He was a hard man to resist, and someone Jenny already felt she would like to know more about. 'And if I say I can't?'
'I shan't beg you, Mrs Cooper.' He got up from his chair. 'Thank you for your time. You have been most generous.' He produced a card from his jacket pocket and placed it in front of her. 'I'll leave you to decide what's right.'
She should have started working through her phone messages or reading her mail, but the priest's plea lingered like a watchful presence. It demanded that she make a decision on whether to rubber-stamp the Crown Court's verdict in line with usual procedure, or to risk the ire of her overseers in the Ministry of Justice and conduct an inquest of her own.
She reached for the court file and began skimming through its pages.
There was a statement from Eva Donaldson's domestic help, who had arrived in the morning to find her employer's body on the kitchen floor of her modest home in Winterbourne Down, a village just outside the northern margins of the city; statements from the several detectives who were called to the scene; a list of items that were removed from the house; a forensics report on the DNA sample recovered from the doormat; and a report by the Home Office pathologist. A bundle of photographs showed the body at the scene. Eva was curled into a foetal position surrounded by a huge pool of congealed blood. Two shots of the body on the slab showed a single stab wound to her chest midway between her breasts and her shoulder-length blonde hair. The final photograph was a close-up of her heart sitting in a kidney dish. A flagged pin marked the stab wound, which had penetrated her upper right ventricle, making death a rapid certainty.
Jenny stuffed the pictures into the back of the file and flicked through the transcript of Craven's police interview.
He wasn't much of a talker. The DI conducting the interrogation, Goodison, had had to tease him along. When eventually he found his tongue, Craven said he kept seeing Eva on the television news talking about her past in blue movies and how she had found God. He had found God, too, which was what gave him the idea of going to talk to her on his release. When the detective asked how he'd found her address, he said he had got it from contact-a-celebrity.com while he was still in prison. Jenny arrived at a section of the interview that had been highlighted:
DI G: You say you walked all the way to her house,
[suspect nods]
DI G: What did you do when you got there, Paul?
PC: Hung around for a while, then rang the bell.
DI G: What did you do while you hung around?
[suspect shrugs]
DI G: Come on, Paul, you can remember that. What did you do? Look through the window, check out the house, go to the toilet, what?
[long pause]
PC: I think I went to the toilet, had a leak.
DI G: Where?
PC: Don't remember. No. Don't remember.
DI G: By the house?
PC: Yeah, that's it, by the house.
DI G: Then what?
PC: Like I said, I rang the doorbell.
DI G: What happened next?
PC: She came to the door. She said, 'Who are you?' I said, 'I'm Paul, like the apostle, and I think God told me to come and talk to you about all the good work you're doing, because I want to give my life to good works too.' And she said, 'Oh, well you'd better come in and tell me more.' [long pause] I followed her into the house, into the kitchen, then she turned to me with this strange look on her face, and she put her hand on me [suspect indicates his chest] and she said, 'You don't have to say anything, Paul, I know what you want and I want it too.' And she moved her hand downwards, you know, down there [suspect indicates his groin area] and I said, 'No, that's not right, please don't do that to me,' but she took no notice. I said, 'Eva, that's a sin.' She said [pause] I can't say what she said.
DI G: It's not a problem, Paul. Just tell me what she said, [suspect covers face with hands]
DI G: Come on, Paul. Let's hear it.
[pause]
PC: She said, [sobbing] she said, 'Fuck me for the devil.'
And that's when I picked up a knife from the counter and stuck it in her, right there, in the chest.