Leave her with some tiny shred of dignity intact.'
Jenny wavered. For a brief moment she believed he was right.
'I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll ask the pathologist to complete his examination today. That way you can have Eva's body tomorrow, and I give you my word I'll deal with this matter as swiftly and discreetly as I can.'
'Before the Decency Bill has its first reading?'
'If at all possible.'
She guessed he had been speaking to Turnbull; they were men who would understand each other.
Donaldson held her in a steady, evaluating gaze. 'You understand my cynicism, Mrs Cooper. This industry my daughter was working to shut down isn't a sideshow, it's a powerful force. Its interests are secretively owned by many hugely successful legitimate businesses. These are people who would stop at nothing, baulk at corrupting no one, to protect their revenue.'
'If anyone offers me a brown envelope you'll be the first to know. Meanwhile, can I assume you'll allow me a day before making a complaint?'
'No. You're a bloody fool and deserve whatever's coming to you.' Donaldson rose from his chair. 'If I were you, Mrs Cooper, I'd be wary of far more than brown envelopes.'
'I don't know why you're bothering,' Alison said after Donaldson had stormed out. 'Haven't we got enough to deal with?'
Jenny looked at her accumulating mountain of files. Heaped up on the floor was a newly delivered stack of document boxes marked R v. Paul Craven. They contained all the papers from Craven's trial and would take at least a day to digest. She was tempted to give Donaldson what he wanted: quick and easy closure and a smooth path for Turnbull to deliver Eva's legacy. A few strokes of the pen and the case would be disposed of. What was stopping her? Images of Father Starr and Paul Craven jostled with a picture, now scored on her memory, of Lennox Strong's haunted expression as he described his brush with death; and behind them all the smiling face of Alec McAvoy as he turned to her with a wise, mischievous smile on the day they first met: 'I could kneel all night in prayer, to heal your many ills, My Dark Rosaleen.'
Jenny said, 'Call Dr Kerr and tell him I want her body autopsied this afternoon.'
Alison protested, 'But Mrs Cooper—'
'Then start making arrangements for the Jacobs inquest. I want it out of the way by the end of the week.'
It took another pill to propel Jenny through the door of the mortuary. The evening was hot and the Vale's creaking air- conditioning battled to keep the temperature to anything less than mildly suffocating. The still air was heavy with the smell of disinfectant and human decay. An outbreak of summer flu had claimed the lives of tens of elderly patients in the space of two days, overwhelming the refrigerators. Gurneys loaded with bodies awaiting collection by overstretched undertakers were parked two abreast in the corridor. Sidestepping around them, Jenny wondered why she found the sight of twenty corpses less alarming than being intimately confronted with one. Perhaps being in the presence of so many bodies at once could make one feel a grim sense of biological triumph at having so far escaped the winnowing.
She grabbed a mask, gloves and surgical gown from the station outside the slap doors to the autopsy room, braced herself, then stepped inside to find Andy Kerr stooped over an array of internal organs at the steel counter to the side of the table. She barely recognized the body as the one she had seen in the photographs. The flesh was a waxy yellow and seemed to have dehydrated and shrunk. The cheek and jaw bones jutted through tightly drawn skin, the hands were clawed and shrivelled. Avoiding looking directly at the face, Jenny came alongside Andy as he peered at a section of tissue through a magnifying glass.
'Do I get a gold star?' he asked. 'I had my first date in weeks lined up for tonight.'
'I'm sorry. I had to promise her father I'd release the body tomorrow.'
'Life as a porn star doesn't do much for young arteries, that's for sure. I've seen sixty-year-olds in better nick.'
'Alcohol?'
'And cigarettes. She may have found God but he didn't curb her bad habits. I'd say she got through forty a day. There was even a small clot forming on the left lung - could have caused her a lot of problems.'
'I didn't see that in the first p-m report.'
'The Home Office pathologist was looking