Page 5

‘Okay, I didn’t have that on my bingo card,’ Stacey said, once the boss had left the room after updating them.

Kim was now on her way back to the crime scene, having left strict instructions to be informed once the doctor had examined Katie Hawne.

‘I mean, surely there’s got to be something wrong to kill your own mother,’ Penn said, sitting back in his seat. He let out a long breath as his eyes glazed over for just a few seconds. He and his brother, Jasper, had been forced to face the loss of their mother not so long ago, and Stacey knew the woman had been very much loved by both her sons.

‘There are many examples going way back,’ Stacey offered. ‘Cleopatra the third of Egypt was assassinated in 101 BC by order of her son. In 2005, an eighteen-year-old girl in Memphis stabbed her mom fifty times. Not everybody had the cookie-cutter childhood with a warm and nurturing mother.’

‘But even so,’ he said, bringing himself back into the room. ‘Didn’t Freud have a lot to say on the subject?’

‘He was mother obsessed though, wasn’t he?’ Stacey asked.

‘I think he believed in a pre-Oedipal phase existence which determines mother/daughter relationships, made up of ambivalent feelings between love and hate from the girl to her mother, which mostly culminates in hatred.’

‘Okay, Wikipenn, translated that means?’

‘He’s kind of saying that there’s a period of time before the Oedipus complex, between the ages of three to five, when attachment to the mother predominates in both sexes. It’s also generally felt that two major contributors to difficult relationships between mother and daughter are jealousy and expectation.’

‘Isn’t there a new term called “mother-blaming”?’ Stacey asked, remembering something she’d read recently. ‘Where every problem is blamed on something the mother did or didn’t do during childhood?’

Penn shrugged. ‘Not sure we’re the right folks to be talking about this, Stace.’

Yeah, Stacey was with him on that one. She knew Penn had been close to his mother and that they’d shared a special bond through their devotion to Jasper. In her own case, there had never been a time in her life when Stacey had not been able to count on her mom. The woman had always represented comfort and safety, with a good measure of honesty. When Stacey made a mistake, her mom had no qualms in calling her out. As she had done when Stacey had finally confided all the events surrounding her ordeal with Terence Birch.

She had not been gentle in criticising Stacey’s actions, but her anger had soon given way to concern and support.

Stacey still experienced the occasional cringe when she remembered the damage she’d done to the most important people in her life by not trusting them with the truth. But everything was repairing slowly and surely, and things were now approaching normality.

She had taken the boss’s advice and contacted Charlotte Danks, who had also been stalked by Birch. They had met a few times, and she had experienced great relief and healing talking to someone who completely understood the level of sheer powerlessness he’d made them feel. It was after their third meeting that both of them realised that they were now keeping him alive by talking about him, and that it was time to move on with their lives.

And part of that included bringing her A game back to work.

She refreshed the system to find out if there was any progress on the incident at the lake. That would probably be their next major case, now it looked as though the brutal murder of Sheryl Hawne had already been solved.