Deaths final sting, p.1
Death’s Final Sting, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Also by Tracy Buchanan
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgements
Venom in the Blood
About the Author
About Embla Books
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by
Bonnier Books UK Limited
4th Floor, Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square, London, WC1B 4DA
Owned by Bonnier Books
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden
Copyright © Tracy Buchanan, 2024
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The right of Tracy Buchanan to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781471415173
This eBook is created using Atomik ePublisher.
Embla Books is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK.
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
Also by Tracy Buchanan
Dr Vanessa Marwood Crime Thrillers
1. Venom in the Blood
2. Death’s Final Sting
3. Moth to the Flames
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To my agent Caroline, my enduring anchor in an ever-changing literary landscape
Prologue
I’ve seen many unusual things over the past few years, but the item I’m staring at right now takes the crown. It is grotesque. Beautifully grotesque. It astounds me anyone would think I’d want a hair clip made from a live beetle as a gift.
It’s cradled in an ornate box, the beetle’s shell lavishly adorned with tiny green jewels. The poor creature is tethered to the hair clip by a fine golden chain. Surrounding the beetle are veined fragments of what look like wings, iridescent green and yellow.
The beetle twitches its legs, yearning for freedom.
Poor darling thing.
I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror. ‘Poor darling thing,’ I tell myself because am I not similar to this beetle, tethered by a golden chain to the industry that discovered me, is devoted to me … and now devours me?
Honestly? I don’t really know what I am beneath the jewels and the fame. Am I the Oscar-winning actress my fans see? A cash cow my agent and film studio see? The vulnerable daughter and sister that my family see?
I move my fingers down my cheek, to my neck and over my collarbone as I watch myself in the reflection. I definitely feel like I am a thing to be pawed, to be ravished, to be adorned like this insect. The truth is, I don’t even feel human anymore, skin peeled away layer by layer. Less Cordelia, more a nameless entity that exists to be admired and stroked.
I read an article yesterday about this condition called scleroderma, where sufferers slowly turn to stone, calcifying. I’ve been feeling like that lately. Numb. Still. A statue. When I told my mother how I felt, she said I needed a break from everything. It felt like a hallelujah moment. She meant a literal break, of course, like the one I took last year to Koh Samui. A physical removal from New York. But I realised it doesn’t need to be as drastic as that. I just need a break from all the distorted images I see of myself. The fact is, my phone has become a house of mirrors with versions of myself constantly thrown back at me, pushing me off course. I don’t need to go on holiday. I simply need to put my phone away.
So here I am, about to begin my digital detox. But before I do, one last picture for him. I need him to know this isn’t his fault. That he is one of the few who truly see the real me. It’ll be just two weeks and I’ll be back to him again.
I go to take a selfie but realise how ridiculous I look, all pouty-lipped and wide-eyed. I need it to mean something. To enamour him so much, his beautiful eyes won’t stray.
So I return my gaze to my little friend, this beautiful beetle. I decide to let him see both of us, and perhaps he will even understand what I am telling him. About myself, my life. And I know it will capture his attention, the sight of such a rarity attached to my hair. One picture, then I’ll find a way to free the beetle from this prison. Maybe it can be my little companion over the coming two weeks?
I carefully remove the hair clip from the box, feeling the beetle’s legs twitch against my fingers. It makes me think of summers in the park behind our house, my brother bringing me bugs as gifts as my mother laughed.
‘Shhh,’ I whisper to the beetle. ‘You’ll be free soon, I promise.’
It stills, as though it understands.
No, as though she understands. I decide she must be a girl, like me. What shall I name her? Mabel, after my grandmother, another actress, another time. She would have understood what I’m going through.
I lift the hair clip to my fringe and gently slide it in. I have to confess, it looks rather beautiful against my red hair. I press it down. Click. The cool metal of the hair clip scratches against my scalp and I feel a pinch, subtle but sharp. I wince slightly. Beetles can’t bite, can they? I ought to remove it, but all I need is a quick photo. I hold my phone out, ready to capture this bizarre blend of horror and vanity in a single frame. Mona Lisa smile. Alluring eyes.
Click.
Change position.
Click. Click.
As I turn, the room blurs at the edges, a strange haze clouding my vision. The pain in my scalp increases, like a clawed hand is tightening its grip over my head.
Something’s not right.
My own hand darts up, my fingers clawing at the clip, but it clings to me, an unwelcome parasite. My breath shortens, each inhale a labour, each exhale a plea for help that won’t come. The room spins, my silk sheets crumpling under clenched fists as a cold dread spreads through my veins.
The beetle. Is the beetle doing this?
A silent scream builds in my throat, my muscles seizing. The world fades to a pinpoint of light, as elusive as the fame that hollowed me out. My eyes, growing heavy, fixate on the ceiling above, where shadows dance in a mocking waltz.
Darkness edges in, curtains closing, slowly slowly until …
Nothing.
Chapter 1
Dr Vanessa Marwood was a portrait of concentration as she walked around her Manhattan lab, moving seamlessly from microscope to specimen trays, then back again. She adjusted the microscope, bringing one of the flies she’d reared from larvae into sharp focus. As she’d suspected, it was Musca domestica, the common house fly which thrived in New York’s urban sprawl. And yet the body the larvae had been feeding on – Jacob Rowland, a chef in his thirties – had been discovered by hikers three hours from the city in a secluded woodland area of the Catskill Mountains.
So how had these city-dwelling larvae found themselves in the rural sprawl of the Catskills? Vanessa’s guess was this man had died in the city, the larvae that had hatched from the eggs placed on him hitching a ride as he was moved to the mountains. This tied into the detective’s theory that the man had been killed in the apartment he shared with his partner. The killer? Maybe the same tear-drenched man who’d told the gathered press his partner must have died while trekking in the mountains. If that was the case then the story told by the two men’s smiling photos on social media was a fake one.
But then weren’t most photos a study in selective memory? They captured moments not as they were, but as we wished them to be, allowing us to edit out the undesirable, the mundane and the painful.
Vanessa caught sight of the one photo she had in her lab. It was of her with her brother, Vincent, and their parents, taken at an event at the butterfly farm where her father had worked. Vincent was just two in it, Vanessa five, both full of smiles. She thinks those smiles were genuine, both unaware that their family would be torn apart by their mother walking out two years later.
Vanessa focused on her mother’s smile. Was the seed o f dissatisfaction with family life that drove her to leave already sprouting? Not that Vanessa had ever really understood why she left. And what about her father? Had he sensed his wife’s disquiet?
She returned her gaze to Vincent’s infectious smile, a glimpse of the toddler he once was. Another story scrubbed away by truth down the line. Or maybe the truth was already there in that chubby toddler face. Vincent said it himself, that there was darkness within him, dragged out by a series of events – from their mother walking out, to the life he experienced on the streets. A darkness that had led him to HMP Frankland in Durham, UK.
Vanessa imagined her brother there now. As she did, she felt that familiar need to see him. She’d spent the first few weeks after her arrival in New York six months ago trying to tamp down that yearning. She’d grow angry, telling herself she needed to stop dwelling on a past version of her brother that wasn’t real. But now she accepted the yearning. He would always be her little brother, despite what he had done. And maybe part of it was being in a new city, away from familiar haunts and old friends. There was a sense of loneliness she hadn’t felt as much in the UK, and that made her crave familiarity, even if that was in the form of her serial killer brother.
She shook her head. Damn, she was getting sentimental. Maybe it was six months in the company of Americans, so quick to express and acknowledge their emotions. The first night she’d met her new colleagues from NovaScope Forensics, she’d felt ambushed by their desire for her story, and to share theirs, too. It was all well-meaning. They wanted – needed – to show her they cared. That they were there for her after the horrors she’d been through. Vanessa had hoped the move to New York would offer a clean break, but she’d been naïve. It had been impossible to escape the news of her brother’s killings back in the UK – the whole sordid story of the Cobweb Killer as salacious across the pond as it was back home. She must have come across as a typical reserved Brit in those early days, all polite smiles while batting away anything that got close to being a personal question.
Thank God she had her work. A chance to muffle those horrors with microscopes and data and larvae. Being in a city that crackled with a never-sleeping sense of urgency helped, too … initially, anyway. But lately, she’d felt something buzzing inside her head, like a queen bee trying to find her way out of her hive. Her American colleagues would no doubt tell her to get therapy, to work it through and get it out. But she didn’t need therapy to know what was wrong. It was sitting there before her, right now, in that picture of her family. One dead. One imprisoned. And her mother, back in the UK, not one word for so many years and, worst of all, nothing since Vincent’s arrest. That irrational – as she saw it – yearning to pull the broken pieces of that family together seemed to grow louder and louder each day.
As she considered this, her new boss and the co-founder of NovaScope Forensics, Dr Bronagh Thompson, stormed into the lab with an energetic stride, her unruly brown hair falling haphazardly around her face. Her well-worn, stained lab coat smelled of the vapes she sneaked puffs from when she thought nobody was looking. She always seemed so chaotic and messy. If it weren’t for her phenomenal reputation in digital forensics, Vanessa wouldn’t be so tolerant of her interruptions and disorganisation. Plus, she made damn good margaritas.
‘Just Tuesday and we’ve already got a big one,’ Bronagh announced with a sigh. She slid a crime scene photo across the surface. It depicted the lifeless body of a woman, face marred with decay and maggots, her faded red hair a shroud around her delicate features.
‘It’s Cordelia Montgomery,’ Bronagh said. ‘They found her an hour ago.’
Vanessa raised an eyebrow in surprise. Cordelia Montgomery was an actress in her twenties known for her Oscar-winning performances. ‘How awful,’ she said. ‘She is – was – so talented.’
‘I know, such a waste. See this?’ Bronagh said, tapping her finger on the hair clip the actress was wearing.
Vanessa picked the photo up to get a better look. The hair clip was a masterpiece of design, embellished with shimmering gemstones, delicate engravings … and what looked very much like a real beetle.
‘Wow,’ Vanessa said.
‘Knew you’d love it.’
For a moment, Vanessa was transported back in time to the opulent Victorian parlours she had read about. She thought of the living beetle jewellery that was so popular in that era, a macabre trend that still remained in some parts of the world, where live insects were worn as accessories.
‘The beetle’s still alive, too,’ Bronagh added.
The familiar excitement that came with working on a fascinating case started building in Vanessa’s chest. Would it be intense enough to hold that buzzing bee at bay?
‘I’m heading to the crime scene now,’ Bronagh said. ‘You coming?’
‘Do you really need to ask me that? Of course I’m coming.’
‘Bring your coat, it’s started to snow again.’
Vanessa grabbed her kitbag and her coat and strode out of her lab after Bronagh, eager to unravel the enigmatic web of secrets that surrounded this actress’s untimely demise.
Chapter 2
The opulent decor of Cordelia Montgomery’s apartment contrasted starkly with the odour of decay that dominated the air. Vanessa’s nostrils twitched beneath her mask. It was a scent she’d encountered more times than she cared to count, but each whiff still brought with it a wave of sorrow. The body she was about to see had until recently lived, breathed, loved. Such a promising young life cut short. An actress in the prime of youth, now food for insects. Vanessa made sure she took a moment to let that sink in before finally stepping into the vast bedroom.
‘Harris,’ Bronagh said, approaching a short, muscular man in his fifties with a bald head and an impressive black moustache. ‘Lieutenant Haworth got you on this one, then?’
‘You know how it is,’ he said. ‘If you’re up, you’ve got it.’
‘Oh come on, don’t be bashful now,’ Bronagh said. ‘You’re one of the most seasoned detectives they’ve got. Williams had to have you on this.’
‘By seasoned, she means old,’ the detective said, giving Vanessa a wry smile. ‘You gonna introduce us?’
‘This is Detective Harris,’ Bronagh said to Vanessa. ‘Harris, this is our forensic entomologist, Dr Vanessa Marwood.’
‘Good to meet you, Doc,’ Harris said to her. ‘Brace yourselves. She’s been in there a while.’ He stepped out of the way of the inner cordon and Vanessa walked forward, the plastic layers of her protective coveralls rubbing together.
It was a beautiful bedroom, like the entire apartment, with high ceilings crowned with intricately carved mouldings and pale pink walls. Vanessa’s eyes settled on the minor details: a messy stack of magazines and romance novels on the bedside table; a rose-gold board pinned with Polaroids of friends, festival tickets and inspirational quotes. Next to the bed was a framed photo of the actress, devoid of all glamour, laughing with an older woman – her mother, Vanessa assumed. Relics of a happier time, now clashing violently with the grim reality of the actress’s lifeless form, which lay on the large queen-size bed before them.
Cordelia Montgomery. Hollywood darling with a face made to adorn magazine covers. But now that face was twisted into a grimace, the flesh distorted by time and decay. Even from a few metres away, Vanessa could see a swarming mass of larvae – or maggots as they were more commonly known – clustered at the corners of the young woman’s mouth. They wriggled over one another, microcosms of insatiable hunger in the circle of life and death.
Vanessa’s eyes travelled up to the actress’s distinctive red hair. She remembered thinking how stunning the colour was when she’d watched one of Cordelia’s films the year before; a dark, aesthetic film about the competitive world of art galleries. The actress’s portrayal of a working-class Irish artist had won her an Oscar for best supporting actress. Now, those famous locks were matted and discoloured by decomposition fluids and insect activity.
