'Straight up. There weren't any files.' He scratched his head. 'I don't know . . . Maybe she put them out with the rubbish?'
Pironi left Jenny to deal with the caretaker, Mr Aldis, an irascible old man irritated at being dragged away from the football match he was watching on television. The communal dustbins were in a locked cupboard on the outside of the building. They hadn't been emptied for five days and he swore that the police hadn't asked for access to them. Jenny borrowed a pair of rubber gloves and spent a cold and unpleasant hour sifting though garbage. There was no sign of any box files.
'Why didn't you tell me?' McAvoy said. 'It's a cop in here who tipped me off. Dear God. Dead . . .' Glasses clinked in the background. He sounded as if he'd made a night of it.
The hands-free cradle in her car had snapped and she had the phone wedged on her shoulder as she drove homewards, praying she wouldn't meet a police car.
'The police think she jumped,' Jenny said.
'She'd be going straight to hell, then,' McAvoy said. 'Like my crew - no messing. Suicides are roasted in fire 'which is easy for Allah', is what it says in the Koran. Guy inside lent it to me one time.'
'Her files were missing. All her papers connected with the case.'
'The cops would have had those, no danger.'
'Pironi denies it.'
'St Peter denied our Lord three times and still got to be Bishop of Rome.'
'He looked me in the eye. I believed him.'
'That's because you're an untainted soul, Mrs Cooper . . . Fucking dead. Why?'
'She'd been drinking. Half a bottle of whisky.'
'Poor soul . . . Poor wretched soul.'
She was clear of the bridge and skirting around Chepstow. She'd soon be past the racecourse and into the gorge of the valley out of radio contact.
'I'm about to lose my signal. I'll update you soon as I hear anything.'
McAvoy said, 'I know what you're doing, Jenny. I understand you want to stay above board, but I could help you . . . If you really want to dig down to the shit, you're going to need a man like me.'
It was six steeply winding miles through dark woods between St Arvans and Tintern, the ancient village with its ruined abbey at which she would turn up the narrow lane and climb the hill to Melin Bach. Since the night the previous June, when - in the thick of the Danny Wills case and suffering from acute anxiety - she had pulled up in the forest car park and wrestled with desperate impulses, she dreaded this stretch of her journey. This late in the evening there was little or no traffic. A skin of water lay over the surface of the road and the bends, always sharper and longer than they appeared on approach, forced her to slow to a crawl or risk plunging down the steep embankment. Each year they claimed several lives.
She switched on the radio to distract her imagination from turning shadows into listless ghosts, and tried to lose herself in the gentle classical music. She conjured a pastoral scene of fields and wild flowers, attempting to engage all the senses as Dr Allen had advised her, but the purer she made the image, the sharper the point of her unprompted fear became. It was a cold, menacing, tangible presence, an entity that clung to her.
Go away, go away, she repeated in her head, trying to force herself back to her idyll. Then out loud, 'You're not real. Leave me alone . . . Leave me alone.'
There was a sudden noise, a sniff, a stifled sob of rejection. Jenny's eyes flicked left to the passenger seat. Mrs Jamal's wide, black, desolate eyes looked momentarily back at her then vanished. Jenny forced a long, deep breath against her pounding heart and pushed the throttle down as far as she dared. She had been battered with all manner of symptoms, but she'd never seen things before.
She hurried from the car to the house, rationalizing that her imagination had been playing tricks. The eyes were flickers of reflected light, the face a fleeting shadow. It was only natural for the mind to make pictures out of darkness.
She locked and bolted the front door.
Hostile rap music with a window-shaking bass boomed out of Ross's room. She called up to say hi, but there was no answer. It was nearly eleven, too late to eat. She needed to calm down. What she would have given for a drink. She stepped into her study, resolving to release her tension onto the page.
She switched on the light and saw that the papers on her desk had been disturbed and that the drawer where she kept her journal wasn't fully closed. She wrenched it open. It was there beneath the jumble of envelopes and writing paper - the black cover clasped shut by the band of elastic - but had she left it that way, with the spine to the left?
'Hi. You're late.'
She spun round to see Ross in the doorway dressed in a hooded sweat top and baggy Indian trousers.
'Have you been touching my things?'
'No ...'
'Tell me the truth.'
'There was no food in the house. I was looking for money to go down to the pub and get some.'
'Don't lie to me.'
'I didn't touch anything.'
'You must never go through my desk. My personal things are in there.'
'Yeah, a lot of crap.' He turned and went up the stairs.
She chased after him. 'Ross, I'm sorry . . .'
'You're a mess,' he said, more in pity than anger.
'Ross, please—'
He crashed into his bedroom and slammed the door.
Chapter 15
She woke at five, drained by the fitful dreams that had disturbed her shallow sleep. Her body was exhausted but her brain was firing, making wild connections and hurling itself into crazy speculation: a confusion of police and government agents, secret deals and concealed evidence; and, hovering in the shadows, the faintly smiling figure of McAvoy. Where did he fit in? Was he genuine or was he, as Alison feared, using her? As if in answer, two images presented themselves at once: an angel and a demon. One of them was him, she was sure, but which she couldn't tell. Perhaps he was both.
The initial shock of Mrs Jamal's sudden death had dulled to a low ache that contained within it several different sources of pain. There were guilt and pity, but beneath them a sense of the shame that she must have carried with her in the moments before her death leap. Jenny still couldn't relate the well-dressed woman who had arrived in her office, and who had sat with such quiet dignity in court, with the i rumpled remains she had viewed on the grass the previous afternoon. She climbed out of bed, pulled on a jumper over her pyjamas and went downstairs to make a pot of coffee, which she took through to her study. She sifted through the notes and papers she had brought home, now searching for another piece in the jigsaw: the thing that Mrs Jamal hadn't told, the thing that had pushed her over the edge.
She read and reread the original police statements, then picked over every word that had been said in court. Apart from the fact that Mrs Jamal had reacted so violently to Dani James's evidence, there was no clue. She tried to recall the conversation with her at her flat, wishing now she had made notes. Mrs Jamal had been distressed when she heard about Madog's evidence but mistrustful of both McAvoy and his investigator friend: there had been tears, but Madog's story had felt like more mud in the same waters. It was only when Jenny had asked her whether there had been another girl that she had reacted differently and reached a state beyond tears. She had remembered the voice of the girl who telephoned as if it were yesterday - she was Nazim's age, well spoken and white. It couldn't have been Dani James, Mrs Jamal would have noticed her Mancunian accent. Their exchange had been brief, yet it had affected her profoundly. Jenny groped for possible explanations. It was more than mere disapproval. Was there a scandal - had the girl been pregnant? Had Mrs Jamal caught them together in her apartment perhaps? Had she driven the girl away and forced such a rift with her son that he never forgave her? And if that was the case,
