Pain of Death by Adam Creed

her intently as she sits back down, untroubled. Together, they look at the door as it opens. A tall, elegant man enters, wearing a finely tailored suit with a high-collared , open-neck shirt. He is about as smooth as the legal profession gets.
    ‘Inspector, this is …’
    ‘Yes, I know. Jasper Renwick. Come on, Sergeant, we’re going,’ says Staffe.
    ‘Don’t you want to search my home?’
    Staffe approaches Crawford. In heels, she would be almost as tall as him. He hisses, ‘I will nail you for this. The law is a sword, not a shield.’
    ‘What murderous metaphors you choose, Mr Wagstaffe. I’ll see you in court – if you wish to waste police time.’
    On the way out, Staffe notices how many books Lesley Crawford has, in cases lining the hallway, all the way to the kitchen at the back of the house, and he wonders what madnesses people might become capable of when they spend their lives drowning in words.
    As they drive away, he says, ‘She wants front pages out of this. Well, she’ll get nothing from us.’
    ‘Jasper Renwick, he’s quite famous, isn’t he?’
    ‘He’s a prick who’d do anything to get on television.’
    ‘But he’s good.’
    ‘We won’t give him the chance. He wants us to go after Breath of Life. So we won’t.’
    Pulford says, ‘Because it’s the individual we need to get.’
    ‘Exactly. Breath of Life just collates the publicity. We can’t put an organisation, a letterheading, in the dock. It’s not even a charity.’
    Staffe’s telephone rings. The screen says ‘Josie.’
    He answers and, immediately, Staffe can tell she is upset. ‘What’s happened?’
    ‘Kerry Degg has been taken into theatre. Twenty minutes ago.’
    Staffe knows that Lesley Crawford wouldn’t bat an eye, would quite possibly draw her thin lips into a smile.
    *
    Kerry’s face is all he can see of her as a surgeon works intently. From the look on the nurses’ faces, Staffe concludes it is a forlorn matter.
    A man in a suit, masked and gloved, sidles to Staffe, says, ‘The prospects are poor.’
    Staffe looks at Kerry, focuses on her eyes, hoping they will flicker, might impart some clue. He will find the killer, anyway. Won’t he? It seems to him that something moves. And her lips – they seem to have parted. He thinks it the slightest semblance of a smile.
    A high-pitched, electronic whine comes from beside the anaesthetist. He moves into action, putting an oxygen feed over Kerry’s face, and Staffe closes his eyes. The man in the suit says something that Staffe doesn’t hear. He feels something leave the room, pictures Lori Dos Passos beguiling her audience with movement and voice, flesh and life.
     

Seven

    The press are having a field day with the Kerry Degg story. Baby Grace is in a critical but stable condition. Sean, by her bedside, has been staring transfixed at his daughter ever since the nurses told him that his wife had passed away. He shed not a single tear, which made Staffe think that, if Sean did crack, he would break altogether.
    The red-tops have somehow acquired a picture of Sean by Grace’s bed, but the editors haven’t dared to come down one way or the other on the subject of Lesley Crawford: devil or do-gooder. It doesn’t help her cause that, despite the fact that she is the signatory for Breath of Life, she looks so calm and assured; nor that she is a childless spinster; nor that Jasper Renwick, smoothest of all the slippery lawyers in London town, has kept the law from her door.
    The News dared to say, in its editorial, that no matter what you think of Vernon Short’s upcoming private member’s bill, the saving of one life – if you accept that is what it was at the time of Kerry Degg’s abduction – can never justify the taking of another. Conversely, though expressed with the lightest of touches, the Post said that an innocent was saved and that nobody could ever call Kerry Degg innocent. They carry a picture of her two children with their foster parents, John