The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (13 page)

Mist hung over the forest canopy in the valley’s basin like a pall of smoke. As Jenny descended the hill, she felt a chapter of her life close. She was still a mother, but a kind she didn’t yet know how to be: a mother to an adult who no longer needed her, who would never seek her out for comfort and affection again.

‘Hello? Hello?’

Jenny came into the office to find Alison with the phone pressed hard to her ear.

‘Damn. Number withheld.’ She dropped the receiver back on the cradle.

‘Who was it?’

‘A man – he didn’t say who – calling to find out what had happened to Adam Jordan.’

‘Was he a friend?’

‘He didn’t say. He had a foreign accent.’

‘What kind? African?’

‘No. He didn’t sound African.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Only as much as he could read in the newspaper – he jumped off a bridge.’

Alison turned to her computer and started banging the keys in a way that told Jenny she was put out.

‘Is everything all right?’ Jenny asked innocently. It was the question she had avoided asking for days.

Alison pretended to be surprised at her inquiry. ‘Sorry. Am I being short?’ She kept her eyes on the screen. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m expecting some results this morning. I’m sure I’ll be fine later.’

‘Right.’ There was little more Jenny could say. Results usually meant the medical kind. Jenny assumed from Alison’s lack of embellishment that it must be connected with the breast-cancer scare she had had the previous autumn. A tiny lump had been removed – caught well in time, the oncologist had reassured her – and she had been given the all-clear.

Alison briskly changed the subject. ‘There’s a message from the Health Protection Agency. They’re asking if you can go for a meeting today.’

‘Go where?’

‘They’re over in Gloucester.’

‘They can come here if they want to talk – I’m far too busy.’ Jenny headed into her office. ‘Let me know if you have any luck with that number.’

‘I managed to speak with Jim Connings by the way,’ Alison said.

Jenny had a momentary blank.

‘My contact in the path’ lab. You wanted to know if they’ve seen a lot of drug-resistant infection.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Off the record, they’re coming down with infections resistant to most of the drugs they can throw at them. TB, C. diff, strep, the lot. It’s like you thought, patients are bringing strains in from countries where things only get partially treated. At the moment it’s the very sick and the old who are dying, but they’re seeing more and more healthy adults with infection. On the record, it’s nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘Do you think he might give a statement?’

‘Oh, I expect so – for about half a million.’ Alison pointed a warning finger at her. ‘Don’t even think about a subpoena, Mrs Cooper. I promised him it was strictly confidential. He’s a friend.’

In the space of two intense hours, Jenny blotted out the world beyond her office door and made decisions in sixteen separate marginal cases, deciding she had sufficient medical evidence to issue death certificates in thirteen – the usual run of deaths on the operating table, old people found dead in their homes, and middle-aged men who had dropped from heart attacks – and three that required further exploration. When she had first taken up her post, a coroner from a neighbouring district had assured her that she would become inured to tragedy, and the day would soon arrive when even the most disturbing set of post-mortem photographs would fail to make her flinch. It hadn’t happened yet. The casual randomness with which death could strike shocked her every bit as much as it always had. The remaining three cases on her desk were all of the kind that made her fear for the fragility of life. A healthy twenty-year-old woman had suffered a fatal brain aneurism on a train. A forty-year-old father of four had been crushed by a truck reversing into the supermarket warehouse where he worked. A three-year-old girl had choked to death on the lid of a marker pen in a crowded day nursery.

Jenny was struggling to end a harrowing phone call to the dead child’s mother, who was demanding to know why no one had faced criminal charges – she refused to understand that the coroner had no connection with the police – when Alison appeared in the doorway with an impatient visitor.

‘Dr Verma, from the HPA,’ Alison said with the slight tilt of the head she used to indicate that they were dealing with what she called an awkward customer.

Dr Verma made no attempt to cover her irritation at being made to travel thirty miles for a meeting she had expected to host. She helped herself to a chair while Jenny continued to placate a mother who was now accusing her of being part of a conspiracy to protect a junior nursery nurse she held responsible for her child’s death.

Ending the call on a sour note, Jenny offered her visitor a weary smile. ‘It would be nice to give good news sometimes.’

Dr Verma responded with the bemused expression of one who didn’t let personal feelings interfere with the serious business of work. Her short black hair and severe suit suggested that her life didn’t consist of much else.

She introduced herself as the specialist microbiologist on the team handling the Freeman case. She was, she implied, an expert with knowledge far in excess of anything Jenny could hope to match, although she didn’t appear to be much over thirty. Dipping into her briefcase, she pulled out a copy of the
Western Mail
.

‘Have you seen this, Ms Cooper?’

Jenny admitted that she hadn’t.

Dr Verma handed it across the desk. At the foot of the front page was an article headed
Mystery Superbug Kills Girl, 13
. Sophie Freeman was named as the victim of an infection said to be of unknown origin, which had caused officials to close down her school and quarantine her classmates. An anonymous hospital source was quoted as saying that her death had caused near-panic among medical staff already uneasy about the increasing incidence of fatal, drug-resistant infections at the Severn Vale District Hospital.

‘I’ve just received word that the story has been picked up by the national press. It’s already springing up on their websites – suitably embellished of course.’

‘That’s unfortunate,’ Jenny said, handing the newspaper back to her. ‘I was told they had agreed not to mention the case.’

‘We assume it’s the misinformation from their inside source which made it irresistible. I don’t suppose you have any idea who that source might be?’

‘Not a clue,’ Jenny said. ‘Though I’m not sure it is misinformation. I get every impression that there is something close to panic breaking out at the Vale.’

‘Really?’ Dr Verma feigned surprise. ‘From whom?’

Jenny parried the question. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve no interest in spreading alarm, only in conducting an orderly inquiry. I presume your team will have some definitive lab results fairly quickly.’

‘We already do, Ms Cooper. Meningococcal meningitis. A virulent strain, but nothing unprecedented. All those who have had contact with Sophie Freeman in recent weeks have been put on notice to report any symptoms, but no new cases have been identified. If we were dealing with an outbreak we would have expected to see several more by now.’

She reached into her case a second time and handed Jenny a document that ran to several pages. ‘My preliminary report. There is more detailed analysis to be done, but we’re satisfied it’s more than sufficient for you to issue a death certificate.’

Jenny glanced over the dense technical text that appeared to compare the sudden onset of Sophie Freeman’s symptoms with similar patterns in other recorded cases. ‘What does this have to say about the issue of drug resistance?’ Jenny asked.

‘That’s a subject for more detailed study,’ Dr Verma said. ‘But as I understand the law, if it’s beyond doubt that death was caused by a specific and identifiable disease, you needn’t concern yourself any further.’

‘That would depend,’ Jenny said. ‘I can’t limit my concern to a specific case if there’s a possibility the originating cause is something else entirely. If a patient dies from an infected wound on a filthy ward, it can’t simply be treated as a death from septicaemia. I have to explore the surrounding circumstances.’

‘That’s precisely what we do at the HPA, Ms Cooper,’ Dr Verma said. ‘And without wishing to be disrespectful, I should remind you that we operate some of the country’s most sophisticated laboratories.’

‘Perhaps you’re not familiar with coroners’ inquiries, Dr Verma. I don’t contract my work out to other agencies.’

‘Our lawyers have assured us that an inquest isn’t necessary.’

‘The problem with lawyers is that you can always find one who’ll tell you what you want to hear,’ Jenny said. ‘And for the record, I don’t write death certificates according to the wishes of interested parties. That would be a denial of due process.’

Dr Verma looked at her in dumb astonishment, as if it had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t be unquestioningly obeyed. ‘You’re intent on holding this inquest?’

‘I have no option.’

‘When?’

‘As soon as possible. I was thinking next Monday.’

‘I don’t know what you’re expecting to hear.’

‘Nor do I,’ Jenny said. ‘That’s why it’s called an inquest. Is that all? I’ve got a lot to do.’

Dr Verma felt compelled to have the last word. ‘I’m sure our lawyers will be in touch.’

Jenny refused to be bullied. ‘That’s what you pay them for,’ she said and smiled.

Dr Verma snapped her briefcase shut and rose sharply to her feet. ‘Thank you, Ms Cooper. You’ve been most unhelpful.’

It’s not my job to help you, Jenny said to herself as the young doctor left. It’s to find out whatever the hell it is your people don’t want me to know. There would be something, she felt sure. The optimistically named Health Protection Agency had the unenviable job of stopping the spread of notifiable diseases as soon as they were detected. Any failure on its part wasn’t just a potential embarrassment, it could cost lives. A case of meningitis ignored by officials that proved the spark for an outbreak would most probably end someone’s career. If there had been negligence at the HPA, Jenny doubted that an employee as earnest as Dr Verma was responsible, but Verma was just the sort who might be lined up to take the drop if uncomfortable truths came to light. She was young and ambitious enough to see being sent on a mission to bully the coroner as a professional compliment, and inexperienced enough not to see what she was being dragged into. Despite her rudeness, Jenny hoped it wouldn’t be too painful a lesson for her.

Other cases intruded on Jenny’s thoughts. She had a married mother of five to telephone, whose husband, a thirty-five-year-old construction worker, had fallen to his death the previous afternoon. The post-mortem conducted overnight had revealed that he suffered a massive coronary as a result of an undiagnosed congenital defect: a time-bomb with which he had been born had exploded at random that particular afternoon. There would be no compensation for the widow, only the small comfort that he had been fortunate to have lived as long as he had.

She was bracing herself to deliver the news, when she heard Alison answer the phone from her desk in reception.

‘Yes, that’s me,’ Alison said. She listened to the caller in silence, then offered a muted ‘I understand’, before asking them to hold for a moment. She set down the receiver and came to the door of Jenny’s office. The colour had washed from her face. ‘Can you do without me this afternoon, Mrs Cooper?’

‘Of course. Is something wrong?’

‘Just a medical appointment.’

Jenny nodded, knowing not to ask any more. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Cooper. I’ll be sure to make up the hours.’

Closing the door behind her, Alison gathered her things and dashed from the office. The news couldn’t have been good. Jenny suspected that a mammogram had shown up a fresh irregularity her oncologist wanted to investigate immediately. It seemed so unfair. Within months of Alison leaving her ungrateful husband for the lover she should have married twenty-five years before, a tiny dark spot on an X-ray had cast the shadow that tainted her happiness and dug at her conscience. It was only natural to look for justice, or at least some shape and predictability to the chaotic chain of events that derailed and ended lives, but Jenny had long ago concluded that if they existed at all, the fates operated by laws far removed from human understanding.

She took a deep breath and lifted the phone. She would deal with the construction worker’s widow, then set the wheels in motion for Sophie Freeman’s inquest. The best she could do for Alison right now was to pretend that everything was normal.

Jenny pulled into the spotless driveway of David’s house a little before eight o’clock. She had left it late enough that the baby, Scarlett, would be in bed. Visiting the house that had been her home for nearly fifteen years was always an ordeal, but the prospect of David and his pretty young partner, Debbie, showing off their ten-month-old girl was intolerable. Whenever she crossed their threshold, Jenny felt like a stain on their perfect domesticity.

It was Ross who came to the door. ‘Hi, Mum.’ He was wearing a shirt she’d bought as a birthday present, though doubted he remembered that it was her who had given it to him. ‘Are you going to come in?’ He glanced guiltily over his shoulder. ‘Debbie’s still upstairs with Scarlett – teething or something.’