said quietly. 'Don't worry about Josie. I'll see to her.'
Mrs Jacobs lowered her feet to the floor. She was thirty- five or thereabouts, pale with mousy blonde hair cut in a sensible bob. She attempted a smile with her 'hello', and Jenny saw in her face that she was suffering from shame as much as grief.
'Sorry to disturb you, Mrs Jacobs. I know it's a difficult time.'
'It's all right.' She spoke with a soft Welsh accent.
Jenny sat on a chair that matched the sofa and glanced around a room that seemed to have been disturbed. The books and DVDs on the shelves by the television were in a jumble. Toys spilled over the edges of a plastic crate.
Embarrassed by the mess, Ceri Jacobs said, 'The police were here most of the evening. They went through everything. I haven't been able . . .' She swallowed, holding back tears. 'How can I help you?'
'They might have explained that if they don't suspect foul play it's my job to determine your husband's cause of death.'
Mrs Jacobs nodded and reached for a Kleenex.
'Were they looking for anything in particular?'
'They said it was routine. I can't remember all the things they took.'
'Computer? Address book?'
'Yes, and some of his clothes.' She pressed the tissue to her eyes. 'Ones that hadn't been washed. I don't know what for.'
'Computers are always taken as a matter of course. They'll check the clothes for third-party DNA,' Jenny said. 'Just in case.'
'No one wanted to kill Alan . . . Why would they?' Ceri Jacobs shook her head with an expression of bewildered incomprehension.
'The pathologist found pills in his stomach, Mrs Jacobs. Phenobarbital. It's a barbiturate, something he might have got hold of at the unit.'
Her gaze turned inwards as she seemed to disengage, not yet ready to absorb this information.
'Was he depressed?'
'No, not that he admitted to me. Work has always been difficult, but he loved it. It was his vocation.'
'Was he being treated for any psychiatric condition, or had he ever been?'
She shook her head.
'When did you last see him?'
'Yesterday afternoon. He said he'd had a call from the unit saying they had several staff sick. They asked if he could cover for the night.'
'Was that unusual?'
'It happens.'
'What time did he leave?'
'About four o'clock. I thought he'd be back by midnight. Josie woke me about six and I saw he hadn't been home. I tried to call him but his phone was off ... I don't know why, but I called the office at the unit. They said he hadn't been in, they had all the staff they needed.' Her eyes filled with tears. 'That's when I called the police.' The widow pressed her hands to her face. 'Why? . . . What was he thinking of?'
Jenny had tried to train herself not to form judgements on first impressions, yet she couldn't help thinking that Mrs Jacobs's knowledge of her husband might have been incomplete, to say the least. The house was a showcase exclusively for their child: framed baby photographs on every surface, nursery school paintings plastering a noticeboard that took up most of the kitchen wall, even Ceri's stretchy pyjamas were decorated with purple hippos. Alan Jacobs left here each day to work with the city's most mentally disturbed teenagers, a job he could only have succeeded in by winning their respect and connecting on their level. Yet it was as if his wife had organized her home as a shield against all that; there was nothing of him or his life outside the family home on display. It looked as if Ceri had decreed that their child was all that mattered to them.
Jenny realized that she'd missed something: God featured here, too. The simple oil painting on the wall behind the sofa was an icon - a modern rendering of the Virgin and Child - and Ceri wore a silver crucifix around her neck.
'Did the police tell you anything about your husband's body, Mrs Jacobs?'
'I know he was -' she could barely bring herself to say it - 'naked.'
'And the cross on his torso?'
She shot Jenny a look she wasn't expecting, a flash of steel as sharp as a razor. 'What about it?'
'Why might he have done that - assuming it was him.'
'I've no idea.'
'I assume you're a Catholic, was—?'
'No, he wasn't,' she interrupted. 'For most of his life Alan wasn't religious at all, his family had poisoned him against it. But he had begun to change. He was an enquirer at St Joseph's. He'd