generates. Hot weather, even more than cold, was the undertaker's friend. In addition to the usual post-operative deaths were numerous suspected coronaries, a gory motorcycle accident and a drowning. The police had emailed photographs of the body of a teenage boy stretched out at the side of a reservoir. There were livid bruises on his chest from desperate attempts at resuscitation. Even after handling over twelve hundred cases, the sight of those who had been torn from life in an unexpected instant never failed to appal her. It was less the physical spectacle than the injustice of it; the inability of the deceased to prepare, to say goodbye to loved ones and make their peace.
She had come to appreciate that a death faced with foreknowledge and a clear conscience was a rare privilege granted only to the few.
Jenny hurried through the hospital reports, certified the cause of death in the cases in which post-mortems had already been completed and by mid-morning finally summoned the courage to call the family of the drowned boy. She spoke briefly to a hung-over-sounding man who said he was the mother's boyfriend. In the background a woman yelled obscenities at screaming younger children, their voices competing with a blaring television. The atmosphere of aggressive chaos hit her like a shock wave. She could understand why the fourteen-year-old might have swallowed a bottle of cheap vodka and gone for a swim. The mother refused to come to the phone and conversation fizzled to an inconclusive end.
Turning to the boxes sent by Paul Craven's lawyers, Jenny skimmed through the papers the police had seized from Eva's house. There were domestic bills, bank and credit-card statements, correspondence with her mortgage and pension companies and documents relating to her work on behalf of Decency. It didn't take an accountant to work out that Eva had been in financial trouble. Decency paid her a salary of three thousand pounds a month plus travel expenses, but she had refinanced her house twice in as many years and was paying eighteen hundred pounds each month in mortgage payments. Her current account was forty-five thousand in the red and between half a dozen credit cards she had racked up another thirty-five thousand pounds' worth of debt. Jenny found a letter marked 'COPY' dated the previous November, in which Eva had written to Michael Turn- bull c/o Decency's London office requesting an increase in salary to reflect her importance to the campaign. There was no evidence of a reply.
Despite their volume, the papers cast little light on Eva's personal life or state of mind. Jenny flicked back to the sheaf of itemized telephone bills to check for frequently called numbers, but on close examination Eva appeared to have made only one or two calls each day from her home number, some days none at all. There were no bills for a mobile phone. She checked the statement made by DC Sarah Munroe, the exhibits officer, and noted that no mobile phone records had been seized, nor even a handset. Buried in the credit-card statements she had spotted a payment for a laptop computer Eva had purchased the previous August, but it was absent from DC Munroe's list of items seized. It was apparent that not everything she would have expected the police to have taken had been recorded, let alone copied and forwarded to Craven's lawyers.
Jenny flicked back through Eva's work papers, searching for some hint of a clue. Most of them had been generated by the Decency campaign office: strategy papers, statistical information for use in interviews (one in three men in the UK has a pornography habit, one in six an addiction), and minutes of meetings with ministers and civil servants. The few personal letters were from campaign supporters or church groups requesting Eva to come and talk to them. Only one item, caught up in the middle of briefing papers for an appearance on television news, gave an insight into the side of Eva's life that most interested Jenny. It was from her solicitors, Reed Falkirk & Co., writing to inform her that having reviewed her contracts with GlamourX Ltd, counsel had confirmed that she had a good claim for unpaid royalties for Latex Lesbians Parts i to 4 and all six films in the Lil' Miss series. The solicitors awaited her instructions, reminding her that they would require ten thousand pounds to be paid on account of their fees. The letter had been written in mid-March, just under two months