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

ravaged by drought and famine. All the photographs were of Africans working for themselves; barely a white face featured. She searched the site for Jordan’s name, but AFAD didn’t appear to be an organization keen on personalities. Jenny quickly gained the impression that one worked for AFAD as you might for a church: for a higher purpose.
    The agency had an office in central London and a contact number was listed. Professional etiquette dictated that it was largely the job of the coroner’s officer to gather evidence, but in a small provincial outpost like Jenny’s, the load tended to be shared a little more evenly than it would have been in better-funded jurisdictions. Jenny didn’t need an excuse, however; she was impatient for an insight into Adam Jordan.
    The phone was answered by an earnest-sounding young woman with an accent Jenny guessed to be Dutch.
    Introducing herself, Jenny asked to speak to whoever was in charge.
    ‘You can speak with me,’ the girl said, ‘we all share responsibility.’
    ‘I see. And your name is—?’
    ‘Eda. Eda Hincks.’
    Jenny hesitated. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about Adam Jordan—’
    ‘We have,’ the young woman interjected. ‘We are all very shocked.’
    ‘The police are satisfied it was a suicide, but I now have to carry out my own inquiry. I appreciate it’s very soon after the event, but would you be able to provide a statement for me?’
    ‘I have no idea what happened.’
    ‘I’d appreciate just a little background. The nature of his work, any personal details that you think may be relevant, or observations on his state of mind. Anything that might help me understand what was going on in his life.’
    ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Eda replied. ‘Adam was here last week. He was perfectly fine. It’s such a shock . . .’ She tailed off.
    Jenny said, ‘You don’t feel there’s anything immediately obvious I should know about?’
    ‘No. He always seemed so happy. That’s what we thought.’
    ‘You knew him well?’
    ‘Professionally, yes. Not so much socially.’
    ‘Did he have a close colleague, someone he’d been working with abroad? His wife said he’d recently come back from Africa.’
    ‘Yes—’ Eda sounded hesitant.
    ‘I assume he wasn’t working alone?’
    ‘No. He was in South Sudan with Harry. Harry Thorn.’
    ‘May I have Mr Thorn’s details?’
    ‘I can give you his number, but I couldn’t say for certain where he is. He’s out of the office at the moment.’
    ‘The number will be fine.’
    Eda read it out to her, and then explained that he and Adam had recently completed a four-month tour of duty working on a trickle-irrigation project. They’d turned parched scrub into maize fields using buried pipes that drip-fed stored rainwater into the soil. It was a huge success, she seemed keen to emphasize; Adam had been delighted with it.
    Jenny ended the call feeling that there was a subtext to Eda’s account that she had failed to grasp. It was as if she had been apologizing for something. She tried Thorn’s number – a mobile phone – but it was switched off with no voicemail.
    Forced to wait for answers, Jenny turned to the pile of other cases that sat accusingly on the corner of her desk. July, along with January, was the most popular month for death. Pneumonia took the old in winter; in summer it was heart attacks and infection. But it wasn’t only the old and sick that accounted for the rise. July was the month when the sunshine tricked the unwary into feeling invincible: they fell from ladders, crashed their motorbikes, tumbled drunk from balconies and drowned in rivers. Senseless, random deaths of the kind to which Jenny had never reconciled herself.
    She was studying a photograph of a young woman’s body – an evening of heavy drinking had caused the rupture of an undetected stomach ulcer, from which she had bled to death in her sleep – when she heard Alison’s familiar footsteps pass her window and