The Sting of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

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. 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