An Unsuitable Death

by J M Gregson

  Then Lambert said, “Oh, but we do, Mrs King. That was your first mistake, though it took me too long to see it for that. The wheelchair was in the hall when we first came here, though you’d dispensed with it by the time we came back on Tuesday. Incidentally, we’ve checked with your tenants: none of them had had a visit from a disabled relative, as you claimed.”

  The blue eyes narrowed. She was shaken even further by their knowledge of the wheelchair. This lean, intense opponent seemed to have discovered everything. She dropped now into the expression of low cunning both experienced men had often seen on the faces of not very intelligent petty thieves. “I don’t know what you mean, wheelchair. You’ll have to prove there was such a thing here.”

  Lambert smiled. “The wheelchair was recovered from the Leonard Cheshire home this morning: it hadn’t yet been used there. It’s on its way to our forensic laboratories now. I’ve no doubt they’ll find some traces of Tamsin Rennie or her clothes upon it.” He looked into the frustrated, vicious face opposite him, seeking only for some way to keep it speaking. “It was an ingenious method of getting a body to the Cathedral: I’ll admit that.”

  She responded immediately. “That idiot actor came here, just after I’d killed his stupid girlfriend. I heard him shouting to her through the letter box. He called out that he couldn’t hang about, that he had to go to his choir rehearsal. Then he used his key to get into the flat. When I heard him go, I gave him a few minutes, then got the girl’s body into the wheelchair, with a headscarf round the head. No one looks at a person in a wheelchair, you know. I once followed Peter Ustinov right through the exit route at Heathrow, and because he was in a wheelchair, no one looked at him and no one recognised him. I pushed her along St Ethelbert Street without anyone giving us a second look — not that there was anyone much about at that time.”

  “Not even at the Cathedral, I imagine.”

  She shook her head with a quick, mirthless smile. She seemed almost detached, so full was she of her own cunning in those moments. “They were just beginning the choir rehearsal. I could hear them as I reached the St John’s door at the back of the Cathedral, which had been left open to allow them in. I only got the idea of the Lady Chapel when I got inside. It was the one place I could get to easily, without being seen by the people at the rehearsal.”

  “And no doubt you had plenty of time to arrange her upon the altar.”

  “Yes. I found a sign about work in progress, saying that people should not go beyond it, and I put that outside the entrance to the Lady Chapel, just in case anyone should come along. I tried to remember how the Sacristan had laid out his victims in those country churches. I put her on the steps of the altar, between two big candlesticks, and folded her hands on her breast, as he had done. Like the figure on the tomb at the side of the Chapel. I even combed her hair back to imitate that.”

  But you couldn’t simulate the Sacristan’s sexual assaults upon his victims, thought Lambert, or you might have had this killing pinned on him for a while longer. He found he had an almost personal need to deflate this creature, who seemed to so relish her dispatch of a young life. “You didn’t deceive us, you know, not beyond the first few hours.”

  He had thought she would want to know the reason why. Instead, she said curiously, “What made you suspect me? I knew you’d go to the parents, that you’d find them a suspect and interesting pair. And I left enough in the flat to give you others to follow up when I went through it.”

  He shrugged. “A variety of things. We found you’d arrived at your friends’ house for dinner an hour later than you claimed at our first meeting, as I reminded you. You told our Scene of Crime team that Tamsin Rennie was ‘a clean and tidy girl’ when you were offering them nothing else in the way of information: that was always very unlikely for a smack addict. And you were always the likeliest person to have cleared the flat. You had your own entry to the place from the main part of the house, so that you could get in there any time you wanted.”

  She said, like one taking pride in her work, “I went through the place late on the Wednesday night after I’d taken the body to the Cathedral and been out to my friends’ house for dinner. Cleaned it very thoroughly. Put all the slut’s clothes away, removed all traces of myself and the supplies of snow and smack I’d given her to sell.”

  “And you left the two photographs, very obvious clues that would lead us quite certainly to other people. They were regular visitors, with their pictures in her flat; people you would have known about, but you pretended not to know about them when we first talked to you, because you knew you’d left us the photographs for us to follow up.”

  “I knew you’d get to young Clarke, but it would have been odd if there wasn’t at least one picture of the boyfriend, so I decided to leave the one in that poncy actor’s pose. And I thought you might not even get on to Councillor bloody Whittaker unless I left his picture for you. He came round and tried to get into the flat, you know, the next night, but I’d put the catch on from the inside. I heard him trying the door when I was going to bed, but his key wouldn’t let him in.” She smiled with satisfaction as she thought of that sad man’s frustration.

  “And when we came to see you, you could afford to pretend you had little knowledge of them, to drone on about the privacy of your tenants.”

  She seemed to resent this as a slur on her tactics, to have become unconscious of her situation in her desire to emphasise her own ingenuity. “I talked about them when you came the second time.”

  “Indeed. You were markedly more forthcoming about other suspects when we interviewed you for a second time, which made me think you were concerned we might investigate you more fully.”

  “You were talking more about drugs by then, as though they might be connected with her death.”

  “And you were scared. I noticed the estate agent’s literature on your table when we spoke, though you tried to give me the impression it was there just because you wanted to re-let Tamsin Rennie’s flat. I now know that you have put this house on the market, though there is no agent’s board outside. You were planning to get out, Mrs King.”

  “Yes. Well, I was right, wasn’t I? I should have gone more quickly, that’s all. McDonald might at least have told me you were close.”

  Neither of the two men even blinked as Hook wrote down the name. It was a new one to them, one she thought they already possessed, presumably the next one up in the chain from her in the carefully hidden line that led eventually to Keith Sugden at the head of his billion-pound criminal enterprise. If Jane King thought they knew everything, so much the better. Her indiscretions might save a few other Tamsin Rennies from violent deaths.

  Jane King had not referred to the dead girl by name throughout their exchanges. She did not even glance down the steps to the flat as they led her out of her house.

  Lambert drove the car out of Rosamund Street, whilst Jane King sat handcuffed to Hook on the back seat. They were almost out in the countryside before they caught a glimpse of the great tower of Hereford Cathedral, standing sentinel over the old city as it had done for centuries.

  Later the next evening, Lambert handed in the tickets he had secured two months earlier at the door of Hereford Cathedral. Then he sat next to Christine and heard the voices of Tom Clarke and his two hundred companions soaring exultantly towards the high ceiling above the nave of the Cathedral in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.

  And John Lambert wondered how many other minds kept coming back, like his, to the Lady Altar, invisible to them all from where they sat, where the bizarre scene which had dominated his life for the last nine days had been set out like a pagan sacrifice in this Christian place.

  If you enjoyed reading An Unsuitable Death, you might be interested in Girl Gone Missing, also by J M Gregson

  Extract from Girl Gone Missing by J M Gregson

  Chapter One

  MURDER takes place on the sidewalk. We have constant reminders of that. But as we reach the end of a violent century, violent
death is not restricted to city centres. Killers are found in beautiful and remote places, as well as in ugly and crowded ones.

  Not that the massive walls of Chepstow Castle, at the feet of which the corpse was found, are unfamiliar with death. They have stood on their cliff above the Wye, controlling the route into Wales, since William the Conqueror brought order to a disordered kingdom. They were the centre of vicious conflict in the Civil War in 1645, when the Wye which swirls below them ran red with English blood. But the castle is now a ruin, and Chepstow is a quiet town, far enough away from the points where the bridges carry the M4 motorway across the estuary of the Severn to be insulated from the noise and the bustle of the traffic which pours in and out of Wales.

  There are no pavements visible beneath these mighty ramparts which have stood for almost a thousand years above the river. And the Wye, swirling here through the last of its picturesque bends to join the estuary of the Severn, is one of the most beautiful and unspoilt of Britain’s rivers. Yet there can be death, even here. Violent and unnatural death.

  The body had come down the river with the floods. It might have drifted ashore a few miles higher up at Tintern, where the angry brown waters had lapped against the stones of the ancient Cistercian abbey and washed three-piece suites from the villagers’ cottages into the main street. But the macabre human detritus had swirled unseen past Tintern’s soaring arches. On one of the great horseshoe bends where the swollen river ran beside Offa’s Dyke, the body had become enmeshed with the twigs at the end of a great branch of gale-felled oak, and been carried thus to Chepstow.

  The Wye Valley walk runs up the river from Chepstow, through some of the most beautiful waterside scenery the country can afford. But the young mother and her son were locals, happy to be enjoying a brisk afternoon stroll with the dog now that the October rains had finally relented. It was the dog, indeed, which discovered the river’s grim cargo.

  It was low tide, and the branch of oak with its sinister burden had come to rest on the mud flats opposite the high walls of the castle on the other bank of the Wye. In a few hours, branch and body would have been lifted softly but inexorably with the rising tide, the highest in Britain, moving up to fifty feet above the water’s lowest level. And as the tide flowed swiftly outwards to the Severn estuary, the already badly damaged corpse would have been washed into the open sea, and perhaps lost forever.

  Instead, the Labrador’s curiosity took it ankle deep into the soft black mud, despite its owner’s urgent shouts of recall. And when it saw what the branch held wrapped within its unseeing arms, the dog barked, excitedly, continuously, unstoppably.

  The woman peered curiously at the source of the dog’s excitement, then moved a pace or two further up the bank to get a better view of the dark bundle beneath the branches. At first she was not sure, swallowing back the sickness which rose to the back of her throat, telling herself that this thing could not be. Then she saw in the distance a grey-white hand, bloated, incomplete, damaged by the unseen creatures of the Wye. She screamed once, long and harsh, the sound ringing in her ears as though it came from a long way off. Then her maternal instincts took over and she gripped the nine-year-old hand firmly and protectively within her own.

  She moved quickly back downstream, her face white and cold, the nausea she had felt heaving within her stilled by the urge to protect her son from this awful thing. The dog barked on for a moment, torn between the body and his owners, his head switching frantically between his find and his disappearing mistress. Then he left the mud and turned reluctantly back to the bank, afforded the branch and its burden a final volley of barks, and raced after the woman and child that represented food and shelter

  The woman found it difficult to steady her fingers in the phone-box. But 999 is an easy number to dial. Within minutes, the police machine was grinding into action. Within half an hour, the area was cordoned off and the police surgeon had confirmed that this was a human death.

  Chapter Two

  ‘SUPERINTENDENT’ John Lambert was a patient man, in normal circumstances. And in these abnormal ones, he was determined to be at his most massively tolerant. Detective Sergeant Bert Hook was also a patient man. He was renowned for his composure in the Oldford CID section, even to the point where younger and more irreverent colleagues had been known to poke fun at his restraint in the face of provocation by the criminal fraternity. When it came to patience, DS Hook was a veritable Job among policemen. But this was golf. A game which brought a wholly unacceptable series of trials. Bert glared at his ball like a malevolent frog, his rubicund, village-bobby features swelling with an unaccustomed fury. ‘Bastard!’ he yelled. ‘You bleeding, stupid, BASTARD thing!’

  ‘That won’t get the thing into the air,’ said Lambert with equanimity. ‘I know — I’ve tried it often enough.’

  ‘I know THAT!’ snarled Hook, with unaccustomed emphasis. ‘But it might make me feel better.’ He did not take his eye off the ball. He felt an obscure certainty that if he did it would roll mischievously between his feet, would bring him crashing ignominiously to earth when he tried to move on. For it was already clear to him that this maddening white sphere had a will and impetus of its own and that its intentions towards him were malign.

  ‘Just address the ball in your own time and swing slowly,’ said Lambert, massively calm.

  Hook risked taking his eyes off the ball for an instant, so as to transfer the full fury of his gaze to his superior officer and mentor. When he swung his attention viciously back to the ball, it had not moved. It lay still among the twigs and the first yellow leaves of autumn, where his last viciously topped effort had trundled it. ‘You can’t even claim you got an impossible ball or a ridiculous decision at this bloody stupid game,’ he snarled morosely.

  ‘That’s the charm of golf,’ Lambert agreed, ignoring the glance of smouldering hatred the remark produced from his companion. ‘You’re always really playing yourself, you see.’ His own ball was lying on the fairway, staring smugly up at him and asking to be hit, in Hook’s view. Lambert selected a 7-iron, knowing privately that this was the club which carried for him the least chance of disaster, and dispatched his ball high and straight towards the green. It flew in a parabola which seemed impossibly high and graceful to his sergeant, pitched a few yards short, skirted a bunker and ran appealingly on to the emerald carpet of the green. Hook muttered something which sounded suspiciously like ‘clever bugger’ and turned his attention miserably back to his own ball.

  Bert aimed three more savage slashes at the uncooperative object, addressed it crudely as an intimate female organ to which it bore no obvious resemblance, picked it up, and strode to the next tee in a fury. John Lambert, schooled for nigh on thirty years in the worst excesses of police vocabulary, had never heard the gentle Bert use that word before, though he had little doubt that it had been addressed to obdurate batsmen in times of stress: Bert was a fast bowler of fearsome prowess, now retired from serious performance.

  Hook was still red-faced and panting with frustration when Lambert arrived smiling at the tee. The Superintendent decided that it was not the moment to comment on the exhilarating nature of the day, with its warm south wind and white clouds flying against the crisp blue of the autumn sky. He had not seen Bert so ruffled since he had refereed a school football match and found ex-pupils chanting ‘Who’s the bastard in the black?’ from the safety of the beeches at the edge of the playing fields.

  Yet golf is as unpredictable as it is exasperating. Salvation was at hand for the suffering Hook. The ninth hole at Oldford Golf course is a par three, only one hundred and forty-seven yards long. He took the 6-iron which Lambert counselled and teed his ball with an air of hopeless resignation, vowing for the tenth time that this would be his first and last visit to this place of torment.

  Shutting his ears to his instructor’s admonitions of rhythm and the straight left arm, he swung savagely and without hope at the tiny white target.

  At first he did not see the ball. It was
the gasp of astonishment from behind him which alerted him to the possibilities and raised his eyes towards the sky. The ball was up there, clear but impossibly high against the azure background. It stayed there for what seemed an impossibly long time, then pitched in the very centre of the green and stopped within a yard. An astonished smile spread very slowly over Bert’s large face, until the visage was as round and delighted as his teenage face had been a quarter of a century earlier when he had bowled the great Gary Sobers in a charity match. ‘Bloody ‘ell!’ he said. Then, more quietly, and with the air of wonderment men produce in the face of great natural phenomena, he repeated softly, ‘BLOODY HELL!’

  Lambert said, carefully keeping the surprise out of his voice, ‘There you are, I knew you could do it!’ Almost as though he had produced the shot himself, Bert thought sourly.

  The Superintendent addressed his ball carefully, feeling a sudden and unexpected pressure upon him. Perhaps he held his tall frame for a fraction too long over it. His shot was thinned; it reached scarcely half the height of Bert Hook’s effort and curled inexorably right, into the deep bunker beside the green. There was a pause. Then Bert produced a carefully articulated ‘Hard luck, John’. He found himself fighting hard against an inexplicable need to burst into uproarious laughter.

  Lambert’s lie in the sand was not a good one. He made three attempts to play it out: each one hit the steep face of the bunker in front of him and came to rest at his feet. When he picked his ball up and said, ‘Ah, bollocks to it!’ Bert felt this was the first piece of golfing jargon which made complete sense to him. He turned his face towards the clubhouse and studied the clockface on the side of it determinedly, wishing he could stuff a handkerchief into his mouth to suppress a childish and inconvenient set of giggles.

  They had switched off their radios on the course. Now, as they passed through the car park and made for the tenth tee in the early evening, Lambert felt he should have a last check with the man they had left minding the shop at CID.