The Sting of Death

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Do as she says,’ Roma ordered. ‘She’s right. It’s obvious when you think about it. Why haven’t the police realised?’

  ‘They haven’t been trying,’ said Maggs. ‘Not really. It was always a something and nothing case to them.’

  ‘It won’t work.’ Justine shivered apprehensively. ‘I know it won’t.’

  ‘We keep at it until it does,’ said Maggs. ‘But I think you’ll be surprised.’

  They parked under some trees and walked quietly up the track, Maggs in the lead. With no sign of life in the house, they made quickly for the big stone barn and scuttled inside. ‘Are you sure they’re in?’ Roma hissed. ‘I didn’t see any cars.’

  ‘They keep them round the far side of the house,’ said Justine. ‘I’ll go and have a look.’

  Furtively she skirted the yard and disappeared from sight. A minute later she reappeared, thumb emphatically raised. ‘They’re both there,’ she breathed, when she was safely back inside the barn.

  ‘Right – ladder,’ Maggs ordered. A lightweight metal one was found standing against the wall leaning its top few rungs against a suspended floor about eighteen feet off the ground. As far as they could see, there was very little stored on the upper level. Justine’s brief moment of exhilaration seemed to evaporate as they stood back and gazed upwards. ‘Oh, God,’ she whimpered. ‘It’s terribly high.’

  ‘Hold on, now,’ Roma tapped her on the back. ‘Don’t spoil everything.’

  ‘Let me just fix the camera somewhere,’ Maggs puffed, halfway up the ladder. ‘Probably at the top here, with a bit of hay to hide it. I hope I remember to set it going.’

  ‘Lucky they haven’t got a dog,’ Roma commented. ‘Or they’d have been out here by now.’

  ‘We’d have handled a dog,’ Maggs boasted confidently. ‘There’s no stopping us now. Right, Roma, come on up.’

  It took a further couple of minutes for them to get themselves settled and then Maggs called down to Justine, ‘Your turn! Give it hell.’ Justine bent and picked up the bell from the floor and began to ring it with all her might. The noise was deafening. She walked to the barn door and kept on ringing until she saw the farmhouse door begin to open. Retreating quickly, she gave one last peal for good measure, dropped the bell and shimmied up the ladder, until her face was just level with the upper floor.

  Philip and Sheena Renton appeared together in the barn doorway. ‘What the—’ shouted Philip. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Daddy! Penn! What are you doing?’ cried Justine in a little-girl voice. ‘Oh, Daddy, why have you taken your trousers off? And Penn looks funny.’

  Roma, in mock rage, appeared at the top of the ladder. ‘Bloody hell, child, what are you doing here?’ She made a lunge for Justine, who ducked and made a masterful impression of falling off the ladder, skimming down it and collapsing in a heap at the foot.

  Maggs was now just visible, hand over her mouth. ‘Philip! My God, what have you done? Georgia! Get up, Georgia!’

  She started down the ladder with some caution, Roma calling after her, ‘Don’t touch her. Wait for me.’

  At the bottom, Maggs and Roma stood together, arms wrapped around each other. ‘She’s dead,’ growled Roma. ‘I can’t let Sheena know what happened. We can’t tell her about us yet. It’s too soon. Look, Penn, why don’t we just fit Justine up? Make it look as if she was responsible.’

  ‘But how?’ Maggs turned trustful eyes upwards. ‘How could we do that?’

  ‘Let me think. Look, cover her up for a bit, and we’ll leave her until we’ve thought of something.’

  A cry of outraged horror came from Philip Renton, at the same time as his wife stepped further into the barn, towards the still-crumpled heap that was Justine. It was as if she really believed it was her dead daughter. She turned back to her husband. ‘Is it true?’ she screamed. ‘Is this what happened?’

  ‘N-no, of course not,’ he blustered. But his face was deathly white and the fight seemed to have drained out of him.

  ‘It is,’ said Sheena more calmly. ‘You pushed her off that ladder and broke her neck.’

  ‘I didn’t push her. She slipped. I never touched her. She was only halfway up, too. She never even saw anything, just heard us up there. She should never even have hurt herself, but she landed awkwardly, I suppose.’ He buried his face in his hands and Maggs went slowly up the ladder again to retrieve the camera.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to Philip, pressing a button. ‘I think I’ve got all that quite nicely.’

  Sheena was kneeling beside Justine, who had roused herself to a sitting position. They were both looking at Philip. The light in the barn was poor, with the sun almost setting outside. ‘You utterly loathsome bastard,’ Justine said, almost conversationally. ‘Your own child, and you just dumped her like a piece of rubbish. You must be subhuman to do a thing like that. You can’t even claim it was all done in a panic. You left her here all day, thinking it all through, right down to the bag of jelly babies. And Penn …’ she choked on her rage. ‘Penn helped you.’

  ‘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 vid
eo 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.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  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 awar
e 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.