Page 103 of Guilty Mothers
‘Of course. If you give me a minute, I’ll go get?—’
‘That’s okay. If you take us to her, we can get out of your way. We won’t keep her for long.’
Kim heard Bryant curse under his breath as the woman led the way.
He would have preferred to question Jenna away from the dead, and she would have preferred him to have performed a better magic trick, but hey ho, such was life.
They followed the woman along a corridor with display rooms on either side: coffins, flower arrangements and cards. They passed a couple of small offices before reaching a set of stairs that led to the lower level. Kim could imagine the expletives running through Bryant’s head.
The woman tapped lightly on a door before opening it. Kim could already smell the formalin from the embalming process.
Jenna Bond was standing to the right of a trolley, leaning over the body of a woman who looked to have been in her eighties. The grey hair had been washed, dried and brushed. Kim could see immediately that she had not been subject to a forensic post-mortem, so no effort would be needed to hide the incisions that would have stretched from the neck up to behind the ears. Incisions for a routine post-mortem were on the chest only and easily covered by clothing.
‘Sorry to visit you at work, Jenna, but we have a couple of follow-up questions.’
‘Shoot,’ she said. ‘But I can’t stop working. It’s a busy day.’
‘We’re not sure you were completely honest about your reasons for leaving the pageant circuit.’
Jenna’s hand stilled above the aged face. Kim could see that she was applying theatrical style make-up as a first layer. She knew that the skin turned many shades during the early stages of decomposition and the thicker, waxier substance covered the blemishes better.
‘I haven’t lied about anything,’ she said.
Technically not, but her exit from the circuit had not been as drama free as she’d had them believe.
‘There were rumours that you actually struck one of the girls.’
‘Rumours,’ she said with a level of conviction not befitting a false allegation, although the passion in that one word caused her to rub harder on the woman’s lower jaw. The lips didn’t move, indicating they had likely been stitched closed to avoid the mouth gaping open during viewing.
‘Gossip normally starts somewhere,’ Kim said, pulling her eyes away, waiting to hear Jenna’s account of the story.
‘It was nothing.’
‘It was clearly something, so we’d like to know about it.’
‘I was looking for something, and Lottie accused me of stealing. I was doing no such thing. I was the one always looking after other people’s stuff. I would never have stolen from them. Lottie was screaming thief in my face, and I pushed her to shut her up. That’s all.’
Lottie, the child of Sally-Ann, the latest woman to lose her life.
Kim took a minute to unpack what she’d just been told as Jenna reached for a tray of normal cosmetics to build the next coat of make-up. She pictured the scene: a hotel room, mothers taking their daughters to and from the stage. Leaving all their belongings in a safe place while they performed, ready to come back and change for the next category.
Knowing how much some of these moms spent on pageants, could she have been tempted by all those unattended handbags and purses while earning a pittance wrangling kids for hair and make-up all day?
Kim didn’t want to brand her a thief, but the opportunity had been there.
‘So, what happened next?’
‘Oh, Lottie went off crying and brought back a whole army of mothers demanding to know about the red mark on her face.’
‘From a push?’ Kim queried.
‘I might have accidentally caught her chin or something as I moved her out of the way. Trust me, that’s nothing to how some of those moms push their kids around.’
Jenna’s story was becoming less plausible by the second, and Kim questioned her own reticence at not branding her a thief.
‘And?’
‘I denied it of course. I was completely innocent. They checked their purses, and Andrea claimed she had a ten-pound note missing. Swore it was her emergency tenner and it had a small pen mark on it.’