The Burning (38 page)

Jenny looked at him and wondered if she had imagined the last half-minute. She thought he looked rather beautiful. Young and untravelled. Skin taut across his jaw; deep eyes that were soulful
despite his efforts to remain businesslike. She silently chided herself for even entertaining the idea that they might – She stopped herself from even having the thought. The moment of
temptation was over, and she had emerged unscathed. They had both done the right and decent thing. She was able to trust herself.

‘I’m OK,’ Jenny said purposefully. ‘I’m going to try to take on board what you said. See if it helps.’

For a brief moment Ryan looked as if he were hovering on the edge of moving forward to kiss her, but he pulled back from the brink. ‘I hope so.’ He stood up from the sofa, placing
himself outside touching distance. But as he stepped away Jenny felt the tug of an invisible force field that was pulling them back together.

‘I ought to go,’ Jenny said.

She moved towards the cupboard where Ryan had hung her coat, passing close by him.

‘Hey,’ he said softly.

She glanced back. He took a step towards her and folded his arms around her, embracing her in a hug.

‘I’m here, all right?’ he said. ‘It may be unprofessional of me, but I care about you – I mean, I care about
you
.’

‘That’s kind,’ Jenny said, not knowing how else to respond, and felt her hands come up from her sides and loop around his upper back. From there it felt only natural to rest
her cheek against his shoulder as he stroked the back of her head. Jenny stepped back from their gentle embrace with a warm smile, letting him know that he had given her something precious.

Jenny fetched out her coat and pulled it on, telling herself it was time to change the mood. There was still an outside possibility she might have to call Ryan as a witness to her resumed
inquest the following week, which was another very good reason she was glad to have held back.

‘I’m starting again Monday morning,’ Jenny said. ‘You’ll let me know if anything more turns up at your end.’

‘Apart from my team that’s still meant to be looking for Robbie, we’re all done,’ Ryan said. ‘My boss is more than satisfied that Nicky Brooks took her own life, so
that’s another file you’ll find on your desk tomorrow morning.’

She had tried not to think about Nicky. Four days on from her death, Jenny was feeling the tragedy of it more acutely, not less, as if she were somehow bound up with her. ‘What
do
you think Ed did with Robbie?’ Jenny asked. ‘He didn’t have a lot of time that evening. He couldn’t have taken him far.’

‘He planned it,’ Ryan said. ‘He’d have had something worked out.’

A thought jumped into Jenny’s mind for the first time, and in the same instant, she realized that she had hardly thought about Robbie in isolation from his half-sisters. ‘It’s
almost as if in making him disappear he was mirroring what happened to Susie Ashton – the idea that not knowing is worse than knowing.’

Ryan seemed taken with the thought. ‘That has a certain logic. He’d seen it all play out for the last ten years.’

Jenny’s mind raced on. ‘What if Ed did have a hand in Susie’s disappearance? And what if the rumours about a paedophile ring were right and he wasn’t acting alone? Robbie
might even still be alive.’

‘You know what you’ve just done?’ Ryan said. ‘You’ve displaced all that anxiety you came with onto something else. You’ve got to check this tendency, Jenny.
You’ll drive yourself crazy.’

She felt a rush of energy as some mental blockage seemed to fall away. Half-formed thoughts and ideas that had subconsciously disturbed her for days burst into fullness. ‘No. Listen. Ed
knew Layla and Mandy carried the baggage of the past. He knew Kelly would get over them somehow. But Robbie was theirs. He was pure; born into happiness. The
only
pure thing Kelly had ever
had. So what’s the worst he could do? It’s not killing him. It’s allowing him to live, but a life of horror; a life that’ll make him inhuman and pervert everything he was to
her.’

Ryan raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve got a dark imagination.’

‘Or what if Ed knew what happened to Susie Ashton and was on the brink of revealing it as his own child approached that age? You should be trawling his history for all his associates, not
just following leads from the public.’

‘I’ll pass on your thoughts. Meanwhile, I recommend a large drink when you get home.’

‘Damn!’

‘What now?’

‘The car on the video you just showed me – could it have been a VW?’

‘Possibly. Why?’

‘A VW Polo belonging to Emma Grant was stolen from her house last November.’

‘Now you really are losing it.’

‘I’d like to check,’ Jenny said. ‘And maybe you could get me a copy of that footage and of any pictures of Robbie you might have.’

‘He’s dead, Jenny.’

‘You can believe that if you like, but I’ve seen no evidence to prove it. And part of a coroner’s job – the bit that most people forget about – is to try to keep
more people from dying.’

He looked at her with concern. ‘You seem a little manic.’

‘It feels like waking up. Call me. I’ll be waiting.’ She gave Ryan another brief hug and let herself out.

Jenny allowed herself one drink, but it did little to calm her frenetic thoughts. It wasn’t until late in the evening, after she had been working for several hours in her
study, that her lids finally started to droop and she began to think about hauling herself upstairs to bed.

She had tidied her notes and was about to switch off the hall light and turn in when she heard heavy footsteps approach the front door. There were three evenly spaced knocks, a signal that it
was the constable who had been posted outside in a squad car.

Jenny opened the door to the young man in uniform who looked suspiciously as if he had just been roused from a deep sleep.

‘You’ve got a visitor, Mrs Cooper. A Mrs Trent. I told her to stay in her car.’ He nodded towards a small hatchback parked in the lane.

Jenny glanced at her watch: it was a quarter to midnight. ‘All right. Tell her to come in.’

As the policeman turned and went back down the path to fetch her, Jenny asked herself what on earth Alison could want that couldn’t wait until the morning. But when she appeared it was
clear that the time was the last thing on her mind. She marched up the path clutching a briefcase, filled with a sense of purpose.

‘I’ve got something for you, Mrs Cooper. I thought you’d want to know immediately.’

Jenny didn’t bother protesting. She took Alison through to the kitchen – the only room in the house that was still warm this late in the evening – and tried her best to remain
patient.

Alison was bursting with excitement as she emptied papers and iPad onto the kitchen table. ‘You know I’m actually grateful to Simon Moreton,’ Alison said. ‘I
wouldn’t have had time to do any of this if I’d been caught up with other things.’

Jenny surveyed the unpromising mess between them. ‘Is this about your Facebook account?’

‘Oh, far better than that, Mrs Cooper. Much more significant.’ She could hardly contain herself. ‘You remember Reverend Medway’s evidence about the man watching Kelly
Hart’s house? I think I’ve found out who it is.’

‘You have?’ Jenny said sceptically.

‘Daniel Burden.’ Alison’s eyes gleamed as she revelled in Jenny’s surprise. ‘I’ve been going through his bank statements and credit-card bills and wondering
how the police could have failed to be interested.’ From amongst the papers she extracted a printout. ‘Last September he bought a camera online – state of the art, along with a
tripod. Eight hundred and fifty-three pounds. I don’t suppose you saw any sign of it at his flat?’

‘No, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Is this important?’

‘Not by itself. But when you look at this –’ She brought out a credit-card bill and pointed to an item she had double underlined in red.

Jenny looked at the item. It was a single purchase of a little over £3,000. ‘Idenco Ltd. What’s that?’

‘They make software. Very clever software that they sell to the Home Office and Border Agency. In fact, they sell it all around the world.’ Alison was enjoying holding her in
suspense. ‘Can you guess what kind?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Facial recognition!’ She grabbed another document from amidst the heap and handed it across to Jenny. ‘That’s the spec. Not only can you use it to identify faces from
your own database, it’ll also trawl the entire internet and look for any photograph that resembles a picture of someone you’ve uploaded. Read what it says – if I were to ask it to
look at a picture of you taken today, it claims it could pick you out from a 1980 school photograph.’

‘How?’

‘It measures the distance between various features and then it does some clever maths. Oh, and there’s something about 3D in there too. It’s not perfect, but governments
wouldn’t be buying it unless it was some use.’

Jenny skimmed through the explanation of the technical wizardry that allowed a computer program to compare every photograph on the internet with a template. Illustrated examples showed
photographs of a range of current celebrities alongside recovered photographs of them going back to their late teens: entire pictorial histories assembled in minutes, listed alongside the web
addresses of the sites from which each image was harvested.

‘When did you find all this out?’ Jenny asked, still trying to piece together what it could mean.

‘Over the last few days,’ Alison said. ‘But then when I sat in court and heard that fellow Kenyon talking it really got me thinking.’ Alison leaned forward over the
table, invading her space. She looked a little unhinged: she hadn’t brushed her hair for a long while and it had fallen away from her temple, revealing the flattened area of skin covering the
titanium plate at her temple. Jenny reminded herself to treat what she said carefully. ‘All that business about checking newly approved passports at random with software like this. Like I
said, it isn’t 100 per cent accurate, so if you can get a picture which is sufficiently close, or
manipulate
one so that it’s close enough to pass the test, then you’ve
something valuable. You see, most passport officials are more interested in what their computers say than the evidence of their own eyes. As long as you look roughly like your picture and the
passport scans OK, you’re home free.’

Jenny tried to follow her logic. ‘So Burden could have used all this equipment and software to help him create passports for criminal customers?’

‘You’re not as dim as you look, Mrs Cooper.’ Alison grinned. ‘Oh, did I mention that you need a powerful computer to run this software? – you won’t do it on
your home PC. That’s why he had something bespoke, and the separate hard drive to keep it tucked away out of sight. Come to think of it, he would most likely have kept it all in a cubbyhole
somewhere. I wonder . . .’

Jenny scanned the growing pile of evidence in front of her. She had to give Alison credit, it was mounting up to proof that Burden really was in the forgery business. Just a pity she
hadn’t had it twenty-four hours earlier at court. Something still jarred with her. Then she realized what it was: the dates.

‘He’d been banking money for more than two years, but he only assembled all this early last autumn—’

‘See? I told you!’ Alison smiled with a glee Jenny hadn’t seen since before her accident. ‘I wondered that, too. He spent over five thousand – that’s a
serious investment. So I checked all his statements again. I found something that got me excited.’ She turned to a second item underlined on the credit-card statement. ‘Twenty-five
pounds, seventy-five pence, to Europcar. The only time you get charged such a small amount by a car-rental company is when they claw it back for fuel or a stain on the upholstery. There’s no
other payment to Europcar, so I guessed he might have settled in cash.’ From the bottom of the assorted papers, Alison produced three sheets clipped together. ‘You have a very old
friend of mine from Bristol CID to thank for this,’ Alison said. ‘He came with me to their office. Daniel Burden hired the cheapest car on their list for three separate weekends last
September and October. A Kia Picanto. I took a picture of it.’ Alison produced her phone and called up an image of a small, unremarkable car in a sickly colour somewhere between green and
very dark yellow. ‘The colour’s called Lemongrass. I’d call it bile.’

Jenny stared at the rental documents with a growing sense of disbelief. It was there in black and white: Daniel Burden had hired the vehicle in his own name and given his address at 15 Janus
Avenue, Henleaze.

‘I told you I wasn’t a complete fruitcake,’ Alison said. ‘True, I sometimes forget to stop myself breaking wind in polite company, but I figure if you can train a toddler
not to, I’m not beyond all hope.’

Jenny looked up from the papers that were trembling slightly in her hands and had the disconcerting feeling that she was looking at the world through distorting mirrors. Her mind was churning
but not gaining any traction, like wheels spinning fruitlessly on ice. She had no idea what any of this
meant
.

‘I can see you’re confused. I was, until I drove there on my way over,’ Alison said confidently. ‘Reverend Medway said he parked just along the church on the verge. True,
you could have seen Kelly’s place from there, but if you were to turn around and look out of the back window – or point a camera that way – you’re looking straight at the
Ashtons’ cottage. And that would be the clever thing to do, wouldn’t it – park the opposite way to the direction you’re looking in?’

‘Why the Ashtons’?’ Part of the answer arrived in Jenny’s mind before Alison delivered it. ‘The £100,000 reward.’

‘There’s a motive for a man who needs money. But he must have suspected Philip Ashton for some reason, and maybe had a photograph somewhere that he was trying to get a comparison
with.’

Jenny was struggling to keep up.

‘Look,’ Alison said impatiently. ‘I remember how attractive Clare Ashton was. You wouldn’t see it now, but she was beautiful. Doll-like.
Innocent
, as if she
couldn’t see the bad in people. He always seemed so rigid and awkward next to her. He had this sort of pent-up-ness you knew was there even before it all happened. You know the
kind.’