Wednesday, 19 April, 9.30 a.m.
Rather unexpectedly, considering she’d been rumbled, Ivor Donaldson rang Martha in the morning asking if she’d come to any decision about the investments. ‘Not yet,’ she said, stalling him for now. ‘I need to think about it.’ She couldn’t work him out. Surely as he knew who she was he must have realized the investments story was simply a ruse to speak to him?
She could, she knew, have asked Simon for advice. If anyone understood the complexities of financial management and investment he surely did, but she’d pestered him enough for now. Leave him alone.
Eleven o’clock brought Terence Marconi in with his grandmother. Bridget appeared to have recovered some of her equilibrium. She was smartly dressed in a pair of well-fitting black trousers and a black and white striped sweater. She wore little jewellery but her air of dignity suited her. Terence was in his school uniform, dark blue and black. He looked less self-conscious this time but clung to his grandmother’s hand as though she was a lifeline and he was about to drown. He gave Martha a tentative smile, met her eyes for a while longer than he needed to. Was she imagining a surreptitious message from an eight-year-old?
Martha decided she should take her cue from Bridget, who spent some time sitting down in the chair, fiddling with her handbag straps, removing her jacket, generally fussing and stalling. Finally she was still and looking across at Martha. Then she gave her a bittersweet smile.
‘Terence and I have had a talk,’ she began. The boy was taking his cue from his grandmother. He gripped her hand even tighter.
Bridget bent down and opened the fastening on her handbag, pulled out an A4 brown envelope. Martha already knew what it would contain. She met Bridget’s eyes. Bridget nodded and Terence looked at the floor. They were both waiting for her to look at the pictures. She pulled them out – three photographs – and the contents made her gasp. If that was Gina she was practically unrecognizable. She looked like a …
Martha met Bridget’s eyes but Gina’s mother simply nodded.
‘It rather explains things, doesn’t it?’
Gina was wearing scraps of garments, bits of cheap red satin, nipples exposed, tiny bit of lace, split at the crotch, her dark pubic hair visible, making the picture even more obscene.
In the second photograph, her legs splayed, Gina looked drunk, with wet, whorish lips. The man with her was at the point of penetration, Gina’s legs wrapped around him, urging him on. The detail was remarkable and intrusive. Full colour. What had they given her to make her like this? Cocaine? Rohypnol? Ecstasy? Alcohol? Worst of all she was wearing her barrister’s wig, lopsided in a parody of her court appearances. She could never have worked as a barrister again. The pictures could not have been more damning. They were awful. Lipstick smeared on like jam on a toddler’s face, legs apart like a desperate whore. What had turned her into that?
Who had been behind the shutter? Or had the camera been set up remotely?
And Martha could see every pornographic detail in glorious Technicolor.
She moved to the next one. Gina, wearing different scraps of clothing this time. So there had been more than one occasion. She was on her knees, her mouth closed around … She could only see the man’s torso, slim, muscular, skin tone a light coffee.
Martha looked away.
But she was being asked to look at them and understand. Not turn away but face it.
So … what now?
She looked at each of the photographs again and then slipped them back in the envelope, looked across at Bridget. And the three of them – even if Terence was only eight and they had kept the worst of the pictures from him – all knew the contents of the envelope would have destroyed everything Gina Marconi had held dear: lover, mother, son, profession. If the tabloids had got hold of these, even with modesty strips over the most explicit bits, Julius’s career too would have gone down the plughole unless he had distanced himself from her post-haste.
Someone had planned this. They had set her up and recorded the occasion.
Martha thought back to the man in the picture. He had a body that would create waves on the internet. Muscular. Olive skinned. Black or very dark brown curly hair. Possibly Moroccan? Algerian? Even Italian? You couldn’t see his face but his body was enough. Physique powerful. But who was he?
Bridget answered her silent question. ‘We don’t know him,’ she said while Terence shook his head, mute.
‘I’ve never seen him before in my life.’ The boy’s expression was disgust.
‘Someone set this up,’ Martha said. ‘They wanted to destroy your daughter.’
Terence was now fighting to hold back the tears. ‘Mum,’ he said. It was all he could manage and that one appeal made Martha realize she owed something to him and to his grandmother.
Question: Is a coroner a sort of avenging angel?
Answer: Sometimes.
‘May I keep these?’
Bridget nodded.
‘Would you mind if I let the police see them?’
Bridget shook her head.
Martha reached out with two hands, one on each of their shoulders. ‘We can suppress this,’ she said. ‘It need not come out in the inquest. There’s no point and it would defeat your daughter’s last hope. For privacy and dignity.’
Bridget let out a long sigh of relief. ‘Thank God,’ she said.
‘You’ve been very brave and … very trusting bringing these to me. Thank you.’
Bridget hadn’t finished. ‘The little boy? Patrick – the one who jumped off the A5 bridge?’
Martha nodded.
‘And the policeman’s wife?’
Startled now, Martha could hardly make any response. She was frozen – paralysed. ‘I read in the paper,’ Bridget continued, ‘that they thought she was mentally unbalanced and threw herself downstairs deliberately.’ Her eyes were watchful. ‘I wondered if there was a connection.’
‘I don’t think so.’