The Sting of Death (25 page)

‘She had the jelly babies anyway,’ Renton muttered. ‘I only threw them down beside her to get rid of them.’

‘So where’s Penn now?’ Sheena cut in shrilly. ‘This is as much her doing as Philip’s. She should be here. I want them both to pay for what they’ve done.’ Her face was dark with fury.

Roma gave her a long look. ‘Penn has already paid, as I think you know perfectly well.’

Maggs stepped forward, the camera still in her hand. ‘We think you know exactly what’s happened to Penn. We think you knew, or guessed, what happened to Georgia as well. Then you took your revenge on your husband’s mistress.’

Justine crawled forwards on hands and knees across the hay-strewn floor as if grief and fury had removed her ability to walk. ‘You two are
the sickest pair of useless parents I’ve ever met. That poor innocent little girl, stuck with you two and never complaining. Frightened to shed a tear in case it drove you even further away. And Penn making it all a hundred times worse. I wish you were both dead, I really do.’

The effect of her words could perhaps have been predicted. The Rentons drew closer together, Philip stretching a hand out to his wife. He spoke directly to Roma. ‘Sheena doesn’t know that Penn’s dead. She hasn’t heard any news or seen anyone for days.’ He stood limply, his hand failing to connect with his wife. ‘I was trying to protect her, you see, from knowing what I’d done. That’s all.’

Nobody spoke as they tried to make sense of his claim. ‘If she’d known, she’d have lost me as well as Georgia. And we’ve had so much loss here …’ He subsided into harsh sobs.

‘So,’ Justine began, with no hint of softening in her tone, ‘why did you tell her you were having an affair with me? How was that going to help?’

‘In the long run she wouldn’t have believed it. I was buying time.’

‘You were telling one stupid lie after another, until nobody knew what to believe,’ Maggs corrected him. ‘You weren’t thinking about the future at all – the long run. You were just scared
shitless and said whatever you thought would save your own skin.’

He shook his head helplessly. ‘You don’t understand,’ he whimpered. ‘That piece of
play-acting
just now – it wasn’t
at all
like that. It was Penn’s idea, most of it. She thought we were going away to Poland together, to start a new life. I kept telling her I couldn’t leave Georgia, not with Sheena so busy all the time. I said we’d have to take Georgia with us. She pushed the ladder;
she
made Georgia fall.’

‘We don’t believe you,’ said Justine icily. ‘That isn’t what you said just now.’

‘I believe him,’ said Sheena quietly. She looked round at all the faces. ‘Did somebody say that Penn is dead? How can that be?’

‘Murdered,’ said Maggs. ‘On Saturday. I wonder where you two were at the time?’

‘I was in town, at the office,’ Sheena remembered. ‘Philip was here all day.’

Maggs tightened her grip on the video camera before she spoke. ‘You weren’t here, were you, Mr Renton? You were in Bournemouth with a hypodermic syringe full of high strength local anaesthetic. You injected it into Penn’s heart, fully intending to kill her.’

He followed his wife’s gaze, from one face to another. ‘They killed all the cows, you know, in this very barn. Shot them, one by one, while they
just stood and waited. They weren’t panicked or scared, even when they could see their friends dropping to the floor. It was a sea of death. We dragged them outside with the tractor and they went rotten before anyone would let us bury them. My father hanged himself a month later.’

Sheena put a hand to her throat, retching, her face greenish in the dim light. ‘So Georgia was just another cow,’ she gasped.

‘We loved those cows,’ Philip said simply. ‘Looked after them like princesses. The line went back fifty years.’

Roma glanced at Maggs, meeting her eye. ‘We’re getting out of our depth here,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t you think?’

Maggs nodded and extracted her mobile phone from her pocket. Deftly she operated the keys with her left thumb, sending a brief message. ‘That should do it,’ she said.

‘You did kill Penn then, did you?’ Roma persevered, making everyone else wince at the unkindness.

But Renton was beyond unkindness. He was slumped against an upright beam supporting the overhead floor. Sheena was holding him, a hand pawing uselessly at his chest.

‘Leave them,’ Maggs said, making a flapping motion towards the door. ‘They’re not going anywhere. We did what we came to do.’

The threesome slowly left the barn and went to sit in Roma’s car. ‘Can’t say I feel much sense of triumph,’ Roma admitted.

‘Wish I had something to smoke,’ said Justine. ‘I feel awful.’

‘I doubt if it counts as a confession,’ Maggs worried. ‘Even though I got it all on camera. He didn’t actually say he’d killed Penn, did he?’

Roma and Justine looked at her in confusion. ‘You switched the camera off,’ said Roma.

Maggs grinned sheepishly. ‘No, I switched it
on
. I forgot all about it for the bit on the ladder. Just as well really. The last part was much more interesting.’

‘It
was
a confession. Surely it was. At least – he didn’t
deny
it,’ said Justine.

‘Maybe,’ sighed Maggs. ‘We’ll have to see what Den thinks. He should be here soon.’

Den thought it was all a bewildering mess when he and Bennie arrived at Gladcombe. Sheena would not let go of Philip, who seemed to be sunk into a catatonic state from which nobody could retrieve him. ‘We’d better search the house,’ Den decided.

In the kitchen, in a cupboard under the sink, was a large bottle of the same local anaesthetic as had been found in Penn Strabinski’s body. There was a pad beside the telephone with ‘Room 32, Elmcroft Hotel’ written on it. The handwriting on that and other items found around the house, matched that in the letters found in Penn’s bedroom.

‘Mr Renton, I’m afraid you’re under arrest,’
Den muttered to himself before going into the living room and formally charging the man.

In the light of his precarious condition, a secure vehicle was summoned and Philip was eventually driven away to a closed psychiatric ward in Taunton. Sheena had to be forcibly disconnected from him.

‘I still think it might have been her who murdered Penn,’ Roma insisted mulishly to the others in the car.

‘I don’t think so,’ Maggs said. She was still glowing from Den’s admiration, which had been unstinting once he’d grasped what she’d achieved.

Roma drove them all back to Pitcombe through the dark country lanes. ‘Summer’s nearly over,’ she said wistfully. ‘It always goes so quickly.’

‘It’s not over yet, by a long way,’ Maggs said from the back seat. ‘September’s usually lovely.’

‘I hate September,’ Roma gloomed.

‘Sarah died in September,’ Justine said.

‘Exactly,’ said Roma.

The atmosphere in the car was subdued and the conversation lapsed. The image of the wreck that had been Philip Renton was an unpleasant one and even Maggs couldn’t sustain her sense of triumph for long.

‘Did you know he was such a mess?’ she asked
Justine, shortly before they got back to Pitcombe.

‘Not really,’ she said softly. ‘But I’m not altogether surprised. He’s been through a lot, after all.’

‘Not as much as you have,’ Maggs reminded her. ‘It must have been dreadful.’

‘Let’s not talk about that,’ Roma pleaded and Justine murmured her agreement.

Maggs managed a full minute’s silence before trying again. ‘I think you should. It’s obviously sitting there between you, spoiling things for you both. It’s such a waste. Mothers and daughters are supposed to be friends.’

‘This sounds like a counselling session,’ grumbled Justine. ‘I’ve had my fill of them, thanks.’ At the wheel, Roma made a
tch
of disapproval.

‘You can tut,’ Justine snapped. ‘But there wasn’t anyone else I could talk to. My child
died
, Mother. You don’t just brush yourself down and get on with things when something like that happens.’

‘I thought
my
child had died, a few days ago,’ Roma said softly.

‘Oh? And how did that feel?’ Justine was aggressive.

‘I have no idea how it
felt
. I was worried, angry. I’ve been worried and angry more or less since you were born, so it was nothing unusual. I’m angry now at what it’s done to Laurie.’

‘None of it is my fault,’ Justine wailed. ‘When will you see that?’

‘I didn’t say it was. I never said it was your fault. I’m not that stupid. I know I was the adult and you were the child. It was down to me to try and get it right. But the task was beyond me.’

‘You should never have had me,’ Justine said. ‘Not with that man. Anyone could have told you it was an impossible mix. There’s scarcely a sane person on either side of the family.’

‘Except Helen.’

‘Right. Poor old Auntie Helen.’ Justine sniffed back the threatening tears and kept her tirade going. ‘So what the hell did you
expect
? You never blamed
him
, did you? My father. You never confronted the horrible mess that you two made of your marriage. No wonder I went off and got pregnant with someone I met in a nightclub and never saw again.’

‘You honestly think that was a rational thing to do?’

Maggs felt a compelling mixture of embarrassment and fascination. There was often something heightened and genuine about a conversation inside a car that you rarely found elsewhere. For one thing, the participants couldn’t easily escape from each other. They had to see the thing through to an acceptable conclusion. There were only three or four miles to go, though, and
Maggs worried that they would need more time than that.

‘I don’t blame you for Sarah dying, you know,’ Justine choked out, after a brief silence. ‘You think I do, but I don’t. I wish now that I’d listened to you and not subjected her to all that horrible medical stuff. They turned her into a
thing
at the end. She smelt of them and their rotten drugs, she cried most of the time, she was nothing but skin and bones. I really wish I’d had the courage to snatch her away and take her home with me to die. But you always hogged all the courage, didn’t you Mother? You were the only one brave enough to reject their whole package. You were the one who faced up to Sarah dying, to losing her forever. You’ve always been so appallingly brave, haven’t you? And you’ve no idea how terrifying that is to other people.’

Roma parked the car beside the wall of her cottage and made no move to get out. ‘Brave?’ she whispered. ‘Is that how you see me?’

‘We all know – we’ve all seen – how you confront your demons. We know how scared you are sometimes, but you deal with it. You carry on. You march out there with a flimsy stick and wave it in the face of the monster, while the rest of us huddle in the cellar and pretend everything’s perfectly all right. You
make us all aware of what cowards we are.’

Ah
, thought Maggs.
Now I understand why Drew likes her so much
.

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Roma faintly. ‘But I don’t know what I can do about it.’

‘Just go a bit easier on us lesser mortals, that’s all. Leave us to our delusions and comfort blankets. Let poor Laurie wallow sometimes, without having to put on a brave face whenever you’re around.’

‘How do you know about Laurie?’ Roma sat up straighter.

‘He told Penn a lot about himself. They had a few sessions together in a pub or somewhere. She told me some of it. She kept me informed quite well, really. Poor Penn – we haven’t been thinking about her as much as we should. Her death is probably the most terrible of them all and yet we’ve scarcely even mentioned her.’

‘Time enough for that,’ Roma said, with a pleading note. ‘If Laurie was as fond of her as you seem to be saying, I’m going to have a job on my hands, aren’t I, trying to put your advice into practice.’

Justine began to say something and then changed her mind. ‘Yes, you are,’ she said.

Den Cooper wasn’t required for long at the Somerset police station, so he went back along
the endlessly tedious M5 to Okehampton, where he wandered outside into the warm street. As he always did, he gazed to the south-east where Dartmoor bulked darkly in the near distance. Although no great rambler, he’d enjoyed a few long moorland walks and carried the knowledge of it inside him – a place to escape to, to get lost in, if things became too heavy.

They were pretty heavy now and he groaned inwardly at the prospect of another lonely evening in his flat. It was not quite nine o’clock. He’d have to kill at least a couple of hours before he could decently go to bed. And he badly wanted somebody to talk to. Somebody with a fresh robust view of life and the horrible things that happened. Somebody who would cut through all the twisted and chaotic emotions that had been knotting themselves tighter and tighter inside him for the past months. Maggs would have been more than willing to give it a try, but he had no intention of inflicting such a weight on her, at this point. Maggs was for fun and optimism and lightness of being.

Without really thinking, he pulled his crumpled notepad out of his pocket and flipped a few pages. Yes, the number was there and his mobile was in another pocket, fully charged. He phoned the number.

A woman answered. ‘Is Drew there?’ he asked.

‘I’ll fetch him,’ she chirped, with no discernible reluctance. There was even a generosity in her voice that warmed him.

‘Hello?’ came Drew’s voice.

‘Oh, hi. Cooper here. Look, I know it’s late and this is a lot to ask, but I was wondering, would you meet me for a jar somewhere?’

‘What? Where are you?’

‘Okehampton. But if we met in Honiton or somewhere it’s only be about forty-five minutes for both of us. We’d have time for a couple of pints. It’s just …’

Drew understood. He’d heard pain in all its many guises by this time. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Do you know a likely pub?’

Cooper named a small village on the A30 which boasted a single hostelry.

Drew arrived first, shortly before ten and for a few minutes he worried that the detective had had an accident, speeding along the dual carriageway around Exeter. Then a Cavalier swept into the tiny car park and the tall man climbed out.

Aware of limited time, by mutual consent they chose a corner table close to a large fireplace and examined each other’s faces. ‘We haven’t really got to know each other through this, have we?’ Drew began. ‘But I gather you’ve made quite an impression on Maggs.’

‘She’s quite a girl,’ Cooper nodded. ‘But that isn’t what I want to talk about.’

‘No. I wouldn’t be the right person.’

‘And I haven’t come to talk about Penn Strabinski or Roma Millan, either. Except as they relate to my job, which I suppose is seeing that justice is done.’

‘Right. Funny thing, justice.’

‘Is it true that Roma was dismissed for slapping a kid in her class? She really lost her job over that?’

‘So it seems. She wouldn’t defend herself, which actually made the whole thing more protracted, oddly enough. She suffered much more than she let on, I suspect. She lost an incredible amount; not just her job.’

Cooper nodded. ‘Respect, confidence, a sense of purpose, structure …’

‘Exactly. It sounds as if you’ve been thinking about it.’

‘She slapped a brazen little bastard, probably leaving only a faint mark on his cheek and a dent in his ego for two minutes and who might in the process have learnt that there’s a limit to what you can get away with. Thirty years ago it would have been completely unremarkable, even approved of. So why do I feel like a fascist for even thinking like this?’

‘I don’t know. Why do you?’

‘Because it affects
me
. I’m not allowed to slap vile little buggers who have no idea how to behave, either. And that Renton man can casually push his kid off a ladder and kill her and probably would have got away with it completely if he hadn’t been crazy enough to murder his girlfriend as well.’

‘No,’ Drew protested. ‘He wouldn’t have got away with it. Didn’t you see his face last week? He’s been in agony since it happened. He’s never going to escape the image of that child with her head flopping loose, and he doesn’t even
want
to. He went to look at her rotting body. He insisted on doing that when you tried to stop him. You don’t have to worry too much about justice. It has a way of taking care of itself.’

Den shook his head miserably. ‘You’re not helping,’ he sighed.

‘Explain the problem, then.’

‘My job,’ said Cooper again. ‘I don’t think I can do it any more. The police aren’t really about the things I thought we were about. We all do our best, but we get so easily distracted. We get all agitated about completely the wrong things. Half the laws in this country are ludicrous, to start with. What’s the point of killing ourselves trying to enforce them when nobody really believes in them? It makes us look like idiots or worse.’

‘Bloody hell,’ breathed Drew. ‘This does sound bad.’

‘It’s bad,’ confirmed Cooper and took a long swig of his pint.

‘So what would you do instead?’

The tall man looked at him with a frown. ‘Instead?’

‘Yes. You’re telling me you want to quit the police – so what would you do instead?’

‘I can’t quit the police. I mean … is that what I said?’

‘Isn’t it?’

Den finished the drink and stared numbly at the empty glass. ‘That feels scary,’ he admitted. ‘I never considered any other kind of work.’

‘There’s plenty out there. You’re single, fit, intelligent. The world’s at your feet.’

Den laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Look. I did it. I was working as a nurse and suddenly realised I couldn’t hack it any more. A bit like you, really. It just wasn’t right, somehow. So I flipped through the Situations Vacant and found an ad for an assistant at an undertakers. I was only there a year before setting up on my own. You’ve got to follow your gut feeling, otherwise why be alive at all?’

‘Precisely,’ said Den through gritted teeth.

‘Well, I can’t tell you what to do. Either you’ve got the nerve or you haven’t. But in my experience
there’s nothing more scary than forcing yourself to stick at a job you don’t believe in. It deforms you in the end and diminishes you.’

‘It was all right for you; you knew what you wanted to do, what was right for you.’

‘I didn’t know until I saw that job ad. I’d never have come up with it in a vacuum. It would never even have occurred to me.’

‘So I should read the job ads?’

‘It wouldn’t hurt. Have another pint?’

‘Thanks. Maybe I’ll get done for drunk driving and have it all settled for me.’

‘Too easy, mate. It doesn’t work like that.’

An hysterical Sheena Renton visited her husband early next morning and pleaded to be allowed to stay all day. The ward staff were forced to enlist a social worker and a doctor to deal with her. When they failed to calm or distract her, they asked if there was someone they could call, someone she’d be able to stay with until things were sorted out.

‘Justine,’ she whimpered. ‘I want to see Justine.’

Justine came without argument, curious to see what was happening and very much aware that she had more than a little in common with Sheena now. They were given a small dark side room and left alone. Each woman
was shocked at the appearance of the other.