government department. Colleagues told her she could have applied to any of the big London law firms specializing in millionaire divorces and negotiated a six-figure salary with prospects for an equity partnership. By the time she was forty-five she could have been earning more than David and heading for a place at the top of her field.
Instead she was a local coroner making just enough to get by, and surviving on ever-increasing doses of anti-anxiety medication. Ignoring Dr Allen's warnings, she had been taking double doses for most of the past week and was still starting at shadows and imaginary phantoms. Entering the clammy, featureless room that had once been the club bar felt strangely like reaching the end of a long road. As soon as this was over, she told herself, she would take a holiday. Then she would attempt to drain the poison once and for all.
She retreated to the former committee room which would serve as her office, while Alison directed workmen arriving with hired-in chairs and trestle tables to set out the main room in a way that vaguely resembled a court. In between sips of coffee from a Thermos flask, she touched up her make-up with shaky fingers and tried to resist the temptation to swallow another Xanax.
Even with her lipstick perfect and all her lines concealed, she remained too edgy to rehearse the questions she had planned for her first witnesses. Unable to relax, she closed the tatty brown curtains, leaving a tiny gap through which she watched a steady stream of people start to arrive. Despite the sign saying CORONER'S COURT Alison had planted outside, prospective jurors, witnesses, press and lawyers all appeared equally baffled by the incongruous building. Jenny smiled to herself as she watched Ed Prince and his entourage disembark from a chauffeur-driven Mercedes van and drag their smart pull-along briefcases across the rough gravel between a jumble of parked cars. The squalid building had one virtue: it would be a great leveller.
Alison knocked shortly before ten and announced that Dr Kerr and all the police witnesses were present.
'What about Craven?'
'The prison has promised to get him here later this morning. That's the best they can do.'
'Then we'd better make a start,' Jenny said with starchy formality, but under her tightly buttoned jacket her heart was racing. The air felt suddenly muggy, a bead of perspiration trickled down the centre of her chest.
Alison stepped out in front of the now crowded courtroom. 'All rise.'
There was an obedient scraping of chairs and a subdued chorus of coughs.
Jenny entered and took her place at the head of the room at a table which had been draped with green baize. Fifty people waited obediently for her to sit before they resumed their seats. She picked out the face of Eva's father, Kenneth Donaldson, sitting alone at the end of a row, surrounded by a brood of journalists eager for a titillating story. From the brief statement he had reluctantly tendered, Jenny knew that he was sixty-six years old and the recently retired managing director of a respected and successful local company which engineered aircraft parts. Sitting stiffly in a pinstriped suit, he looked every inch a man used to being in command who wasn't going to let his suffering show in public. Three rows behind him, also unaccompanied, sat Father Starr. He fixed her with a still, penetrating gaze designed to remind her that she was answerable to only one authority, of whom he was the official representative.
No fewer than eight lawyers were spread across the two rows of tables ranged opposite Jenny's. The most senior of them, Fraser Knight QC, rose to make the formal introductions. A tall man with elegant features and an aristocratic bearing, he had earned a formidable reputation representing the Ministry of Defence in a succession of awkward inquests involving the deaths of badly equipped British soldiers in Afghanistan. An eloquent advocate whose deadliest weapons were studied charm and feigned deference, he greeted her with a courtly nod and declared that he represented the Chief Constable of Bristol and Avon police. Two further members of his team sat behind him: junior counsel and a young instructing solicitor. Representing Kenneth Donaldson was Ruth Markham, a solicitor from Collett Abrahams, one of the oldest and most prestigious firms in Bristol, though one noted for its expertise in wills and probate rather than coroners' inquests. In her late thirties, expensively dressed and with a slender figure of which she was evidently very