An Unsuitable Death

by J M Gregson

  “Did anyone call at the flat while you were there?”

  “No.”

  “Any phone calls?”

  “No.”

  “How often did you see Tamsin Rennie?”

  “Three times a week. Mondays, Thursdays and either Saturday or Sunday.”

  “A very regular arrangement. Was that at Tamsin’s insistence?”

  Twenty minutes earlier he would have argued; now he was too spent for that. “Yes. She said we should test our relationship properly.”

  And thus left herself room for all kinds of other manoeuvres, they thought. “Had you considered living together?”

  He seized eagerly on that. “Yes. I told you, we were going to. But Tamsin didn’t want to do it here. It was going to be well, a—”

  “A fresh start. I see.” Hook wrote for a moment, then looked up into Clarke’s anxious face. “Where were you on Wednesday night?”

  “When she was killed, you mean? You’re asking me to tell you where I was at the time when Tamsin was killed?”

  Hook was not to be shaken from his massive calm by the shriller tone in the young man’s voice. “On Wednesday night, yes.”

  Tom Clarke looked from him to Lambert, as if seeking some relief or reassurance. There was none. Four experienced eyes studied him to check his reactions. He said in a low voice, “I was at home. I’d spent the day decorating and I was knackered. I tried to ring Tamsin at about eight o’clock, but there was no reply.”

  “And is there anyone who can confirm this for us?”

  “No, I don’t suppose there is. My mum was out for the whole of the evening. She goes to a yoga class, and then two or three of them go on for a drink afterwards.”

  Hook studied him, as if he expected some further elaboration, then made a final careful note.

  It was Lambert who said, “You have a key to the basement flat, I imagine?”

  “Yes. Tamsin had one cut for me. I should return it to the landlady, really, but I thought she might not take kindly to the thought of an extra key for the place. Tamsin said it was against her regulations.”

  “You had better leave the key with us. We’ll see it gets back to her in due course. Tell me, have you been back to the flat since you heard of Tamsin’s death?”

  “No. Of course I haven’t! Here, you’re thinking I might have killed her, aren’t you? That there’s things I might have wanted to pick up from there!” The coltish figure was on its feet in outrage, the uncoordinated limbs moving wildly.

  “Sit down, Mr Clarke!” Lambert spoke crisply, like a man giving a sharp blow to a hysteria victim, and the young man subsided like a broken doll on to his chair. “You had access to a murder victim, and the opportunity to kill her. So far as we are aware at this moment, you were the only person apart from Tamsin’s landlady who had a key to her flat. We have to eliminate you as a suspect. The sooner we can do so the better, from our point of view as well as yours. Now concentrate, please. Tell me, would you say that Tamsin was a tidy person? Was her flat always clean and neat?”

  Clarke looked puzzled. “She was as careful about the place as anyone else. The place was never dirty, not really.” He sounded as if he was afraid of being disloyal, of a last, petty piece of betrayal.

  Lambert smiled. “It sounds to me as if you’re saying that she was like most other young people. Not particularly tidy, except on special occasions.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. Is it important?”

  “It could be. I’ll tell you why. Whenever we have a suspicious death, our Scene of Crime team searches the victim’s place of residence very thoroughly, as you’d expect. Now, they found very little of value in that basement flat. Everything was very neat, very tidy. The only photographs around were the two I have showed you. Every item of clothing was neatly folded and put away in a drawer or a wardrobe. I have to say that it would be most unusual for a drug-dependent occupant to leave the place in that condition. It rather looked as if someone had been in there since Tamsin was killed, and Mrs King, the landlady, assures us that she hasn’t been into the flat. If you didn’t go there yourself, can you suggest anyone else who might have done?”

  “No. I told you, I didn’t know many people who knew Tamsin. She kept it that way, and I was happy with it. I didn’t want to know, because I was going to take her away from it all.”

  They took his address and thanked him for coming forward. It had taken him thirty-six hours since the announcement of the identity of the murder victim to do it; they asked him why he had delayed. He said it had taken him time to compose himself, to control his distress well enough to present himself. And he had really expected them to come to him, thinking they would have found lots of traces of him in Tamsin’s flat. There had been several photographs of him there, he said plaintively.

  He certainly looked thoroughly exhausted at the end of the interview. They dismissed him and sat in silence for a moment, each knowing the other and his methods too well to ask what he was thinking.

  Hook said eventually, “I liked the lad, but he’s a professional actor, so we have to allow for the fact that he might have been presenting a front.”

  “If he was, he’d had a day and more to decide on the image he wanted to project. Still, his distress seemed genuine enough. But that’s the modern method of acting, they tell me. You look for the necessary traits of character within your own personality, presenting as much of yourself as you can, finding what you want for the part from within yourself, as far as possible.”

  “Proper Stanislaysky, aren’t you?”

  “You’d never have used words like that, Bert Hook, before you did that Open University degree. Adult education has a lot to answer for.”

  “Anyway, I’m not discounting the fact that our young man might well have found he was being two-timed by the mysterious Tamsin Rennie.”

  “Or even three-timed. Heroin addicts are notoriously bad bets for relationships. I didn’t tell him about the pregnancy, and he didn’t appear to know about it himself. We may need a DNA test to establish whether it’s his or not. I fancy young Tom Clarke would make a very jealous lover. And perhaps a violent one. All those modern notions about women not being property seem to disappear very quickly when beset by the green-eyed monster.”

  The two cynical old sweats of murder had their first serious suspect.

  Eight

  On Sunday morning, they had the formal post-mortem report. It ran to six pages, but it did not add much to what they already knew.

  The girl was two months pregnant. She would certainly have known about her condition, which raised the question of why she hadn’t communicated the information to Tom Clarke. Which raised in turn the possibility that someone other than he might have been the father. Clarke might of course have known and merely withheld the information. If so, why? And what else might he have withheld from them? For a man who had been planning to spend the rest of his life with Tamsin Rennie, he had known very little about the detail of her life. Or had claimed to know very little.

  There was hypostasis of the blood in the shoulders, buttocks and calves, showing that the body had been lying flat on its back for many hours before discovery, confirming in effect that the corpse had been in the Lady Chapel of Hereford Cathedral overnight. Death had been by strangulation, almost certainly by someone wearing gloves, but it was impossible to say whether the girl had been killed in the Lady Chapel itself or had been taken there shortly after death.

  The stomach contents of the corpse indicated that a meal of fish and chips had been eaten approximately sixty to ninety minutes before death. That would tend to place the death some time during the evening, perhaps between seven and nine. That timing was supported by the evidence of heroin injection. There had been no intake for about ten hours before death — presumably the last injection had been early on the morning of the day of her death. Her degree of dependency would have necessitated a further shot in the evening, but she had presumably been killed before that fix.

 
There had been no heroin found in the flat. That left the question of where her next supply would have come from. But perhaps Tamsin Rennie had possessed ample quantities, which had disappeared from her rooms after she had been killed.

  Lambert and his team were increasingly convinced that someone — whether the murderer or someone else entirely — had been through the flat and removed evidence before Jack Johnson and his SOC team reached it.

  ***

  Tom Clarke walked by the Wye on that gloriously sunny Sunday morning. There had been no appreciable rain for over a fortnight, and the low river ran softly between banks lush with the green of high summer. It was still only nine o’clock and there were not many people about. He could see a family half a mile away, where the river curved out of sight to the left; he watched the father helping the smallest child over a steep rise in the path, heard the excited voices of the children calling through the still, clear air.

  The very innocence of this rural scene seemed a rebuke to him, not the consolation he had hoped for. But there never was any escape from facts. Tamsin was dead, and he was walking alone here, wrestling with his guilt.

  He greeted the family as they passed him, forcing a false cheerfulness into his voice, taking care not to catch the eyes of the parents. Then he walked faster, on round the curve of the river, watching a village church disgorge its congregation from beneath its square stone tower on the other side of the river. It was a scene which could hardly have changed much since Gray wrote his elegy, and Tom recited aloud a few of the verses he had committed so easily to memory as a child. The lines had simple rhythms, and the fine cadences beloved of an actor exploiting the range of his voice; they did not calm his racing mind.

  He walked a long way in the attempt to exhaust himself: ten or eleven miles, without a stop, he reckoned, when he looked at his watch. But his spirit when he returned to his mother’s old Fiesta was as restless as when he had started. He drove northwards slowly, hoping against hope that some solution would present itself to him before he got back to the familiar house. He wished for the first time in many months that the father who had left them ten years ago was there now for him to consult. But in his heart, he knew that this was a problem he would have confided to no one.

  His mother was glad to have him home for Sunday lunch. She couldn’t remember when they had last eaten a formal meal together at this hour. She knew he was only here now because that awful girl was dead, but she had enough sense to bite her tongue and say nothing about her. Tom had talked to the police yesterday afternoon; she knew that much. But he had said nothing about it, except for a sullen assurance in answer to her anxious query that it had been “all right”.

  He raised the matter obliquely when they had eaten their slices of beef and roast potatoes — in almost total silence, apart from a few half-hearted sallies from his mother and a desperate compliment on her Yorkshire pudding from Tom. “You were at your yoga class last Wednesday night,” he said, as if he was giving her an order rather than asking her for information.

  “Yes, as usual. And as usual, I went round to Jean’s for a drink afterwards, before Amy dropped me off here.”

  “Yes. As you say, just as usual. Look, Mum, could you do me a favour? Could you just say you rang me here and spoke to me? If anyone asks you, I mean. They probably won’t.”

  There was an interval which was probably no longer than ten seconds, though it seemed to Tom to stretch into minutes. Then his mother said, in a monotone which seemed to come from a long way away, “At what time did I make this phone call?”

  He tried to be casual. “Oh, about eight o’clock, I expect. Any time around then. Well, perhaps earlier rather than later.”

  He smiled. His mother wondered if they taught you how to smile when it wasn’t appropriate at acting school. She tried unsuccessfully to smile back at him.

  Tom had never asked her to lie before.

  ***

  “I’m afraid we are not in a position to release the body for burial yet, Mrs Rennie.”

  Lambert began with the formal apology, hoping he would not have to go on to the full reasons for the delay. If and when they eventually arrested the girl’s killer and brought him to trial, the defence would be entitled to a second, independent postmortem examination of the mortal remains of Tamsin Rennie, in case they wished to contest the findings of the Crown. Not being able to say farewell with the ritual of a funeral often added to the distress of close relatives who were already devastated by the sudden removal of a loved one.

  Sarah Rennie did not seem to be fighting emotional distress. She nodded curtly. “There is no problem with that. The soul is gone. What remains is unimportant.”

  “You are very clear-sighted. Having a strong religious faith must be a consolation, at an awful time like this.”

  “It may be, for some. Superintendent Lambert, you need not treat me with kid gloves. I am not going to dissolve into tears in the face of your questions. I told you when I came to the police station at Oldford, this death was not a shock to me, nor to my husband. ‘As you sow, so shall you reap,’ the Bible tells us. Tamsin had sown the seeds of her death and her damnation when she left home and chose to live as she did.” The lips in the long, oval face set into a thin line of satisfaction, the head nodded its affirmation, and the crow-black hair moved gently, as if in support of this irrefutable logic.

  Lambert was nettled enough to respond. “You surely cannot believe that your daughter - is damned, whatever you think of her actions. What about the grace of repentance? What about the infinite mercy of the Lord, who is surely the only one who could see right into her heart?”

  For a moment, she looked as if she would like to engage him in theological argument, and he knew in that instant that she was one who could never be content with a faith that was merely personal, that she would be forever compelled to evangelise, to urge the logic of her beliefs on whoever would listen. She said, “Infinite mercy must always listen to the demands of infinite justice, Superintendent. The Book of Revelation tells us that we shall be judged by the tenets of scripture: ‘And I saw the dead, great and small, stand before God: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works’. The note there is one of justice, not of mercy.”

  She looked past him, out of her square, sparsely furnished sitting room and down the long garden to the narrow border where phlox and roses straggled untended. A disturbed personality, this; one which at the moment seemed incapable of any generous thought. She had mentioned a husband, which set him wondering what any man could see in this formidable fortress of pride. Perhaps her bitterness was confined to the daughter she seemed so determined to reject, even in death. Or perhaps she was one of those zealots who found release in private in fierce sexual passion. Policemen over the years’ experience many personalities at the extremes of the continuum of the human temperament.

  Lambert said stiffly, “We need to ask you certain questions about your daughter, Mrs Rennie.”

  “Of course. But I warn you, I shall be able to tell you very little. When Tamsin walked out of this house and rejected the Lord, she walked out of our lives.”

  “Your husband shared your views?”

  “Shares, Superintendent, not shared. Tamsin’s death does not affect the rock of our faith. I should perhaps tell you that he is not Tamsin’s natural father, but her stepfather. Her natural father passed out of my life many years ago. I understand that he died two years ago.” She made it sound as if it were the natural conclusion to such perfidy.

  “May I ask the name of the religion you follow?”

  “We are Born Again Christians, proclaiming the message of the Good Book. We have formed our own group, without clergy or formal religious services. We meet to read the scriptures and reflect on their message.”

  In which charity does not figure prominently, reflected Lambert. He said, “It is a small group, no doubt.”

  If she detected irony, she was too disdainful to react t
o it. “Righteousness is not measured in numbers,” she said contemptuously.

  Lambert said, “I understand Tamsin left home about eighteen months ago. What age was she then?”

  “She was twenty-one.”

  “And was the parting amicable?”

  “It was not. We gave her the alternative: worship with us, live our kind of lifestyle, or live elsewhere. She chose to follow her own way. It was not the way of the Lord.”

  From what little they knew, that was certainly true. Lambert said, “How often have you seen your daughter since then, Mrs Rennie?”

  “Only once. She came home to speak to me, about six months after she had left. Apparently she had the opportunity of renting a flat of her own in that place where she was living. She came to ask for financial help. I wasn’t able to offer it.” The contempt was edging her voice again, an eerie contrast to the warmth of affection which surged into many mothers’ voices when they spoke about their children.

  “You didn’t have the means to help her?”

  “No, Superintendent Lambert, I chose not to. She could give me no guarantee that she was going to amend her lifestyle, to live once again in the ways of the Lord. I had no choice but to refuse her request.”

  “And did your husband agree with this decision?”

  “He was not present at the meeting. When he heard the details of my conversation with my daughter, he fully supported me.”

  It would take a brave man to stand up to Sarah Rennie, Lambert reflected. He was already looking forward to seeing what kind of man this husband might be. Lambert studied her for a moment; the intensity in the deep brown, unblinking eyes, the certainty on the pale oval face as she spoke so dismissively of her dead daughter, were unique in his experience. For the first time, he began to entertain her seriously as a murder suspect.

  He said, “You had your own reasons no doubt for refusing to give your daughter money. But did you not offer her any other help when you saw her in trouble?”