The Sting of Death (3 page)

Everything had been kind and calm and sympathetic, but there had been a moment when the summer sky suddenly turned heavy and sinister. The blue intensified, the air thickened, until she could hardly breathe. She hadn’t known Drew well enough to predict his
response, and it was never easy to manipulate people into doing what you wanted. She had almost lost his attention at one point, despite the promising beginning. She’d said too much, waffling on about the Rentons and pottery and how far back she and Justine went. He’d clearly been impatient for her to go, and more than half inclined to dismiss the whole story as a lot of groundless anxiety. The bit about the runes had been a gamble. Her experience had been that the most surprising people took these things seriously, especially when the readings often did turn out to be amazingly accurate.

And she had eventually secured his
co-operation
. When it came down to it, of course, he could hardly have refused. She was Karen’s cousin, after all.

Karen too was aware of the persuasiveness of the cousinship. ‘I feel rather responsible,’ she said to Drew, on Monday morning. ‘You’re only appeasing her because she’s family.’

‘I don’t expect I am,’ he said. ‘To be honest, I had Roma in mind more than you.’

‘Charming.’

‘Wait till you meet her. You’ll like her as much as I do. She’s a real original.’

‘Bit off, getting sacked for hitting a primary school kid, though,’ Karen said. ‘I thought Penn
was a bit over the top about that. It’s absolutely not on these days.’

‘We don’t know the details,’ Drew objected. ‘The kid probably had it coming. And you can see she’s not a woman to stand any nonsense. Very old-fashioned she’d be as a teacher. Stern but fair, that sort of thing.’

‘And what was that stuff about not speaking to her daughter for five years? Sounds very extreme. How do you know she’ll be pleased with you for cooperating with Penn? She might be glad Justine’s disappeared.’

‘That’s possible,’ Drew agreed diplomatically.

Karen crunched a piece of toast, while peeling a banana for Timmy and dribbling pieces of discarded bread across the floor with the side of her foot. None of this prevented her from continuing the conversation.

‘No, listen. Think about it. Presumably she – Justine – must know there’d be people worrying about her. Penn, for a start. And the people on the farm. So either she’s a selfish cow who doesn’t care if she upsets people, or something caused her to rush off before she had a chance to tell anybody.’

‘Maybe Penn was driving her mad and she’s just gone off for a break.’

‘You think Penn’s a bit … smothering?’ The word came out with a mouthful of toast crumbs.

‘She could be,’ Drew conceded. ‘After all, she doesn’t appear to have a bloke. She wastes a lovely summer day visiting an ageing aunt and a cousin she hasn’t seen for decades.’ He cocked his head at her, deliberately caricaturing the situation.

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Karen began, before realising he wasn’t serious. ‘Oh, go to work, will you.’ She threw the banana skin at him.

He caught it deftly and added it to the overflowing compost bucket in the corner. ‘Ah, there’s Maggs. Now I’ll have to tell her the whole story as well. She can come with me this evening, if she’s not doing anything.’

‘Go on then,’ Karen flapped him away. ‘I’ve got nappies to wash.’

Maggs greeted him warily. ‘Nothing from the hospice, then?’ she enquired, as he opened the office door for her. ‘Dragging on a bit, isn’t it?’ The hospice was overseeing the dying of a Mr Graham French, who was destined for a grave in Drew’s field when the time finally came. Drew had visited him three times, liking him more on each occasion, and the protraction of his passing was stretching nerves on all sides.

‘Just shows, you never know,’ Drew said routinely.

‘Hmmm. I thought they would have given him the killer dose by this time. It doesn’t seem kind to let it take as long as this.’

‘He’s not in too much pain. Maybe he asked them not to. I got the feeling he’s quite happy to let it take its time, when I saw him last week.’

‘Scared, I suppose,’ hazarded Maggs.

Drew shook his head. ‘I don’t think he is, oddly enough. There’s no sign of it in his eyes. He says he’s had a good life, done most of the things he set out to do, and really loves the idea of his atoms turning into grass.’

‘The perfect customer,’ Maggs nodded.

‘Or would be, if it wasn’t for the Wicked Daughter.’ Mr French had two daughters, Mrs Jennings and Mrs Huggett, the Good one and the Wicked one respectively. Mrs Huggett didn’t like burials, hated the idea of a semi-permeable cardboard container which would allow entry to worms and water and other substances below ground. She had phoned Drew and berated him for his disgusting practices. Mrs Jennings, on the other hand, was entirely supportive of her father, and had written Drew a note to that effect, giving her phone number and making it clear that she would be one of his more
hands-on
customers when it came to preparing the body for burial.

‘I’m going to be quite sad when he does
die,’ Drew admitted. ‘He’s a really nice man.’

‘Occupational hazard,’ Maggs said, with scant sympathy, effectively curtailing this topic of conversation.

Drew had some difficulty in broaching the subject of the missing Justine. Maggs had been very much more closely involved with his last brush with mysterious death than Karen had, and was party to most of its more embarrassing aspects. The fact that yet again the central characters were all female was sure to cause his business partner some amusement.

He decided to come at it obliquely. ‘Had a visit from Karen’s cousin yesterday,’ he began. ‘Did I tell you she was coming?’

Maggs frowned. ‘Can’t remember,’ she said. ‘Did you do that piece for the Natural Death outfit?’

‘I made a start. The cousin stayed hours longer than we expected her to.’

‘Visitors can be a pain,’ she said vaguely, turning her attention to the post that had been sitting inside the office door. ‘Hey, look! The Briggses have paid at last. And they want to know if we can supply a hazel tree over the grave. Hazel – we haven’t had one of them yet, have we? Don’t they grow nuts?’ She grinned. ‘Doesn’t that mean that if you eat the nuts, you’ll be eating bits of Old Lady Briggs?’

Drew had had enough. ‘Maggs,’ he blurted, ‘are you doing anything this evening?’

She turned her clear black eyes on him, widening them to show the very white whites. It was a trick she had, that Drew always enjoyed. He looked at her, her brown skin several shades darker after two months of summer sunshine, her ample contours clearly outlined in a tight T-shirt and stretchy pedal-pushers. She’d worked for him for nearly two years now, and they understood each other to the core. ‘Why?’ she invited.

‘Um – detective work,’ he said quickly.

She tilted her head sideways. ‘Oh?’

‘This cousin – her name’s Penn – she’s worried about another cousin, Justine—’

‘Whoa! Too many cousins. Explain.’

‘Right. Well, Karen’s mother and Penn’s father were brother and sister.
Are
brother and sister, I should say. So they’re first cousins.’

‘Penn – this person’s called Penn?’

‘Right. After William Penn, the well-known Quaker.’

‘Who founded Pennsylvania. Got it. And …’

‘And Penn’s mother is Roma Millan’s sister. You know Roma Millan – the woman who sells the honey in Pitcombe.’

Maggs shook her head. ‘We get our honey from the supermarket.’

‘Shut up and listen. Roma has a daughter
called Justine. So she’s first cousin to Penn as well, but on the other side of her family. They’re quite close buddies, it seems – see each other all the time. I suppose the cousin bit doesn’t really matter, the point is, Justine’s gone missing in the past two or three weeks, and Penn’s getting very worried. Splurged it all out, just as she was leaving. And then stayed about two more hours filling in the background.’

‘Hmmm,’ Maggs adopted her sceptical face. ‘Did she already know you were Drew Slocombe, Ace Detective, on the side?’

He thought about it. ‘I doubt it. Only if Roma told her, and I wouldn’t think
she
could have heard anything. They haven’t lived here long and it’s not as if I’ve been headline news recently.’

‘So out of the blue, this cousin of Karen’s asks you to track down another cousin. She must have had some idea that you were into this sort of thing. You don’t just ask people to help search for missing persons unless you think they’ve got some sort of special interest or talent for it. Or if you do, you go to somebody you already know and trust. What about Justine’s father? What about—’

‘Okay,’ he stopped her. ‘I get the message.’ He tapped a front tooth with his pencil. ‘You think I’m being set up?’

‘I think it’s possible. But carry on; I’m with you so far.’

‘Good. Now – we’re going to a village called Tedburn St Mary, the other side of Exeter, this evening, to Justine’s cottage, to see if we can discover signs of disturbance, or anything to suggest she left under duress, as they say.’

‘Hasn’t Penn already had a look?’

‘She says she wants a second opinion.’

‘What’s she like, anyway? I need to know more about her if I’m going to be involved in this.’ She stuck out her chin. ‘I never signed on as an amateur detective, you know. This is something you got yourself into, nothing to do with me.’

He chose to concentrate on the original question. ‘She’s pretty – very like Karen, actually. Neurotic, gets into a state about the slightest things. We couldn’t say anything without her working herself up. Wasps, teachers—’

‘Lots of people are scared of wasps and teachers,’ Maggs remarked. ‘She was all right about the field, then?’

‘Not really. When I said Roma was thinking of booking a plot, she freaked out then, as well.’

‘Sounds boringly normal to me,’ dismissed Maggs.

‘She reads runes,’ said Drew slightly desperately.

‘Hmmm,’ said Maggs, and then asked, ‘What does Karen say?’

‘Something along the lines of
Here we go again.’

‘I don’t blame her.’

‘But we’ll do it anyway, won’t we?’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t leave me to cope all on my own?’

‘Course I wouldn’t,’ she winked at him. ‘I was beginning to worry that we were never going to do anything but bury people and argue about chapels.’

He raised a forefinger sternly. ‘The chapel argument has been settled,’ he told her. ‘We’re definitely not having one.’

‘That’s what you think,’ she muttered, turning to go to the filing cabinet.

Monday morning was an unwelcome dawn for Detective Sergeant Den Cooper. It was his first day back at work after a fortnight’s holiday on Corfu. The whole thing had been a horrible mistake. Greece was intolerably hot in July and August, the girl he’d gone with had rapidly let her mask slip and turned into a whingeing monster with no interest in anything that Corfu had to offer. They’d trudged down to the same beach every day, swum for an hour, spent three hours in the same taverna for lunch, gone back to their room for a siesta, and then sought out a succession of ad hoc night-time entertainments which seemed to get worse by the day. He had come home burnt, fat and depressed.

But he wasn’t at all enthusiastic about going back to work, either. He’d been based at Okehampton Police Station since first qualifying as a Constable, and it was stalely familiar by this time, nearly seven years later, despite having progressed to Detective Sergeant during that time. Most of his colleagues had moved on and he was aware of a reputation as a plodding worker, conscientious but uninspired most of the time. It was Cooper who went the extra mile to ensure that there was no lingering doubt about a villain’s guilt, Cooper who was kind to old people, tolerant of juvenile miscreants and who got to convey bad news to relatives. Cooper who had had a messy love life, and was showing little sign of getting that side of things sorted.

The station seemed to have been put under a sleeping spell when he presented himself for duty. Another hot day, all the windows were open, hoping to catch the light breeze that the building’s position generally enjoyed. No phones were ringing, no computer printers chattering.

‘Everything quiet then?’ he asked Julie, on the front desk.

‘As the grave,’ she sighed.

‘So you haven’t missed me?’

‘Didn’t even notice you weren’t here, to be honest. You may as well take another two weeks for all the work there is.’

‘You should be glad. Not many places can claim to have a redundant police force these days.’

Julie reached down and produced a paperback book. ‘Funny you should say that. I picked this up in one of the tourist places. It’s an old novel, set in a village down near Teignmouth. They arrest this girl on suspicion of setting fire to a hayrick, but they don’t like to lock her up, because the jail hasn’t been used for years and it’s full of hen shit. Not like Teignmouth these days, eh.’

Den smiled. Julie’s passion for bygone fiction was legendary. She’d read everything, and drove everybody mad by comparing present experiences to something she’d just come across in a book. It got her into trouble at times.
Julie, for heaven’s sake, why can’t you live in the real world?
was a commonly-heard complaint.

‘Teignmouth’s a dump,’ he agreed. ‘Not too many hayricks round there now, either. What was the penalty, by the way?’

‘What? For burning the hay? Oh, transportation for a first offence. Hanging if you did it more than once. Though it seems the judge had some discretion about that. Scary, anyway.’

‘I don’t know.’ Cooper was wistful. ‘If they hadn’t arrested anyone for years, it must have worked pretty well as a deterrent.’

‘Maybe.’ Julie looked up at him, as everyone
had to. ‘You don’t look as if Corfu did much to refresh you,’ she observed.

‘Corfu was fine; the company was disappointing,’ he summed up.

‘Oh dear. New girlfriend not up to scratch?’

‘You see a different side of people on holiday.’

‘So –?’

A year or two ago, he would have resented the interest. He’d struggled to keep his private life separate from work. Now it didn’t seem to matter any more. ‘So she is now an ex-girlfriend,’ he said baldly.

‘Well, she’s got plenty of company, hasn’t she? That must be quite a big club by now.’

He sighed and picked at his nose where the skin was peeling. ‘I’m giving up on women,’ he announced. ‘It’s obviously never going to work.’

‘You’re probably right,’ came the unsympathetic reply.

Philip Renton drove jerkily, impatiently overtaking at every opportunity, only to find himself forced to a crawl behind yet another maddening old person, apparently out for a leisurely spin. Surely it wasn’t his imagination – there really were more of them every time he went out.

Recklessly, he pulled out from behind the
latest old dodderer, forcing the Saab into third gear and revving ferociously as he passed the Fiat Uno. He threw its driver a savage look, which went entirely unheeded. Coming towards him was an oil tanker, travelling much faster than Philip had first judged, leaving scant space for him to return to his own side of the road. Swinging the wheel, he made it, cutting up the Uno in the process. The tanker sounded its horn in a long reproach, and Philip scorched away, grinning manically to himself.

Ahead the road was temporarily clear, and he reached ninety before having to slow again behind a caravan. A glance in the mirror showed no sign of the Uno, but if he couldn’t pass soon, it would catch up with him, and the driver was unlikely to feel very well-disposed towards him after his demonstration of impatience. At the very least, Philip would feel humiliated at his lack of progress.

It would all be perfectly all right, of course, if only they’d put some money into improving the roads. This stretch was crying out for some dual carriageway – with all these stupid dips and bends making it so tricky to overtake on single lanes. But the car knew its stuff, and he shot past the caravan the instant an opportunity arose. This was more like it, he rejoiced – and only six or seven more miles to the motorway now.

He hadn’t wanted to do this trip, anyway. He’d planned a lazy Monday tidying his office, and sending out some advertising copy to a few of the local papers. The straw harvest had been good, and his stores were growing rapidly, as he bought up the product of fifty or sixty farms across the South of England. The trick, as always, was going to be to get ahead of the competition, persuade his customers to order enough for the whole winter’s needs, at a price that could turn out to be inflated. The whole business was based on risk. A long cold winter, with animals lying in that crucial week or two longer than usual, could make straw a highly sought-after commodity. Those who bought extra stocks now might make a modest profit by reselling it later. But a short mild winter would leave them with a surplus that nobody wanted. Philip was a clever salesman – he let people think they’d got a bargain, as well as being foresighted enough to lay up secure stores for the winter to come. Considering he was new to the game, he’d taken to it very successfully. Unsettling, then, the way it came over him every few days how much he disliked it; how much he craved to go back to the days when he’d been a
real
farmer, with real animals and none of this nonsense with giant lorries and all this wheeling and dealing.

‘So restock, why don’t you?’ his wife and
others asked him repeatedly. ‘Everybody else has.’

It was true that all his neighbours had bought in new herds of dairy or beef cattle, new flocks of sheep, too. They seemed to have got over the agony of 2001. Philip, it seemed, could not.

He’d been called out by Ralph Gardner, all the way up the M5, nearly as far as Tewkesbury. Ralph wouldn’t take the responsibility of passing 150 acres of wheat straw as best quality, because there was ragwort growing in amongst the corn. Although straw was seldom used as fodder, there were always going to be animals nibbling at it, if it was left outdoors where they could reach it, and ragwort could kill horses and cattle. Philip had been irritable. ‘Well, is there or isn’t there? Tell him we won’t buy it if it’s not clean.’

‘It’s just in one corner of one field. He says he’ll keep that stuff separate.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘I don’t trust him. And I haven’t got time to stand here watching him while he combines the field. If you speak to him, put the fear of the Devil into him, he’s not likely to try anything.’

Ralph was part of Philip’s network, negotiating on his behalf, arranging transport, scheduling pick-ups and drops, but he was always careful to avoid taking responsibility for hard decisions.

Sheena wouldn’t be back till late – probably
they’d turn up together somewhere around seven. The evening meal would be some microwaved junk that would have made Philip’s father gag. Philip had grown up on Gladcombe Farm, his father a specialist in dairy cows and sheep, the yard full of hens and geese and two or three collies. But the entire stock had been wiped out the year before in the cataclysmic foot and mouth epidemic, Frank Renton had hanged himself in the barn, and Philip was left to pick up the pieces. He’d taken up the dealing, and let his wife, with her high-powered career, bring in three times the cash that he could earn.

The old cottage, home to old Sid Pike for sixty years, had been one of their residual assets. Sid had reluctantly gone to live with his daughter near Taunton, and Justine Pereira had been taken on as tenant. The arrangement had worked smoothly, Justine doing fill-in childminding for young Georgia, when both parents were out in the evenings or at weekends. Justine worked at her pottery in a small barn, keeping herself afloat financially. As far as Philip had been aware, she had no objection to the babysitting. She took Georgia for walks, played with her, told her stories, and in many ways acted more like a loving mother than Sheena did.

He’d been warned, of course, that having a young female lodger was asking for trouble. 
Ralph had been the first to put it into words: ‘If she’s pretty, you’ll be running off down there every chance you get,’ he’d predicted. ‘And if she’s not, there’ll be other problems. Depression. Loneliness. What’s she doing, living all by herself like that, anyway?’

Philip had dismissed it all. ‘Keep up, mate,’ he’d admonished his colleague. ‘Women these days, they’re a different breed. She’s an artist, putting everything into her work. No time for any goings-on.’

‘And
is
she pretty?’

Philip shrugged. ‘Not particularly. Very thin and pale. Big strong hands, from working the clay, I suppose. Straggly black hair.’

‘Hmmm,’ was Ralph’s knowing reply.

Justine had lived in the cottage for almost two years now. Trouble had accompanied her, after all. But not at all in the way Ralph had predicted.

Well-trained by her old-fashioned father, Penn sat down that evening to write a short letter:

Roma let the dog jump out of the car ahead of her, watching it fondly for a moment before scooping up her shopping and ducking out of the vehicle herself. Laurie was inspecting runner beans inside the front gate. ‘Aren’t they lovely!’ he said. ‘They grow them for the flowers in some places, you know, and hardly bother with the edible angle.’

Roma ignored him. ‘You’ll never guess what’s just happened to me,’ she interrupted.

He looked at her, noting the bristling quiver of her shoulders. ‘Dangerous driving accusations?’ he hazarded.

She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘How did you guess?’

‘Sheer luck.’

‘Well, it’s ridiculous. Lolly knows to keep still when we’re driving.’

‘You won’t get any sympathy from me. Who saw you?’

‘Some officious young constable with nothing better to do. He actually
chased
me, pushing me off the road into a layby. That was far more dangerous than having the dog on my lap.’

‘There was a woman stopped for eating a piece of toast while driving, not so long ago. Dogs on laps are obviously well beyond the limit of tolerance these days. If you persist in doing it, you’ll have to take the consequences.’

‘Don’t be so boring.’ Roma tossed her head. ‘Everything’s gone safety mad, these days. They all think they can live forever if they just follow all these lunatic rules. Haven’t they any
idea
of how it all actually works?’

Her husband sighed softly. ‘Evidently not,’ he murmured. ‘Come and have some coffee. You’re not going to be charged, are you?’

‘Certainly not. They wouldn’t dare.’

‘No – they probably wouldn’t,’ he agreed.

But Laurie knew her well enough to realise that she’d been quite badly stirred up by the incident. He could imagine the righteous indignation on the face of the policeman, the subtle scorn directed at this middle-aged madwoman. It
happened to Roma over and over again: the rash assertion of her unconventional ideas so often brought her face-to-face with other people’s contempt. And contempt was very wounding, all the more so because it was generally what she herself felt towards the world at large. The ongoing restless unfocussed power struggle that she waged against authority and institutions was exhausting and, Laurie felt, quite unnecessary.

The protracted battle against dismissal from her teaching job had badly shaken her, but hadn’t noticeably altered her general attitude. Laurie had been as supportive as he knew how to be, but he knew he’d been disappointing. They had only been married a year when the business started and the shock to him had been very nearly as bad as it had to her. They both knew she was effectively on her own in this and other crises, not least because of her prickly reaction to his clumsy attempts to help.

She wasn’t always like this, of course. Absorbed with her bees or her fruit bushes, on long companionable walks, reminiscing about her early years, she was the best possible partner. Funny, shrewd, uninhibited – Laurie knew how to appreciate her good qualities and to turn his face away from the flipside of her nature. If there were taboo areas between them, well, he’d just have to live with that. Nobody was perfect, after all.