by J M Gregson
One prominent member was resolutely silent through the last hour of the meeting. As far as he was concerned, the important matters had been dealt with early in the evening and the important votes had been taken then. The meeting would have been concluded by now, if it had had a brisker and more ruthless person in the chair. Normally this member would have been patient, knowing from long experience that the more you tried to hasten things on in Council meetings, the more ponderous they seemed to become. Parkinson’s law, the law of diminishing returns, and various other axioms were easily witnessed in local government, but Sod’s law still seemed the most powerful one of all.
Especially, it seemed, when you had urgent business elsewhere.
He tried to avoid looking at his watch as the meeting wound its interminable way through Any Other Business. Had these buggers no homes to go to? Had they no life outside this place?
This last was the wrong question to ask of himself. It made him uncomfortably aware that a year ago people might have been asking the same question about him. Hopefully, indeed, most of them still did, for the thing that had brought his life alive could not be made public. Not yet awhile, anyway, she had said; not until he had sorted out her life for her and made things regular. Had that been allowed to happen, he would have been only too proud to announce their partnership to the world.
Whereas now, he thought bleakly, it must be kept secret forever.
He fretted anew as the Chairman dealt ponderously with a question about refuse collection in the new estate of houses in Tupsley. The Chair was too patient with trivia that should be referred to sub-committees. It seemed to be almost a principle of their operations that meetings had to be prolonged until after ten thirty, whether there were real items to discuss or not. Things would be conducted altogether more briskly when he was in charge. If he ever was.
He became suddenly aware that the Chair was referring to him by name. He gathered his resources, forced his racing brain into the strait-jacket of concentration, and referred the questioner to the decision of the Housing Sub-committee in their February meeting, which had been confirmed by the March meeting of the full Council. This stilled discussion, because he was the only one who knew clearly what he was talking about. Thank heavens for his memory, which had not let him down, even in this crisis. The Chair thanked him, gratefully and elaborately. Get on with it, you orotund old windbag.
It was ten to eleven before he had made his hasty farewells to his colleagues and moved away into the darker world outside. It was still warm on this August evening, but he wore his long winter coat and a hat, as he had not done for months. He did not
know why he had chosen to wear them; perhaps he thought they were some sort of disguise, that if he enveloped himself in clothes he would be less recognisable. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that a man muffled secretly to the eyes had moved through these ancient streets, he was sure. The attempt at a grim humour failed to console him.
The streets in the oldest area of the city were narrower and quieter than the ones he had left. He was thankful to see that Rosamund Street was completely deserted as he turned into it. Yet the silence and the quiet made him also more nervous. He was relieved to hear the faint sound of a television set announcing ITV’s news at eleven o’clock from behind one of the curtained Georgian windows beside him.
The high old houses on each side seemed to tower away from him, leaving only a ribbon of starless sky above him. The lamps which had been retained from Victorian times in this preservation area were picturesque, but they threw only minimal light upon the pavement he trod, with pools of darkness between them which more garish modern neon lights would not have allowed.
He should not be moving like a felon through these streets he helped to administer and control, he told himself. Yet he still felt obscurely that he was less likely to be recognised if he showed the minimum amount of flesh, so he shrunk his neck more deeply into his collar, and thrust his sweating hands deep into the pockets of his winter coat. He found the remnants of a packet of cough sweets there: it must be five months at least since he had last worn this coat.
It was a short street, but it seemed to take him a long time to reach the familiar entrance, to turn with only the slightest hesitation down the darkened steps that led to the door of 17a. He felt more secure in the pool of deep darkness at the bottom of the steps. He had got here without anyone noticing him or following him, he was sure of that. He listened for a moment, becoming conscious in that instant of how fast his heart was beating.
Nothing. No sound of footsteps, ringing or furtive, on the street above him. For an instant of blind, consuming panic, he thought he had lost the key. Then his fingers closed upon it at the bottom of his trouser pocket. In a few moments, he would be inside, would be able to remove all signs of himself from the flat, to wipe out any trace that he had ever been there.
It was what he had come for. What he knew he must do. What he had to do, to preserve the life he had built up for himself over fifteen years and more. And yet he felt his treachery as his trembling hands produced the key. He had come here so often with his heart full of love and his mind full of excitement. And now he was coming stealthily at night, with a heart like lead and an ignoble wish to remove all vestiges of himself from the place.
He knew it had to be done. It was what she would have urged him to do, his dear, dead, disastrous girl. His trembling fingers tried once, twice, three times to find the invisible socket of the lock. The key slid home and he turned it.
Four
On the morning after the Hereford murder, Lambert read what the press had to say of it over his breakfast. If you were going to be involved in a case, as he now knew he was, it was as well to know how the newspapers were treating it. And in due course, unless the culprit was arrested quickly, treating you.
The reporters didn’t know yet about the nature of the Cathedral killing: they were still presuming that the killer was the Sacristan and smacking their journalistic lips with relish. THE SACRISTAN STRIKES SOUTH trumpeted the alliterative Express in two-inch-high headlines. The text beneath them informed a startled nation that, “Women all over the South West of England were last night taking extra care to lock and bolt their doors and windows against the maniac now universally known as the Sacristan. This latest and most daring of his killings has moved the goalposts of terror dramatically further south. Where his previous four killings had been confined to women in the quiet country area around Shrewsbury, the Sacristan has now invaded the ancient city of Hereford. And there he has deposited the body of the latest and youngest of his victims in the medieval Cathedral, at the throbbing heart of that city.
“As shown in our artist’s impression above, the body was left as a gesture of contempt upon the very steps of the altar of the beautiful seven-centuries-old Lady Chapel. No one knows yet when or where this innocent girl died. It seems probable that she was strangled within the sacred walls of the Cathedral itself. Police said last night that the body had been identified, but they have not yet released the details.”
There was much more in the same vein, with some ingenious speculation about the sexual assaults committed on the previous four victims, which allowed the writer to hint that this latest victim had also been the victim of some awful sexual violation. The dress of the girl in the artist’s impression which had been superimposed upon the photograph of the Lady Chapel was in enough disarray to reveal a shapely thigh, to support the implication that this girl had suffered rape at least before she died.
The article, which carried the byline From our local correspondent in Hereford, Joseph Roper, concluded with an exhortation to the police from a vehement Herefordshire housewife: “For God’s sake catch this maniac quickly. We cannot sleep safely in our beds, yet nothing seems to be happening. The police sit on their backsides and do nothing, and every week another innocent woman is killed.”
The Times report was more sober, but its analysis of police bafflement was no less trenchant and rather more c
ogent. All the papers took the opportunity to exploit the photogenic possibilities of the Cathedral, with many expert shots of the massive central tower and a couple of stunning colour photographs of the Lady Chapel, with its brilliant stained glass backdrop to the tragedy. The Express was the only daily to carry an artist’s impression of the body itself, but the Mirror had an aerial view of the Cathedral and its immediate surroundings, with a cross marking the spot where the body had been found.
Christine Lambert came and looked at the pictures over her husband’s shoulder. “Don’t they just love a maniac?” she said. “Especially in August when they are no politicians to get their knives into. This story could run and run.”
“It could when they find out this morning that there isn’t just one maniac, but two,”
said her husband drily, looking at his watch and turning with relief to the cricket page of his Times.
He felt his wife’s hands tighten as they rested lightly on his shoulders. “Are you saying this latest killing isn’t by this — this Sacristan?”
“I’m saying exactly that, I’m afraid, love.” He went briefly through the reasons why the Hereford killing could not be by the same man who had perpetrated the four previous killings around Shrewsbury, as though he was reiterating them to convince himself as well as his wife. “The Chief Constable will be announcing that the Cathedral murder isn’t the work of the Sacristan to the media at ten o’clock this morning.”
“So you have a — a Copycat Killer.” She pronounced the phrase carefully, giving it capital letters, for it felt to her not a general phrase but a piece of the police jargon she had always eschewed in the days when her husband’s preoccupation with his job had seemed to threaten their marriage.
He smiled at the way she produced the phrase. “Looks like it. On our patch, too.”
The last words sounded like a warning in her ears. “But it won’t be your pigeon, will it, John? Surely the Regional Crime Squad will be handling it.” Again she produced the routine title with diffidence, as if any knowledge of police procedures or organisation would be seen as a weakness in her.
“We’ll liaise, of course. And if this one kills again, it will no doubt pass to them. But they’ve got their hands full at the moment, not least with this Sacristan man, who will certainly kill again if he’s not caught quickly. The decision last night was that the Hereford Cathedral killing would be treated as a routine suspicious death in our area. Douglas Gibson will announce to the media this morning that I’m now officially in charge of the case.”
He tried — unsuccessfully, in Christine’s view — not to sound elated by the fact.
***
Lambert took Bert Hook with him and went back to Hereford Cathedral. They left the Superintendent’s old Vauxhall in the public car park and walked the five minutes to the Cathedral from there. As they crossed St Owen’s Street, they saw uniformed officers moving in and out of the long line of shops, questioning the owners about anything suspicious they might have seen on the evening when the girl died. The routine of the murder investigation, the boring but necessary legwork which the public rarely saw and scarcely considered, was under way. By the end of the day, the
routine would have thrown up its normal quota of suspicious individuals and suspicious incidents, all of which would have to be followed up on the chance that just one of them might give a genuine lead to this particular crime.
Hook went off to check entrances and exits and the general geography of the huge building and its environs, whilst Lambert went to a prearranged meeting with the Dean of the Cathedral. The cleric was younger than Lambert had expected — how many times did he find that nowadays? he thought to himself wryly — a brisk and cheerful man rather than the austere Trollopian figure Lambert realised he had half-expected. The Dean was anxious to be helpful and found it difficult to conceal an indecorous excitement about the melodrama of murder within these massive and ancient walls. John Lambert was not surprised at that: he was well used to the charnel-house glamour of this oldest and worst of all crimes.
“This is an awful thing, Superintendent,” the Dean said. “I shall not say like Lady Macbeth ‘Woe, alas, what in our house?’ though the press already seem to be doing so. It’s an awful thing to happen anywhere.”
“Indeed it is. And we don’t know for certain yet that it happened here, of course.”
The Dean raised his eyebrows above the blue, intelligent eyes. “You mean she might have been brought here after death?”
“It’s a possibility. We shall have to consider it. We shall need to find out if anyone saw a man bringing someone who looked drunk or distressed into the Cathedral on his arm.”
“Or her arm?” The Dean could not resist his amateur detective question. He then blushed incongruously at his temerity.
Lambert grinned. “Or her arm, as you rightly remind me. It would be easier for a man to bring a corpse into the Cathedral like that, for obvious physical reasons, but not impossible for a woman.”
“It would be easier still to kill your victim here in the Cathedral. In the Lady Chapel, in fact, where she was found.”
“Indeed it would. Especially if she didn’t suspect she was in danger and came here with her killer when the Cathedral was closed to normal visitors. That’s one of the things I wanted to check with you.”
The Dean frowned. “It’s complicated. Our last service is Evensong at five thirty. Once that is over, we begin to think about closing the Cathedral up for the evening. I’m afraid if you leave it open for very long after Evensong is over you get undesirables in.” He looked suddenly defensive, as if he were wary of displaying an unchristian attitude. “It’s all right encouraging sinners to come in and repent, but if they come in looking to remove your priceless silver that’s a different matter.” Then he grinned, refusing to be embarrassed at his practicality; a policeman more than anyone would surely see the logic of it.
“So we can say that by seven o’clock the Cathedral would normally be closed to visitors?”
“Normally, yes.”
“Would it be possible for anyone to come in as a normal entrant and simply stay behind until the building was shut up for the night?”
The Dean frowned, considering a possibility he had not thought of earlier, fascinated by this new and intriguing business of detection. “I think it would, yes. The verger or whoever is shutting up for the night does a quick tour of the Cathedral before the doors are shut, but it’s a big place, with lots of nooks and crannies. I’m sure someone who was determined not to be found could escape notice by hiding away in a side chapel or even just by moving behind one of our massive central pillars. If he was in the crypt, for instance, it’s quite possible that whoever was shutting up for the night would simply call a warning to that effect down the stairs, if he was in a hurry.” The Dean brightened with excitement at that thought. “And the crypt is right beneath the Lady Chapel, where the corpse was found on Thursday morning.”
“Let’s go and look at it now, then,” said Lambert, and the Dean stood up eagerly to accompany him.
With the removal of the body and the conclusion of the work of the SOCO team in the Lady Chapel, the barriers had been removed and the area was once again open to the public. A dozen or so people stood at the back of the chapel, whispering to each other and pointing to the spot where the body of Tamsin Rennie had been discovered on the previous morning. Detective and Dean stood for a few moments in front of the altar steps, then went down the stone staircase to the crypt below.
The August day was warm outside, but this oldest and most atmospheric place in the Cathedral was cold and a little damp. The only light in this below-ground section was artificial. Huge stone columns supported the massive weight of the cathedral above the crypt. “You see what I mean?” said the Dean in a breathy whisper. “Your killer could have hidden down here, either with a body or with his victim still alive, until the Cathedral above was locked and deserted. Then he could have gone back up the stairs and laid out t
he body on the Lady Altar where it was found the next morning.”
“He — or she — could have done just that. But we can’t assume that’s exactly what happened. It’s one possibility, that’s all.”
The Dean nodded. “If the killer hid down here — or even if he didn’t, for that matter —why didn’t he lay out the body down here? There’s an altar here to satisfy whatever warped parody of religious ceremony he had in mind.” He gestured towards the simple stone altar at the easternmost end of the crypt. “If, as you say, this man was a copycat killer, aping the crimes of the Sacristan, this cruder altar would be much nearer to the simple altar in the country church where that man left his last victim.”
“That’s a fair point,” said Lambert, much to his companion’s satisfaction. “There would have been less risk of the body being discovered quickly, and a smaller risk of the killer being seen with his victim. Perhaps he had always envisaged the tableau he set out for us on the steps of the Lady Altar. Perhaps it was important to his perverted sense of ritual that he set his woman victim upon the altar dedicated to the most famous woman in Christendom. Your question about the crypt will need to be answered in due course, but at the moment there’s no point in speculating too far. Tell me, if our killer got himself locked in with his victim, alive or dead at that point, could he have got himself out of the Cathedral easily after he’d set out the body as he wanted to on the Lady Chapel altar?”
The Deacon looked suitably shamefaced. “Yes. Even on a normal evening, he could probably have got out. Most of the old doors at the smaller entrances to the Cathedral are very substantial, but they bolt from the inside. He could have drawn back the bolts and made his escape, I’m sure, especially if he knew the Cathedral well or had explored the possibilities in advance. But I’m afraid I’ve just remembered something which makes the question academic.”
“And what is that?”
“We have the Three Choirs Festival here next week. There was a rehearsal on Wednesday night, in the nave of the Cathedral. There were about two hundred people in the place.”
