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

Street where Jenny had her modest, two-room ground-floor offices was drenched in unaccustomed sunlight that showed up the cracking paint on the window frames and the rivulets in the ancient panes of glass. There was a faded grandeur about the slowly crumbling sandstone facade that might even inspire a level of awe in the casual visitor, but beyond the front step, the building she shared with three other sets of offices on the upper floors was tired and uncared-for. A worn carpet covered creaky boards in the hallway, and unclaimed junk mail spilled from a shelf which none of the tenants ever cleared. Jenny made her way along the passage to the heavy oak door that bore a dull brass plaque that read simply, ‘Coroner’.
    The reception area – the inviolable domain that belonged to Alison, her officer – was deserted. The magazines set out for visitors were neatly ordered. Jenny’s bundle of messages and overnight death reports were precisely clipped together and sitting squarely in a brand-new wire tray. The papers that usually cluttered Alison’s desk had been filed. Gone too was the array of sticky notes that invariably decorated the surround of Alison’s computer monitor, along with the postcards and photographs that had covered the noticeboard behind her chair. Alison had done more than merely tidy. It felt like a purge. Jenny instinctively scanned the desk for some clue – there was always a reason for her officer having one of her irregular clear-outs; it was her way of imposing order on churning emotions – but all personal traces had been swept away.
    Unsure whether the fresh sensation of unease she felt steal over her had been carried with her from the hospital or stirred by the unquiet atmosphere left in Alison’s wake, Jenny moved through into the comforting disorder of her office on the far side of the connecting door. Files were stacked in heaps either side of the desk, books and papers covered every surface and much of the floor. It had been a more than usually hectic summer and Jenny sensed it was about to get busier.
    A computer groaning with unread emails was waiting for her. Much of the mail was made up of the tedious circulars and bulletins that were spewed out daily by the Ministry of Justice, but one email was from DI Watling’s station at Gloucester. Attached to the cursory message were scans of the papers in their file: statements from the traffic officers who had found Adam Jordan’s body, several photographs of it lying
in situ
, a statement from the female officer who had discovered his child wandering in the memorial woodlands, and two photographs of Jordan’s car as it was found, an elderly black Saab parked on a grass verge. Jenny noticed that the passenger door was open, there was a child seat in the back and what appeared to be a small wooden figurine hanging from the rear-view mirror. The final document was a scan of two petrol receipts found stuffed in the Saab’s cup-holder, one several days old from a Texaco garage in Bristol, the other bearing yesterday’s date from a filling station in Great Shefford, Berkshire. The time code showed it was paid for at 5.45 p.m., along with a sandwich and several soft drinks.
    Jenny clicked back to the photographs of the inside of the car and increased their size. There was very little to see. She homed in on the figurine and saw that it was a slender female form carved in dark wood, naked from the waist up. Recalling the one piece of useful piece of information Karen Jordan had managed to give her, she ran a search on AFAD. The Aid Agency’s website popped up at the head of the list. Jenny opened it and surfed through its pages, learning that it was an organization operating chiefly in South Sudan, Ethiopia and Chad. Partnered with a host of environmental charities that shared the ‘small is beautiful’ philosophy, it seemed to concentrate its efforts on digging wells and setting up sustainable agriculture programmes in areas that had been