An Unsuitable Death

by J M Gregson

  “And I’ve already told you that I know nothing about that.”

  “You have. We shall need to find out the facts, in due course, though. It may well

  prove to have something to do with her death.”

  Jane King’s shoulders shrugged beneath the silk blouse. She seemed to be at pains to indicate that the matter was of supreme indifference to her. “I’ve no idea where her money came from.”

  “Did she pay her rent by cheque?”

  Her eyes narrowed and she said, “I can’t remember at the moment. I have seven different sources of rent in this house, you know.” Lambert wondered if she was calculating the odds of discovery; they could find out if the cheques had passed through her bank account, if she became a suspect at a later stage. But he couldn’t see why that should happen. Eventually she said, “Once or twice in the early days she gave me a cheque. In the last few months, it’s always been in cash.”

  “New notes or used ones?”

  “I really can’t remember. Used ones, I think. In tens and twenties.”

  Precise that, for someone who couldn’t remember. “Thank you. Can you recall any regular visitors to that basement flat in the last few weeks? I needn’t stress the importance of this: it’s obvious we shall need to investigate anyone who was in regular contact with Tamsin, now that she’s become a murder victim.”

  She thought hard for a moment, then shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can see the importance of the question. But one of the things my tenants pay for is their privacy. The kind of woman who watches their every move from behind lace curtains wouldn’t be a very popular landlady.”

  Lambert smiled. “No. Old ladies who have nothing better to do all day than spy on their neighbours from behind lace curtains are not usually popular with anyone. Except policemen, of course. I’ve come across quite a few useful busybodies in my time.” He rose to his feet and Hook followed him, shutting his notebook carefully, conveying that impression of bovine stolidity which had caught many a villain off guard.

  “I’ll ask my other guests if they know any more than I do when I see them.”

  “Please do. Other members of our team will wish to question them, too. And we’ll need to get a Scene of Crime team into that basement flat to go over it very thoroughly. I’m afraid you won’t be able to re-let it until we give you clearance.”

  She smiled. “That won’t be a problem. As it happens, the rent was paid until the end of September. I’m quite prepared to give a rebate to the next of kin. And I may not be a demonstrative woman, but I liked what little I saw of Tamsin Rennie. I hope you get the swine who did this to her.”

  Jane King’s knowledge of the movements and contacts of her basement tenant were irritatingly minimal, thought Lambert, as they drove away from the high, spacious Georgian house. Her ignorance appeared genuine enough, but he would postpone judgement on that for the moment.

  ***

  It was Detective Inspector Chris Rushton who attended the post-mortem examination on Tamsin Rennie.

  He had undertaken such tasks many times before, but he was moved and depressed despite himself by the slow ritual of examination conducted over the young corpse, flawless apart from the marks of repeated drug injections on both arms and one of the thighs. Curiously, these minor imperfections seemed only to emphasise the perfection of the body as a whole and the pity of this death.

  The photographs taken between the removal of each item of clothing, the removal of the earrings from the pierced ears, the fingernail clippings and scrapings dropped into the labelled plastic bags, the sampling of the girl’s thinly applied lipstick to match against any smears which might later be found upon her assailant’s clothing, the Sellotaping of the blackened area around her throat to lift any minute traces of material left from the gloved hands of her strangler, the sampling of the genital area for any traces of semen, all seemed like assaults upon the privacy of a defenceless and beautiful young woman.

  They would have to wait for the morrow for the full written PM report, which he would feed into his computer with the other information accruing from the efforts of the thirty-man team already allotted to the murder. But what he learned at the scene of the autopsy did not add much to what they already knew. The girl had died by strangulation. Probably she had been surprised and it had happened too quickly for her to defend herself, for there did not seem at first glance to be any skin or hair trapped beneath her nails. There was no trace of sexual assault, though the girl had been sexually active in the months before her death.

  To some effect, apparently. That was the one new and potentially useful piece of information DI Rushton carried away from the Hereford autopsy.

  Tamsin Rennie had been two months pregnant.

  Six

  Murder hunts do not cease at weekends. The majority of the team of thirty carried on with the dull but necessary routine of the investigation, patiently trying to contact anyone who had seen Tamsin Rennie in her last hours.

  The investigation of the occupants of the house where she had lived out the last months of her life proved disappointing. Sergeant Jack Johnson and his SOCO team turned up very little which seemed significant in the basement flat she had occupied. There were a couple of empty syringes, but no supply of heroin. Not many clothes, but the ones the single wardrobe contained were expensive. There was nothing to suggest how this girl with what must have been a modest salary from a bookshop had been able to afford either these clothes or the rent of this well-furnished, spacious flat.

  There were four women and two men who rented the six other rooms in the high Georgian house. The youngest was twenty-three, the oldest was forty. All of them

  seemed to regard their residence there as temporary, though their notion of temporary varied. None of them knew much about the girl who had lived in the basement. Or none of them was admitting to knowing very much: the police officers who inter-viewed them made that reservation with professional scepticism.

  Two of them had seen an older man visiting Tamsin’s flat. Whether it was the same man, whether it had been an isolated visit or one of a series, neither of them could say. There had been a younger man too. They thought he had visited more regularly, but no one was sure about how often. They thought it was the same young man on several occasions, but when they were questioned about his appearance it emerged that they could not even be sure of that.

  Jack Johnson came to report the findings of the SOCO team to Lambert. They were old hands together, these two, and the grizzled Sergeant was quite apologetic about the series of blanks he had drawn. “I had a word with whoever was around in the place while the team were examining the flat, but I didn’t find out much about the girl. I got the impression that some of those people knew a little more than they were telling me. Not much perhaps, but a little. They all seemed to want to give me the bare facts and draw the line at any speculation.”

  “And you say the flat was tidy?”

  “Too tidy, if you ask me. Especially for a heroin user. There were clean sheets on the bed, clean smalls in the drawers. The floor looked as if it had just been vacuumed. We’ve bagged everything we could, and the lads picked up one or two outside fibres from the carpets and the chairs, but I doubt if anything will prove to be very useful.”

  “Do you think someone had been there before you?”

  Johnson pursed his lips, almost as reluctant to commit himself as if he had been in court. It was this habit of caution which made him an excellent Scene of Crime Officer; his teams found him irritatingly slow at times, but his methodical approach and refusal to cut corners meant that very little was missed. “I think someone had been over that place since the girl was killed. Couldn’t say who. We don’t know how many keys there were. There’s only a Yale lock on the basement flat. Mrs King has one herself and gave one to Tamsin Rennie. As she points out, there is no guarantee that the girl didn’t have other keys cut. I gave her the go-ahead to get a new lock fitted, by the way.”

  A sensible measure, with a
murderer possibly at large with a key. Lambert said,

  “What did you make of Mrs Jane King?”

  “A shrewd woman, who wasn’t giving much away. I had the feeling she might know rather more than she was telling, but I couldn’t be sure of that. It may be just that she keeps herself to herself and expects others to do likewise. She kept going on about respecting their privacy.”

  Lambert smiled. The same phrase she had repeated with him and Bert Hook. He couldn’t see the resolutely methodical Johnson getting much more information than she wanted to give from the composed and alert owner of that rambling house. “Do you think Jane King had been in and cleaned the flat and removed anything that might have been useful to us?”

  “She said not. She said Tamsin was a clean and tidy girl, or she wouldn’t have allowed her to rent the best accommodation in her house. Pointed out the vacuum cleaner to us in a cupboard. There was nothing to analyse there, by the way: it had a clean bag in it. I’ve got people investigating the contents of the dustbin bags from the house, but I’m not hopeful. If it was someone from outside the house who went through the flat and cleaned it, he would surely have taken the stuff away with him.”

  “Did the other tenants have any views on Jane King?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice. They almost put up the ‘No comment’ signs when she was mentioned. Perhaps they just don’t want to offend Mrs King and risk losing their rooms. Those bedsits are surprisingly spacious and well furnished.” Johnson spoke as an expert who had seen many hundreds of rented rooms, sordid and salubrious, in his time.

  Lambert frowned. “We’re not finding enough out about the murder victim, so far. I was hoping you’d pick up more from that flat.”

  “Sorry, Guv’nor. I’ve not come across many places that had less to offer.” Johnson looked glum, then dived suddenly into his black briefcase, like a conjuror producing the rabbit after all for a disappointed audience. “They probably won’t lead us any-where, but there were just two photographs. They were between two folded blouses, in the top drawer of the dresser in the living room.”

  Lambert took the pictures, each encased in clear polythene, like everything else the SOCO team had removed from the flat. A man who looked to be in his mid to late forties, smiling straight at the camera in a studio portrait, his chin lifted a little to disguise his receding hair. And a colour picture of a younger man, good-looking in a

  rather gaunt way, taken in striking profile against what seemed to be black velvet.

  A strangely contrasting and as yet anonymous pair. He wondered what part each had played in the young life of Tamsin Rennie. And whether either of them could have been the man who ended that life so harshly.

  ***

  At Brown’s Bookshop, DS Hook was not finding out much more about the dead girl than the Scene of Crime team at her residence.

  The owner of the bookshop, Cedric Brown, was in his late fifties, grey haired, worried, and with a slight stoop. “Miss Rennie came to work here about a year ago. I was willing to train her up in the trade. The business didn’t really warrant an assistant, to be honest with you, but I was trying to look forward a few years to the time when I retire. My wife thought that if we got someone suitable we could leave them to manage the place and just take a little out of the business to supplement our pensions. We were both civil servants, you see, until five years ago.”

  Bert Hook did see. Another man who had always wanted to run a bookshop, had wanted to live his life surrounded by the objects he loved, who had persuaded his wife to retire early with him to do the thing they had always wanted to do. And who had no doubt found it much harder to wring a living from this rather old-fashioned shop at the wrong end of the town than he had expected.

  The space for new books, hardback and paperback, was cramped, so that the easy sellers could not be strikingly displayed. Over half the shop was given over to second-hand books. Bert wished he had time to browse there, made a note to come back when he was not on duty to see if he could add to his collection of cricket literature. But he was willing to bet that more browsing than buying went on in the second-hand section — and even that this pleasant, helpful man was happy to indulge the browsers.

  “Was Tamsin Rennie a satisfactory employee?”

  Brown looked for a moment as if he was reluctant to speak ill of the dead. Then he shook his head sadly and said, “I’m afraid not. She was interested in books, and in the first few weeks she learned quite a lot. She even taught me a few things — largely about what our computer could do. She helped me to streamline our ordering system. And for about three months she was quite a pleasure to have around: bright and interested, and with a ready smile for the customers.”

  “But the good start didn’t last?”

  “I’m afraid not. Tamsin seemed to lose interest rather, after that promising beginning. She also became, well, unreliable. I had to check everything she was doing. She gave people the wrong change a couple of times —not through dishonesty, but through genuine carelessness. But nothing does more harm with customers than that. And she forgot to put through a couple of orders.”

  “And have you any idea why this happened? She seemed from what you say to have made a good start.”

  Bert was thinking that this was the classic unreliability of the drug user who was becoming more dependent. But this innocent man hadn’t considered that explanation. “No. I asked her once if she had some trauma within her family, or perhaps boyfriend trouble. But she just smiled and shook her head. Tamsin was always quite apologetic when she made a mistake, but her remorse didn’t seem to improve her. She got worse, in fact. She became very unpunctual, particularly in the mornings, whereas she’d been an excellent timekeeper when she started.”

  “Could you give me some idea of the dates of all this?”

  The earnest face wrinkled with concentration. “Well, she was all right for about three months, I think. Then she became gradually more and more erratic, over a period of about six months. Things came to a head when she was rude to a customer. I gave her a final warning. She didn’t argue with me. She said she deserved it. She seemed quite upset, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. Then she said I was quite right, and it would be better if she left there and then, without waiting to let me down again. She insisted on going that afternoon. She kept saying she was sorry.”

  Cedric Brown looked upset at the recollection, as if he still wished that things had turned out differently, as if he felt in some way responsible for the girl’s death because he had dispensed with her services. Hook fancied he had been more patient with the girl than most would have been, had probably kept her on long after others would have sacked her. He said gently, “How much was she paid each week, Mr Brown? It’s important that we know. I’ll explain why in a moment.”

  Brown said apologetically, “Tamsin got a hundred and sixty pounds a week. It’s not a lot, I know, but the business didn’t really warrant even that.”

  Hook nodded. “She was a drug addict, Mr Brown. That’s probably why she became so unreliable. And why she behaved out of character like that with customers. What you’ve told me will help us to document the time when she passed from being just a user of drugs to being dependent upon them. It’s also why I needed to know how much she was paid. There is no way she could have funded her accommodation and a hard-drug habit on what she was paid here. And for the last few months of her life, after you dispensed with her services, she had no regular income at all, as far as we know at this moment.”

  Brown was shocked. He said, “I was stupid not to have thought of this before. I’ve no experience of the drug culture, you see.”

  “I doubt if it would have made very much difference if you had realised what was going on. She was probably already dependent when you saw her work becoming more unreliable.”

  “Poor thing!” said Brown. It was more than a conventional cliché of regret: he was genuinely upset.

  Bert Hook left the proprietor sitting miserably behind the c
ounter of his cramped shop. He realised as he left that in the twenty minutes he had been there on a Saturday morning, there had been not a single customer.

  Seven

  It was on Saturday afternoon that the case got its first positive assistance from the public. A man appeared at Oldford Police Station and asked to see Superintendent Lambert, the officer he had heard was now in charge of the investigation into the Tamsin Rennie murder. Murder opens the doors which bureaucracy normally bolts shut; he was ushered straight through to the CID section and to the office where DS Hook was reporting to his chief.

  He was no more than twenty-five, exuding a briskness and an assurance in this alien place which he could surely scarcely have felt. A salesman perhaps, projecting the confidence in himself which he hoped would extend to his product. A man whose attitude said, “Your time is valuable and so is mine; I won’t waste more of either than I can avoid.” He might have been an actor making an entry, thought Lambert wryly.

  A moment later, he found that he was just that. The young man said with a nervous laugh, “Thomas Clarke. Tom to my friends. Actor and dogsbody. Resting at the moment. Available for repertory, musicals and pantomime.” He pitched the information into the room above their heads, as if he were projecting the words for a small, select audience. Only then did he look into the grey, observant eyes of the man who had risen to greet him, or take in the weather-beaten face of Bert Hook, or the crowded office, with its filing cabinets and papers strewn over the big wooden desk.

  It was when Clarke sat down as requested that Lambert realised that this was the young man pictured in the dramatic profile pose against black velvet which Jack Johnson had brought from the dead girl’s flat. It was an accurate likeness, but one so posed that it pictured an idea rather than a person. The photograph reminded Lambert of a seventy-year-old one of a young John Gielgud as Romeo. No doubt it was designed to suggest a similar histrionic potential to the agents and theatrical managers who might be persuaded to take on the young man’s services.