M Hall - Coroner (Jenny Cooper 1)

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Tableof Contents

Thefirst dead body Jenny ever saw was her grandfather's. She had watched hergrandmother, sobbing into a folded handkerchief, draw the lids down over hisempty eyes and then, as her mother reached out to comfort her, sharply push theproffered hand away. It was a reaction she could never forget: accusatory,vicious and utterly instinctive. And even as an eleven-year-old child, she hadsensed in this moment, and in the exchange of looks that followed, a bitter andshameful history that would rest and settle behind the older woman's featuresuntil, seven years later, she too shuddered unwillingly from her body in thesame bed.

When,at the graveside, she stood behind her father as the coffin was loweredawkwardly into the ground, she was aware that the silence of the adults aroundher contained the poison of something so dreadful, so real, it gripped herthroat and stopped up her tears.

Itwould be many years later, when she was well into troubled adulthood, that thesensations of these two scenes crystallized into an understanding: that in thepresence of death, human beings are at their most vulnerable to truth, and thatin the presence of truth, they are at their most vulnerable to death.

Itwas this insight, gained the night her ex-husband greeted her with divorcepapers, which had stopped her driving off a cliff or tumbling under an expresstrain. Perhaps, just perhaps, she managed to convince herself, the morbidthoughts that had dogged her were no more than signposts on a dangerous andprecipitous road which she might yet navigate to safety.

Sixmonths on she was still a long way from her destination, but far closer thanshe had been that night, when only a flash of memory, given meaning by far toomuch wine, brought her back from the brink. To look at her now, no one wouldknow that anything had ever been wrong. On this bright June morning, the firstof her new career, she appeared to be in the prime of her life.

TEEN TERROR FOUND HANGED

DannyWills, aged 14, was found hanging by a bed sheet from the bars of his bedroomwindow in Portshead Farm Secure Training Centre. The discovery was made by MrJan Smirski, a maintenance worker at the privately run facility, who had cometo investigate a blocked toilet.

Mixed-raceWills had served only ten days of a four-month detention and training orderimposed by Severn Vale Youth Court. Police were called to the scene but DI AlanTate told reporters that he had no grounds to suspect foul play.

The sonof 29-year-old Simone Wills, Danny was the oldest of six siblings, none ofwhom, according to close neighbours, share a father.

Hiscriminal record comprised drugs, public order and violent offences. Hisimprisonment followed a conviction for the violent theft of a bottle of vodkafrom Ali's Off-Licence on the Broadlands Estate, Southmead. During the robbery,Wills threatened the proprietor, Mr Ali Khan, with a hunting knife, threateningto 'cut [his] Paki heart out'. At the time of the offence he was in breach ofanti-social behaviour and curfew orders imposed only two weeks earlier forpossession of crack cocaine.

StephenShah of Southmead Residents' Action today said that Wills was 'a well-known teenterror and a menace whose death should stand as a lesson to all younghooligans'.

BristolEvening Post

DannyWills's short stain of a life had come to an end shortly before dawn on aglorious spring morning: Saturday 14 April. He was, perhaps by fatedcoincidence, aged fourteen years and as many days, earning him the dubioushonour of being the youngest prison fatality of modern times.

Noone - apart from his mother and the oldest of his three sisters - shed a tearat his passing.

Danny'ssix-and-a-half-stone corpse was wrapped in white plastic and lay on a gurney ina corridor of the mortuary of Severn Vale District Hospital over the weekend.

Ateight o'clock on Monday morning, a consultant pathologist, Dr Nick Peterson, alean, marathon-running forty-five- year-old, glanced at the bruises risingvertically from the throat and decided it was suicide, but protocol required afull autopsy nonetheless.

Laterthat afternoon, Peterson's brief report landed on the desk of Harry Marshall,Severn Vale District Coroner. It read:

I

Diseaseor condition

directlyleading to death (a) Asphyxiation dueto

strangulation

Antecedentcauses (b) None

II

Othersignificant

conditionscontributing to

thedeath but NOT related

tothe disease or condition

causingitNone

Morbidconditions present

butin the pathologist's

viewNOT contributing to

deathNone

Isany further laboratory

examinationto be made

whichmay affect the cause

ofdeath? No

Comments

Thisfourteen-year-old male was found in his locked room at a secure trainingcentre, hanging by a noose improvised from a bed sheet. Vertical bruises on hisneck, absence of fracture to the hyoid bone and localized necrosis in the brainare consistent with suicide.

Harry,a world-wearied man of fifty-eight who struggled with his weight, mild anginaand the financial burden of four teenage daughters, duly opened an inquest onTuesday 17 April which he immediately adjourned pending further enquiries. Hesat again two weeks later on 30 April, and, over the course of a day, tookevidence from several staff employed at the secure training centre. Havingheard their mutually corroborative accounts, he recommended to the eight-memberjury that they return a verdict of suicide.

Onthe second day of the inquest, they obliged. On Wednesday 2 May Harry decidednot to hold an inquest into the death of fifteen-year-old drug user Katy Taylorand instead signed a death certificate confirming that she died as the resultof an overdose of intravenously administered heroin. This was to be his lastsignificant act as Her Majesty's Coroner. Thirty-six hours later, on wakingfrom an unusually restful night's sleep, his wife found him lying stone cold nextto her. The family doctor, a long-standing friend, was happy to attribute hisdeath to natural causes - a coronary - thereby sparing him the indignity of apostmortem.

Harrywas cremated a week later, on the same day and in the same crematorium as DannyWills. The operative charged with sweeping ashes and bone fragments from theretort of the furnace into the cremulator for fine grinding was, as usual, lessthan conscientious; the urns handed to the respective families contained themingled remains of several deceased. Harry's urn was emptied in a corner of aGloucestershire field where he and his wife had once courted. In a touchingimpromptu ceremony, each of his daughters read aloud from Wordsworth, Tennyson,Gray and Keats.