An Unsuitable Death

by J M Gregson

  “And yet you withheld all of this from us four days ago. You can hardly have thought it insignificant.”

  “I mind my own business. It is much the best way to conduct affairs, if you are a landlady, I can assure you. My reaction at the time was to shut the window and get on with my own life. I heard the sound of raised voices and thought it was private.”

  “But you now think that Councillor Whittaker was one of Tamsin Rennie’s sexual clients. That this was perhaps a lover’s quarrel.”

  “That is for you to follow up, not me, Superintendent. But since you seem to think I have been less than forthcoming and now ask me to speculate, I will do so. In the light of what you have told me today, I think that James Whittaker had been paying for sexual favours over some months; that he had become besotted with a pretty young girl twenty years younger than him, that he wished to reform her ways and make her his permanent partner. I believe that that was what the row I heard was all about.”

  It was a major switch from withholding information to speculating as far as this. Lambert noted the change of heart, had even time to wonder quite what had prompted it, but did not comment upon it; what Jane King was now saying was far too interesting for that. He said with a smile, “How far is this conjecture and how far fact, Mrs King?”

  She looked at him shrewdly, her head a little on one side, as if estimating an opponent. “It is conjecture based on the few facts I know, that is all. My theory fits in with the very limited fragments I saw of the dealings between Tamsin and James Whittaker. I know a little about Mr Whittaker because he happens to be my local councillor. He is a widower with no children who lives on his own in quite a large house within half a mile of here. Just on the other side of the Cathedral, as a matter of fact.”

  She paused for the implications of her last phrase to be digested by all of them, including perhaps herself. None of them smiled at the mention of the Cathedral: this was now too serious for that. Lambert merely said, “You think Mr Whittaker is a lonely man?”

  Jane King shook her head, coolly estimating how far she should go with this. “I can’t say that: I don’t know him well enough. It would fit the facts, in so far as I know them. Councillor Whittaker visits a nubile girl, over twenty years younger than him, for what now appears to be sexual purposes. He becomes besotted with her, asks her to live with him in his own house perhaps to marry him, for all we know, and—”

  “You’re saying that a man wise in the ways of the world, with aspirations to become mayor of his city, asks a girl who is little better than a streetwalker to become his permanent partner?”

  Even as he said it, Lambert knew that it wasn’t as preposterous as he made it sound. And as if she read his mind, Jane King said with a sour smile, “Men always think they can reform fallen girls.”

  Lambert wondered what worlds of experience lay behind her quiet contempt for his gender. He said, “Is that what the argument between the two of them was about? The one you just said you heard a few days before Tamsin was killed?”

  She nodded. “I only heard snatches, you understand. But he was certainly arguing that she should go somewhere with him. I thought at the time that it might be on some trip or other, a temporary arrangement. Now, in view of the other facts you have filled in for me, I’m inclined to think he was suggesting a more permanent liaison. I don’t think my view would stand up in the face of a hostile cross-examination in court, mind. A clever lawyer would tear me apart, because I didn’t hear enough to be certain. I’m just giving you my thoughts because you asked for them.”

  And you think that Whittaker might have killed the girl in a fit of jealous rage a few days later, thought Lambert. But you are too clever to state anything so unpleasant, Jane King. Leave it to the CID to do the dirty work. Well, fair enough. She had been far more forthcoming about the men who had known Tamsin Rennie on this visit than on their first one. Whatever the reasons for that, she had confirmed for them that both Tom Clarke and James Whittaker should be added to the mother and stepfather of the dead girl as serious murder suspects.

  What she had not been able to help them with was any clue to the threat which might have come from the dark world of drugs which lay beyond the facts they had now assembled about this death.

  Fourteen

  At seven twenty on the morning of Wednesday, August 24th, Christine Lambert found her husband smelling the roses, the policeman’s traditional escape from reality.

  It was a glorious morning, with the garden burgeoning in high summer profusion. “You’ve done a grand job on those weeds whilst I’ve been busy,” said John. In the complex double-speak of marriage, this was an acknowledgement that she was in full health again after the heart bypass operation she had undergone a few months earlier.

  They toured the garden, remarking the unique beauty of the hybrid tea blooms, congratulating themselves on the way the new clematis was cloaking the old apple tree with its cerise flowers, talking nonsense to their tame thrush, which hopped along four yards behind them. It was a sane, ordered world, which helped to set the sometimes crazy one outside into a proper perspective.

  Lambert had thought to enjoy a few moments alone here, but he was glad now to find Christine at his side. They did not touch each other as they walked around the dew-soft lawns, but each knew that this was a moment of intimacy, a reassertion of their personal world and its values. It was a world that had been threatened twice in the last two years, first by cancer and a mastectomy for Christine, and more lately by her heart bypass operation. They were unwelcome reminders of mortality, but they had brought the pair closer than ever before in a relationship which had been strengthened by the vicissitudes of its early years.

  Christine knew better than to bring anything external into their admiration of the early morning garden. It was not until he was finishing his toast that she asked him about the progress of his investigation into what the papers were now headlining as “Murder in the Cathedral”.

  “It will be a week ago tonight that she died,” he said. “A week tomorrow morning since the body was discovered.”

  She knew what he meant without needing an explanation. Most murders are solved within the first week. A high proportion of those unsolved at the end of that time are never solved. Although the official line is that cases never close until an arrest is made and an offender is charged, there comes at some stage a gradual withdrawal of resources, a diversion of personnel to other, more urgent and hopefully more rewarding fields.

  “How’s it going, then?” she asked as she poured the massive beaker of tea with which he always concluded his breakfast. At one time she would never have asked. He would have hugged the details to himself like a priest guarding a confession, and she would have scorned to show any interest in the work which seemed like a black hole between them. Now she was genuinely interested in whatever crumbs he chose to volunteer to her.

  “It’s difficult to say. We do know a lot more about the dead girl than we knew six days ago, but I’m still not sure which are the relevant bits. It’s taken more time than I’d have wanted to get this far; there’s one man who seems to be a strong suspect whom I haven’t even seen yet.”

  He didn’t volunteer that it was a local councillor, and she had more sense than to ask him for details. She put her hands on the back of his neck as he sat at the table, massaging it on the left-hand side, where she knew it was always stiff. “If I know Superintendent Lambert, he’ll produce something out of the hat in the next few days. The Chief Constable more or less said that on Central Television news last night.”

  “Did he really? Well, I’m glad he’s so confident!” But there was no resentment in his irony; he was glad enough for the CC or anyone else to give statements to the media and keep them off his back.

  Christine went to shut the garage doors as he reversed with some difficulty down the curving drive. She was going to get him an electronic garage-door opener for his birthday. She knew he would veto it if it were announced beforehand, but find it thoro
ughly convenient after a week’s use. Silly old sod, she thought affectionately.

  He thought he might have shut up about the case too abruptly within the bungalow, as had always been his wont, so he threw her a last few words through the open window of the car. “I’ve got a nasty feeling that girl’s death is going to be drug related,” he said gloomily.

  She knew what that meant. He was fearful they might never find who had committed the newspapers’ Murder in the Cathedral.

  ***

  The first thing which struck Lambert and Hook about James Whittaker, Councillor and prospective mayor of Hereford, was how remarkable a likeness of him Bert “Nosey” Parker had managed to capture in a pencilled sketch.

  Whittaker was of average height or a little less. He had a high forehead above large brown eyes and a nose which looked curiously malleable, as if a child could have bent it into a variety of curious shapes. His hair was receding, accentuating the dome of his forehead; this and the formal clothes he wore made him seem a little older than the age of forty-six years which they had now confirmed for him.

  One thing was added to the face they knew from the sketch. Although he had invited them into his own house and he sat in his favourite armchair, James Whittaker was extremely nervous. He twisted a large, clean handkerchief between his stubby fingers as he sat in the tastefully furnished modern room and saw the comfortable, ordered world in which he had lived and been successful disintegrate before his eyes.

  He had got off on the wrong foot by trying to disclaim all knowledge of the dead girl. Lambert said, “Unfortunately, you are a well-known local face, Mr Whittaker. Let me explain to you why we are here this morning. We have three witnesses who saw you going in and out of the basement flat in Rosamund Street where Tamsin Rennie lived. Not on one occasion, but on several. The last one was only a few days before someone put his hands round her throat and crushed the life out of her. Do you still wish to deny that you were ever there? If so, you had better get yourself a lawyer and we’ll continue this interview at the station.”

  The colour had drained from Whittaker’s rather florid face with every phrase from Lambert. He must have suspected this when Hook arranged the meeting and refused to enlarge upon the reasons for it. But like most weak men, he had hoped until the last minute that things would not be as bad as they were. Now he found that they were worse: he was staggered by the extent of the knowledge the police had acquired. He had told himself that whatever happened he must be cautious. Now the only words that would come through his dry lips were a ridiculous, “I didn’t kill her!”

  Lambert was not disposed to let a floundering fish off the hook. “I’m glad to hear it. Why, then, have you not come forward and offered us your help in finding out who did? Miss Rennie died a week ago tonight. We put out a request for anyone who had seen her in the days before her death to come forward. Yet if we hadn’t unearthed your name from other sources, I don’t believe you would ever have spoken to us.”

  Whittaker had twisted the handkerchief into a dry rope between his anxious fingers.

  “I wanted to come and speak to you. I felt I should do. I knew it was my public duty. But I have more to lose than anyone else.”

  Lambert noted that mention of others, wondered how much Whittaker knew about the other men who had visited Tamsin Rennie. He would come back to that, eventually. Unless, of course, this pitiable man offered them enough for an arrest in this very room. “When did you first meet Tamsin Rennie, Mr Whittaker?”

  “A long time ago now.” He spoke like a bomb-blast victim, as though he could scarcely believe it was his own voice that was giving this information, “A year ago. Just a week over the year.” He sounded as if the time belonged to another, half-forgotten world, much further away than the time implied.

  “Where was this?”

  “I saw her for the first time in Brown’s Bookshop. I was buying a book about local history. It’s an interest of mine. I wanted a detailed account of what happened to Hereford during the Civil War. Tamsin was very helpful to me, and surprisingly knowledgeable about other books which were out of print but perhaps available secondhand.”

  It was a touching glimpse of the dead girl in the world of her lost innocence, the kind a parent might have seized on and treasured. But not the mother or the stepfather of this girl, who were both at present suspected of her murder. Lambert said, “And you arranged to see her again?”

  “Not on that occasion. But I ordered a book, and it was Tamsin who rang me to say that it had come in and to suggest a couple of other volumes she thought might be useful. When I went to collect the book, I asked her if she’d let me buy her lunch because she’d been so helpful. It was this time last year, a blazing hot day. We ate outside, in the garden behind the White Hart.” He delivered the details with an air of wonder, clinging to the picture his words evoked.

  Lambert could not stay in that time of lost innocence. He prompted, “And things moved on from there.”

  “Yes. We had a drink one night in a pub, just after she’d finished at the bookshop. She caught me looking round, trying to see if anyone was noticing us. I had to explain to her that I was well known, had been a local councillor for seven years. Although I was a widower, people would still gossip, if they saw me with a young girl. She was quite shy about it, but she said that if I liked we could meet in her flat — she’d only just moved in then, and she seemed rather proud of the place.”

  “And so you started an affair.”

  James Whittaker looked resentful at this brutal interruption of his wistful idyll. “Yes. I suppose we did. She used to call me Milburn, because she knew I had to keep things secret. Eric Milburn, I think. It was a bit of a joke between us, the secrecy.”

  Lambert smiled sourly. It was the name Tom Clarke had given them for the dead girl’s older lover, the one she had obviously used to him to keep Whittaker’s name a secret. The team had spent a lot of fruitless hours in following up the Milburns on the electoral register. He said abruptly, “When did you first sleep with Miss Rennie?”

  The rope of handkerchief had become static as Whittaker recalled the exciting days when a young girl had declared she was attracted to him, when each step into her world had seemed like a dream. Now it began to twist again as he was recalled to his nightmare. “Tamsin took me to bed two months after we had first met.”

  Spare me the account of how wonderful it seemed, thought Lambert, I’ve heard it all before. As if he read his questioner’s thoughts and sought to surprise him, the man twisting the handkerchief said suddenly, “I wasn’t the only one, you know. Well, I assume you do, by now, but I want you to know that Tamsin didn’t deceive me. I owe her that.”

  He was a strange mixture of idealism and world-weary honesty, this man. Or seeming honesty, Lambert reminded himself. Unless he was going to confess to the crime, every one of his statements would need to be weighed for their truthfulness, in due course. He said, “Tamsin took money from you for sex, didn’t she?”

  He saw Whittaker’s face wrestling with the idea of his special girl as a prostitute, thought of the lurid headlines the popular press would build from the brutal facts of his situation, and shuddered inwardly for him. Eventually Councillor James Whittaker said, “No. Not for sex. Not just like that. I gave her money, willingly. Not always at the time when we had been in bed together.”

  “You’re saying she didn’t charge you a set price for each session in bed?”

  The broad face with its pliant features winced at this. “No, nothing like that. We didn’t count the number of times we went to bed. I gave her a little money, to help her out with the rent. She said I was the father that she’d never had, but a lover too, so that she had the best of both worlds.”

  With a father she had never known and a stepfather who had assaulted her, that might even be true, thought Lambert. He could see Tamsin Rennie, who was descending into such a turbulent life, drawing a little comfort from this gentle older man. “How much did you give her altogether?”<
br />
  He shrugged hopelessly. “I don’t know. About a thousand pounds, I suppose, over the months.”

  And the rest, thought Lambert. Well, it’s going to cost you a lot more than money, now. He said gently, “You say you knew even at the time that you weren’t the only one. Didn’t it concern you that you were becoming more involved with a girl who was in effect a prostitute?”

  Unexpectedly, Whittaker responded to the harsh word only with a bitter smile. “I threw that word at her myself, Superintendent, and worse, so don’t expect to shock me with it. I don’t think either she or I thought of it like that, not at first. I knew her stepfather had been to see her, more than once. I was quite glad, thinking he was just trying to repair the family rift which had led to her leaving home in the first place. Then I found that not only had he seduced her at home but that he was now coming to Rosamund Street and paying her for sex. When she confessed that to me, she told me that there were others as well. It had all happened over two or three months, when she’d lost her job at the bookshop and needed money for her rent. Some of them were random pick-ups, paying her for what they got on a one-off basis.”

  The handkerchief slipped through his fingers and fell to the floor; his hands went on twisting against each other with a rhythm which seemed quite divorced from his otherwise static body. Lambert pressed him relentlessly. “But you didn’t finish with her when you found out about this.”

  “No. When she poured it all out, she seemed to be as upset and shaken as I was about what she had drifted into. I said I would help her to put things right. And I think she gave up most of the men after that.”

  “But there was young Tom Clarke. You knew about him?”

  “Yes, I knew about Tom. A pleasant young lad, Tom.”

  “You didn’t resent Tom Clarke?”