had been out of prison for only a few days, having spent twenty- one years, all of his adult life, in jail.'
'Before we go any further,' Jenny said, 'you have got to understand - I'm a coroner. I determine cause of death. If you've evidence that could overturn the finding of a criminal court, the correct course is to instruct a lawyer to mount an appeal.'
Father Starr gave a patient nod. 'If we had a year or two, maybe, but Mr Craven doesn't have that long. There is a struggle within him that I sense he is losing.'
The phone rang. Jenny looked at it and pressed the divert button. 'All right, fifteen minutes. Then I really have to get on.'
Father Starr reminded Jenny of the highlights of Eva's career, telling her that she had been something of an inspirational figure to him and the prisoners he ministered to in Telhurst, a long-term prison in south Gloucestershire. At twenty she dropped out of art school and started acting in pornographic films. At twenty-five she was at the peak of her career when a road accident left her with permanent scars that disfigured one side of her face. The production company she was contracted to spat her out and sued her for loss of revenue, arguing that the drugs she had taken caused her to lose control of the car. They won. The pills she took to rev her up for a shoot cost her three hundred thousand in cash, her country house and her career.
Eva entered a downward spiral of drink, drugs and self- loathing. Later, she would tell audiences how she was on the verge of taking her own life - actually walking to the pharmacy to collect the painkillers she planned to wash down with the vodka she had ready in her bag - when she overheard a young woman telling a friend how the church she had joined had given her a permanent high. Eva caught the name of it as she pushed on the pharmacy door: the Mission Church of God.
Back then, nearly three years ago, the worshippers met in a disused bingo hall. The pastor was an inspirational young American named Bobby DeMont, who from nothing had built the mother church in Washington DC to be one of the biggest single congregations in the USA, over thirty-five thousand strong. That night Eva claimed she saw the light of God shine. It was in Bobby DeMont's eyes as he spoke, and in the faces of the young men and women around her as they heard the unadulterated truth for the first time in their lives.
Not only did the church give her back her will to live, through it she was introduced to its chief benefactor, Michael, now Lord Turnbull. At forty-one years of age Turnbull had sold his software company for two hundred million dollars, but his conscience was troubled. As a young idealist, he had pioneered video-streaming software in the hope of putting the lie-peddling media multinationals out of business. What, in fact, he inadvertently provided was the means for the pornography business to reach into every home with a computer, making a lot of disgusting people exceedingly rich. A year later Turnbull had been struggling to hold down a consultancy to a lobbying company in Washington while suffering from increasingly crippling depression. Dependent on alcohol and pills, he had started to fantasize about jumping from his penthouse balcony when he chanced on an item on the local news about a spate of miraculous healings that had taken place at the Mission Church of God. Desperate, and with nothing to lose, the multi-millionaire sobered up and took himself to an evening service. When Bobby DeMont called on all those who hadn't yet pledged their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ to do so right now, Michael Turnbull obeyed. He would later describe to television viewers around the world the feeling when Bobby first laid his hands on him as like being giddy with wine and madly in love, only many times stronger.
Born again, Michael donated generously to the church and hatched the idea of starting a sister church in his home city of Bristol. Fired up with the idea of taking the gospel back to a country that had brought so many evangelists to the US, Bobby DeMont himself came to England for the first few months to sow the seeds. Within a year the congregation had grown to a thousand members and Michael Turnbull had