a quiet word with Mr Craven before his interview to make sure he remembered his lines.'
'No,' Goodison said, with a faint smile. 'It's absolutely out of the question.'
'Maybe I'm reading a little too much into the subtext,' Sullivan said, 'but we might as well air it. In the back of some people's minds might be the thought that Craven urinated on the doormat of a former female porn star, but that he didn't actually kill her. Is it possible that he left his deposit hours, or even days before she died?'
Goodison said, 'This is a man who had spent his entire adult life in prison and had only recently been released.' He looked towards Father Starr. 'I know there are some who believe he'd experienced a genuine religious conversion, but in my view this was a psychopath capable of murder and deceit; a man beyond redemption.'
'Thank you, Inspector,' Sullivan said, as if with relief that the truth had at last been heard. 'You have been most helpful.'
Ruth Markham, the lawyer representing Kenneth Donaldson, took up the baton, greeting the detective with a polite, unchallenging smile.
'Can you confirm for us please, Inspector, that your inquiries didn't reveal any other suspect with a motive for murdering Miss Donaldson?'
. 'I can.'
'And can you also confirm that her home address was in fact listed on contact-a-celebrity.com, as Craven claimed?'
'It was.'
'Thank you, Inspector. That is all.'
His cross-examination over, Goodison stepped down from the witness box without having suffered a single uncomfortable moment. Jenny began to wonder if her suspicion of him had been misplaced.
She took the uncontentious witnesses next, and dealt swiftly with two scene-of-crime officers and a senior forensic scientist, Dr Jordan, who had tested the doormat and the various scrapings and tissue samples taken from Eva's body. There was no evidence of foreign DNA under Eva's nails, Jordan confirmed, nor any traces on the swabs taken from her lips, cheeks, eyelids and the backs of her hands. If there had been a physical struggle he would have expected the attacker's saliva to have sprayed onto the victim's skin; its absence suggested their contact was extremely brief. He produced a photograph of the doormat which had successfully trapped the small number of epithelial cells present in urine. He attempted to explain the finer points of mitochondrial DNA amplification to a glazed jury, but with no evidence to contradict his findings, Jenny saved him the effort. She was satisfied that Dr Jordan had proved beyond doubt that some base male instinct had caused Paul Craven to urinate on the threshold of Eva Donaldson's home. The only question in her mind was what had happened next.
Father Starr's expression grew darker and more censorious as the morning drew on; Jenny deliberately avoided his accusing gaze as Alison read aloud the original post-mortem report filed by the Home Office pathologist, Dr Aden Thomas. Starr had expected her to confront and challenge aggressively, to test each witness to the limit and upbraid them for not having exhausted every possible explanation for Eva's death. Justice was something his spiritual brothers had frequently died for, she could imagine him saying, and here she was letting partial truth pass unchallenged. But there was a limit to how far she could question the integrity of witnesses, a barrier of convention beyond which she simply could not go, even for a priest.
As Alison recited the final sentences, the flaking double doors at the back hall creaked open. Michael and Christine Turnbull entered, followed by Lennox Strong. Heads turned and even jaded members of the press smiled in acknowledgement of the famous couple. Jenny noted Kenneth Donaldson's nod of greeting and their smiles in return.
A knot of tension formed in the pit of Jenny's stomach at the prospect of what she now had to do.
She called for Dr Andrew Kerr to come forward.
The pathologist was not yet a confident public performer. He was capable of spending entire winter evenings alone in the mortuary, but giving evidence to a room full of people was an ordeal she knew he dreaded. Jenny would have to lead him by the hand.
'Dr Kerr, recently you examined Miss Donaldson's body and carried out a review of the findings of the first post-mortem carried out by the Home Office pathologist, Dr Aden Thomas.'
'That's correct.'
'Did you agree with Thomas's conclusion?'
'Yes,' Dr Kerr said cautiously. 'Broadly.'
'We've seen the photographs of the single stab wound. You do accept that was the cause of death.'
'It was. But with respect to Dr Thomas, he didn't comment