The Sting of Death (23 page)

Laurie Millan was inscrutable over the hotel lunch, despite an apparent willingness to fill in some gaps for Drew and Maggs. ‘You’ll be wondering why Penn and I are here together,’ he began. ‘I assure you that the obvious explanation is the wrong one … at least … well, I suppose we are in a sort of alliance against Roma. She’s so … dismissive, you see. She doesn’t listen to any worries or difficulties. So I turned to Penn. And she had been having her own problems, poor girl, which she couldn’t confide to her aunt or mother, so she came to me. I admit I was flattered.’

‘Problems?’ Drew encouraged.

‘I’m afraid I can’t disclose anything she’s told me.’ He turned his attention to his plate, carefully removing the skin of his trout and lifting a slab of pink flesh to his mouth. Maggs had opted for a chicken salad, but Drew also had the fish. They ate in silence for a few moments before a startling thought struck Drew.

‘Er … you did know they’d found the body of the little Renton girl, didn’t you?’ he asked gently, unsure of the man’s reaction.

Laurie lifted his head slowly. ‘I saw it in the papers,’ he said. ‘Such a shame. One of my reasons for coming here was to escape that additional trauma. Were you … ?’

‘Yes. Maggs and I removed her and took her to the mortuary.’

Laurie glanced at both pairs of hands, first Drew’s, then Maggs’s. People often did that, as if expecting some stain to be visible. ‘I don’t think I want to know any details,’ he said.

‘We should just add that it was Roma who found her,’ Drew persisted. ‘That wasn’t in the papers, I suppose. And they’re still not sure what happened to her.’

‘Complicated,’ said Laurie, taking a deep draught of the Chardonnay he’d ordered without consultation, as if it were unthinkable to eat trout with any other sort of wine.

‘You don’t seem very upset,’ Maggs observed.

‘It isn’t exactly a surprise, you see.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Drew leant towards him. ‘Why’s that?’

Laurie put his cutlery down. ‘The truth is, I just don’t have any emotion to spare for a strange child. I feel so tired all the time.’

‘But what about Penn? Do you think she
might know what happened to Georgia?’ Maggs pressed.

‘I can’t speak for Penn, but I can say she has made no mention of it to me.’

‘I’m sorry this seems like an inquisition,’ Drew smiled. ‘Do tell us if it gets to be too much for you, but there’s still a lot I don’t understand. For example, how long have you and Penn been … allies?’

‘A year or so. It really isn’t anything to get excited about. Just an occasional lunch in town and a chat.’ He replenished his glass without offering anything to his visitors – the only sign Drew could find of the man’s antipathy.

Drew could see that Maggs was becoming restless. He himself had little idea of what they ought to do next, apart from telephoning Roma to tell her what they’d found. She wouldn’t be surprised, he realised; she’d known that Laurie and Penn would be here together, which was doubtless the reason why she hadn’t come herself. She hadn’t wanted to embarrass them. She’d known of their alliance all along. Whatever else she might be, Roma was not a fool. And Drew did not believe that she was a bad listener, either. She heard everything that Laurie and Justine and others had to say; she just felt very differently from them on many issues. Drew himself did not share Maggs’s outrage concerning little Sarah.
He had worked as a nurse, including a stint on the paediatric ward, and knew the horrors of leukaemia in small children. He agreed, to some extent, with Roma: the treatment could be worse than the disease, and after a certain point it was the best and bravest decision to leave the pitiful little thing to die. He remembered a family who’d insisted on doing just that and he had been deeply and permanently impressed by the whole process. It had led, in part, he later realised, to his career change soon afterwards. Knowing he had to leave nursing, he’d applied for a job with a funeral director in Bradbourne, becoming a coffin-maker, bearer and
remover-of-bodies.
Drew, like Roma, had gained an insight into the reality of death that few people appeared to share.

The meal over, they took coffee into the lounge and made small talk about the weather, much to Maggs’s disgust. For lack of anything else to do, she took her mobile phone out of her bag, intending to call her mother with a rough idea of when she’d be home. ‘You should do that outside,’ Drew hissed at her, casting a worried eye over the somnolent residents who would almost certainly abhor mobiles.

‘OK,’ she shrugged, thumbing the tiny buttons as she got out of the chair. ‘Oh!’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ She flushed and then dimpled. ‘Just a message.’

‘From our friend in Okehampton, I suppose.’

‘Shut up,’ she mumbled, and left the room, gazing raptly at the minuscule screen in her hand.

‘Boyfriend?’ Laurie asked when she’d gone.

‘She seems to be very taken with the police detective investigating the Renton business,’ Drew said.

‘You don’t sound very happy about it.’

‘It’s her business of course. She’s had boyfriends before, but they never last long. She’s very committed to the business, you see.’

‘I don’t quite see the problem.’

Drew shook himself. ‘There’s isn’t a problem. Good luck to her. Karen thinks it’s perfectly sweet. But they’re an odd couple, just the same.’

‘Couples are generally odd, I find,’ said Laurie with a twinkle.

Maggs returned ten minutes later and stood impatiently in front of Drew’s chair. ‘It’s past two now,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t we be getting on?’

‘Get on with what?’

‘Seeing what Penn has to say for herself. Asking her what happens next – what she wants us to tell Roma.’ She put her hands on her hips, bending slowly forwards to make sure Drew took notice. ‘You know.’

‘I’ll pop up and see if she’s awake,’ offered Laurie. ‘She hasn’t been sleeping well, you see. She’s upset …’

‘And you won’t tell us why,’ Maggs accused.

‘Perhaps she’ll tell you herself when she comes down.’ He levered himself out of the chair. ‘Won’t be long.’

Afterwards, Drew couldn’t say for sure how long Laurie had been gone. Maggs thought it was almost fifteen minutes, but Drew felt it was less than that. They talked about Den Cooper, each aware that they couldn’t permit taboo subjects to develop between them. Their relationship must be protected from any such nonsense. But it was an awkward, jerky little conversation, which neither of them enjoyed.

Laurie did not come directly back into the lounge. He went to the Reception desk, and called for assistance, loudly enough to be heard by most of the ground floor. ‘Ambulance!’ he shouted. ‘Call an ambulance!’

Drew was by his side instantly, pulling at his sleeve, demanding to know what was wrong. Laurie finally turned to him, his face haggard. ‘It’s Penn,’ he said. ‘I think she’s killed herself.’

Too stunned to go up to the room to see for himself until the ambulance had arrived, Drew never got close enough to make his own assessment of what had happened. Then
he hovered with Maggs in the corridor outside while a brawny female paramedic performed heart massage on a limp Penn Strabinski. She didn’t persist long before backing away and shaking her head at her colleague. Two police officers turned up, taking an age to establish who everybody was and then summoning their own police doctor to certify life extinct. Laurie collapsed onto a fragile chaise longue in the hotel corridor, with Drew and Maggs clustering attentively beside him.

‘She can’t be
dead
,’ he kept saying. ‘What’s Roma going to say? And Helen? Oh, God, poor Helen!’

The policemen muttered with the paramedics, made phone calls, consulted the doctor and wrote things down. They asked if anybody could identify the deceased and Drew stepped forward. After a long interlude, during which a police photographer materialised and took a dozen close-up flash pictures, two undertakers’ men appeared and removed the body. This, for Drew, was the strangest part.

Laurie clumsily extracted a small notebook from an inside pocket and thumbed through it, eventually finding Helen and Sebastian Strabinski’s address, having been asked for Penn’s next of kin. Maggs had been watching the proceedings avidly as well as cocking a sharp ear
for the muttered exchanges between the various professionals. Drew looked forward to hearing what she’d gleaned, once they were alone.

Which suddenly they were. Laurie was taken to his own room by one of the paramedics and treated for shock, the hotel manager disappeared and the last policeman departed.

‘There was a hypodermic,’ Maggs muttered. ‘They think she injected herself with something lethal. She’d only been dead about twenty minutes or so when the ambulance arrived.’

‘But Laurie must have been with her then.’

‘Maybe.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘Yes, maybe he was.’

‘You think he
killed
her?’

‘Before she could tell us anything. Maybe,’ she added irritatingly.

‘It’s a terrible thing, however it happened. I mean, she’s Karen’s cousin, for heaven’s sake. We’re
involved
– I mean,
personally
.’

Maggs threw him a cynical look. ‘You hadn’t even met her until last week,’ she reminded him. ‘You barely even knew she existed.’

‘I did. Karen’s only got three cousins. I couldn’t fail to know she existed.’

‘Well, I don’t think you’re going to miss her particularly. Neither will Karen. But it’s very nasty, I know,’ she added hurriedly. ‘And very mysterious.’

‘It’s got to have something to do with the Renton child. Don’t you think?’

‘Definitely,’ she agreed.

‘Like – Penn killed her and then committed suicide because she felt so guilty.’

‘The obvious explanation,’ Maggs agreed.

‘A bit too obvious?’

‘Maybe.’

Karen was completely emphatic on one point. ‘Penn wouldn’t have killed the little girl,’ she insisted. ‘I just know she wouldn’t.’

‘You can’t be sure, especially as it looks like an accident. She could have panicked,’ Drew remonstrated.

‘I’ll never believe it,’ she said implacably.

Drew and Maggs had delivered Laurie home to Roma, but hadn’t stayed. Drew had an uncomfortable feeling that he had somehow precipitated Penn’s death, and was loath to stay and hear this accusation from Roma. Time enough for that when the police had done their part.  

Maggs was subdued, riding home on her motorbike without any further discussion. Drew was in no doubt that she was yet again thinking about Den Cooper.  

‘I’ll have to go and see Auntie Helen,’ Karen worried. ‘She must be desperately upset.’

‘What – now?’ Drew was alarmed. It was eight o’clock in the evening.

‘No, no. Tomorrow. Drew, I can’t help feeling this is somehow all our fault. Even if it isn’t, we’re deeply involved.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he said gloomily. ‘That’s what I said to Maggs. But we didn’t start it. Penn came to us, remember. We didn’t have much choice.’

‘It feels as if we failed. As if she came to us because she was scared something would happen, and we never came up with the goods. We didn’t do what she wanted us to.’

He shook his head helplessly. ‘I don’t know what else we could have done.’

‘Probably we did too much,’ she said, with a grimace full of pain.

Drew searched for some distraction. ‘Did you know Justine had a daughter? Sarah. She died of leukaemia when she was three.’

Karen stared at him. ‘What?’

‘That’s what the argument between Justine and Roma was about. Roma wouldn’t cooperate with a bone marrow transplant and I guess Justine blamed her for the child’s death.’

Karen took a while to digest this, aware that Drew had strong feelings on this sort of subject, aware of herself as the mother of a child of a similar age. ‘Bloody hell!’ she breathed. ‘So Roma was a granny.’

Somehow Drew hadn’t seen it from that particular angle. ‘Is that significant?’ he wondered.

‘Only that she must have been appallingly torn. Justine’s her only child. Her only hope of immortality lies with her and any children she has. That’s usually a huge commitment. And she let it die.’

‘I think she was convinced it would die whatever she did.’

Karen reached for Drew’s hand. ‘It scares me,’ she admitted. ‘Little girls dying.’

He followed her gaze to where Stephanie was playing outside the window. ‘Me too,’ he said. 

If u arent busy, how about the seaside? This pm.

Maggs knew he’d recognise her number, so she didn’t sign the message. The desire to see him was a nagging pain in her chest, drowning out everything else. He’d probably be working, anyway, now there was another death, despite it being Sunday. He’d have to ask lots more questions, and look at reports about Penn, trying to work out whether she really did kill herself. He would have to interview Laurie Millan, and probably herself and Drew.

The death of Penn was continuing to mystify Maggs, but in a low-level background sort of way. She wanted to talk to Den about  it, to offer him her suggestions, such as they were, but more
because of Den than Penn. She wanted him to think she was clever and concerned and mature. She assumed that he would be preoccupied by the matter and therefore she should discuss it with him.

Always inclined to go for the most dramatic explanation, she very much favoured the theory that Penn had been murdered. And although in that case, Laurie Millan had to be the prime suspect, there was just a chance that it had been someone else. If the doctor had been wrong about the time of death by five or ten minutes and if Laurie had gone first to his own room, or the Gents, before finding Penn, then there was every chance that someone could have slipped into her room before Laurie got there.

It was this fine-tuned scenario that she wanted to run past Den Cooper. And if it was true then she thought she knew the only possible person it could have been.

The post-mortem on Penn Strabinski, performed by special arrangement on Sunday morning, revealed poisoning by a large injection of local anaesthetic, of a type normally used for cattle and sheep. The only puncture wound had been found directly into the heart, which while possibly self-inflicted, was far more likely to have been administered by another party. Mild bruising
on the thoracic area suggested that the deceased was held down firmly as the injection was given. Death would probably have occurred relatively slowly, but the effects of such a dose on a human heart were unpredictable. To the pathologist’s knowledge, this was an unprecedented method of killing someone and he was unable to say with any certainty how long a time might have elapsed between the injection and the moment of death. The heart had suffered some damage from the needle itself, and the lungs had also been affected by the anaesthetic.

‘Weird,’ Den remarked to DI Hemsley, when he read the report. They’d both been called in to begin the investigation. Both were in Sunday mode, a long way from any excessive action. ‘Must have been suicide, don’t you think?’ He was still trying to get to grips with the fact that Drew Slocombe and Maggs had been at the scene of death, and yet she could send a casual invitation to the seaside as if nothing had happened.

I am busy. Need to see you though. Drew too
, he’d replied.

Hemsley pursed his lips. ‘Funny way to top yourself,’ he objected. ‘With friends just downstairs. Doesn’t seem very likely to me. Not with those bruises as well.’

‘So it’s a murder enquiry, is it?’ Den sighed.

‘That’s what we have to assume,’ the DI
concluded. Then he leant back in his chair and fixed Cooper with an unsettling stare. Den’s heart began to flutter with apprehension.

‘Cooper,’ Hemsley began with unusual heaviness. ‘I seem to be getting some odd vibes from you these days. I don’t get any sense of
engagement
with the work. For all you care, children can get themselves killed, young women not safe in their own hotel rooms, and none of it seems to touch you. What’s the matter with you?’

Den considered, but dismissed, the easy option. He’d worked with Danny Hemsley for years and owed him a modicum of candour. ‘I’m a bit low, to be honest,’ he admitted. ‘Probably just a phase. Burnout, maybe. I’ll be OK again in a bit.’

‘Never mind burnout. It’s woman trouble, isn’t it? You haven’t been right since the final rift with Lilah. Time you got someone new, mate. That’s what you need.’

‘As it happens, I’m working on that. It’s very early days and it isn’t going to be plain sailing, I can see already – but there is someone. It’s just that she doesn’t seem to be doing the trick, workwise.’ He heaved a sigh. Putting it into words only seemed to make it all much worse. The truth was suddenly a lot bigger and blacker than he had admitted to himself so far.

‘OK. Well, maybe you can take the rest of the day off. I’ll arrange for this Millan chap to be taken to Taunton, and go and interview him there myself. He came within a whisker of being caught red-handed, as I understand it. We ought to see what he has to say for himself.’

‘But …’ Cooper felt a tremor of panic. He was being taken off the case! He was all the more agitated for knowing it was what he had wanted, only a day or so ago. Now it felt like a put-down. Worse than a put-down – it felt like the beginning of the end, and that was very scary.

‘Make good use of it, that’s all I ask. And be back here tomorrow, bright and early,’ Hemsley added, before he dismissed him.

Laurie Millan had been warned by the police to make himself available the next day for questioning. There was no room for doubt that he was by far the most significant suspect in the matter of Penn’s death. He had quavered repeatedly, ‘I didn’t touch her. You must believe me. I never laid a hand on her.’ Only when reunited with Roma did he quieten down.

‘Oh, God,’ he trembled. ‘I really thought they’d charge me with her murder.’

Roma refrained from questioning him, aware of his fragile condition. Instead, she put him to bed with a hot milky drink and a warm affectionate
spaniel for his feet. Even in his traumatised state he noticed the change. ‘Thank you, dear,’ he breathed. ‘This is very kind of you.’

She’d nodded wryly and said nothing.

Next morning the police came for him, requesting politely that he accompany them to the station to make a statement. They were solicitous, accompanying him gently in and out of the car, bringing him a mug of tea. But the questions were pointed.

‘Could you please describe the exact nature of your relationship with Miss Strabinski?’

‘How long were you intending to remain at the hotel?’

‘Did you see anybody you recognised while staying there?’

‘Please tell us, in your own words, precisely what happened between two-fifteen and
two-thirty-five
on Saturday afternoon.’

Hesitantly, Laurie talked them through those long twenty minutes. He’d gone to the lavatory first, on the ground floor, a little way from the lounge. Then he’d waited for the lift because Penn’s room was on the second floor. It had been slow in arriving. There had been three people coming down in it. He had also heard voices on the stairs. There were still people coming out of the dining-room, too. In short, the hotel was relatively bustling.

He did not have a key to Penn’s room – of course he hadn’t. Why would he? So he knocked, gently at first, thinking she might be asleep, not wanting to give her a rude awakening. When she did not reply, he tried the handle and found the door unlocked …’

At this point, Hemsley looked up and frowned. ‘Don’t hotel doors lock themselves automatically when closed?’ he asked the officer sitting next to him.

‘Not at the Elmcroft,’ Laurie said robustly. ‘You have to turn the key on the outside. Too many people lock themselves out, otherwise. You have to remember we’re talking about Bournemouth, where practically everyone is over eighty.’

Hemsley smiled tightly, and waved for Laurie to continue his account. Quite slowly, he explained, he had pushed the door open, calling Penn’s name, wondering why she wasn’t answering. The room had a short shadowy corridor between the door and the main area, where the bathroom had been added. He had assumed initially that she must be in the bathroom and therefore unable to hear him. He’d even tapped on the open door and called her name again. Only then had he stepped towards the bed and seen her. He thought she was asleep – obviously that was what he thought. But her eyes were open, her mouth drooling, her
arms flung out. People didn’t sleep like that. He’d approached her, with his head spinning with the impossibility of what he was seeing. He’d poked her, then shaken her, then lifted her up and tried to waken her.

He could tell no more than that. The rest was already documented. The rest they already knew.

‘Thank you, sir,’ they said. ‘We’ll just have that transcribed, if you’d wait a few minutes, and then perhaps you could read and sign it for us.’

At 9 a.m., Maggs was trying to read, out in the garden, her mobile close beside her. Her mother had been astonished at her early rising. ‘But it’s Sunday!’ she’d protested. ‘You never get up before eleven on a Sunday, unless Drew calls you out.’

‘I’m going out,’ Maggs explained. ‘I hope.’ She gave her mobile a little shake as if to ensure it was still working. ‘But not with Drew.’

Her mother sighed. ‘Oh,
I
see. Why do girls
still
wait for the man to make the call? Hasn’t feminism made any headway at all?’

‘Because,’ Maggs explained tightly, ‘you have to be sure he wants to go out with you. And that’s the only way to do it. If I called him and persuaded him to do something he didn’t really 
want to, I’d regret it later. Some things are best left the way they are.’

‘Well it shouldn’t have to be so complicated. And one-sided. It all seems ridiculously unfair to me.’

The phone beeped and Maggs’s whole demeanour changed. She read the message in silence.

‘Well?’ her mother demanded.

‘I’m not sure,’ Maggs frowned. ‘I think I’m supposed to wait for further developments or something. He says he’s busy.’

‘You could go back to bed,’ her mother suggested.

But Maggs remained in the garden, leaving her mother to get on with her regular Sunday routine of seeing to all the house plants. There were at least a hundred, on every windowsill and several other surfaces, and they all needed their dead leaves removing, or their aphids destroying, or a new pot, as well as a good drink of enriched water. It all took well over an hour.

The phone warbled before she quite reached the point of despair. Den’s voice came strongly down the airwaves as if he was standing next to her. ‘Seaside then,’ he said. ‘Is your cozzie packed?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll be there just after eleven.’

‘You’re sure you can find it?’ Had she even given him her address, she wondered?

‘Escott Way, Bradbourne, right? You told me when we were in the pub.’

‘Did I? I’ll wait outside for you. Number 42.’

‘I’m on my way.’

They went to Weston-super-Mare and spent hours on the pier, then paddled, and sunbathed and talked and walked. They held hands, and then kissed and cuddled on the grey sand, oblivious of the families and couples and ice cream sellers all around them.

They spoke seriously about global warming and pollution and the future of the planet. They giggled over anecdotes concerning their mothers and the folly parents are prone to. They did not mention funerals or murders. Den showed her his trick of bending his legs until his feet were on his shoulders. She showed him her doublejointed thumbs. He built her a castle of stones and shells, which she decorated lavishly with seaweed.

They ate scampi and chips at a kiosk and then drank Bass in a nearby pub. He drove her home at ten, each of them wondering how time could possibly pass so quickly.

‘Tomorrow the police will have to interview 
you about Penn Strabinski,’ he said regretfully as they sat in the car outside her house. ‘It won’t be me – I’m too far away.’

‘Don’t talk about that,’ she flashed. ‘Don’t spoil the day.’

‘Sorry.’ He stroked her cheek wistfully. ‘I’ll phone you. Early. You and Drew.’

‘Fine,’ she nodded, before sinking into one last long goodnight kiss.

Monday was different in countless ways. Maggs looked at Drew, the burial field, the sparse settlement that was North Staverton, with completely new eyes.

‘Right,’ she said, as soon as she was in the office. ‘This is the first day of the rest of our lives. You know that, don’t you?’ She regarded Drew sternly. ‘We need to sort this Penn Strabinski business out, once and for all. It’s getting in the way. It’s making Den depressed.’

‘And we can’t have that, can we?’ Drew tried to keep his tone light. ‘So how are we going to do it, then?’

‘He’s going to call this morning. We’ll have to be interviewed again.’

‘Obviously, now they’ve got the post-mortem results.’

Den’s call came at nine-thirty, and Drew handed the receiver to Maggs. She conversed for
ten minutes, while Drew diplomatically removed himself to the field. She came to find him, eyes sparkling.

‘Listen to this!’ she cried. ‘They want to interview us both again, you first, then me. Den and his boss, Danny, are coming up here later on …’

Drew interrupted impatiently. ‘Maggs, there’s work to do here. Look at all these letters. We’ve got to send accounts out for last week, and another reminder for the Grants. I’m officiating at the crem tomorrow, in case you’ve forgotten. I should really have gone to see the family on Friday. I’ll have to go today.’

‘You mean you forgot them until now,’ she accused.

‘Sort of,’ he admitted. ‘They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

‘I seem to remember you grumbling about vicars who left it till the last minute,’ she said.

‘OK, OK. Anyway, I’ll go this morning. You’ll have to hold the fort here.’

‘Fine, so long as you’re back by twelve. It’ll all fit perfectly well, don’t fuss. Although I
might
have to make a few phone calls. Drew – you realise how seriously involved we are with the police case, don’t you? You don’t seem to have taken it on board.’

He leant towards her in mock earnestness.
‘Maggs, believe me, I am deeply serious about it. But I’m even
more
serious about my livelihood here. I know I can be of no further help to the police, and I don’t intend to make any more attempts to solve the case single-handedly without them.’