The Redeemed

CHAPTER 2




It had been a month since Jenny last sat opposite Dr Allen in the consulting room at the Chepstow clinic. During the one session they had had since her visit to her father in his nursing home, she had neglected to tell her psychiatrist what he had said to her. In fact, she hadn't told a living soul. He had advanced Alzheimer's, for God's sake. She'd be madder than him to take any notice of his lunatic outbursts.

Dr Allen sported new glasses and a salon haircut. Finally having arrived at an age that matched his serious nature, he was beginning to find a look that he felt comfortable with: stylish academic. She had never asked him if he was married but she assumed not, and guessed that the subtle makeover was part of his strategy to remedy the situation.

He looked up from the bound notebook in which he made his precise longhand notes. 'Has it really been four weeks?' He smiled. 'Any progress on the research you were promising to do?'

She felt a rush of electricity travel up her spine and she almost said it; almost confessed that her father had told her that Katy was a first cousin, his brother's little girl. It had shocked her; her uncle and aunt had lived round the corner yet she had no memory of a little girl, let alone one her age. 'What happened to Cousin Katy?' she had asked him. Sitting there in his armchair, chuckling at the seagull on the windowsill, he had said: 'You remember, Smiler. You killed her.' A minute later he was out cold, the heavy sedatives he was fed giving him the death-rattle snore she would hear all the way to the lift at the end of the corridor.

Jenny said, 'No luck, I'm afraid.'

Trying to hide his disappointment, Dr Allen said, 'Never mind. I'm sure we'll continue to make progress through regression.'

Jenny doubted that very much.

'How have you been feeling? Is the medication working?'

'On the whole.' She smoothed a wrinkle from the lap of her black suit skirt. 'It seems to hold the anxiety at bay - no panic attacks at least.'

'You've managed to avoid alcohol?'

'No problem.'

'And how does that make you feel?'

She resisted the temptation to tell him how much that phrase irritated her; she had counted him using it eight times in their last session.

'Honestly? ... It makes me feel miserable, like there's something wrong with me.'

'Do you think there isn't?' He floated the question neutrally, as if whatever answer she gave was fine by him.

Jenny crossed her legs, trying not to let the lurch she felt in her stomach show on her face. She would tell him about her father, just not now. How could she be expected to probe an open wound first thing in the morning? And what would Dr Allen do with her answer anyway? It was her responsibility. She would deal with it when she had the time and space, which wasn't now.

'Well?' he prompted her, his eyes searching her face.

'The more often I come here,' she said in what she hoped was a calm and measured tone, 'the more I'm inclined to believe that acute anxiety doesn't necessarily have one exciting cause. As you've said, sometimes time is the best healer.'

He kept his eyes trained on the centre of her face. He was making her nervous.

'How is your relationship with your son? Is he still living with his father?'

'For the time being. It makes sense him being close to college with all his commitments.' She sounded like a fraud and could tell that he saw straight through her.

'And with your boyfriend - Steve, isn't it?'

'We've both been rather busy. He works in the day and has to study at night. I barely get an evening to myself . . .'

'So neither of you feels the need to make the effort? Last time we met I recall you said he'd declared himself.'

Declared himself. Where did he get these phrases from?

Jenny shrugged. 'I suppose I have to take most of the blame.'

Dr Allen nodded, as if she had confirmed his theory. 'I sense that you're feeling somewhat disconnected from your emotions. Helpful as the new medication is, perhaps it has allowed you to retreat a little too far from the issues.'

'I thought I was doing pretty well. No incidents, no breakdowns.'

'On that level I'm very pleased.'

'But you'd be happier if I was suffering a little more - is that what you're saying?'

'I'm sorry; I think we're in danger of a misunderstanding-'

She didn't let him finish. 'I know how much you want to experience a big eureka moment, find some hidden memory that's going to put everything right again, but to be honest, Dr Allen, I think I've moved beyond that now. Imperfect as things may be, I'm coping, and that's a hell of an improvement.'

'That's all to the good.' He hesitated, glancing down at his notebook. 'I just have to check.'

She recognized that tic. He always looked down when he was hiding something. 'Check what exactly?'

His cheeks flushed with embarrassment. There. She had nailed him.

'Well, since you feel strong enough to have this conversation I'll be honest with you. I . . . I'm a little concerned that just as we were making strides you've retreated into avoidance, and you've found a way of burying your feelings that allows you to function on one level, but on another might be making things worse.'

'I thought this treatment was about helping me to cope.'

'It is, but it's also about cure, and about not making things worse. I feel we're at a tipping point, Jenny.' His left hand reached for the knot of his tie. 'Look, I think it's best for both of us if I'm completely honest. I respect the fact that you're an intelligent, professional woman, but in some ways it makes my job harder - you feel able, quite rightly, to question my approach. But I remain certain of my diagnosis: you have a buried trauma which lies at the root of your generalized anxiety syndrome. I would like to persist with a fortnightly course of regression therapy for at least six sessions. If you don't want that, I suggest I refer you elsewhere.' He sat back in his chair and fixed her with a look. 'We have twenty minutes. Shall we try?'

Jenny said, 'What, in your opinion, might happen to me if I passed on the offer?'

'Experience has taught me that there is invariably a day of reckoning. Painful as it may be, I really do recommend you give this a chance.'

She thought of the files stacked up on her desk, the emails and telephone messages that would be waiting for her in the office, the calls she would have to make, the endless petty but important battles each day brought. She wanted to say to him, All right, but just not now.

Jenny said, 'Can I call you?'

Dr Allen closed his notebook. 'By all means, but you'll understand that it may not be me who sees you next time.'





Jenny spent the remainder of her commute to work on the phone, the recently acquired hands-free turning the once private space of her car into an office. Government fraud officers had broken into a disused industrial unit and discovered the crudely embalmed bodies of five elderly Asians whose various pensions and allowances were still being claimed by their relatives. The last thing the police wanted was to get involved in what they called an 'all Indian', and they were trying to offload the legwork onto the coroner's office. Jenny was dealing with the crane collapse - six phone calls from victims' lawyers before nine a.m. - and told the Detective Superintendent in charge to forget it. She had barely hung up when Alison called with the news that a nine-year-old girl had been declared dead on arrival at the Vale from suspected alcohol poisoning. Jenny sent her to witness the autopsy and take statements from the ambulance crew and A & E team. The thought of a pre-pubescent body stretched out in the morgue filled her with overwhelming and irrational dread. Child deaths were one thing she had yet to learn to cope with. She tried not to think why that might be.

She approached her office at 14 Jamaica Street to find a man standing on the pavement outside. He was snake- hipped with short dark hair and olive skin, dressed in a dark suit that emphasized the narrowness of his limbs. He turned sharply at the sound of her footsteps as if startled, and she saw that he was a priest: he wore a black clerical shirt of the Roman style, a thin collar tight to his neck showing only a narrow band of white beneath his Adam's apple. She noticed his eyes were jet black, his slender features as smooth as polished walnut.

'Can I help you?' Jenny said. 'I'm Mrs Cooper. The coroner.'

A look of relief came over the priest's face. 'Ah, Mrs Cooper. I am so sorry to trouble you. Father Lucas Starr. I was hoping to make an appointment to discuss a case.' He spoke with an accent she couldn't place. She would have said Spanish but couldn't be sure.

'Have you tried phoning? We are in the book.' She stepped past him and unlocked the door.

'It's a matter of some urgency,' he said calmly, but in a way which held her attention. 'Of life and death, you might say.'

Jenny glanced at her watch: it was nearly ten and she had a hundred things that would demand her attention the moment she walked through the door.

'Look, I'm really very busy this morning. How about at the end of the day?'

The priest formed his right hand into a fist and enclosed it with his left palm, the subconscious gesture somewhere between a threat and a prayer. 'If you could only spare me ten minutes, Mrs Cooper. Your response might make all the difference to the man with whose welfare I am concerned.'

'Ten? You're sure?'

'You have my word.'

She took him through the dimly lit, windowless hallway that led to her ground-floor offices. There was a vague smell of damp; the cheap wallpaper the landlord had recently pasted up was already starting to peel at the corners. Ignoring the heap of mail waiting for her on Alison's desk, Jenny ushered the priest through the heavy oak door to her room. He waited for her to be seated behind her desk before he sat in the chair opposite, his back straight as a board, hands crossed precisely on his lap.

Jenny said, 'I'm listening, Father . . . What should I call you?'

'Father Starr is fine.'

Jenny nodded. 'You're a Catholic priest, I presume?'

'Yes,' he said, with a trace of hesitation. 'Not a parish priest, a Jesuit in formation to be precise. I'm nearing the end of a five-year ministry as a prison chaplain. One final year of tertianship and I become a brother, God willing.'

'I had no idea it took that long.'

'Start to finish, seventeen years, sometimes more.' He smiled softly. 'They don't let just anybody in.'

She placed him at about forty, but somehow his age didn't seem to define him. She was curious about his accent, though: she detected traces of American; no, Latin American - that was it. 'You said you were concerned for someone's welfare.'

'Yes, please let me explain. This relates to the death of a young woman named Eva Donaldson. I understand you are about to make the formal certification of the cause of death?'

Jenny glanced at the file bound with white ribbon sitting on top of one of three disorderly heaps on her desk.

'Eva Donaldson, the actress?'

Jenny had skimmed the Eva Donaldson file and picked up bits and pieces from news reports over the couple of months since the young woman's death, but hadn't stopped to consider the full story of her transformation from art student to adult movie star, to religious convert and full-time campaigner for Decency, a pressure group advocating a ban on internet pornography.

'The same. The man to whom I am ministering is named Paul Craven. He confessed to killing her.'

'I remember. He pleaded guilty to her murder.'

'You are correct, but he was not in his right mind. Paul Craven did not kill Eva Donaldson and he should not be spending the rest of his life in prison. I fear that unless the truth is told his life may not be very long.' A look of pain briefly passed across the priest's face. 'He is a sensitive and a troubled man, and a deeply religious man also. He had been out of prison for only a few days, having spent twenty- one years, all of his adult life, in jail.'

'Before we go any further,' Jenny said, 'you have got to understand - I'm a coroner. I determine cause of death. If you've evidence that could overturn the finding of a criminal court, the correct course is to instruct a lawyer to mount an appeal.'

Father Starr gave a patient nod. 'If we had a year or two, maybe, but Mr Craven doesn't have that long. There is a struggle within him that I sense he is losing.'

The phone rang. Jenny looked at it and pressed the divert button. 'All right, fifteen minutes. Then I really have to get on.'

Father Starr reminded Jenny of the highlights of Eva's career, telling her that she had been something of an inspirational figure to him and the prisoners he ministered to in Telhurst, a long-term prison in south Gloucestershire. At twenty she dropped out of art school and started acting in pornographic films. At twenty-five she was at the peak of her career when a road accident left her with permanent scars that disfigured one side of her face. The production company she was contracted to spat her out and sued her for loss of revenue, arguing that the drugs she had taken caused her to lose control of the car. They won. The pills she took to rev her up for a shoot cost her three hundred thousand in cash, her country house and her career.

Eva entered a downward spiral of drink, drugs and self- loathing. Later, she would tell audiences how she was on the verge of taking her own life - actually walking to the pharmacy to collect the painkillers she planned to wash down with the vodka she had ready in her bag - when she overheard a young woman telling a friend how the church she had joined had given her a permanent high. Eva caught the name of it as she pushed on the pharmacy door: the Mission Church of God.

Back then, nearly three years ago, the worshippers met in a disused bingo hall. The pastor was an inspirational young American named Bobby DeMont, who from nothing had built the mother church in Washington DC to be one of the biggest single congregations in the USA, over thirty-five thousand strong. That night Eva claimed she saw the light of God shine. It was in Bobby DeMont's eyes as he spoke, and in the faces of the young men and women around her as they heard the unadulterated truth for the first time in their lives.

Not only did the church give her back her will to live, through it she was introduced to its chief benefactor, Michael, now Lord Turnbull. At forty-one years of age Turnbull had sold his software company for two hundred million dollars, but his conscience was troubled. As a young idealist, he had pioneered video-streaming software in the hope of putting the lie-peddling media multinationals out of business. What, in fact, he inadvertently provided was the means for the pornography business to reach into every home with a computer, making a lot of disgusting people exceedingly rich. A year later Turnbull had been struggling to hold down a consultancy to a lobbying company in Washington while suffering from increasingly crippling depression. Dependent on alcohol and pills, he had started to fantasize about jumping from his penthouse balcony when he chanced on an item on the local news about a spate of miraculous healings that had taken place at the Mission Church of God. Desperate, and with nothing to lose, the multi-millionaire sobered up and took himself to an evening service. When Bobby DeMont called on all those who hadn't yet pledged their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ to do so right now, Michael Turnbull obeyed. He would later describe to television viewers around the world the feeling when Bobby first laid his hands on him as like being giddy with wine and madly in love, only many times stronger.

Born again, Michael donated generously to the church and hatched the idea of starting a sister church in his home city of Bristol. Fired up with the idea of taking the gospel back to a country that had brought so many evangelists to the US, Bobby DeMont himself came to England for the first few months to sow the seeds. Within a year the congregation had grown to a thousand members and Michael Turnbull had established a lobby group, Decency, to try to undo some of the damage he had inflicted on the world. When he heard Eva Donaldson had become a member of the church, he immediately recruited her to the cause. For the remaining year of her life she became the public face of the campaign: her scarred beauty a symbol of the ugliness of pornography; her first-hand testimony of being abused for profit a stain on the conscience of every man who heard her.

The world's media and politicians were stunned by the level of public enthusiasm for Decency's cause. Liberals poured scorn on what they dismissed as an old-fashioned moral backlash, but facing down her critics in what would become her most famous network television interview, Eva Donaldson said, 'Do you think it's right that images of me having sex with men and women I barely knew, committing acts I sometimes had to drug myself to perform, are available to your child at the click of a mouse?' She left her opponents floundering.

Jenny reminded her visitor of the time. His fifteen minutes were up.

'I'm giving you the history, Mrs Cooper,' Father Starr said, 'to emphasize how many people there were with a motive to silence her.'

'But hasn't she been made a martyr? I've read there's a good chance the Decency Bill they've been agitating for might actually become law.'

The priest leaned forward in his chair. 'Look at the circumstances of her murder. There were no signs of forced entry, indicating she opened her door to a caller. She was stabbed once, in the kitchen, with a weapon which has never been recovered. There was no evidence of sexual violation. At the time of her death Mr Craven was residing in a bedsit in Redland, over seven miles from her home. Read the transcript of his police interview - he couldn't state her address or even describe the route he would have taken to it.'

'I've not read the whole file,' Jenny said, 'but I do recall that Craven gave himself up at a police station, confessed freely, and that his DNA was found in the grounds of Miss Donaldson's house.'

'The DNA is unreliable. They say he urinated on the doorstep. I have spoken to experts who say there are very few cells excreted in urine.'

'Then it sounds as if you've grounds for appeal. An uncorroborated confession by a man in a fragile state of mind isn't usually sufficient for a conviction.'

'The psychiatrists say there's nothing wrong with him. I know otherwise, but what notice would the courts take of a priest?'

'Surely Craven's had good lawyers representing him. What do they think?'

'He told them he was guilty. Now he insists he isn't, they are professionally embarrassed and he has to instruct new ones. But without some evidence, some lead, he won't get legal aid. I understand that leaves him at the mercy of the Criminal Appeal Cases Review Commission. Who knows when they might get to his case - months, years?'

'Look,' Jenny said, 'where there's been a conviction a coroner is entitled to investigate the circumstances of the death, but the law states that I mustn't return a verdict which undermines a finding of the criminal court, and that includes a guilty plea.'

'I've informed myself on the point,' Father Starr said. 'But as I understand it, you would be acting perfectly lawfully in investigating the circumstances of Miss Donaldson's death. And if you were to discover evidence exonerating Mr Craven, it would be grounds for an appeal.'

Jenny smiled. 'I can't fault your optimism, Father. But is that all you've got? Tell me what makes you so sure Craven didn't kill her.'

The priest studied her, carefully weighing his words. 'When he was a vulnerable and disturbed teenager Paul Craven killed a young woman. I have now known him for five years. I know him more intimately than any other human being: I am his confessor. I have seen him turn to God and I have seen God change and redeem him. I ask you to believe me when I say I can divine whether he's lying about such a profound matter as whether he committed murder.'

'Then why did he confess?'

'I think it's best that you ask him that. It's not possible to judge a man until you have met, don't you think?'

'I can certainly send my officer to take a statement—'

'Please,' Father Starr interjected, gesturing with his hands, 'I ask this one thing of you, that you interview him in person. Then, I guarantee, you will understand.'

He was a hard man to resist, and someone Jenny already felt she would like to know more about. 'And if I say I can't?'

'I shan't beg you, Mrs Cooper.' He got up from his chair. 'Thank you for your time. You have been most generous.' He produced a card from his jacket pocket and placed it in front of her. 'I'll leave you to decide what's right.'





She should have started working through her phone messages or reading her mail, but the priest's plea lingered like a watchful presence. It demanded that she make a decision on whether to rubber-stamp the Crown Court's verdict in line with usual procedure, or to risk the ire of her overseers in the Ministry of Justice and conduct an inquest of her own.

She reached for the court file and began skimming through its pages.

There was a statement from Eva Donaldson's domestic help, who had arrived in the morning to find her employer's body on the kitchen floor of her modest home in Winterbourne Down, a village just outside the northern margins of the city; statements from the several detectives who were called to the scene; a list of items that were removed from the house; a forensics report on the DNA sample recovered from the doormat; and a report by the Home Office pathologist. A bundle of photographs showed the body at the scene. Eva was curled into a foetal position surrounded by a huge pool of congealed blood. Two shots of the body on the slab showed a single stab wound to her chest midway between her breasts and her shoulder-length blonde hair. The final photograph was a close-up of her heart sitting in a kidney dish. A flagged pin marked the stab wound, which had penetrated her upper right ventricle, making death a rapid certainty.

Jenny stuffed the pictures into the back of the file and flicked through the transcript of Craven's police interview.

He wasn't much of a talker. The DI conducting the interrogation, Goodison, had had to tease him along. When eventually he found his tongue, Craven said he kept seeing Eva on the television news talking about her past in blue movies and how she had found God. He had found God, too, which was what gave him the idea of going to talk to her on his release. When the detective asked how he'd found her address, he said he had got it from contact-a-celebrity.com while he was still in prison. Jenny arrived at a section of the interview that had been highlighted:



DI G: You say you walked all the way to her house,

[suspect nods]

DI G: What did you do when you got there, Paul?

PC: Hung around for a while, then rang the bell.

DI G: What did you do while you hung around?

[suspect shrugs]

DI G: Come on, Paul, you can remember that. What did you do? Look through the window, check out the house, go to the toilet, what?

[long pause]

PC: I think I went to the toilet, had a leak.

DI G: Where?

PC: Don't remember. No. Don't remember.

DI G: By the house?

PC: Yeah, that's it, by the house.

DI G: Then what?

PC: Like I said, I rang the doorbell.

DI G: What happened next?

PC: She came to the door. She said, 'Who are you?' I said, 'I'm Paul, like the apostle, and I think God told me to come and talk to you about all the good work you're doing, because I want to give my life to good works too.' And she said, 'Oh, well you'd better come in and tell me more.' [long pause] I followed her into the house, into the kitchen, then she turned to me with this strange look on her face, and she put her hand on me [suspect indicates his chest] and she said, 'You don't have to say anything, Paul, I know what you want and I want it too.' And she moved her hand downwards, you know, down there [suspect indicates his groin area] and I said, 'No, that's not right, please don't do that to me,' but she took no notice. I said, 'Eva, that's a sin.' She said [pause] I can't say what she said.

DI G: It's not a problem, Paul. Just tell me what she said, [suspect covers face with hands]

DI G: Come on, Paul. Let's hear it.

[pause]

PC: She said, [sobbing] she said, 'F*ck me for the devil.'

And that's when I picked up a knife from the counter and stuck it in her, right there, in the chest.

DI G: How many times?

[suspect shakes his head]

DI G: What did you do then?

PC: I ran out of that house. I ran away from there.

DI G: What did you do with the knife?

PC: Threw it away.

DI G: Where? Where did you throw it?

[suspect shakes his head, breaking down into tears]



The last document in the file was a report from the court- appointed psychiatrist, Dr Helen Graham, who said she had examined Craven on three separate occasions during his remand. In her opinion he was suffering from a mild personality disorder which gave him 'a sometimes tenuous grasp on reality and a tendency to fixate on abstract, often religious ideas', but there had been no evidence of violence in his character during his long prison term. He had attended classes conducted by female teachers and been in contact with a female parole officer without any suggestion of inappropriate behaviour. He wasn't clinically insane, and in her view there was no evidence to support any suggestion that he was suffering from diminished responsibility or a temporary psychological illness. During their three sessions Craven had refused to discuss the circumstances of the alleged offence, but on one occasion did express remorse for what he had done. Dr Graham concluded that there was no reason to question the validity of Craven's confession and expressed the opinion that the stress of release had caused him to commit a crime very similar to that for which he had originally been imprisoned.

Stapled inside the back cover of the file was a copy of Craven's criminal record and a handwritten statement of the facts of his first murder. At eighteen, he had met a twenty- three-year-old nurse named Grace Akingbade at a Bristol nightclub. Late in the evening they were seen leaving together. Grace's body was found in her room in a hospital accommodation block the following afternoon. She had been beaten and strangled but there was no evidence of sexual molestation. Craven was arrested the same day and made a full confession. His explanation for the killing was that the young woman had mocked him when he had failed to perform sexually.

Jenny finished reading and made up her mind that there was nothing to investigate. If Craven wanted to protest his innocence he would have to do what everyone else did and find a criminal lawyer to fight his battles for him. There were far more deserving cases on her desk.





She looked up with a start as Alison thumped through the door and dumped a fresh heap of papers in front of her.

'Are you all right, Mrs Cooper?'

'You shocked me.'

'Fun as it was watching an autopsy on a nine-year-old, I thought I'd better tear myself away.'

Jenny noticed that she was wearing shiny red lipstick and had brushed her dyed blonde hair forward over her cheeks. 'It suits you,' she said, her heart still pulsing hard against her ribs.

'Thank you,' Alison said with self-conscious abruptness and swiftly changed the subject. 'The pathologist confirmed death by alcohol poisoning so social services have asked the police to look at criminal negligence. I doubt it'll end with charges, but at least it's off our plate for the time being. We've had an anonymous email from a man who claims he was one of the gang which erected the crane and says they were using sub-standard bolts, and Dr Kerr just emailed an interim report on Alan Jacobs - it's not looking too pretty. Oh, and there's been a fatal RTA on the Portway I should probably go and have a look at.'

She turned abruptly to the door.

Jenny sensed there was more to Alison's agitation than her caseload. 'Is everything all right?'

'I've had more relaxing mornings.'

'Is it Terry again?'

'Terry?' Alison said, as if her husband was the furthest thing from her mind. 'He's no trouble to me now he's in Spain.'

'Another holiday?'

'I don't know what you call it,' Alison said, 'but I suppose you might as well know before you hear gossip. He's been seeing some woman he met out there last time.'

'I'm sorry. I'd no idea—'

'Neither did I till last Thursday. But I told him if there was something he wanted to get out of his system I'd rather he did it out of my sight.'

Jenny knew there had been arguments, mostly over her husband Terry's desire to sell up and retire to a Spanish condo while he was still young enough to get round the golf course, but she had no idea relations had turned this sour. 'So, where does that leave the two of you?'

'I haven't a clue, but I'm damned if he's going to have all the fun.' The phone rang in the outer office. 'That'll be traffic wanting to know if I'm coming to see the body.' 'Couldn't we make do with their photographs?' 'I'd rather get out if you don't mind, Mrs Cooper. I'm afraid I can't tolerate my own company at the moment.'

She left, thumping the door shut behind her. It seemed only a few weeks ago that she'd been wrestling with feelings for DI Pironi and had spent three days in self-pitying silence having stood him up on a dinner date. Veering between church- going piety and guilt-ridden desire, Alison spent weeks on end as moody as a teenager.

Jenny picked up Dr Kerr's single-page interim report and prepared herself for the worst. It didn't disappoint:



Rectal examination showed fresh and semi-healed abrasions consistent with intercourse on more than one occasion; swabs show presence of semen deposited in the hours immediately preceding death. Minor lesions on both forearms appear to have been made by human fingernails. Tissue samples from affected sites have been submitted for analysis.

While the immediate cause of death is an overdose of phenobarbital, it is not possible to say with certainty whether consumption was voluntary.



Jenny thought of Mrs Jacobs and tried to imagine her reaction as DI Wallace broke the news of her husband's final hours. She pictured her face set in a stony mask of denial.

How would she cope? Would she even understand? No. If Jenny had gained one insight into human nature through being a coroner, it was that two people could inhabit the same space for years and in all meaningful respects remain distant strangers.

She placed the report on the arbitrary pile at the right side of her desk which she had started with Paul Craven's court file, and was struck by the thought that only weeks and a handful of miles apart sex, drugs and God - a trinity of life's most potent forces - had colluded in the untimely deaths of both Alan Jacobs and Eva Donaldson. The thought seemed to open a door to an untravelled corner of her subconscious. She found herself in a dark and downward-sloping tunnel. And in the gloom behind her the door slammed shut.