of his complexities. Again, Kelly struck her as like a child in that respect: trusting and
unquestioning, too unknowing to look for deeper layers.

Jenny sifted through the papers on her desk and uncovered the booklet of post-mortem photographs Dr Kerr had appended to his report, photos that Jenny had deemed it unnecessary that the jury
see. It had been the right decision. They were images that once seen would never be deleted from the mind. Spurred into action, she started to sketch out her theory in a fresh legal pad. It centred
on Ed having disposed of both Susie Ashton and Freddie’s bodies by similar means: he would have cremated them somewhere out of the way, or possibly even somewhere in plain sight, then
disposed of the remaining fragments of teeth and bone in a manner he considered foolproof. She quickly concluded that he would either have ground up the bone fragments himself and disposed of them
in the woods or in the estuary, or put them through the grinders at Fairmeadows Farm. On balance, the former seemed more likely than the latter, if only because the chances of being seen were so
much smaller. For her theory to work, someone would have to have seen him behaving suspiciously. Could it have been the man Helen Medway had seen in the car? And if it was, what was he doing?
Trying to get a clear view of Ed, perhaps? Trying to connect his face with one glimpsed through trees ten years before?

The watcher in the car quickly took on a story of his own. He’d passed Ed in the woods ten years before, perhaps even seen him scattering ashes, but thought nothing of it. Nearly a decade
later a memory had stirred. He’d gone to the internet, seen Ed’s picture and begun to wonder. His recollection was imperfect, not enough to guarantee a conviction and the reward that
would come with it, but if he had isolated the guilty man there were ways of working on him. Perhaps he had contacted him, threatening to go to the police if he didn’t pay up. That could
easily have pushed Ed over the edge.

And here was another thought, a really devilish one: what if the watcher wasn’t a witness, but had been part of the original investigation? A police officer who thought he could put the
squeeze on Ed – the one that got away – and thereby boost his retirement fund. It wasn’t too ridiculous.

An even darker possibility suggested itself. What if the police-canteen rumours had been true and Ed had been part of a paedophile ring? After the Susie Ashton case he had cut free and kept his
head down, but ten years later one of his old contacts had come back to haunt him.

Now even further into the pit: the watcher had appeared in late September. Exactly three months before the fire, and at exactly the time Layla had become pregnant.

Jenny shuddered. Her increasingly bleak train of thought had left her with an unsettled feeling, as if the room had been invaded by a bad spirit. The image of the levelled, snow-covered site
where the house had stood returned to her, and with it the sense that had been with her that afternoon when the police had been so eager to demolish the burned-out house: something important had
been erased. She pulled out her phone and called up the thirty seconds of video footage she taken before the great clawed machine had moved in. The picture was dark, almost sepia. It scanned over
ghostly, soot-stained walls and charred timbers; a child’s swing and upended toys in the garden. But it was something else that caught her eye: in the far background of a sweeping shot of the
garden she noticed a section of wire hanging loose from the high fence surrounding the property. She froze the frame and zoomed in, but the image grew more ambiguous the larger and grainier it
became.

With thirty minutes to go before the afternoon session, Jenny felt the need for fresh air. Slipping out of her shoes and into her boots, she left the hall and took a short walk
along the lane. The freezing air sharpened her senses and helped reorder her thoughts. A plan started to form. She would use the witnesses to build a chronological picture of Ed Morgan’s life
and hope that, bit by bit, incidental pieces of evidence would come together in a way that would help her and the jury glimpse inside his mind. All she required was patience and a little faith.
Answers would come. They always did.

She had managed to walk for nearly a mile out and back along the lane, and was nearing the end of the return leg when she saw a police car double-parked outside the hall. An officer in uniform
was talking to Alison at the gate. Jenny quickened her step, knowing instinctively that something was wrong. Alison’s grave expression as she approached confirmed her fears.

‘What’s happened?’ Jenny asked.

‘It’s Nicky Brooks,’ Alison said. She glanced at the constable, who gave a solemn, confirmatory nod. ‘She’s dead.’

T
HE CONSTABLE HAD ONLY SKETCHY
details. Nicky Brooks’s mother, Sandra, had discovered her daughter’s body in her bedroom at home earlier
that morning. She appeared to have taken her own life. He thought she had hanged herself, but couldn’t be sure; he had heard rumours amongst his colleagues that she had been found kneeling on
the floor.

Jenny hurried past the jurors and witnesses gathering in the hall and shut the office door. She dialled DI Ryan’s number, clasping her phone in trembling fingers.

‘Jenny. You heard about Nicky Brooks?’

‘When? . . . How?’

‘I’m just about to speak to her mother. Can I call you later?’

‘I need to know how she died. I’m in the middle of my inquest – she was meant to be appearing as a witness tomorrow.’

‘I know—’

‘Was it suicide?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Did she leave a note?’

‘If she did, no one’s told me.’

Jenny struggled to think clearly. She felt sick and appalled, and confused. All the pieces so carefully arranged in her mind had been thrown into disarray. ‘Look, I’m going to need
some answers. She was a key witness – the most important after Kelly. Maybe even more so, I don’t know.’

‘And you expect me to do what, exactly – conclude a fatal-incident investigation in four hours flat?’

‘Shit . . . Shit!’ Jenny slammed her clenched fist against her forehead. Her chest tightened. She could hardly breathe.

‘Jenny? What are you doing? Stop it.’

‘She was
fourteen
.’

‘This is not your fault. You’re the coroner, not her social worker.’

‘What the hell has been going on? You can’t tell me there isn’t something your super’s trying to hide.’

‘You know how it is. He’s trying to stop a bad smell, and save his pension while he’s at it.’

‘Smell of what?’

‘Look, now’s not the time, OK? Let me get some details. Believe me, we both want the same thing . . . Jenny? Are you still there?’

She switched off her phone without giving him an answer.

Maintaining a veneer of outward calm had taken all of Jenny’s effort as she reported the news of Nicky Brooks’s death to a subdued courtroom, and announced that the
inquest would be suspended while police investigated the circumstances. The only blessing had been that Kelly Hart had already been informed outside the hall, and to save her from the attention of
the press, had been whisked back to her flat in a police car. Of all the stunned and appalled expressions she had registered on the faces looking back at her, it was those of Clare and Philip
Ashton that had scored themselves deepest. Horror wasn’t nearly an adequate word to describe the emotion which had frozen both their faces. It had taken Jenny until the hall had emptied to
realize just what the thought must have been that was passing through their minds: Nicky Brooks, Layla Hart and Susie Ashton were all the same age, and they lived within a quarter of a mile of one
another. Now all three were dead.

Alison had been full of wild speculation as she stacked away the chairs and folded up the trestles. As far as she was concerned, Nicky’s death was vindication of her darkest theories about
Ed Morgan’s involvement with powerful and predatory paedophiles. She was convinced that Layla and Nicky must have numbered amongst their victims, and possibly Mandy, and perhaps even Susie
Ashton, too. The fact that Nicky died the day before she was due to give evidence proved it beyond all doubt: the people who had abused her had so damaged her mind that she had taken her own life
rather than expose them in court.

‘Please, please, don’t repeat any of this,’ Jenny had implored her. ‘Not even to your friends or family. The press will be scavenging for anything they can get hold
of.’

‘You think I don’t know that, Mrs Cooper?’ Alison had answered, as if the very idea of her breathing a word was preposterous.

‘You know how they operate. Just don’t trust anyone.’

‘I could say the same to you, Mrs Cooper. You haven’t exactly got form for staying out of trouble yourself.’

Jenny had taken Alison’s parting shot on the chin, and left without telling her where she was going.

Jenny pushed through the swing doors to the autopsy room to find Dr Kerr and Dr Hope working together on a body that lay fully opened on the table. It was Nicky’s. She
tried to avert her eyes, but was too late. She inwardly groaned. The tragedy of another young life lost bore down on her like a great weight.

‘Mrs Cooper. Aren’t you meant to be holding an inquest?’ Dr Kerr stepped forward, apparently surprised to see her.

‘The police haven’t told you who she is?’

He shrugged. ‘Name and age. That’s all.’

‘She was meant to be giving evidence tomorrow. She was Layla Hart’s best friend, not to mention her neighbour.’

‘Ah.’ He exchanged a glance with Jasmine Hope, who for the moment had laid her scalpel aside. ‘I thought the officers who brought her in seemed a little tense.’

‘What did they say? Was it Ryan?’

‘He was one of them.’ Dr Kerr glanced again at his colleague.

‘What? What is it?’ Jenny asked, sensing there was something he wasn’t telling her. He seemed torn.

‘Tell her, Andy,’ Dr Hope urged.

‘I had a call from Superintendent Abbott asking if I could report my findings to him before I forwarded them to you.’

‘What did you say to him?’

‘He didn’t really give me a chance. It was more of an order than a request.’

‘One he’s not entitled to give. Do I need to remind you of the law?’

‘That’s not necessary.’ Dr Hope answered for him. They had become quite a double act since the last time she had seen them together.

‘Sam Abbott was on the team that failed to solve the Susie Ashton disappearance ten years ago,’ Jenny said. ‘His worst fear is all of this having something to do with that.
It’s not your job or mine to stop his nightmares coming true.’

Dr Kerr nodded. He wasn’t a man who enjoyed conflict, but it couldn’t be helped.

Jenny forced herself to take a proper look and moved forward to the table. She saw the lesion caused by the ligature at once: an ugly narrow groove travelling virtually horizontally across the
neck approximately two inches beneath the chin. Nicky’s swollen face bore all the classic signs she had come to recognize from asphyxiations: the lips were blue, the eyes wide open and
bulging; there were traces of bloodstained froth beneath the nostrils.

‘The police provided photographs of the body
in situ
,’ Dr Hope said. She pointed to a brown A4 envelope sitting on the bench at the side of the lab.

It was the last thing Jenny wanted to see, but she had no choice. She steeled herself and picked up the envelope. A welcome sense of unreality descended as she drew out the contents.

A dozen or so photographs covered the scene from every angle. Unlike the downstairs rooms Jenny had been in, Nicky’s bedroom was tidy and well kept. She was kneeling at the foot of her
bed, dressed in knickers and an overlong white T-shirt. A length of orange nylon string was tied tightly around her neck. The end was tied to a pipe that travelled down the wall behind her to a
radiator. Her head was slumped forward, her hair covering her face. Her fists were tightly clenched and in the area around her knees the beige carpet was stained with a liquid that Jenny presumed
was urine.

It wasn’t a sight she had witnessed before, but it was something she had read about. In recent years there had been clusters of teenage suicides in which the victims, who had often
communicated with each other online, had used this technique. They called it ‘rocking yourself to sleep’. A little forward pressure, then a little more. It was reputedly a far less
traumatic end than suspension from above.

‘Have you got a time of death?’ Jenny asked.

‘We estimate 9.30 this morning, give or take half an hour.’

‘A strange time,’ Jenny said. Most suicides took place at night; very few in the morning hours of daylight. ‘Any sign of drugs or alcohol?’

‘The bloods results will be back any minute,’ Dr Kerr said, ‘but I doubt it. The stomach was empty. Doesn’t look as if she had consumed anything since yesterday
evening.’

Jenny slotted the photographs back in the envelope. ‘You’re satisfied it’s suicide?’