The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) Read Online Free PDF

frame, and dabbed at her eyes with a wad of paper towel. Even with a door between them, Jenny felt her bewilderment like a radiating force. She knocked lightly and stepped inside.
    ‘Mrs Jordan?’
    The young woman turned, a sob catching in her throat.
    Jenny moved cautiously towards her. ‘Jenny Cooper. I’m the coroner.’
    Karen Jordan stared at her with eyes frozen in an expression of shock.
    ‘Would you mind if I asked a couple of questions about your husband?’
    She shook her head, her lips clamped tightly together.
    ‘His name was Adam Jordan?’
    She nodded.
    ‘His age?’
    ‘Thirty-two.’ The words came out in a hoarse whisper.
    ‘Occupation?’
    ‘He worked for a charity. It’s called AFAD – Africa Aid and Development . . . He came back from South Sudan at the end of May.’
    ‘Is there anything about your husband’s state of mind that I ought to know?’
    She shook her head violently, her hair sweeping across her face and clinging to her cheeks. ‘No.’
    ‘I was told he had parked at the Bristol Memorial Woodlands – that’s a cemetery, isn’t it?’
    ‘A natural burial ground. Adam’s father died last autumn. He’d gone there with Sam, that’s all. I was working.’
    ‘Sam’s your son?’
    She nodded.
    ‘Was your husband close to his father?’
    ‘I suppose—’ Her voice cracked.
    Thinking it better to get the painful conversation over quickly, Jenny persisted. ‘Can you think of any reason why your husband may have taken his life, Mrs Jordan?’
    ‘He didn’t!’
    ‘I see. And how do you know that?’
    ‘He was my husband.’ She stared at her with wild, enraged eyes. ‘Don’t you tell me I don’t know my own husband!’
    Jenny wanted to tell her the agony would pass, that as despairing as she felt now, it would not get any worse, but she was unreachable. There was no question of putting her through the ordeal of an identification. She turned to the door and quietly left her to cry herself out.

FOUR
     
    F ROM THE MOMENT SHE HAD ENTERED the mortuary early that morning, Jenny had felt something intangible, a deep, uneasy sensation that had stayed with her and intensified after her unhappy encounter with Jordan’s widow. As hard as she tried to be rational, she couldn’t help acknowledging her instinct that something about the dead man hadn’t
felt
right.
    Dr Kerr, along with every other pathologist she had ever met, seemed able to deal with each set of human remains with the same degree of clinical distance: the flesh on the table was nothing more than a forensic puzzle to be solved. But for Jenny, each body carried its own complex atmospheres and stories. There were those empty shells from which the soul had passed peacefully; those that still carried the pain of a protracted struggle to cling to life; those that seemed still frozen in the violent moment of suicide; and those, like Jordan’s, that hurled confusion at her. She had dealt with more than a handful of bridge jumpers in her five years in post, and all had had a history of depression or worse. As suicides went, they were at the considerate end: they had chosen an emphatic death away from the intimacy of the home. Nearly all had jumped into water from either the Severn or the Clifton Suspension Bridge. But a leap from a motorway bridge was something altogether different. It was an enraged choice made by someone intent on inflicting their suffering on the innocent strangers who would have the misfortune to run over their bodies. It spoke of a fury that bordered on the murderous.
    Jenny carried these thoughts with her during the drive across the Downs, wearing thin and brown at the end of a dry spell that had lasted nearly a month. Descending the hill, she entered the bustling street-life of Whiteladies Road: crowded cafes and music throbbing out of a reggae record store, kids with waist-length dreadlocks dancing outside on the pavement and bemused old women stopping to watch.
    The Georgian terrace in Jamaica