The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (37 page)

‘Couldn’t you stay at home for a while, Mrs Cooper? It’d make me sleep easier.’

‘I don’t want you to sleep, Detective Superintendent, I want you to find Ayen.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘On my way to Oxford – does that meet with your approval?’

Williams sighed. ‘I’m not normally a superstitious man, Mrs Cooper, but I’ve got a bad feeling.’

A large and excited party of summer-school students had gathered outside the porter’s lodge. Taking advantage of the confusion, Jenny weaved through their midst, managed to avoid the gaze of Davies, the porter, and hurried through to the cloister and into the quad beyond. She searched for Forster’s name on the hand-painted boards at the foot of each staircase. His accommodation was also on the second floor. The stairs were similarly well trodden, the paintwork similarly scuffed by a thousand student trunks. Forster’s outer door, his ‘oak’, was ajar. Jenny pulled it open and knocked.

‘Who is it?’ he answered in his curt tutor’s voice.

‘Jenny Cooper.’

She could sense his alarm. There was a brief silence from his side, then slow, resigned footsteps. The figure who greeted her was pale and unshaven. He wore reading glasses that aged him ten years. Jenny glanced past him and saw that he’d been working at his desk, but had pulled the lid of his laptop closed shut.

‘What do you want?’ He made no attempt at politeness.

‘I think you might prefer not to have this conversation on the stairs.’

Reluctantly, he stood aside and let her in to his conspicuously orderly room. The furniture was modern: an angular leather sofa with matching armchairs; books meticulously arranged in height order on glass shelves; no stray paper in sight. A man adept at wiping his tracks, Jenny thought.

‘Well?’ Forster challenged.

‘I understand that you and Mrs Blake were closer than I had appreciated. You must have been aware of her complicated family history.’

‘You’ve been talking to her ex-husband.’ He grunted. ‘What of it?’

‘Given her interests, and her recent involvement with a man who died falling from a motorway bridge, I thought you might be wondering about the circumstances of her death.’

‘We know how she died. It’s a serious condition that can go undetected. Sonia was hardly one to run to a doctor over trivial symptoms, so she probably won’t have had a diagnosis.’

‘Were you still lovers – recently, I mean?’

‘Not for months. Though what concern it is of yours, I’ve no idea.’

‘It’s a long and involved story, Mr Forster, but I’ll give you the most recent instalment. The dead man was called Adam Jordan. He was a thirty-two-year-old aid worker recently returned from South Sudan. He met with Sonia and I believe they communicated online. At the beginning of June this year, they sponsored a young woman from Sudan to come to the UK on a six-month visa. It turns out she was the only survivor from a village that had been wiped out by some sort of disease.’

She studied his features for a reaction, but spotted it instead in a nervous scratching of his fingers on the lip of the desk.

‘Did she tell you about the girl?’

‘No,’ he said dismissively.

‘Jordan? Did she mention his name, tell you his story?’

‘Only the vaguest details after you came here first. Look, this really isn’t my territory. Sonia was Politics, I’m Economics – and not African economics, I might add. Strictly First World only. Our relationship, such as it was, was purely personal.’ He pulled off the reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I really have nothing to say to you. I don’t know this man, Jordan. Sonia didn’t trouble me with all the details of her work, any more than I did her with mine.’ A sideways tic of the head. He was angry and straining to contain himself.

Jenny tried to isolate what it was that was making him so defensive. He’d shared a bed with Sonia, he would have known her intimately, heard stories of her father repeated night after night. Why the attempt to shut the conversation down?

What was so threatening? She ran her eyes along the unnaturally neat shelves designed to reveal nothing, yet saying much about their owner.
First World only
. His was a serious and applied mind, not that of some muddle-headed idealist; an outsider from the former colonies determined to stake his place at the heart of his profession. Sonia had come to him as she had to her ex-husband, looking for a man who would bring order to her chaos; a lover and a father. He must have felt worshipped for a while, at least until he realized the full depth of her obsessions, what he had got himself into: a relationship with potential to threaten his untarnished career; and a source of gossip amongst waspish colleagues searching for his Achilles heel.

Jenny chanced her arm with the theory. ‘I’ve no wish to draw you into anything that might damage your reputation, Mr Forster. I didn’t have to talk to you in person; I could merely have summoned you to my inquest to give evidence in public.’

‘I’ve told you, Mrs Cooper, I’ve nothing more to say.’

In anger, his accent grew stronger, back to its New Zealand roots. She pictured a small town as neat as his room, his every achievement faithfully reported in the local paper; proud parents making a scrapbook of the clippings. No, there would have been no natural place in that narrative for a girlfriend or wife like Sonia Blake.

‘Let me tell you a little of what I know and see if you still feel the same, Mr Forster.’ She gave him no chance to object. ‘In the late 1960s Sonia’s father worked on a biological weapons programme for the US Army. In late 1981 an article in the
Washington Post
exposed the programme’s work, citing anonymous sources. A few months after it was published he was murdered in Arizona. Sonia persisted in believing he was killed by Russians. She tracked down a defector, also a military biologist, named Roman Slavsky. She kept a file on him. Immediately before he came to meet her here in Oxford, Adam Jordan bought a book Slavsky had written. Straight after her death, or perhaps even before, the contents of Sonia’s file on Slavksy went missing from her room.’

‘How do you know that?’ Forster said.

‘I came here the day after she died – you saw me. I went to her room and saw an empty file with Slavsky’s name on it.’

‘What were you doing in her room?’

‘My job. Looking for evidence.’

He shrugged. ‘I tried not to involve myself with that side of her . . .’ he hesitated, ‘with her more unconventional activities.’

It was odd, his detachment. He had been affected by Sonia’s death, Jenny could see it in the greyness of his face, the heavy shadows under his eyes, but from his words alone she wouldn’t have guessed it. He seemed frightened, or
unable
to grieve.

‘What exactly was the nature of your relationship, if you don’t mind my asking?’ Jenny said.

‘I do mind,’ Forster said.

There. He averted his face: the first sign of emotion.

‘Her ex-husband said you were lovers. If you’ll pardon me, you don’t appear to be reacting as a lover might.’

Forster stepped away from the desk. ‘My feelings are a private matter. Unless you’ve anything useful to say, I would kindly ask you to leave. I have a lot of work to do.’

‘Are you angry with her? Is that it? Was her death a culmination of events? Help me, Mr Forster – I’m in the dark here, people have died.’

For a passing moment her plea seemed to have breached his defences. He seemed about to speak, when they were interrupted by the sound of Jenny’s phone. She glanced at the screen and saw that it was Simon Moreton calling.

‘Excuse me a moment.’ She took the call. ‘Simon?’

‘Jenny,’ he said briskly. ‘Yet again, you seem to have caused something of an inter-departmental crisis. Welsh detectives charging around Bristol at your behest, I hear?’

‘I’m hearing the Jordan inquest in Chepstow. There are no suitable venues on the English side of the border.’

‘I see. Look, I’m afraid I don’t know exactly what’s going on.’ A note of urgency entered his voice. ‘This is just scraps of gossip from mates over in Vauxhall – but I get the impression you’ve strayed into some extremely sensitive territory.’

‘I’ve not
strayed
anywhere. I’m simply doing what the law requires.’

‘Don’t get pompous on me, Jenny, I’m trying to help. I just had a call saying our friends from south London are going to bring you in for questioning.’

‘They’ve no authority.’

‘Moot point.’

‘Simon, I’m doing nothing improper. Phone them. Tell them I’m not to be interfered with.’

‘Good in theory, not in practice,’ came Moreton’s weasel reply. ‘There are occasions when protocol is bypassed and everyone looks the other way. I sense this might be one of them. It’s up to you, but I think perhaps you ought to cooperate.’

‘And my inquest?’

‘Jenny, I’ll only say it once.’ He lowered his voice, as if that simple safeguard might allow him to avoid detection by imagined listeners. ‘Nothing I can do will help you on this one. Believe me. I am truly sorry.’

He ended the call.

Jenny turned to Forster. Before she could speak, he said, ‘I don’t know what she was involved with. I didn’t want to know, and she respected that.’

‘But you knew it was significant?’

He drew in a breath and exhaled, exasperated. Jenny could imagine the conversations that must have taken place in this room: Sonia excitedly wanting to share the latest link in one of her convoluted conspiracies and Forster insisting he must know nothing that might damage his precious career.

‘If you tell me, I may not need to call you, Mr Forster. I have no wish to compromise you.’

He gave her a calculating look, weighing the odds of getting her off his back if he gave her what she wanted. Or perhaps she was being too harsh? Perhaps there was an honest though conflicted man beneath the hard exterior. Sonia must have seen something endearing in him, after all.

‘This is the truth, Mrs Cooper – I know nothing about your African girl, and I only heard Sonia mention Adam Jordan after his death. She was clearly being very secretive, which frankly was quite unlike her. I know about her interest in Roman Slavsky, but I never looked at the file myself. The day after you first came here, I think she may have moved some papers from her rooms. I went in there briefly and saw boxes on the floor.’

‘Did she say where she took them?’

‘We didn’t discuss it. I can’t even tell you for certain that’s what she did.’

‘Where might she have taken them?’

‘I don’t know. She has no office as such at the faculty. Her room was always such a mess. For all I know she might just have been getting rid of stuff.’

‘Did she ever mention the word
Ginya
?’

Forster shook his head. Jenny judged his denial genuine.

‘Who do I ask about these papers? Are there friends, colleagues?’

They were interrupted a second time, on this occasion by four loud knocks on the door. Jenny and Forster traded a glance, both reacting with alarm to the knocks’ abruptness.

‘Mr Forster?’ It was a man’s voice, impatient and businesslike. A detective, perhaps.

Then a second voice: ‘Are you in, sir?’

‘Coming.’ He hesitated, then nodded towards the bedroom.

Jenny moved silently across the room and slipped through the internal door. She fastened the bolt securely from the inside as Forster went to admit his visitors.

‘Good afternoon. How may I help you?’

She didn’t linger to listen in on their conversation. She knew who they would be. She quietly opened the connecting door and found herself in the small passageway that linked Forster’s rooms to Sonia’s. The door to Sonia’s bedroom was open. Jenny went through, locked it after her, and made her way through to the sitting room that looked to have been disturbed yet again since she had last seen it. She let herself out onto the next-door staircase.

She had started down the stairs when an instinct told her she had taken a wrong turn. She slipped off her shoes and ran noiselessly up the two flights to the landing above. Moments later she heard the sound of a door being staved in from inside Sonia Blake’s rooms. Jenny pressed herself hard against the wall, managing to stay almost, but not quite, out of sight from the landing below. Her two pursuers emerged from the open door and clattered down the stairs without an upwards glance. As their footsteps faded, she glanced over the banister and caught a fleeting glimpse of the square-jawed man she had seen at the Diamond Light Source, the one who had tried to break Michael’s ribs.

J
ENNY HID AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS
for a full twenty minutes before making her way cautiously down to the bottom. From here she continued down to the sub-level that she remembered led to a small courtyard and the extensive grounds beyond. It wasn’t safe to return to her car, nor did she want to risk exiting onto the street at the front of the college, so she turned left towards the modern accommodation blocks and set about finding another way out. After a prolonged search, she chanced on a gate at the side of the playing fields that opened onto a Jericho side street. Without a clear map of the city in her mind, she was as good as lost. Her only thought was to move away from the centre and in so doing shave the odds of being seen. Keeping the college at her back, she started walking. Canal Street, Mount Street, then a dogleg into Juxon Street, she tried to lose herself in their ordinariness.