The Sting of Death (19 page)

‘No, I’ll do it now. Where is she?’

‘Philip?’ Sheena raised her head from its slumped position on the table. ‘Why?’

‘Because it has to be done and if I don’t do it now I may never find the strength again.’

‘No, I don’t mean that. Why did she kill her? Why in the world did Justine have to kill my baby?’

Maggs watched the slow dispersal of the various professionals, once the little body had been stowed in the back of the van, and Drew was having a final word with DS Cooper. One individual seemed to stand out, a solitary figure apparently lost in her own thoughts. Instinctively, Maggs went up to her.

‘You must be Roma Millan,’ she said quietly. ‘All this is so awful, isn’t it.’

‘It doesn’t feel real,’ said the older woman. ‘When you see death at close quarters like that … it’s just a foul smell and extra work for everyone. That’s all I can see.’ She spoke dreamily, not looking at Maggs.

‘Oh, but it’s ever so much more than that,’ the girl assured her earnestly.

‘You think so?’

‘Yes. Absolutely. You should talk to Drew about it.’

‘I have, dear. More than once.’ Roma seemed to shake herself, focusing finally on the girl in front of her. ‘You’re Drew’s famous business partner, are you? He’s told me about you.’

‘And me about you. Pleased to meet you.’ Maggs smiled. ‘We don’t have to hang about here any longer, you know.’

‘You might not. I’ve got to wait for a lift home.’

Maggs didn’t pause to think. ‘Oh, we could take you. If you don’t mind the van. And I suppose it might whiff a bit, come to think of it.’

‘I could probably bear that.’

Maggs suddenly realised that the woman had been fighting back tears throughout their conversation. ‘Anything rather than stand here for another minute.’

‘That’s sorted, then.’ Maggs looked round for Drew. ‘Oh, there he is. Drew!’ she called. ‘Can we go?’

His frown told her she ought not to be raising her voice. A hush had fallen over the yard from the moment Philip Renton had emerged from the house and been taken to identify the body of his child. The resulting howl had completely silenced everyone for some minutes.

Chastened, Maggs climbed into the van, inviting Roma to follow her. ‘The middle seat isn’t very comfortable,’ she explained. ‘You’re better off by the door.’ Drew came to the driver’s side with an enquiring expression. ‘I said we’d take Roma home,’ Maggs explained. ‘She doesn’t want to wait around for the police.’

‘Better tell them, then,’ Drew said tightly. He beckoned DS Cooper over. ‘Mrs Millan’s coming with us, if that’s all right,’ he said softly. ‘It looks as if you’re not quite finished here.’

‘Right. Thanks.’ The detective seemed absent. His eye caught Maggs’s and he stirred himself enough to give a friendly wink. It did little to ameliorate the distress etched on his features.

Roma became talkative in the van. ‘They’ll arrest Justine, of course. Everyone’s convinced she killed the little girl now. I did the right thing, didn’t I? I couldn’t just leave her there, once I’d found her. I should never have gone looking for her like that. It was stupid of me – interfering old bat that I am. She’ll never forgive me. Why should she? I betrayed her.’ Tears dropped sporadically from the outer corner of each eye, to be dashed impatiently away.

‘Everything’s collapsing around me. Laurie’s gone off, God knows where. That’s a dreadful smell, isn’t it. Do I have to come with you to the
hospital? It’s an awfully long way in the wrong direction.’

Drew had the window open, hoping the air current would help dispel the noxious reek from the body in the back. ‘We can take you first,’ he offered. ‘The Coroner trusts us not to tamper with the body.’

Roma wiped her eyes with a crumpled tissue. ‘Just drop me in the village. Don’t go to the house.’ Drew knew better than to argue with her.

‘They’ll have to keep the mortuary open for us,’ Maggs reminded him, with a glance at her watch. ‘Sam isn’t going to be too pleased.’

‘There’s isn’t much of an alternative,’ Drew said tightly. ‘We can be there in under an hour, even via Pitcombe. If they’d called Plants, it wouldn’t have been any quicker. We were on the spot, after all.’

‘Poor little thing,’ Roma murmured. ‘I hope she didn’t suffer. It conjures up some horrible images, doesn’t it?’ Drew and Maggs both knew what she meant.

‘You don’t really think it was Justine, do you?’ Drew asked.

‘I can’t let myself think that, can I? I’m her mother. And you’ve seen her; she’s so small and fragile. How could she have done anything like that?’

Drew remembered that Justine was a potter; it must take some muscle to throw clay on a wheel. She had big sinewy hands. Justine might be small, but Georgia Renton was a lot smaller.

‘They’ll be able to tell us much more tomorrow,’ he said. ‘After the post-mortem.’

Maggs felt the pressure of the older woman’s arm and shoulder against her. It was shaking, although when Maggs glanced sideways at her there was no visible sign of the tremor. ‘What am I going to tell her?’ she burst out. ‘She’s there now, waiting for me. She doesn’t know what’s going on. I don’t think I can bear to say the words.’ She clutched her hands together. ‘Isn’t that stupid?’

Maggs turned to Drew. ‘I can stay with her, can’t I, and see if I can help. You don’t need me to come to the mortuary.’

‘Drew cleared his throat. ‘Well …’ he began.

‘Of course you don’t. It’s not as if she’s too heavy for you.’

‘True.’

‘But how will you get home?’ Roma asked.

Maggs shrugged. ‘I could stay the night, if that’s all right with you. Drew can come and fetch me in the morning.’

Drew understood that a bond had instantly developed between the girl and the woman, and marvelled at Maggs’s acuity. In anyone
else it would have seemed like impertinence, an invasion of the family at a time of crisis, but Roma seemed to grasp at the offer with undisguised relief. He knew better than to interpose his own misgivings.

‘I suppose I could,’ he agreed.

Justine met them at the door as they walked the few hundred yards from where Drew had set them down. ‘Who’s this?’ she demanded, staring at Maggs.

‘Her name’s Maggs and she’s staying the night,’ said Roma shortly.

‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Where have you been all afternoon? I’ve been phoning all over the place trying to find you.’

‘Oh?’ Roma showed a flash of curiosity. ‘Who in the world would you have phoned? You have no idea who my friends are or where I’d be likely to go.’

‘I tried Karen Slocombe and Aunt Helen and one or two people in your address book. None of them replied except Karen and she didn’t seem to know anything.’

‘I’m not surprised. It’s Thursday.’

‘So?’

‘Bridge night,’ Roma told her. ‘They’ll be wondering where I am. I never miss it.’ Justine hugged herself, waiflike in a baggy
cotton jumper. ‘I thought you’d walked out and left me here, like Laurie.’

‘Justine, something really dreadful has happened and I’m going to have to try and tell you about it. There’s a good chance the police will be here in a little while, so we might not have much time. Maggs has very kindly offered to stay with us, because – well, because we might need her. We’d better go into the living room.’

‘We should have some tea or something first,’ Maggs suggested. ‘It’s ages since I had a drink, and I bet you’re the same.’ She thought back over the afternoon. Mr French’s funeral seemed days ago already. She and Drew had finally set out for Gladcombe shortly before three. Now she looked at her watch to find it was well past seven. ‘Gosh!’ she exclaimed. ‘No wonder I’m thirsty.’

‘I’ll make some tea then,’ said Justine faintly. ‘What about something to eat?’

Roma and Maggs shook their heads in unison. ‘Not hungry,’ they grimaced.

In the event, Roma’s ominous preliminaries made it easy for Justine to guess the news. She wept as her fears were confirmed, the tears shaking free from her pinched little face. ‘Oh, that poor baby,’ she moaned. ‘She was such a sweet little thing, so good and undemanding.’ She crossed her arms tightly across her stomach and
rocked herself. ‘She must have been so scared, out in the fields by herself.’

Roma’s voice broke harshly through. ‘How do you know she was in the fields?’ she grated, her face suddenly grey.

Justine frowned at her. ‘She must have been, surely? They’d have found her if she was anywhere else.’ Terror at her mother’s tone dried her tears. ‘My God! You think I killed her, don’t you? You still think all this was me, that I made up the story about Penn locking me up.’

‘Nobody said anybody killed her.’

‘You didn’t have to. I can see it in your face. You said the police would be coming. Coming for
me
, I suppose. Charged with murder, on the say-so of my own mother.’ She laughed wildly and looked at Maggs. ‘And you think so too. You’re here to protect her against me, in case I strike again. Justine the mad murderer, not safe to be with.’

‘Stop it,’ Roma ordered in a shaky voice. ‘You’re not helping yourself, behaving like this.’

‘Why should I help myself? Why should I care what happens to me? It was all falling apart anyway, only the pills keeping me going. And Georgia. She loves me far more than her mother, you know. That stupid cow barely even knows she’s got a kid at all. She doesn’t deserve such a little love as that.’ She collapsed into weeping
again. ‘I knew something terrible must have happened to her. I just hoped that somehow Penn had taken her and kept her safe. She knows Penn, so that would be OK.’

‘But you knew she was out in the fields,’ Maggs reminded her in a low voice. ‘When you can’t really know for sure, unless …’

‘Unless I left here there, you mean. I was guessing, OK? Look, you’ve both got mud on your shoes and Ma’s got a leaf in her hair. I just picked up the clues with realising. You both smell, as well.’ She plunged her face into her hands, closing her fingers over her nose. ‘That’s her smell, isn’t it? Something that’s been dead for days. If that’d been in a house or barn, someone would have noticed.
Of course
she must have been outside somewhere.’

‘So you still say you were abducted by Penn. Your cousin, my sister’s daughter, did that to you?’ Roma’s face seemed to strain forward, hungry for the truth.

Justine nodded vigorously, her face still hidden. ‘She did,’ came her muffled voice. Then she raised her head. ‘But I’ve been thinking about it, over and over. I don’t believe she really meant to hurt me. It was almost as if she was
saving
me from something even worse.’

Maggs ventured a small laugh. ‘You could say the whole story’s so unlikely it has to be
true,’ she said to Roma. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘If it is true,’ Roma began, having taken a deep steadying breath, ‘then Penn deliberately made fools of us. Drew, me – the whole thing about you being missing.’ She tilted her head awkwardly towards her daughter, as if scarcely bearing to look at her. ‘She pretended to be worried about you, when all along she’d left you to die of thirst. That’s impossible to believe,’ she sagged back in the armchair. ‘It’s just too bizarre.’

‘She might have intended to come back and release me,’ Justine suggested. ‘Although … well, maybe if she’d given me a
fantastically
good reason, I’d have forgiven her. She didn’t really hurt me too badly, apart from my wrists. She might even have known I could climb through my arms. We used to do it when we were little and I was always better at it than her.’

‘Chloroform?’ Maggs reminded her. ‘That’s serious stuff. Where would she have got it?’

‘College, I suppose. They’ve got a big Natural Sciences department. They probably use it to kill rats and things for dissection.’

Roma stared hard at her daughter. ‘Jelly babies,’ she said, her voice icy.

Maggs barely stifled a giggle, while Justine shook her head in bewilderment. ‘What?’ she said.

‘There was a big pile of jelly babies with the little girl. It had wasps all over it.’

‘So?’

‘Justine – you were always mad about jelly babies. You must have eaten thousands of the damned things. I’m quite sure you would have bought them for this little one.’

Maggs was suddenly aware of something unspoken between mother and daughter; some event or person they’d been thinking about, almost referring to but never quite permitting it into their discourse. It could only be the cause of their rift five years earlier, something that made one angry and the other fearful, too momentous for words, even now. Like a huge iceberg sitting there in the room, which they could look through, but which distorted their view of each other and which froze the normal emotions that mothers and daughters felt for each other.

Justine refused to defend herself against this new accusation. Instead she leant her head back and closed her eyes. ‘I guess I’ll just wait for them to come and arrest me,’ she said. ‘I’d rather explain myself to them than to you – at least they might keep an open mind.’

But Roma couldn’t leave it there. ‘Can’t you see I
want
you to convince me?’ she demanded with awful intensity. ‘I want to believe you. That’s the reason I went over there today, to see if I could find something that would confirm your story.’

‘And didn’t you? Wasn’t a dead child enough?’

Roma shook her head miserably. ‘Not when I saw the jelly babies,’ she whispered.

‘I think you should give her the benefit of the doubt,’ Maggs asserted, her voice ringing loud. ‘Don’t judge her so quickly. There’s obviously much more to the story than you’ve heard yet. We need to find Penn, for a start. We need to talk it all through from the starting point that Justine hasn’t done anything wrong and see if we can make sense of it that way.’ She sat back in her corner of the sofa, and gave Roma a stern look.

Roma sighed. ‘Don’t make us go through it all again,’ she pleaded. ‘I imagine we’ve got until tomorrow, anyway. I don’t think the police are coming, after all.’

‘They haven’t got much evidence until the
post-mortem
,’ Maggs agreed. ‘We should probably all get an early night.’

‘We should have something to eat,’ Roma worried. ‘I always forget about food when Laurie’s away. If we don’t have some supper we’ll all be prowling around the kitchen at two in the morning.’ She went off to the kitchen and neither girl did anything to stop her.

Penn thanked providence for the invention of mobile phones. Calls could not be traced – at
least not without massive police pressure on the phone company – and could be made from discreet locations where nobody could overhear.