in his face surprised her. In the back of her mind she had invented a story of abuse for Eva's tattoo: riddled with guilt at her years prostituting herself, it was to be an ironic testament to the true cause of her pain, a mirror image of the scars that disfigured her face. Marking her body in this way was a form of therapy: sex could never be had for the sheer hell of it again; it would always be married with the truth. But Donaldson's expression didn't fit with her neat version of history. In her many years in the family courts dealing with men who had done unspeakable things to their daughters, she had learnt to recognize the benign, detached, self-deluding smile the guilty ones adopted. There was nothing self-deluding about Kenneth Donaldson's reaction; no, he was in genuine pain.
'Mr Turley,' Jenny said, 'did Miss Donaldson talk to you at all while you were drawing the design?'
'Very little. She seemed sort of distant.'
'Did you ask what it meant to her?'
'No. It didn't seem right.'
'Why was that?'
Sullivan rolled his eyes. Ed Prince drummed his fingers impatiently. Jenny ignored them and urged Turley to answer.
'It was just a feeling,' he said. 'A lot of people want tattoos when they've just lost someone - it's like a memorial. The young lady felt like that. Sad. As if she'd just come to the end of something.'
Chapter 14
What had she done?
It had been less than twenty minutes since Dr Kerr had revealed the existence of Eva's tattoo and it was already the major headline on newspaper websites. Jenny surfed through them in her office. All grasped the opportunity to print photographs of Eva from her porn-star days, and took care to mention the fact that her father was a retired industrialist who had been widowed for almost fifteen years. Jenny could picture Michael and Christine Turnbull and their colleagues wincing at the damage the story would already have done to their campaign: even as she was championing anti-pornography laws that would have turned the clock back forty years, Eva was marking her body with a tattoo which was ambiguous at best. Somehow it smacked of hypocrisy and mixed motives, and far more damagingly of buried secrets from a woman who claimed to have none left. Out of a simple desire to have the whole truth told, Jenny realized that she had unleashed a story that wouldn't die until there was an answer. She slammed down the lid of her laptop and grabbed her pills from her handbag.
She had barely forced the tablet down when Alison arrived to tell her that Ed Prince had nearly come to blows with reporters who had swarmed around the Mercedes van he and his team were using as their mobile office. The Turnbulls and Lennox Strong were in there with them, besieged by a news-hungry mob who had blocked the van's exit from the car park.
Jenny said, 'Can you call the police?'
'They're on their way.'
Sensing Alison's disapproval, Jenny said, 'I had to do it-'
'Mr Donaldson wants to give evidence,' Alison retorted. 'His solicitor would like you to call him this afternoon. He's writing a statement now.'
'Good. I'll hear from him whenever he's ready.'
'Her old boyfriend Joe Cassidy's finally answered his summons, but there's no sign of Freddy Reardon yet. No one's picking up the phone at his home address.'
'He'll be nervous. He might need a bit of encouragement. Maybe you can ask the police to send someone to get him.'
'And if he doesn't want to come?'
'I'll give him a chance to cooperate before I issue a warrant. I'm sure he will.'
Alison gave a doubtful grunt.
'What is it?' Jenny said. 'I've done something you don't approve of. I can tell.'
Alison stalled at the door. 'It's not you. It's that priest, Father Starr—'
'What about him?'
'It's just an instinct - there's something not quite honest about him. Even when we were at the prison, it didn't feel as if he was being completely straight with us.'
It was a concern that had been nagging at Jenny too, but she had put it down to her insecurity on being confronted with a man who led such an austere and observant life. His triumph over normal human weaknesses served to make her more painfully aware of her own.
'What has he got to be dishonest about?' Jenny said, asking herself as much as Alison.
'You wouldn't find me at the Mission Church of God,' Alison said, 'but at least they're achieving something. On the brink of