The Burning (19 page)

‘You didn’t know Jacob,’ Falco said gravely. ‘And I’ll forgive you for making that suggestion. He wouldn’t have.’

He exited the office, leaving behind an odour of cigarettes and cologne that hung in the air like bad memories and made her feel queasy. Moments later, and almost without warning, Jenny felt a
sudden return of the nausea that had gripped her the previous morning, but this time there was no beating it back. She rushed to the Ladies’ and threw up.

‘I
SAID YOU WEREN
’
T LOOKING WELL
, Mrs Cooper. It’s a virus. Everyone’s coming down with them at this time of year,’ Alison
insisted, pressing a cup of tea into Jenny’s hands. ‘You should be at home in bed.’

‘I can’t. I need to talk to Burden’s brother—’

‘You leave that to me. It’s no trouble.’

Jenny couldn’t deny that she felt too ill to focus on her mountain of paperwork, but giving up halfway through the first working day of the year would seem like a bad omen. Reluctantly,
she settled on a compromise: she would leave Alison to take a statement from Burden’s brother and to start the process of arranging an inquest into the deaths at Blackstone Ley, while she
would take her work home, and if she felt strong enough, call in to talk to Nicky Brooks en route.

‘You don’t know when to stop,’ Alison said reproachfully. ‘You’ll only make yourself worse.’

‘Coming from you, that’s rich,’ Jenny answered. She started to load files into her briefcase, already having misgivings about leaving Alison to deal with a grieving relative
alone.

‘I couldn’t help overhearing a little of your conversation with Mr Falco,’ Alison confessed. ‘Something about Burden and his client?’

‘Maybe best to steer away from that this afternoon. Just stick to the known facts and ask the other Mr Burden if he has any insights into his brother’s state of mind.’

‘Do I mention he might have been gay?’

‘I don’t recall saying that.’

‘You hinted at it.’

‘You really didn’t miss much, then?’

‘You know how voices travel in here.’ Alison was unapologetic. ‘It’s hardly something I can skirt around if he asks me what we know – not without lying to him, and
I can’t do that.’

Jenny weighed her options and realized that having Alison in possession of only half the facts was probably more dangerous than her knowing the full truth. She sucked in a deep breath as another
wave of nausea consumed her.

‘OK. I’ll trust you with this as long as you try to be sensitive – it seems Daniel Burden was born female. He had some reassignment surgery in his twenties, but the process
wasn’t fully completed.’

‘Really . . .?’ Alison said, fishing for more.

‘That’s it. That’s all I know.’ Jenny’s head was swimming. ‘I’ll call you later.’ She hoisted her briefcase and made her way unsteadily from the
office.

All the way up Whiteladies Road and over the top of Clifton Downs, Jenny clung to the steering wheel with white knuckles, fearful that at any moment she might have to pull
over, but as she broke out into the suburbs normal sensation gradually and miraculously returned. The speed and completeness of her recovery was uncanny and only served to reinforce what she had
concluded after her experience at the mortuary the previous day. She wasn’t suffering from a winter virus. This was an entirely mental, not a physical disturbance. Once again she found
herself searching for the reason, the trigger for this sudden and distressing reminder of her fallibility, and once again it eluded her. ‘Fight it, Jenny,’ she repeated to herself, but
deep down she knew that railing against it wasn’t the answer. There would be a reason for these episodes, and if her past experience was anything to go by, it would reveal itself only when it
was good and ready.

Arriving at the corner of Blackstone Common, Jenny took the right fork that led to the Ashtons’ cottage and the church beyond. But this time she travelled only a hundred
yards along and pulled up behind a battered four-wheel-drive pick-up truck that was parked opposite the entrance to an unmade track. The decal on the side of the truck read:
Darren Brooks,
Building Contractor
. The track was narrow and lay deep in snow, and deciding that it might prove too challenging even for the Land Rover, Jenny continued her journey on foot.

She followed a thin trail of footsteps along the track, around two steep bends and through an ancient apple orchard. Then she discovered the reason why Brooks’s truck was parked out on the
common: the house, a small, unlovely building built from rough-hewn lumps of the local grey-black stone, sat at the top of a steep bank that it would have been impossible to negotiate in anything
less than a tractor. Jenny pressed on up the slope and arrived weak-kneed and out of breath at the top. Almost immediately she was assailed by the sound of furious barking. A black-and-tan pointer
shot out from behind the house and ran straight at her. Instinctively she braced herself, ready to feel its bite, when a woman dressed in a thick cardigan flung open the back door. ‘Dixie!
Come away!’ Her voice was sharp and commanding. ‘Dixie! In!’

The dog stopped in its tracks, gave an ominous growl, and skulked head down back to the house.

‘Sandra Brooks?’ Jenny asked, her heart racing.

‘Yes?’ the woman answered coldly.

‘Jenny Cooper. I’m the coroner investigating the deaths in the fire the other day. I visited your husband in hospital last week.’ She drew closer to where Sandra Brooks stood
guarding the entrance to her home. ‘I understand your daughter Nicky was a friend of Layla Hart’s. I was hoping I might speak to her. My officer should have called you.’

Sandra folded her arms defensively across her narrow, angular body as Jenny approached her. She would have been an attractive woman in her youth, with light blonde hair and china-blue eyes, but
her skin had aged prematurely, the spiders’ web of lines on her pale face telling a long story of disappointments and wrong turns. ‘Speak to her about what?’

‘About Layla and what was going on in her life. Kelly tells me they were close friends.’ Jenny glanced beyond Sandra to the gloomy interior of the house.

‘She doesn’t know nothing about the fire.’

Jenny detected movement. A girl in a hooded sweater was standing in a doorway along the passage, peering out at her. The dog was sitting at her feet.

‘I’d be happy to speak to the two of you together.’

‘She already spoke to the police. They said they wouldn’t trouble her no more.’

‘I’m nothing to do with the police,’ Jenny explained, aching to step out of the cold. ‘I could have asked Nicky to come to my office in Bristol to make a formal
statement, but I thought it might be easier this way.’

The hint of a threat gave Sandra Brooks pause. She glanced over her shoulder, then back at Jenny.

‘I’ll only be a few minutes,’ Jenny said, deliberately softening her tone.’

Sandra Brooks called back to her daughter: ‘Lock Dixie out the back.’ She gave Jenny a hard stare. ‘Remember she’s a kid, all right? She may not look it, but that’s
what she is.’

Jenny went with her down a cold hallway that smelt of mildew and into a room that served both as a kitchen and general living space. Several threadbare and mismatched armchairs were gathered
around a coal stove. Washing was drying on a clothes horse suspended by a rope from the ceiling. Whatever Darren Brooks’s skills were as a builder, he hadn’t employed them in his own
home: the floor was carpeted with taped-together oddments and the battered kitchen units could have been scavenged from a skip.

Nicky emerged through a latched door that led to a lean-to at the back at the house, letting in a gust of freezing air. She was as tall as Jenny, fuller-figured than her mother, and could easily
have passed for eighteen. It was only her painful shyness and refusal to meet Jenny’s gaze that gave her away as far younger. Jenny introduced herself and settled on the chair that was the
least smothered with dog hair. Nicky nodded, unwilling to speak in more than a mumble, her eyes constantly seeking out her mother’s.

Delivering the speech she reserved for people who had never encountered a coroner before, Jenny explained that she was nothing to do with the police and that her job was to find out the cause of
Layla, Mandy and their stepfather’s deaths. She couldn’t be sure if Nicky had understood or not; when she wasn’t looking at her mother, she kept her eyes fixed impassively on the
flames licking the glass door of the stove.

Sandra reached for a packet of cheap cigarettes.

‘Mum,’ Nicky protested, ‘not in the house.’ They were the first words she had spoken.

‘Won’t hurt. Anyway, your dad’s not here to complain.’ Sandra lit one and sucked in the smoke with the urgency of a hardened addict.

‘I’ve met with Kelly Hart a few times,’ Jenny said to Nicky. ‘I understand you’ve been friends with Layla since you were small.’

‘Yeah,’ Nicky mumbled, hiding her hands inside the baggy sleeves of her grey cotton sweater.

‘Best friends?’

Nicky shrugged.

Sandra answered Jenny with a nod, smoke seeping out between her nicotine-stained teeth.

‘You must have spent a lot of time together?’

Nicky shrugged again.

‘She was always over at theirs or Layla was over here,’ Sandra said, ‘or else they were off out somewhere.’ It was said with a note of disapproval, and Jenny felt Nicky
draw even further into her shell.

‘There are a couple of things in particular I’d like to ask you about, Nicky. I’d be really grateful if you’d be as honest as you can, OK?’ Ignoring Nicky’s
sigh, Jenny persisted. ‘Some time last autumn graffiti appeared on Layla’s house. I expect you remember. Do you have any idea who put it there?’ Jenny waited for an answer, and
receiving none spoke a little more sternly: ‘Nicky, this is important.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It was just some boy Layla knew.’

‘Which boy?’

‘There were a bunch of them, from Bristol.’

‘Why would they deface her house like that?’

Another evasive shrug.

‘Tell her, Nicky,’ Sandra said.

‘They were taking liberties. Her stepdad had to get rid of them.’

Sandra gave her daughter a look to which she refused to respond. ‘It was a bit more than that, wasn’t it?’

Nicky turned her face even further away from Jenny.

Sandra drew on her cigarette and pushed her wispy hair back from her forehead. ‘Ed told me he came home to find Layla and Nicky with four boys. They were videoing each other with their
phones.’ She glanced at Nicky, who was cringing with embarrassment. ‘They were making the girls do things to them – you know. Mandy was upstairs somewhere scared half to death. Ed
showed them his shotgun. He didn’t tell the police, because he didn’t want anyone to know. He thought one of them came back and did the graffiti.’

‘Did he tell Kelly about this?’

‘I’m not sure he did. She was at work. He felt responsible.’

‘But he told you?’

‘Didn’t have much choice, did he?’

Jenny turned to Nicky, who had remained motionless throughout this exchange. ‘Is that what happened, Nicky?’

‘I never wanted to. It was Layla who went along with it. I just got dragged in.’

‘I can believe that,’ Sandra added, with an edge of bitterness.

‘Did Layla tell you she was pregnant?’ Jenny asked.

Nicky looked up at her in alarm. It was the first time she had made eye contact.

‘She was three months pregnant when she died. Did she tell you who the father was?’

‘She wasn’t pregnant. No way. She can’t have been. She would have told me.’

‘The evidence isn’t in doubt. Can you think of any reason why she might not have told you?’

Nicky shook her head, still refusing to believe it. Jenny studied her face closely and decided that her shock was real.

‘Do you know who she might have had sex with? Could it have been one of these boys you were talking about?’

‘No. She didn’t do that with them. That was off limits.’ A note of uncertainty entered her voice. Sandra had heard it too, and cocked her head questioningly to one side,
demanding to hear it all. Nicky wavered for a moment, then spat it out. ‘She said she’d only ever been with one boy like that, and that was last summer.’

‘Who?’ Sandra asked, cutting in before Jenny.

‘Is he going to be in trouble?’ Nicky said.

‘For Christ’s sake, Nicky, just tell her,’ Sandra snapped. ‘It’s not your job to protect him.’

Nicky lapsed into a stubborn silence.

‘I will find out,’ Jenny said calmly, ‘one way or another.’

Nicky looked from Jenny to her mother and back again, and slowly seemed to accept that she was backed into a corner from which there was no escape.

‘She said she’d done it with Simon Grant,’ Nicky mumbled. ‘She could have been making it up,’ she added unconvincingly.

‘Who is he?’ Jenny asked.

‘David and Emma Grant’s son,’ Sandra said with grim satisfaction. ‘He’s seventeen. Goes to some posh boys’ boarding school. Kelly works up at their place.
Layla must have gone up there with her in the holidays.’

‘You’re making her out to be a slut,’ Nicky shot back at her mother. ‘She wasn’t. People got her all wrong. They thought she was putting out when she wasn’t.
She just got led along.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Jenny said, ‘but sometimes there’s a reason why girls behave like that.’ She hesitated, trying to find a delicate way of
putting her question, but there wasn’t one. ‘Nicky, did Layla ever mention if anything happened to her in the past?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did she ever give you any hint that she’d been abused by anyone?’

‘No.’ Nicky seemed puzzled at the suggestion.

‘How did she get on with her stepfather?’

‘Are you trying to say Ed did things to her? No way.’ She shook her head in disgust.

‘It’s a question I have to ask.’

‘No way. She loved him. There was nothing weird about Ed. You know when blokes are looking at you, you just do, but he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t.’

‘All right,’ Jenny said, trying not to appear disappointed with her answer. She pushed a little further. ‘Layla had some extra help with her school work from your neighbour, Mr
Ashton. Did she mention why that stopped?’