filled her with overwhelming and irrational dread. Child deaths were one thing she had yet to learn to cope with. She tried not to think why that might be.
She approached her office at 14 Jamaica Street to find a man standing on the pavement outside. He was snake- hipped with short dark hair and olive skin, dressed in a dark suit that emphasized the narrowness of his limbs. He turned sharply at the sound of her footsteps as if startled, and she saw that he was a priest: he wore a black clerical shirt of the Roman style, a thin collar tight to his neck showing only a narrow band of white beneath his Adam's apple. She noticed his eyes were jet black, his slender features as smooth as polished walnut.
'Can I help you?' Jenny said. 'I'm Mrs Cooper. The coroner.'
A look of relief came over the priest's face. 'Ah, Mrs Cooper. I am so sorry to trouble you. Father Lucas Starr. I was hoping to make an appointment to discuss a case.' He spoke with an accent she couldn't place. She would have said Spanish but couldn't be sure.
'Have you tried phoning? We are in the book.' She stepped past him and unlocked the door.
'It's a matter of some urgency,' he said calmly, but in a way which held her attention. 'Of life and death, you might say.'
Jenny glanced at her watch: it was nearly ten and she had a hundred things that would demand her attention the moment she walked through the door.
'Look, I'm really very busy this morning. How about at the end of the day?'
The priest formed his right hand into a fist and enclosed it with his left palm, the subconscious gesture somewhere between a threat and a prayer. 'If you could only spare me ten minutes, Mrs Cooper. Your response might make all the difference to the man with whose welfare I am concerned.'
'Ten? You're sure?'
'You have my word.'
She took him through the dimly lit, windowless hallway that led to her ground-floor offices. There was a vague smell of damp; the cheap wallpaper the landlord had recently pasted up was already starting to peel at the corners. Ignoring the heap of mail waiting for her on Alison's desk, Jenny ushered the priest through the heavy oak door to her room. He waited for her to be seated behind her desk before he sat in the chair opposite, his back straight as a board, hands crossed precisely on his lap.
Jenny said, 'I'm listening, Father . . . What should I call you?'
'Father Starr is fine.'
Jenny nodded. 'You're a Catholic priest, I presume?'
'Yes,' he said, with a trace of hesitation. 'Not a parish priest, a Jesuit in formation to be precise. I'm nearing the end of a five-year ministry as a prison chaplain. One final year of tertianship and I become a brother, God willing.'
'I had no idea it took that long.'
'Start to finish, seventeen years, sometimes more.' He smiled softly. 'They don't let just anybody in.'
She placed him at about forty, but somehow his age didn't seem to define him. She was curious about his accent, though: she detected traces of American; no, Latin American - that was it. 'You said you were concerned for someone's welfare.'
'Yes, please let me explain. This relates to the death of a young woman named Eva Donaldson. I understand you are about to make the formal certification of the cause of death?'
Jenny glanced at the file bound with white ribbon sitting on top of one of three disorderly heaps on her desk.
'Eva Donaldson, the actress?'
Jenny had skimmed the Eva Donaldson file and picked up bits and pieces from news reports over the couple of months since the young woman's death, but hadn't stopped to consider the full story of her transformation from art student to adult movie star, to religious convert and full-time campaigner for Decency, a pressure group advocating a ban on internet pornography.
'The same. The man to whom I am ministering is named Paul Craven. He confessed to killing her.'
'I remember. He pleaded guilty to her murder.'
'You are correct, but he was not in his right mind. Paul Craven did not kill Eva Donaldson and he should not be spending the rest of his life in prison. I fear that unless the truth is told his life may not be very long.' A look of pain briefly passed across the priest's face. 'He is a sensitive and a troubled man, and a deeply religious man also. He