He gave a defensive nod, his cheeks flushing.

  'In the course of the attack she broke the victim's nose and stole thirty pounds to buy drugs.'

  'That's right.'

  'After six weeks in Portshead Farm Secure Training Centre she was released from detention on 17 April and placed under your supervision for the remaining six weeks of her sentence.'

  'Yeah.'

  'What did that supervision involve, exactly?'

  'She had to go to school every day, she was on a seven p.m. curfew and she was meant to go to RA twice a week.'

  'RA?'

  'Recovery from Addiction. She came out of Portshead clean and she was meant to stay that way.'

  'How were these conditions enforced?'

  'She was on voice verification. She'd get a phone call on her home number at seven-fifteen every night and the computer would check the voice print to make sure it was her.'

  'Did she have to attend personal meetings with you?'

  'Twice a week after school before RA.'

  'Sounds like a tough regime.'

  Justin didn't answer. Jenny suspected he didn't know what regime meant.

  'But she was only out five days before she went missing.'

  'Yeah.'

  'How many times did you see her in person during this period?'

  'Twice. On Wednesday the 18th for an appointment, and just in passing on Friday before her RA. She was due to see me again on the Monday, the 23rd.'

  Jenny wrote down his reply and in brackets added ('well rehearsed').

  'Did she stick to her curfew?'

  'Mostly. She was late in on the Friday night, I think.'

  'But she turned up for RA?'

  'Yes.'

  'Did you know or suspect that she had been prostituting herself to buy drugs?'

  'I did read that on her file.'

  'Did you discuss it with her during the Wednesday appointment?'

  'No, I don't think so.'

  'What did you talk about?'

  'I explained the terms of her contract to her, took her voice print and gave her all the information about the course. It was more admin than anything.'

  'Admin? Weren't you meant to be there as an emotional support, Mr Bennett? Surely discussing the reasons for her previous offending and prostitution was pretty fundamental, especially given that she was only fifteen.'

  Justin turned a darker shade of pink. 'It was just an initial meeting.'

  'I see. And do you have any knowledge of any friends, acquaintances or anyone who might have supplied her with heroin?'

  'No.'

  'You never asked who she bought from?'

  'We never ask young offenders to inform. It's our job to win their trust.'

  In five minutes of questioning she felt she had extracted all she ever would from Justin Bennett. He reminded her of so many social workers she had encountered in family law - a couple of years into the job they realized their struggle to right the wrongs of society was futile, got compassion fatigue and turned into clock watchers. Ask the requisite questions, tick the boxes and get out of the office by five. Justin showed every sign of fitting the mould.

  'Thank you, Mr Bennett, no more questions.' She looked over at Hartley, who shook his head. 'You may stand down. Leave the building if you wish.'

  Justin bolted from his seat and straight for the exit, avoiding the gaze of Mr and Mrs Turner. He was already shrugging off his suit jacket as he pushed out of the door.

  The only other witness to have arrived was Police Constable Helen Campbell, a nervous, overweight young woman who had trouble moving one thigh in front of the other; she didn't look capable of tackling determined criminals. Her hands shook as she read the oath, stumbling over the words. Several members of the jury looked surprised at this and exchanged glances. Jenny knew how the young officer felt, and, adopting her most unconfrontational tone, proceeded to question her gently.

  PC Campbell had been first on the scene at nine a.m. following a call from a member of the public. She was alone in the patrol car as her partner had rung in sick. Still alone, she taped off the immediate area around the body and called in CID, who arrived an hour later with a small forensics team. It was raining hard and had been for several days previously. By one p.m. forensics had drawn a blank and she was given the job of arranging an undertaker to remove the remains to the Vale mortuary. Later that afternoon she met Mr and Mrs Taylor at the hospital and arranged for them to identify their daughter's body. Before ending her shift she wrote a longhand report of the day's events which she handed to Detective Superintendent Alan Swainton, the officer in charge of the investigation. She heard no more about it until two days later, 2 May, when she learned that CID were satisfied the death was due to an accidental overdose and that the coroner had released the body for burial.

  Jenny paused for a moment and considered the evidence PC Campbell had just given. A young, clearly substandard officer had been first to arrive at a potential murder scene. It had taken an hour for detectives and scenes of crime officers to arrive. Although Campbell was barely literate, she had been charged with writing the report to the coroner. Jenny made a note of these thoughts, then turned back to the police constable.

  'Would you consider it unusual for an officer of your relative inexperience to be left in charge of a potential murder scene for a full hour and to have been given the responsibility of writing the report to the coroner?'

  'Not really, ma'am.' PC Campbell spoke in her thick Bristol accent, growing a little more confident now. 'We were that stretched, it was a question of whoever was free to do it.'

  'Did you offer to write the report or were you asked to?'

  'I had to write a statement about finding the body anyway. It was Detective Superintendent Swainton who asked me to send it to the coroner's office.'

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jenny noticed Hartley listening closely to this exchange. Alison, too, was on the edge of her seat. Jenny recalled her speculation in the office before she broke down: that Swainton had been sat on, that Katy might have been consorting with someone prominent, or even a police informer, someone neither the police nor Marshall wanted - or dared - to touch.

  'Constable, could you tell the jury exactly how and by whom Katy's body was discovered?'

  'A woman walking her dog, a Mrs Julia Gabb, found her. Actually the dog did. He'd run off and the lady found him by the body.'

  'Did she walk her dog there every day?'

  'She said she hadn't been to that spot for a week.'

  'Presumably, a lot of other people walk there too?'

  'A few do, yes.'

  'So, even though the body was out of sight of the road and the footpath above, it might be considered strange that it wasn't discovered before?'

  PC Campbell shrugged. 'I couldn't say.'

  Jenny picked up her copy of the police photographs of Katy's body at the scene and studied them again. The corpse was under the cover of a large shrub, a laurel or a rhododendron. She recalled from her childhood haunts on the north Somerset coast that such shrubs appeared impenetrable from the outside, but once you were through the outer leaves, there was invariably a secret den in the middle. How would Katy, a thoroughly urban girl, know that? Why go to such lengths to find somewhere to take drugs?

  'Tell me, PC Campbell, did you find anything at the scene to suggest that this was a place where people commonly injected drugs or entertained prostitutes - any needles or condoms on the ground?'

  'Only the one syringe next to Katy.'

  'Is this a place known to the police as somewhere these activities commonly occur?'

  'Not particularly.'

  'Would it be fair to say that it's a remote place, only really accessible by car?'

  'Yes.'

  'And Katy was wearing high heels?'

  'She was.'

  'It seems unlikely she got there by herself, doesn't it?'

  'It does, really.'

  'Which leaves us with two possibilities: either she went to this place with another person while she was alive, or her body was placed there after she was dead.'

  'All I did was write a report, ma'am. I'm not an investigator.'

  'No.' Jenny glanced at the jury, registering their suspicion. 'Wait there, PC Campbell.'

  Hartley rose to his feet with a saccharine smile, a gold tooth glinting in the upper corner of his mouth. 'Just a couple of questions, Officer. I presume you were first on the scene because you were the closest officer at the time the alarm was raised.'

  'That's correct.'

  'And being first to arrive you were obliged to write a report of what you had found.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'And you have no idea how Katy Taylor came to be in that place, do you?'

  PC Campbell stalled for a second, before conceding, 'No, sir.'

  Hartley shot the jury another smile and sat down again, pleased with himself.

  Right on cue, Peterson arrived, together with a uniformed police officer who, from the row of pips on his shoulder, Jenny took to be Detective Superintendent Swainton. Both men looked indignant at being hauled away from their busy lives to an obscure corner of the Gloucestershire countryside. Jenny felt a small swell of satisfaction at being able to wield such power over them.

  She called Detective Superintendent Swainton forward first. A tall, broad-shouldered man of around fifty, still sporting a full head of dark brown hair, he was an imposing physical presence and gave the impression of being impatient to get back to far more important matters. His manner was abrupt and confident, unintimidated by Jenny or her court. Immediately she found his confidence unnerving. Bennett and Campbell had been soft witnesses; here was a man determined to match her.

  'Officer, you were in overall charge of the investigation into Katy Taylor's death?'

  'I was.'

  'When did you arrive at the scene?'

  'Approximately an hour after Constable Campbell. My team and I had been up all night dealing with an armed incident over near Stroud.'

  'Did you regard the death as suspicious?'

  'Initially. But when the post-mortem report came it was clear she had died of a heroin overdose.'

  'But that finding couldn't tell you whether she had administered the fatal dose herself or if someone else had assisted, or even forced it on her.'

  'There was no evidence from the pathologist of any physical force having been used against her.' He turned to address the jury directly, determined to deliver the last word on the matter. 'Of course we couldn't rule out the possibility of manslaughter, or indeed murder, but there was no physical evidence on which to base such an assumption. In that situation we hand the case over to the coroner but continue to keep the file open in case any further evidence comes to light. That is what we have done, and no evidence of third-party involvement has yet arisen.'

  'So you do accept the possibility that she was killed either accidentally or on purpose by another person?'

  'Of course, but we can only do what we can with the resources available to us. We probably have a dozen or more accidental overdose cases like this every year. If we treated every one as a potential murder we'd need twice the number of detectives we have.'

  'Katy Taylor was a vulnerable fifteen-year-old girl with a history of drug taking and prostitution. Surely if anyone was going to be taken advantage of by a predatory man, it was her.'

  'I would agree with you.'

  'So why didn't you investigate the circumstances more fully? Why not concentrate resources on trying to pinpoint her last known movements, who she was with?'

  'Believe me, we tried, but prostitutes are not people inclined to help the police. My officers have appealed for information and will receive anything anyone has to say in the strictest confidence, but the fact remains there is to date no evidence of violence having been used against her.'

  'What about the possibility that her body was positioned where it was after her death?'

  'Firstly, the body had been well soaked with rain over several days, preventing the recovery of third-party DNA, and secondly, the pathologist confirmed that the pattern of rigor mortis and the pooling of blood in the parts of her closest to the ground were consistent with her having been in that position since she died.'

  'How did he inform you of that? It's not in his report.'

  Swainton glanced at Dr Peterson, sitting in the front row of the gallery. The question had broken his stride and the jury sensed it. The Detective Superintendent cleared his throat and said, 'I had a detailed telephone conversation with him on the afternoon of i May, after he had conducted his examination. It was as a result of this that I decided to hand the file over to the coroner's office.'

  'Only twenty-four hours after the body was found.'

  'As I've explained, it didn't mean we were closing our file, only that there were no obvious grounds to suspect foul play.'

  'You didn't consider her death worthy of even a few days of concentrated investigation?'

  'At the time we were dealing with several brutal homicides and serious sexual assaults.'

  'In other words, it wasn't a priority.'

  'Compared with others, no, it wasn't. It felt like a case more appropriately handled by the coroner's office.'

  Jenny sat back in her chair and considered the implications of Swainton's evidence. If he was to be believed, the police were simply too undermanned to give every death the attention the public would expect. Obvious and brutal homicides took precedence; those that were problematic or obscure went to the bottom of the heap. And to counter allegations of neglect, they claimed cases remained active when the truth was they were buried as deep as the victim. It was a good time for killers who had the wit to cover their tracks.

  Jenny said, 'What kind of investigation did you expect the coroner to carry out?'

  Detective Superintendent Swainton nodded, as if he had been waiting for this question. 'I must confess I was surprised that a death certificate was issued without an inquest being held, especially given Katy's troubled history. She was meant to be under close supervision by the Youth Offending Team.'

  His attempt to pass the buck was delivered with admirable understated sincerity. Jenny imagined he had been planning his move ever since the summons landed on his desk yesterday afternoon.

  'Did you query this with the coroner, Mr Marshall?'

  'No, ma'am. I wouldn't consider it my place to do so, and by the time I found out, unfortunately, he had died. But I have to say, I am very grateful that you are now giving Katy's death the attention it deserves.'

  Charm itself. Swainton had skilfully avoided all responsibility and somehow handed it back to her. She felt a sudden, childish urge to retaliate. Alison had read the signals and was giving her a warning look. Jenny ignored her. 'The question remains, Officer, why you and your force spent barely more than a few hours investigating the death of a fifteen-year-old girl. It seems so extraordinary that one has to wonder if there wasn't a sinister reason for it.'

  Hartley leapt to his feet. 'Ma'am, I really must object. Detective Superintendent Swainton has given a perfectly rational account of his decision.'

  'It may appear rational to you, Mr Hartley, but I have to say I am far from satisfied.'

  She had the bit well and truly between her teeth. Alison stared hard at the ground, while Hartley dropped back into his seat with an expression of barely suppressed fury.

  'I'll be more precise, Officer. Did you come under any pressure to back off from this investigation?'

  'No, ma'am, I did not.'

  The several reporters in the gallery were scribbling in unison, hanging on every word.

  'Was there ever any hint or suspicion that Katy had been consorting with someone your force may have had reason to protect, an informer, for example, or someone prominent?'

  Swainton fixed her with a cold, level look. 'Absolutely none whatsoever. And with the greatest of respect, ma'am, I deeply resent that suggestion.'

  Feeling herself diminish under his gaze, Jenny thanked him for his time and tried to regain her composure while Hartley asked some easy questions designed to repair the damage. She could have kicked herself. Not only had she sounded impetuous, she had shown her hand too soon. If Swainton did have anything to hide, he would now move heaven and earth to keep her from finding it out. She felt the familiar knot forming beneath her diaphragm, a pressure either side of her forehead: the drugs were wearing off. She waited impatiently for Hartley to finish his final question and called a brief adjournment.

  Jenny bought herself a few minutes alone, telling Alison she had to make some calls. She brought out her bottle of temazepam and a metal nail file she carried in her handbag and cut three tablets in half. It was a procedure she hadn't carried out since the dark post-episode months when each day in court was a desperate struggle. She wasn't anywhere near as anxious as she had been then, but she had no fall-back position; there was nowhere to run and hide if she could no longer cope. During those desperate times she had learned that each half-dose would keep her steady for an hour. Now the clever part: a tube of Polo mints, the only edible item considered acceptable in a British courtroom. She carefully unwound the foil package, extracted six, jammed half a pill in the centre of each and rewrapped them.

  No one would ever know.

  Detective Superintendent Swainton had left the building, leaving Peterson to face the music alone. Grantham, too, had disappeared, adding to Jenny's suspicion that the two of them were in cahoots. Peterson sat in the witness chair with the air of a man resigned to having his day ruined. The flirtatious smile was gone. He looked tired and seemed to carry the weight of the corpses backing up along his mortuary corridor on his narrow frame.

  'You conducted a post-mortem on the body of Katy Taylor on the morning of 1 May, approximately twenty-four hours after it was discovered. Is that correct?'

  'Yes. That's right.'

  'What did you know about the circumstances of her death?'

  'Only what PC Campbell had told me, that she was found in a seated position with a syringe next to her.'

  'What did your post-mortem reveal?'

 

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