The Redeemed

CHAPTER 13




The chilly, grey Monday morning could as easily have been in March as late June. Jenny gave an ironic smile as she gazed out at the bleakness of the scene that perfectly reflected her mood. All attempts to persuade the Courts Service to provide a courtroom in the handful of intervening days had failed. The only venue Alison had managed to find which could accommodate an inquest at short notice was a former working men's clubhouse on the fringes of Avon- mouth, the area of heavy industry where the River Avon emptied into the Severn estuary. Nestled between the factories that lined the shore from the sprawling docks to the east to the new Severn crossing in the west, it was a single-storey cinder-block building with a sheet tin roof, surrounded by a weedy area of gravel which merged into the surrounding wasteland. Nearby the massive chimney of a bitumen plant pumped out foul, cream-coloured smoke that smelled of hot tar and burning rubber. It was an unloved place that existed only to be passed through on the way to somewhere else; a fitting location, Jenny decided, to unpick the details of Eva Donaldson's death.

She had had five days including the weekend to prepare and summon witnesses, and had fully expected the Ministry of Justice to intervene to make her think again. But apart from a solitary email from Amanda Cramer, they had remained eerily silent. Cramer's message had been tersely headed 'FYI', and contained a link to a newspaper article reporting insider gossip that the government and Decency were in advanced negotiations to secure the Decency Bill's safe passage through Parliament. It was to have its first reading in a week's time. Michael Turnbull himself was slated to open the debate in the Lords. Jenny interpreted it as a warning for the long term rather than as a threat. It was intended to remind her that as a junior member of the Establishment, she had a duty not to throw a spanner into the machinery of government. Even if she was technically within her rights to conduct an inquest, it would count as yet another black mark against her.

To make matters worse, Steve had been asked to stand in for his boss at a series of meetings with prospective clients in Edinburgh. He had been stuck in the office at the weekend, and Ross had cancelled their fortnightly Sunday lunch, claiming he was overwhelmed with coursework. Jenny had made the mistake of calling her ex-husband while she was still smarting with the pain of rejection, and had humiliated herself by bursting into tears. It was the excuse David needed to suggest she should try a new psychiatrist. He recommended a colleague at the hospital. She had felt so wretched she had taken the woman's number. Before he rang off, David said, 'I'm so glad you can talk to me like this now, Jenny. You do realize how far you've come in three years?'





Pushing open the creaking door to the former Severn Beach and District Working Men's Club, Jenny couldn't be sure if this was progress or not. Before her 'episode', the formal beginning of which she marked as the day she dried up and broke down in the middle of a family court hearing, she had been a well-respected lawyer running an entire local government department. Colleagues told her she could have applied to any of the big London law firms specializing in millionaire divorces and negotiated a six-figure salary with prospects for an equity partnership. By the time she was forty-five she could have been earning more than David and heading for a place at the top of her field.

Instead she was a local coroner making just enough to get by, and surviving on ever-increasing doses of anti-anxiety medication. Ignoring Dr Allen's warnings, she had been taking double doses for most of the past week and was still starting at shadows and imaginary phantoms. Entering the clammy, featureless room that had once been the club bar felt strangely like reaching the end of a long road. As soon as this was over, she told herself, she would take a holiday. Then she would attempt to drain the poison once and for all.

She retreated to the former committee room which would serve as her office, while Alison directed workmen arriving with hired-in chairs and trestle tables to set out the main room in a way that vaguely resembled a court. In between sips of coffee from a Thermos flask, she touched up her make-up with shaky fingers and tried to resist the temptation to swallow another Xanax.

Even with her lipstick perfect and all her lines concealed, she remained too edgy to rehearse the questions she had planned for her first witnesses. Unable to relax, she closed the tatty brown curtains, leaving a tiny gap through which she watched a steady stream of people start to arrive. Despite the sign saying CORONER'S COURT Alison had planted outside, prospective jurors, witnesses, press and lawyers all appeared equally baffled by the incongruous building. Jenny smiled to herself as she watched Ed Prince and his entourage disembark from a chauffeur-driven Mercedes van and drag their smart pull-along briefcases across the rough gravel between a jumble of parked cars. The squalid building had one virtue: it would be a great leveller.

Alison knocked shortly before ten and announced that Dr Kerr and all the police witnesses were present.

'What about Craven?'

'The prison has promised to get him here later this morning. That's the best they can do.'

'Then we'd better make a start,' Jenny said with starchy formality, but under her tightly buttoned jacket her heart was racing. The air felt suddenly muggy, a bead of perspiration trickled down the centre of her chest.

Alison stepped out in front of the now crowded courtroom. 'All rise.'

There was an obedient scraping of chairs and a subdued chorus of coughs.

Jenny entered and took her place at the head of the room at a table which had been draped with green baize. Fifty people waited obediently for her to sit before they resumed their seats. She picked out the face of Eva's father, Kenneth Donaldson, sitting alone at the end of a row, surrounded by a brood of journalists eager for a titillating story. From the brief statement he had reluctantly tendered, Jenny knew that he was sixty-six years old and the recently retired managing director of a respected and successful local company which engineered aircraft parts. Sitting stiffly in a pinstriped suit, he looked every inch a man used to being in command who wasn't going to let his suffering show in public. Three rows behind him, also unaccompanied, sat Father Starr. He fixed her with a still, penetrating gaze designed to remind her that she was answerable to only one authority, of whom he was the official representative.

No fewer than eight lawyers were spread across the two rows of tables ranged opposite Jenny's. The most senior of them, Fraser Knight QC, rose to make the formal introductions. A tall man with elegant features and an aristocratic bearing, he had earned a formidable reputation representing the Ministry of Defence in a succession of awkward inquests involving the deaths of badly equipped British soldiers in Afghanistan. An eloquent advocate whose deadliest weapons were studied charm and feigned deference, he greeted her with a courtly nod and declared that he represented the Chief Constable of Bristol and Avon police. Two further members of his team sat behind him: junior counsel and a young instructing solicitor. Representing Kenneth Donaldson was Ruth Markham, a solicitor from Collett Abrahams, one of the oldest and most prestigious firms in Bristol, though one noted for its expertise in wills and probate rather than coroners' inquests. In her late thirties, expensively dressed and with a slender figure of which she was evidently very proud, she exuded confidence. In a team of one, Ruth Markham gave the impression of being more than able to cope alone. Decency and the Mission Church of God were jointly represented by a pugnacious rising star of the criminal bar, Christopher Sullivan. Good-looking in a slightly rough-hewn way, and supported by Ed Prince and two further junior solicitors armed with laptops and imposing piles of textbooks, Jenny recognized Sullivan from a recent article in the Law Society Gazette. Tipped to become the youngest Queen's Counsel of his generation, Sullivan had battled his way up from tough working-class roots in Bradford to a Cambridge scholarship. But rather than turn his skill into millions at the commercial bar, he had chosen criminal law and become a notoriously fearless prosecutor. The pundits said he was certain to make a move into politics before he was forty.

It was an impressive array of legal talent and the nods and smiles they exchanged amongst themselves told Jenny that despite representing different clients they were united in wanting the same result, and quickly. Her suspicious were confirmed when, as Alison swore in the eight jurors who had been chosen by lot from a pool of fourteen, the lawyers huddled and whispered to one another, as if finalizing battle plans.

The preliminaries dealt with, Jenny turned to address the newly empanelled jurors, who sat in two rows of seats to her left positioned at ninety degrees to her and the advocates' desks. In an arrangement far more intimate than that found in a regular courtroom, the six women and two men would sit in the thick of the action, almost within touching distance of the small table and chair which would serve as a witness box; close enough to Jenny and the lawyers to spot every tic and gesture.

Hoping that only she was aware of the hint of a nervous tremor in her voice, Jenny explained to the eight puzzled faces that a coroner's jury had a completely different task from that in a criminal case. Their job was to listen to all the evidence called concerning the violent death of Eva Donaldson, a twenty-seven-year-old former adult movie actress whom they had doubtless known as the public face of Decency. At its conclusion they would be asked to use their common sense and good judgement in completing a questionnaire known as a 'form of inquisition'. The most important questions they would have to answer were when, where and precisely how she died. Finally, Jenny reminded them that there had already been a brief but well-publicized criminal investigation into Miss Donaldson's death, which had concluded with Paul Craven's confession and subsequent guilty plea to her murder. Given that fact, they might be forgiven for thinking there was nothing more to be investigated, but, she stressed, the coroner's court had a duty to look at the evidence independently from the criminal court. What had gone before must not influence them in any way.

Sullivan couldn't contain himself. 'With respect, ma'am,' he said in a thick, combative Yorkshire accent, 'the jury must be reminded that they have no power to contradict the finding of the criminal court. Craven has been properly convicted of Miss Donaldson's murder and therefore this tribunal cannot, under any circumstances, contradict that finding.'

His aggression hit her like a fist. Battling a fresh eruption of anxiety, Jenny said, 'I don't agree, Mr Sullivan. The law is very clear on the point. In the Homberg case the High Court said, "The coroner's overriding duty is to enquire how the deceased died, and that duty prevails over any other inhibition."'

'As I understand the law, ma'am, the only verdict this jury is entitled to return is one of unlawful killing. And with all due respect, given Craven's conviction, it could be argued that these proceedings are of doubtful legitimacy at best.'

Jenny's apprehension was overwhelmed by a rush of anger. 'I will forgive you for not being familiar with the status and procedures of the coroner's court, Mr Sullivan, but you should know that it is neither inferior nor superior to the Crown Court. Although there are many who wish it were not so, a coroner has an entirely separate jurisdiction and must conduct her inquiry in a spirit of uncompromised independence. Is that understood?'

Rocked by the ferocity of her response, Sullivan was briefly silenced. 'We'll have to agree to differ,' he muttered, and returned slowly to his seat with a look to the jury as if to warn them that they were being sorely misled.

With adrenalin now coursing through her veins, Jenny informed the jury that despite what Mr Sullivan might believe, their duty was only to the truth, whatever they found that to be. They would spend the morning hearing from police witnesses and the pathologist who had most recently examined Eva Donaldson's body. Later in the proceedings they would hear from her friends and colleagues, and finally from Paul Craven himself.

Sullivan and Fraser Knight exchanged a glance. They were looking forward to that.





Dressed in a crisp charcoal suit with a purple silk tie, Detective Inspector Vernon Goodison strolled to the witness chair with the air of a man only too happy to help. Jenny immediately marked him down as one of the new breed of media-savvy detectives, outwardly benign and aware that every word they uttered in public and published by the press would be forever recorded on the internet. Jenny watched the jury respond warmly to his trust-me smile.

With impressive fluency, Goodison recounted how he received a call early on the morning of Monday, 10 May to say that Eva Donaldson's body had been discovered by her cleaner. Together with four scene-of-crime officers, he had arrived twenty minutes later. The paramedics had had the good sense to realize she was irretrievably dead and had left the scene virtually undisturbed. Alison handed the jury copies of various police photographs showing the body lying on the kitchen floor, and views to and from the front door through the hallway. Jenny saw several of them flinch at the pin-sharp images: Eva curled up like a baby, her silky blonde hair trailing in a huge, sticky pool of coagulated blood.

Goodison confirmed that there was no sign of forced entry to the property, nor any indication that it had been ransacked. An extensive search had been made for the murder weapon - presumed to be a knife with a blade approximately seven inches long - but none had been found.

Jenny said, 'You must have seen many murder scenes in your career, Inspector. What was your initial assessment?'

'I thought it was a domestic,' Goodison said, 'a row with a boyfriend that had got overheated. But there again you take care only to respond to the evidence.'

'Was there evidence that anyone had been in the house with her?'

'Nothing that we could find. None of the neighbours had heard anything. There was a bottle of wine open on the counter, only one glass.'

'Where did you and your team conclude the stabbing had taken place?'

Goodison held up the photograph that was taken from just outside the front door. 'It's exactly twenty-seven feet from the threshold to where she was lying. There was no evidence of blood in the hallway, but some spots were found just inside the kitchen here. It's possible they could have sprayed out from across the room, but my best guess is it happened here, near the kitchen door. If I was forced to speculate, I'd say she was backing away from someone who'd come through the front door.'

'And there were no signs of sexual assault?'

'No.'

'Did that strike you as odd?'

Goodison said, 'When he got to the house, I don't believe Craven had the courage to go through with what he intended. She opened the door to him, he forced his way in, stabbed her and ran.'

'Not pausing to steal anything?'

'There was no evidence of that. Nothing of interest was recovered from his bedsit.'

'But there were items missing from Miss Donaldson's house you might have expected to find: a personal computer, a mobile phone.'

Goodison smiled patiently, as if to congratulate Jenny on spotting the obvious. 'We were informed by Miss Donaldson's employers that they had advised her to cease electronic communications in February of this year. We think she may have disposed of her laptop computer altogether. We do believe she possessed a mobile phone, though she hadn't retained a regular contract for more than a year.'

'Was it recovered?'

'No. But there are several possibilities. Craven may have taken it, or even an opportunist thief. Miss Donaldson may have mislaid it. We simply can't say.'

'Did you discover her phone number?'

'Yes. I'll have one of my officers provide it if you wish.' He nodded to Fraser Knight and his team. The police solicitor made a note.

Jenny said, 'You didn't recover the murder weapon either?'

'No. That was slightly more troubling. Craven said in interview that he threw it in some bushes, but he couldn't remember where. It's seven miles from Miss Donaldson's home to his address, and he claims to have covered the entire distance on foot. We did all we could within our resources.' He turned to the jury. 'Obviously once Craven had confessed and his DNA was confirmed at the scene, our efforts were better spent elsewhere.'

The power of a taped confession was such, Jenny soon realized, that only the most cynical and experienced of lawyers could resist its allure. As the film played on an old- fashioned television monitor, Jenny observed the jurors frown and shake their heads as Craven told his story about going to visit Eva to help her with her good works, and claimed that she had touched him, saying, 'F*ck me for the devil.' She studied their faces as Goodison teased out his final admission: 'And that's when I picked up a knife from the counter and stuck it in her, right there, in the chest.'

They shuddered, appalled at the casualness of his delivery. His obvious lies and vagueness Over detail only confirmed the impression of guilt. He was the perfect embodiment of the inexplicable face of evil.

'Did you collect the doormat before or after this interview?' Jenny asked Goodison when the film was over.

'We already had it bagged up. It was sent for analysis after Craven said he had urinated on it.'

She cut to the chase. 'I appreciate you had a confession from a man a psychiatrist deemed sane enough to be telling the truth, but once he had said those words, did you consider any other possible explanation for Miss Donaldson's death?'

'No, ma'am,' Goodison answered. 'There was no need.'

'Did you ever doubt the reliability of his confession?'

Goodison considered his answer carefully. 'He clearly wasn't as sane as you or I, but this was a man who had killed before, and once we had his DNA on the doormat there was no question.'

Jenny gestured to Alison and handed her a copy of the list of people Goodison's team had spoken to at the Mission Church of God. Alison passed it to Goodison, who pulled a pair of designer reading glasses from his breast pocket and took his time fully digesting it.

'One of your officers recorded the names of people your team spoke to informally. I presume these conversations happened on Monday, 10 and Tuesday, 11 May before Craven presented himself at the police station.'

'I would presume so,' Goodison said.

'Do any records of these conversations exist?'

'It's unlikely unless anything of interest was said, in which case we would have taken a statement.'

'Did any suspects emerge?'

'No,' Goodison said confidently.

You liar, Jenny thought to herself, but let nothing show on her face. 'Who compiled this list?'

'That would have been Detective Constable Stokes,' Goodison replied. 'He was coordinating the inquiry team.'

Jenny turned to Alison. 'Ask DC Stokes to come to court this afternoon.'

Goodison glanced at Fraser Knight, who remained inscrutable, his only gesture a slight, disinterested raising of his chin. Jenny knew it would be no use her pressing the point any further with this detective. He would bluff and obfuscate all morning.

She changed the subject. 'The time code on the interview tape says you commenced at four thirty-five p.m. According to the duty sergeant's log, Craven presented himself at the police station at two minutes past midday. Did you or your officers have any informal conversations with him during the intervening four hours?'

'Only a brief one,' Goodison said. 'He wanted to talk straight away. I asked him to keep it for the interview. It took four hours for his solicitor to arrive.'

Jenny made a note to check what Craven had to say on the subject.

'One last point: Craven said he picked up the knife from the kitchen counter. Did you check the cutlery drawers to see if there was a seven-inch carving knife missing? Was there an incomplete set, perhaps?'

Goodison said, 'You know as well as I do, ma'am, without concrete proof that a knife was missing, evidence that one may have been missing wouldn't have been let anywhere near a criminal court.'

'Was there or wasn't there a knife missing? You must have a view.'

Out of the corner of her eye, Jenny saw Fraser Knight give the tiniest shake of his head.

Goodison said, 'No, ma'am. I don't.'





Fraser Knight offered no cross-examination of his man, calculating that while Jenny might have revealed her suspicions, the jury needed no reminding of them. Sullivan preferred the head-on approach, and set to with the energy of a boxer stepping up to the mark.

'I think what's being suggested to you, albeit in code, Inspector, is that you had a quiet word with Mr Craven before his interview to make sure he remembered his lines.'

'No,' Goodison said, with a faint smile. 'It's absolutely out of the question.'

'Maybe I'm reading a little too much into the subtext,' Sullivan said, 'but we might as well air it. In the back of some people's minds might be the thought that Craven urinated on the doormat of a former female porn star, but that he didn't actually kill her. Is it possible that he left his deposit hours, or even days before she died?'

Goodison said, 'This is a man who had spent his entire adult life in prison and had only recently been released.' He looked towards Father Starr. 'I know there are some who believe he'd experienced a genuine religious conversion, but in my view this was a psychopath capable of murder and deceit; a man beyond redemption.'

'Thank you, Inspector,' Sullivan said, as if with relief that the truth had at last been heard. 'You have been most helpful.'

Ruth Markham, the lawyer representing Kenneth Donaldson, took up the baton, greeting the detective with a polite, unchallenging smile.

'Can you confirm for us please, Inspector, that your inquiries didn't reveal any other suspect with a motive for murdering Miss Donaldson?'

. 'I can.'

'And can you also confirm that her home address was in fact listed on contact-a-celebrity.com, as Craven claimed?'

'It was.'

'Thank you, Inspector. That is all.'

His cross-examination over, Goodison stepped down from the witness box without having suffered a single uncomfortable moment. Jenny began to wonder if her suspicion of him had been misplaced.

She took the uncontentious witnesses next, and dealt swiftly with two scene-of-crime officers and a senior forensic scientist, Dr Jordan, who had tested the doormat and the various scrapings and tissue samples taken from Eva's body. There was no evidence of foreign DNA under Eva's nails, Jordan confirmed, nor any traces on the swabs taken from her lips, cheeks, eyelids and the backs of her hands. If there had been a physical struggle he would have expected the attacker's saliva to have sprayed onto the victim's skin; its absence suggested their contact was extremely brief. He produced a photograph of the doormat which had successfully trapped the small number of epithelial cells present in urine. He attempted to explain the finer points of mitochondrial DNA amplification to a glazed jury, but with no evidence to contradict his findings, Jenny saved him the effort. She was satisfied that Dr Jordan had proved beyond doubt that some base male instinct had caused Paul Craven to urinate on the threshold of Eva Donaldson's home. The only question in her mind was what had happened next.





Father Starr's expression grew darker and more censorious as the morning drew on; Jenny deliberately avoided his accusing gaze as Alison read aloud the original post-mortem report filed by the Home Office pathologist, Dr Aden Thomas. Starr had expected her to confront and challenge aggressively, to test each witness to the limit and upbraid them for not having exhausted every possible explanation for Eva's death. Justice was something his spiritual brothers had frequently died for, she could imagine him saying, and here she was letting partial truth pass unchallenged. But there was a limit to how far she could question the integrity of witnesses, a barrier of convention beyond which she simply could not go, even for a priest.

As Alison recited the final sentences, the flaking double doors at the back hall creaked open. Michael and Christine Turnbull entered, followed by Lennox Strong. Heads turned and even jaded members of the press smiled in acknowledgement of the famous couple. Jenny noted Kenneth Donaldson's nod of greeting and their smiles in return.

A knot of tension formed in the pit of Jenny's stomach at the prospect of what she now had to do.

She called for Dr Andrew Kerr to come forward.

The pathologist was not yet a confident public performer. He was capable of spending entire winter evenings alone in the mortuary, but giving evidence to a room full of people was an ordeal she knew he dreaded. Jenny would have to lead him by the hand.

'Dr Kerr, recently you examined Miss Donaldson's body and carried out a review of the findings of the first post-mortem carried out by the Home Office pathologist, Dr Aden Thomas.'

'That's correct.'

'Did you agree with Thomas's conclusion?'

'Yes,' Dr Kerr said cautiously. 'Broadly.'

'We've seen the photographs of the single stab wound. You do accept that was the cause of death.'

'It was. But with respect to Dr Thomas, he didn't comment on either the angle of the wound or the force needed to inflict it.' He glanced at the restive lawyers. 'The blade penetrated to a distance of six and a half inches and pierced the aorta. Blood pressure would have collapsed in seconds. The victim would have been unconscious in moments, dead in a minute or two at the most.' He brushed his face nervously with his hand. 'But to force a blade, even that of a slender carving knife, right through the chest wall, would take considerable force.'

'Can you quantify that for us?' Jenny asked.

'An average person's full strength.' He paused to take a gulp of water, wilting under the sceptical glares of lawyers sitting less than six feet away from him. 'And the blade went in almost exactly horizontally, whereas most aggressive knife wounds are either angled upwards or downwards —’

'Because?'

'I'll show you.' He took a pen from his jacket pocket and held it in a clenched fist. 'You're either stabbing down from the top of the chest, or up from beneath the ribcage. And it's hard to kill someone with a knife. That's why you read that victims have been stabbed twenty or more times. The attacker doesn't often get the penetration to deliver a fatal blow.'

Ed Prince leaned forward and whispered urgently in Sullivan's ear. Sullivan frowned and gave a dismissive shake of his head. He wasn't impressed so far.

Jenny said, 'Are you able to say precisely how this wound was inflicted?'

'Not precisely, but I can draw certain reasonable conclusions.'

'Such as?'

'It was either a lucky blow or the killer acted very deliberately, aiming the knife horizontally so as to pierce the ribs with a single deep strike.' He rubbed a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. 'What it doesn't look like is a frenzied, emotional attack such as you might see following a rape, for example; it feels too calculated for that.'

The lawyers frowned. The police solicitor tapped Fraser Knight urgently on the shoulder and handed him a note.

Jenny said, 'Why do you think Dr Thomas failed to raise these points?'

'Each pathologist tends to draw their own frame of reference. He obviously didn't see it as his job to speculate.' He shrugged. 'Times change. I was taught differently.'

Jenny watched two women in the front row of the jury look again at their shared photograph of Eva's body. They were starting to think, to imagine different possibilities.

Bracing herself, Jenny said, 'Was there anything else about the body which you noticed that Dr Thomas hadn't remarked on?'

'It's not of any forensic value,' Dr Kerr said, eager to get to the end of his ordeal, 'but I noticed that there were two tattoos on the body. The first was a butterfly design just above the base of the spine, and the second two words tattooed just above the pubic bone on the left side of the mid-line.'

'Can you say when she had these tattoos done?'

'The one on her back had been there for some time, years perhaps. The one on her front was very fresh, perhaps only a few weeks old.'

Jenny nodded to Alison, who handed out two photographs showing the front and back of Eva's body to the jury and to the lawyers. Inset on each was a close-up of the corresponding tattoo.

'Did you take these photographs, Dr Kerr?'

'I did. Early last week.'

Sullivan rose abruptly to his feet. 'Can I ask you, ma'am, why these photographs weren't disclosed to the interested parties before this hearing?'

Jenny glanced at Kenneth Donaldson, who was in whispered conversation with one of Ed Prince's assistants.

'There's no legal requirement for a coroner to disclose in advance, Mr Sullivan.'

'There's a right to see a post-mortem report in advance,' Sullivan snapped back.

'And copies were sent to your instructing solicitors.'

'It contained no mention of these tattoos.'

Praying that Andy Kerr would hold his nerve, Jenny said, 'Perhaps Dr Kerr didn't consider them relevant. And I fail to see what difference disclosure of this detail would have made.'

'Ma'am, I wish to raise a matter of law in the absence of the jury.'

'No, Mr Sullivan. There is no reason for this evidence to be withdrawn, and there is certainly no reason for its existence to be suppressed.'

Sullivan jabbed the air with his forefinger, 'Ma'am, there are extremely important issues of public interest that need to be addressed with a full consideration of the law.'

'You misunderstand the nature of a coroner's court, Mr Sullivan. I am not an arbiter between competing cases, I decide what evidence I consider relevant. If you have a complaint you make it to the High Court.'

'Then I request an immediate adjournment.'

'Out of the question.'

Prince's second assistant hurried to the door, phone in hand. Jenny had no doubt that within the hour a London QC would be in front of a judge pleading for an injunction to prevent reporting of the existence of Eva's dubious body art.

Jenny turned to the jury. ' "Daddy's girl" is what the tattoo says.'

Kenneth Donaldson fixed her with an expression of icy contempt.

Ignoring Sullivan, who remained stubbornly on his feet, she continued, 'In a moment you'll be hearing from the artist who drew it.'

In a matter of seconds, half the twenty or so reporters in the room had dashed from their seats and hurried for the exit to phone the revelation through to their editors. In a tight race against a possible injunction they could have their story on the internet in minutes and spread out across the social networks and blogs seconds later. Even if a High Court judge could be persuaded on spurious grounds to rule that the public had no right to know, it would be already too late to put the genie back in the bottle, and the lawyers knew it.

Calmly, Jenny said, 'You can sit down now, Mr Sullivan.'

The frustrated prosecutor slammed into his chair and turned to plot his revenge with a furious Ed Prince. Jenny didn't dare look at the Turnbulls and Lennox Strong, but she did catch a glimpse of Father Starr: for a fleeting moment he was smiling.

Jenny turned to Dr Kerr. 'Is there anything else you wish to add, Dr Kerr?'

'No, ma'am,' he said apprehensively.

Fraser Knight rose to his full imposing height and fixed the young pathologist with a look of disappointment tinged with disbelief. 'How long have you been a fully qualified pathologist, Dr Kerr?'

'Thirteen months.'

'I see. And Dr Aden Thomas?'

Dr Kerr reddened with embarrassment. 'I've only met him once or twice—'

'Thirty-two years,' Fraser Knight said. He looked down at his legal pad and cast a disapproving eye over its contents. 'You have seen fit to "speculate" - your word - in a way in which he didn't.' He delivered his question while looking at the jury: 'Do you think that in his thirty-two years of practice he may have learned that it's not a wise, let alone a scientific, thing to do?'

'I've no idea.'

'No,' Knight said, with an indulgent smile. 'Nor do you know the state of mind of Miss Donaldson's killer, or the exact manner in which he held the knife, or the exact sequence of events leading to her murder.'

'No,' Dr Kerr admitted.

'From the evidence gleaned from her body, all you can say for certain is that she was killed by a single, powerful stab wound.'

'Yes, but—' Dr Kerr hesitated in mid-sentence, losing courage.

'So you would accept, therefore, that your speculation does not help us to establish any key fact. It is only speculation.'

With an apologetic glance to Jenny, Dr Kerr answered, 'Yes,' his authority all but destroyed.

Sullivan asked only one question of the witness: 'You have no factual evidence whatever, do you, for suggesting that anyone other than Paul Craven murdered Eva Donaldson?'

'No, I don't.'

Sullivan gave a theatrical sigh and threw the jury a look that said he pitied them for having their time so needlessly wasted.





It was almost one o'clock, stomachs would be aching with hunger, but Jenny called the tattoo artist, Alan Turley, to give his evidence before the lunch break. With a shaved, tattooed head, and nose and ears peppered with rings and studs, he was a man Jenny would have crossed the street to avoid. But Turley, who practised his craft under the name Doc Scratch, was quietly spoken, and gave the impression that he was a gentle soul, devoted to his work.

Alison handed him a copy of the photograph of Eva's body. He looked at it briefly and lowered his head, visibly upset. Jenny took him carefully through the evidence he had given in a statement he had made to Alison the week before, making sure that he repeated every detail. He told the jury that Eva had booked the appointment by telephone several days in advance under the assumed name Louise Pearson. When she arrived for her appointment she wrote down the words she wanted tattooed and selected the font from a style book. It took no more than fifteen minutes to apply and she paid in cash: sixty pounds.

Jenny stole a glance at Kenneth Donaldson. What she saw in his face surprised her. In the back of her mind she had invented a story of abuse for Eva's tattoo: riddled with guilt at her years prostituting herself, it was to be an ironic testament to the true cause of her pain, a mirror image of the scars that disfigured her face. Marking her body in this way was a form of therapy: sex could never be had for the sheer hell of it again; it would always be married with the truth. But Donaldson's expression didn't fit with her neat version of history. In her many years in the family courts dealing with men who had done unspeakable things to their daughters, she had learnt to recognize the benign, detached, self-deluding smile the guilty ones adopted. There was nothing self-deluding about Kenneth Donaldson's reaction; no, he was in genuine pain.

'Mr Turley,' Jenny said, 'did Miss Donaldson talk to you at all while you were drawing the design?'

'Very little. She seemed sort of distant.'

'Did you ask what it meant to her?'

'No. It didn't seem right.'

'Why was that?'

Sullivan rolled his eyes. Ed Prince drummed his fingers impatiently. Jenny ignored them and urged Turley to answer.

'It was just a feeling,' he said. 'A lot of people want tattoos when they've just lost someone - it's like a memorial. The young lady felt like that. Sad. As if she'd just come to the end of something.'