An Unsuitable Death

by J M Gregson

  One of the difficulties the infiltrators have is keeping contact with their fellow officers in the Drugs Squad. They need to report back anything they have found, so that it can be useful in this war against an anonymous enemy. Equally, they need to be apprised of any information about the world in which they move which other

  operations have discovered: at times, their very lives may depend upon knowledge of the latest development.

  Yet the infiltrators have to be very careful about their contacts with the police forces they serve. Days, sometimes weeks, go past without them being able to make contact without endangering themselves. It is because of such danger that the Drugs Squad is a self-contained unit, pursuing its own war and jealously guarding its own procedures. Murder is such a serious crime that it can break down these barriers, but even a murder investigation has to proceed with care when it impinges upon the shadowy world of drugs.

  The man who came to see Lambert under cover of darkness would certainly never have been taken for a police officer. He had a scruffy four-day growth of beard, a skin which looked as if it had not seen the light for weeks, and an odour which might most charitably be described as unwholesome. His jeans were shiny with dirt and split at the knee; his shirt looked as if it had been worn for at least a week. He sat in Christine Lambert’s neat kitchen like a presence from an alien world — which, in a sense, he was.

  They did not waste time on preliminaries, nor even on names. Lambert knew the young man was a Drugs Squad Sergeant and he knew that Lambert was a CID Superintendent, but neither bothered with the irrelevance of rank. Lambert said simply, “Tamsin Rennie. Can you help us?”

  “The girl found dead in Hereford Cathedral? Not much. She’s not on my patch and we don’t have anyone in her circle of dealers. Hereford is not a prime target.” He permitted himself a sour smile at the thought of the quiet cathedral city being a major vice centre. “What I can tell you is that she was dealing.”

  It was what Lambert had feared from the start. Feared because it pushed his investigation into this bleak world of drugs, where murder was casual and its instruments anonymous. But heroin was an expensive habit, and the earnings from Tamsin Rennie’s sporadic prostitution were always unlikely to have supported both the habit and her considerable rent for the flat. “Do you know who her supplier was?”

  “No. It’s a fringe ring, lucrative for those involved, but too small and too remote from the centre to interest us. Too dangerous for us, too, from the very fact that it is small. It’s difficult to hide a sleeper in a group where people know each other and their backgrounds.”

  “But you say it’s on the fringe of something bigger.”

  “Yes. I know the ultimate controller, though we can’t pin anything on him as yet. It’s in the hope of assembling a case against him that I’m operating in Birmingham.”

  He hadn’t given the man’s name, even now. Caution had moved from an instinct to a habit in the world where he lived for seven days a week. Lambert thought he knew what was coming, but he had to say, “Give me the name of this top man. I promise we shan’t do anything to compromise you.”

  The brown eyes in the young-old face studied the lined visage of the older man unashamedly, wondering how much this glibly delivered promise was worth. Then he said, “Keith Sugden. You won’t hurt me if you go to see him. We’ve been after him for three years now, but he knows we’re nowhere near him yet. If we get near, the bastard will disappear.” For a moment, the hopelessness of his mission seemed to overwhelm him. Then he shook his head vigorously, as if to shuffle off his doubts. “I’ll put out feelers about that girl’s supplier, but I don’t hold out much hope of learning anything quickly. Sugden’s whole bloody empire is built on ignorance, with each unit knowing the minimum about those above and below it in the chain.”

  Before he could stop himself, Lambert said, “Don’t take any risks,” and the sallow features creased immediately into a bitter smile at this ridiculous injunction. Lambert followed up gruffly, “That was stupid. I mean don’t jeopardise the major operation you’re involved in for the sake of this on the sidelines.”

  The young man nodded. “Murder isn’t a sideline, I know. And I’d like you to get whoever killed that poor kid — I see too many in the same danger as she was. But I can’t do much to help. The thing we’re involved in could save hundreds of lives, in the long run.” He sounded glad to iterate that, and Lambert guessed it was the sentiment he had to repeat silently to himself when he was alone in that world where he lived so perilously.

  The man looked at the back door which led from the curtained kitchen into the garden, anxious to be away from this safe world whose bright fluorescent lighting seemed so threatening after the dimness of the places where he normally moved.

  Lambert caught the glance and said, “Will you have a hot meal before you go? It won’t take long to rustle up something—”

  “No, thanks.” A grin from the emaciated face, half of gratitude, half at the futile bourgeois politeness of this world he had forsaken. “I’ll get what I need back at the

  squat.” He bared his forearm briefly, showing the needle marks. “I dilute it, whenever I think I won’t be observed. But you don’t need much food, when you’re on this.”

  In a moment, he was gone, roaring away on his small motorcycle from the comfortable modern bungalow into the darkness whence he had come. Lambert wondered whether he would go all the way back to the city on the bike, or whether he would be picked up in a layby by an unmarked car which would drop him within walking distance of his Birmingham squat. The Drugs Squad, operating in a world of savage and anonymous violence, used a caution that would have been appropriate in MI5.

  He shivered involuntarily as he went back into the warm room where his wife was waiting. It was eleven o’clock on a Monday evening. The living gas fire flickered cheerfully in the grate. The colour television in the corner was replaying a prom concert. Christine was standing in the middle of the room and he went over instinctively and put his arms round her, holding the small body against him, wanting to reassure her that he was not threatened by the world she had glimpsed with his visitor.

  “Has he gone?” she asked. She was shaken by how appalled she had been by the appearance of the young officer. She found herself at once resentful of him bringing the cold shaft of that darker world he inhabited into her home and guilty that she should feel that resentment of such a brave man.

  “He’s gone,” John Lambert reassured her. “I said we’d make him something hot to eat, but he seemed anxious to be away. Perhaps he felt that if he sat in comfort and warmth for too long he wouldn’t be able to go back.”

  He had grown used to resenting his lost youth, to bemoaning the way the years fled ever more swiftly. Now he was suddenly glad that he was not a young copper, starting out on life in the service.

  Twelve

  Lambert’s first task on Tuesday morning was to ring the Superintendent in charge of the Drugs Squad. They had met, once, years earlier, but there was no time for polite preliminaries.

  “I need to see Keith Sugden.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t, John. He’s a villain and a big one, as you probably know. But we aren’t ready to move against him yet. We have to have a case the CPS will take on before we arrest him. At the moment, he’d laugh at us.”

  “Nevertheless, I need to see him. A murder victim was pushing drugs for him. We need to establish who was supplying her.”

  A pause. Murder, even here, even in the context of a Drugs Squad operation costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, could not be turned away. “It’s difficult, John. We’re getting nearer, amassing some valuable stuff on Sugden, but we’re nowhere near ready to take him yet.”

  “Nevertheless, I need to see him. This isn’t the normal gangland killing, where we know we stand very little chance of arresting the killer. This was a girl who was only on the fringe of the drugs trade. I’m going to get the man who killed her.”

  His confidence impr
essed even the hardened man on the other end of the line, whose experience entitled him to be cynical. “I don’t want the safety of any of my officers compromised. They’re in enough danger as it is.”

  “I know that. I won’t jeopardise anyone’s safety. You’re not the only ones who’ve been after Sugden for years, though it sounds as if you now have the best chance of putting him away. But he knows me. He knows I’m well aware he has a drugs empire, though he also knows I haven’t the proof to do a damn thing about it. Nevertheless, once it was obvious that our murder victim was an addict, he wouldn’t be surprised by a visit from me.”

  A sigh — the sound of reluctant acceptance of the inevitable. “All right. But for God’s sake, tread carefully.”

  “I will. Don’t worry about that.”

  For God’s sake, mused Lambert. Whatever God you believed in, He or She had nothing to do with the hard drugs industry.

  ***

  Bert “Nosey” Parker’s drawings were even more useful than he had anticipated. He was an artist manqué; perhaps, thought DI Chris Rushton as he collated information at his computer in the Murder Room, they should employ him to draw some life into those identikit pictures which so seldom produced any reliable identifications for the police.

  They had already confirmed that the subject of the second drawing was Arthur Rennie, and used it to expose the tissue of lies with which he had attempted to distance himself from his dead stepdaughter. Now Parker’s drawing of the first middle-aged man who had visited the dead girl prompted the memory of others. The dead girl’s landlady, Jane King, so keen when Lambert questioned her to respect the privacy of her tenants, now recalled that she too had seen this man of about forty-five entering and leaving the flat on occasions. She couldn’t remember when, but she thought his comings and goings had been surreptitious.

  Once they knew who the man was, it became obvious why. It was a young mother of three at the end of Rosamund Street who provided the identification. It was a cause for raised eyebrows in the world at large as well as for the police. Or as journalist Joe Roper, who filed his copy for local rag and national dailies alike that night, put it, a matter of public interest.

  For the man with the incipient pot belly and receding hair was one James Whittaker, local councillor, campaigner for the homeless, and favourite to become the ancient city’s mayor in the forthcoming year.

  Or rather, as Joe told his colleagues happily over his third pint, favourite until this juicy revelation.

  ***

  In the wide valley of the Severn, four miles outside Worcester, an ivy-clad mansion lies hidden behind trees in a small estate of four acres. There has been a house here since medieval days, the first one being that of a fourteenth-century merchant who made a fortune from the wool trade and established himself here in well-serviced comfort, with a view of the river in front of him and the dramatic outline of the Malvern Hills to the south.

  That house is long gone, apart from an ancient barn and a few stone stumps in the garden. The present walls of mellow Cotswold stone date only from the early nineteenth century, when a Birmingham toolmaker built himself a great business and retired to the grand house his standing demanded. At the end of the century, this man’s grandson was much taken with William Morris and the arts and crafts movement, and much of the original furniture, furnishings and even two wallpapers of that period survive in the high hall and the large, comfortable rooms. They are superior in quality and preservation to similar examples exhibited in houses owned by the National Trust and open to the public.

  But no curious eyes are allowed to gaze on these treasures. The high gates at the end of the drive are manned day and night by a security guard, and no one gets past the entrance lodge without an appointment or the owner’s permission via the internal phone system.

  As the electronic gates swung back and he drove the old Vauxhall between them with Hook at his side, Lambert wondered how many people even in affluent Britain could afford to live in this high style and employ this many servants. Crime, he thought sourly, was the great growth industry of the new century.

  And Keith Albert Sugden was one of the great successes of that industry. He greeted his police visitors with that air of ironic condescension which he judged would be most irritating to them. “We meet again, Mr Lambert, as they say in badly written thrillers,” he said.

  Sugden was a grammar-school boy who prided himself on his learning. Brains were not rare in modern crime, but a decent education still was, except among fraudsters. Sugden found that it gave him respectability in the rarefied circles of society where his money now allowed him to move. He continued, like a man using the diction of an earlier age, “I can’t think what strange notion it was which brought you here, and I won’t go so far as to say that it is a pleasure to renew our acquaintance. But let us have afternoon tea and behave like civilised people.”

  There was no chance to refuse. The maid entered the room with the silver tea service on a trolley even as he spoke. Sugden poured the tea himself, handing them the finest Royal Worcester china and small homemade cakes with unhurried care, enjoying the ceremony of this very English piece of hospitality, enjoying even more putting the unwilling recipients of his hospitality at a disadvantage.

  He took some pains to look as unlike the popular conception of a successful crime boss as possible. The guttural utterances of a Mafia Godfather were not for him. He was tall: though three inches shorter than John Lambert’s six feet four, he matched Hook’s height, and was immensely more poised. He was slim and graceful in his Armani suit. His fifty-five-year-old face had a healthy tan which was set off by his carefully coiffured grey hair and the gold-rimmed half-moon glasses he wore for reading. He took these off, folded them deliberately with his manicured fingers, and set them upon the low table beside him. Looking like a man whose family had lived for generations in this elegant milieu, he said with a smile, “What is it that you mistakenly think I can help you with, Superintendent Lambert?”

  “You can help us to determine who killed a young woman called Tamsin Rennie.”

  “The girl who was found in Hereford Cathedral? I applaud your murderer’s sense of the dramatic in his choice of place, but I can’t for the life of me see why you think I might be able to help you.”

  “You know perfectly well, Sugden. The girl was on heroin. She was drug-dependent and she had to finance the habit. I believe she was a pusher. A pusher for the drugs which were supplied by your network.”

  Sugden had scarcely ceased to smile since they had come into the room. Now he lifted his eyebrows. “My network, Mr Lambert? If I were more easily offended, I might make something of that.”

  “We both know I can’t prove it, Sugden.” Lambert was mindful of the need to protect the Drugs Squad officers who were so patiently and courageously pursuing this man. He glanced round the sumptuously furnished room. “Equally, we both know that you’re financing all this from the dirtiest trade in the world.”

  “We know nothing of the sort. If I were disposed to, I could make out a case for drugs. They bring much pleasure to people who would have barren lives without them. If you wish to condemn their abuse, you should know that in this country one person a month dies from ecstasy, one a day from heroin and cocaine, and one every fifteen minutes from alcoholism.” Sugden beamed triumphantly as he produced the statistics, like one scoring a debating point in the senior common room of a university.

  “And if you have anything to do with it, if empires like yours develop unchecked, those figures will alter drastically. You know as well as I do that our job is to enforce the law. We can’t do much about alcohol and its effects, whatever the problems it causes us, but we can about you and your ilk. You’re dealing in death, and making a fortune from it. And what death! You’ve seen how people die from drugs, as I have. There aren’t many worse ways.”

  Lambert wondered, as he felt the anger pounding in his head, how he had allowed

  himself to be drawn into this. The relaxed co
mfort of this man’s lifestyle, his easy panache in the face of a police visit, had got to him, as he had not intended that it would. Keith Sugden knew that too, and smiled his satisfaction in the thought. “I wouldn’t agree, of course, any more than I would agree that I have the remotest connection with this trade. I don’t think I can help you with the death of this girl, so there seems no point in prolonging our discussion.”

  He stood up, and Bert Hook almost followed him on to his feet, so powerful was the aura of this man in his own carefully contrived environment. Then, just in time, Bert realised that Lambert had not moved at all, and took his cue from his chief. Lambert said evenly, “Tamsin Rennie was a pusher for your drugs, Sugden. I believe she was going to cease doing that, to move out of the area, to enter a clinic in order to be cured of her addiction.”

  He had no idea whether this was true — it was a lot to build on the thin evidence of young Tom Clarke’s vague assertion that he was going to take the girl away with him and start a new life elsewhere. But he had to get at Sugden somehow, and both he and the man opposite him knew the implications of what he said.

  Sugden sat down again in the high-backed chair with the carved wooden arms. He kept his smile, but there was perhaps the first slight hint of disturbance in the increased frequency of his blinking. “You are no doubt entitled to your view. But what is it to me, who never even saw the wretched girl?”

  “You know as well as I do that a rescued addict is a loose cannon. Especially one who has been a pusher. They’re few and far between, but they’re pure gold to us. They are the most valuable sources of information we can have about organisations like yours.”

  Sugden smiled, pursed his lips, nodded two or three times, pretending a professor’s academic interest in a practical area from which he was far removed. “I can see that, I suppose. Reformed junkies might be prepared to talk to your Drugs Squad about what they know. Might even feel a missionary zeal to communicate their knowledge.”