'If that was scabbing from the tattoo, I'd say within her last month. Interesting choice for a devout Christian, don't you think?'
Jenny looked away, feeling suddenly queasy. 'Do me a favour - don't mention this in your report. Some things are better left for court.'
Chapter 6
Many phone calls and much cajoling later, Alison had succeeded in calling in a long-overdue favour from the administrator of Short Street Courts and secured the use of their smallest, stuffiest courtroom for Friday morning. Jenny didn't mind that it was windowless and painted the same dull institutional green as prison corridors, she just wanted the Alan Jacobs case dealt with and another burden lifted from her shoulders. The previous day had been spent cooped up in her office attacking her backlog of paperwork. She had made progress, but only by ignoring everything and everyone else. Repeated messages from Father Starr and several concerned text messages from Steve had gone unanswered. She had even managed to miss her Wednesday night call with Ross. It was now officially undeniable: being professionally competent meant being a bad mother.
As well as sending Alison out to round up witnesses and gather statements for the Jacobs inquest, Jenny asked her to make enquiries about Eva Donaldson's tattoo. Since seeing it she'd scoured the internet for images of Eva and couldn't find a single one in which it appeared. She'd tracked down her last known contribution to the adult genre: Devils Bi Night. The butterfly on her back was much in evidence, but there was no Daddy's girl. A trawl through her bank statements and credit-card transactions failed to cast any light, leaving Alison to work through every tattoo parlour in the Bristol Yellow Pages. She drew a blank. The artists who answered their phones either couldn't recall or wouldn't discuss their clients on principle. Resigned to a longer search than she had anticipated, Jenny wrote to Kenneth Donaldson telling him that she would have to break her promise to release the body, only saying obliquely that further tests might prove necessary.
The call made, Jenny pushed Eva temporarily from her mind and turned to Alan Jacobs.
She was determined that the inquest would be a discreet, low-key affair. A finding of suicide was a virtual inevitability; she didn't want it to be any more painful for Mrs Jacobs than absolutely necessary. As the death couldn't be said to have occurred in circumstances with implications for the health or safety of the public at large, it would be conducted without a jury. Jenny would consider the evidence and reach her verdict alone.
She entered from the cramped, windowless office behind the courtroom and took her place on the judicial seat. On the rare occasions on which she held an inquest in a dedicated court rather than one of the draughty, far-flung village halls to which she was normally consigned, she had mixed feelings about her elevated status. A coroner wasn't like a judge arbitrating from on high, she was a judicial officer with the role, unique in the British justice system, of asking whatever questions were required to determine the true facts of an unnatural death. Drawing the truth out of a witness was best achieved through striking up a rapport, which was far harder in a space designed to inspire fear and awe.
There were two lawyers present: Daniel Randall, a genial, silver-haired solicitor, represented Mrs Jacobs, and Suzanne Hayter, an austere young barrister with scraped-back hair and small, rimless glasses, appeared for the Severn Vale Health Trust. Immediately behind her sat an in-house solicitor named Harry Gordon, whom Jenny recognized as the Trust's chief litigator. In his two years in post he had earned an awesome reputation for fighting every negligence claim and slashing their damages bill by two-thirds. The rows behind the lawyers were filled almost to capacity with witnesses and members of the Jacobs family. Ceri Jacobs sat at their fore alongside her mother, both women in identical black two-piece suits. Determinedly in control of her emotions, the widow fixed her cool, expectant gaze on Jenny and seemed to demand an answer that would fly in the face of the facts she was about to hear.
Jenny began by explaining to the family that the purpose of the hearing was simply to call evidence that would assist in determining the cause of death. There was a range of possible verdicts including accident, suicide, unlawful killing, misadventure (meaning that the deceased took a