'She talked to you about that - the demands of her work?'
'Sometimes. It wasn't that big a deal. She was tough. Tougher than most people.'
Jenny wondered why Eva would choose a vulnerable teenage boy as a confidant, and presumed it was because she felt unthreatened by him. Michael Turnbull and his immediate colleagues were educated and successful. No matter how high her media profile, Eva would always have felt their inferior. Even the most pious would have seen her as the ex-porn star.
'Freddy, do you think she was in any sort of trouble? Was anyone threatening or hassling her?'
'She never said anything.'
'She didn't get any problems from people who knew her from before?'
'She never talked about that,' Freddy snapped. 'When you're born again, that's it, you're changed for ever. There's no need to go over the past. Your sins are taken away. The Holy Spirit drives out the bad spirits, that's the whole point.'
Jenny nodded, longing to put a comforting arm around him.
'That's what her book's about.' He looked at her with wounded, accusing eyes. 'I bet you haven't even read it.'
'I've started,' Jenny lied.
She could see he didn't believe her. 'You might learn something,' he said. 'God changes people. Not just a little bit, completely. And for ever. All you have to do is let him.'
His heartfelt belief made her feel doubly deceitful. The idea that Freddy's closeness to Eva had tipped into a frenzy of murderous emotion seemed absurd; she despised Father Starr for having planted the poison in her mind. He was worse than a sly detective, moving in the shadows, forming baseless theories to suit his prejudice, not even man enough to tell her where he was getting his grubby information from.
Jenny said, 'Freddy, I'm going to be straight with you. I may have to call you as a witness at my inquest. I know how much you've changed since going to church, but the fact that you've a criminal record will come out. I'm just preparing you for that.'
Freddy shrugged. 'I waved a knife at my stepdad. It was stupid, but so was he. I told the police he did far worse to Mum, but they weren't interested in that.'
'I see you got a supervision order.'
A hint of a smile lifted the corners of his mouth. 'It's like Eva said, it was all part of God's plan.'
'What happened?'
'The social worker took me to a psychiatrist and put me in hospital. They said I was psychotic. Maybe I was.' He looked at her with the same bright expression with which he'd greeted her the first time they had met. 'The doctor told my mum I could be on pills for the rest of my life. You should have seen his face after Lennox had prayed for me. He wouldn't believe it. He said it must have been my hormones or something. I haven't had pills for over a year. I don't need them any more. I've got peace of mind.'
'Which hospital was it?'
Freddy paused, a hint of suspicion in his eyes. 'What do you want to know that for?'
The rock returned to Jenny's throat, bigger than ever.
'Was it the Conway Unit?'
'Might have been.'
'And was there a nurse called Alan Jacobs there?'
Freddy was quiet for a moment. 'He was one of them.'
'Was it him who told you about the Mission Church?'
'No. He had nothing to do with it. I thought you said you weren't like the police. I've had enough of this. You people are all the same.'
He shot up from the bench and took off across the grass.
'Freddy—'
He broke into a run and didn't look back.
It had been there all along. Buried in the police files was a rough photocopy of a barely legible handwritten list entitled, 'Persons spoken to informally'. All the big names at the Mission Church of God were listed: Bobby DeMont, Michael and Christine Turnbull, Lennox Strong, Joel Nelson, and more than twenty others. Two-thirds of the way down she made out Frederick Reardon and, a little further on, Alan Jacobs.
Jenny had called DI Goodison, who made no attempt to disguise his annoyance at being troubled by her a second time. He had had a team of five detectives going through the church, he said. In the two day after Eva's death they spoke to whoever they could find who had been associated with her. They stopped when they did because Craven had come forward and confessed. There was no particular significance in the names on the list.