'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.
Chapter 3
It was in the early evenings that the effect of her slow-release medication tapered off and the ghosts it held at bay returned to haunt her. They had no faces, these forms hovering at the margins of her consciousness, but they wanted her to know that they were only a breath away; that she had only one foot in the world of the living. Lately their presence had become sharper. It was as if the eruption of spring into summer, with all the valley humming with the urgency of life, had spurred them to greater efforts.
There was no relief from them tonight. Throughout her drive home their presence had grown. They were waiting for her in the shadows at Melin Bach, behind the trees at the end of the cottage's garden, amongst the clutter of ancient tools and implements in the dilapidated mill shed. She couldn't settle to read her papers at the scrub-top table on the lawn without feeling watched by unseen eyes, feeling the touch of their hands in the breeze on her neck. The psychiatrists would call it mild paranoia, but that didn't begin to explain the dark and complex landscape of her other world.
The scent of the newly mown meadow was overpowered by the smell of the churchyard where Alan Jacobs's body had lain. His features hovered behind her eyes, and the shame and anguish of his final moments tugged at her, as if she were somehow wrapped up in the cause of his despair.
Such irrational thoughts were nothing new. They had dogged Jenny throughout her short career as a coroner, taunting her with the notion that she was doomed to consort with the dead, denying her the chance to live unselfconsciously among the living. She had tried to pull free, to confine her imagination within normal limits, but then Alec McAvoy had arrived and flung the door to the abyss wide open. My Dark Rosaleen, he had called her. He had seemed to know her secrets without her saying a word and he had left without saying how. But left her to what?
Listless, and for the first time in weeks fighting the desire to drive into town to buy a bottle of wine, Jenny retreated to