The Sting of Death Read online

Penn shook her head. ‘They wouldn’t take much notice. She’s an independent adult, and there’s no sign of violence.’

  ‘Have you got any mutual friends? Anyone else who might have some idea of where she’s gone?’

  ‘Only the Rentons.’

  ‘And they haven’t seen her either?’

  Penn closed her eyes in a give me patience gesture. ‘No,’ was all she said.

  ‘How much does she have to do with them? Rather a lot, by the sound of it.’

  Penn paused, as if mustering her thoughts. ‘It’s quite complicated,’ she said with a frown. ‘Philip doesn’t keep much stock, as I said. Just a few sheep, I think. He buys and sells straw, great lorryloads of it, and does a bit of dealing in fodder. Justine’s cottage is a long way from the house; a quarter of a mile at least. And she has the use of a small barn, as well. For her pottery.’

  Almost lazily, he elicited the rest of the story. It didn’t strike him as of very much interest, and he felt no sense of excitement or challenge. Justine babysat the Rentons’ daughter, Georgia, and did some secretarial work for Philip on his computer. In return she was charged a very low rent, and allowed to use the computer for email and internet access. Sheena Renton was a workaholic sales manager, commuting to Bristol and away from the farm most of the time. Her life seemed filled with a never-ending succession of new initiatives, launches, promotions, assessments. ‘Justine makes fun of all the jargon,’ Penn said with sudden relish. ‘She can be very funny when she’s making mock of someone.’

  In the end Drew went into the house to fetch tea, and threw himself dramatically on Karen. ‘Save me!’ he hissed. ‘She’s never going to go at this rate.’

  ‘Not a very fascinating mystery then?’ she asked, from her cosy place on the couch, with a child on each side. ‘I had a feeling it wouldn’t be.’

  ‘I think she’s making something out of nothing. Although … well …’

  ‘Drew Slocombe!’ she accused. ‘You’ve been hooked, haven’t you? Don’t pretend to be bored. I know that look.’

  ‘No, really. I think it’ll come to nothing.’ Drew glanced impatiently at the window onto the patio. ‘I’m supposed to be doing that piece for the Natural Death Centre. I’ll never finish it now.’ He scratched his hairline with frustration. ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ said Karen. ‘I think I know the very thing.’

  And she did. She carried Timothy outside, and plonked him on Penn’s lap. ‘Sorry I’ve been so selfish with him,’ she beamed. ‘He’s having his bath in a little while, so this is your last chance to play with him. It’ll do me a favour, too. Stephanie likes a bit of special time with me, especially on a Sunday.’

  Penn got the message. After three minutes of clumsy dandling, she made a big show of not realising the time, and gathered up her things.

  At the front gate, to which Drew had accompanied her, she turned. ‘You don’t think she’s in trouble at all, do you?’ she accused.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you this, because I’m sure you’ll think it’s rubbish. But I do rune readings for people.’ Drew said nothing. ‘And when I did Justine’s, on Thursday, I got Hagalaz which means radical disruption. Then the symbol for breakthrough – complete transformation – and then the Blank.’ She looked at him fiercely. ‘And that means death. Those last two in combination are the most powerful thing you can draw. And believe me, Drew, I’m good at the runes. My readings are always accurate. So when Justine didn’t turn up for our lunch date, I was sure something had happened to her.’

  Drew sighed. ‘I said I’d do what I can to help. I’ll go to her cottage tomorrow evening, and see what strikes me about it. I can’t say more than that, can I?’

  ‘You might say you believe me,’ she flashed, before getting into her car and driving off with the briefest of waves.

  Penn hadn’t missed the glance that Drew and Karen exchanged when she first mentioned Justine. There’d been something avid, especially in Drew’s eyes – something almost predatory. He’d wanted to hear the whole story, leaning slightly towards her. ‘Just because a person disappears doesn’t mean they’ve been murdered,’ he said. Penn thought he lingered on the word murdered as if saying rapture or merriment. In short, he’d reacted very much as she’d hoped he would. Drew Slocombe was obviously obsessed with violent death, preferably with a mystery attached, and Penn had handed him the very thing he craved. The eager hungry look in his eye had betrayed him and belied the charming boyish manner he adopted.

  The brief reference to person named Maggs had been intriguing. ‘She’s a marvel,’ Drew said, as if repeating something he’d said countless times. But Penn had gleaned very little more about her than that. A young female partner in the undertaking business, who apparently had many skills and talents, and who of necessity would be made party to the Case of the Missing Cousin, as Penn suspected Drew had instantly labelled her story.

  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, wil
l 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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  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. G
reece 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.’