An Unsuitable Death (15 page)

By the time he came to what was clearly, to a cynical policeman, the real business of the evening, he had his audience eating out of his hand. In the first few minutes of his address, Sarah Rennie and a woman at the other end of the front row had instigated the audience participation by their own enthusiastic responses to the Pastor’s rhetorical questions from the platform. But the rest of the rows did not need much prompting. They had moved from a gathering chorus of alleluias to repeating the prayers after their leader, until in the end they sought to outdo each other in their demonstrations of fervour.

Chris had been waiting to hear the request for money he knew must surely come. But it struck no jarring note with this audience when it did. Looking along the rows of rapt faces, Rushton saw few that were troubled by the switch: for them, the transition from prayers to monetary demands was clearly a seamless one. Rennie moved from a denunciation of the worship of the false God of Mammon to a generalised account of the dangers of wealth and opulent living. He quoted the story of the young man whom Christ told to sell all his possessions if he wished to become a disciple.

Then he brandished a finger on an outstretched arm, Gladstone-like, at his audience and intoned the quotation Chris had been waiting for as if it came newly minted from his fertile mind: “Brethren I say unto you, It is harder for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” He paused, lowering his arm in slow motion to his side. “Harder than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. In other words, impossible. Think on that, brethren.” Some echoed the word “impossible”. The hissing sibilants passed like a whispered message along the rows. Others shouted “Alleluiah!” and nodded at each other in the discovery of this somber truth.

Rennie was suddenly quieter, intensely serious. “That is why I do not apologise as others might for divesting you of money and possessions. In the harsh and evil world in which we live, the Word of the Lord cannot be spread without resources. It is glorious work, brethren, and money cannot be better spent. But the reason I do not apologise for asking for your support is that I am offering you the chance to tread securely on the narrow path which leads to Heaven. Only those who divest themselves of the possessions of this world can hope to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Brethren, I am offering you tonight the chance to take the first faltering steps along that road. And I say unto you, once you have stripped away the dross of possessions, once you have divested yourself of the fool’s gold that sinful men take as the trappings of success, your tread along the path of virtue will become stronger and surer, until it becomes a triumphant march. And in the end, it is we who have forsaken the trappings of this life who will march together towards Salvation!”

His wife and his other front-row acolyte now passed collection plates along the rows of the audience. Rushton saw Sarah Rennie flick a ten-pound note into the plate as she transferred it from the first row to the second, and there was a good deal of paper money amidst the pound coins by the time the platters had completed their journey.

Arthur Rennie had remained on the platform throughout these minutes, kneeling in prayer, transformed into an image of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Nor was he foolish enough to finish on the note of acquisition. He rose again to his full height, congratulated his audience upon their taking this opportunity to divest themselves of what he called “the dross of Satan”, and led the way in prayers which united them in an emotional commitment to “the Lord and His paths, which had seemed lost but are now revealed once again unto us”. The date and place of the next meeting were announced and enthusiastically received.

Many of his followers remained to talk at the end of the formal proceedings. Covenant forms were produced for those who sought to regularise their commitment, while Sarah Rennie offered her services to two elderly enthusiasts who sought to revise their wills to aid the work of the Pastor.

It was a good half-hour after the formal ending of the meeting before Detective Inspector Chris Rushton was able to have the Rennies to himself. It was Rushton who had prepared the formal statements for them to sign as summaries of their exchanges with Superintendent Lambert, but they had seen him only very briefly. Sarah Rennie had tipped the contents of the collection plates into a copious handbag by the time Rushton emerged from the shadows of the now-darkened hall to the platform at the front which was still brightly lit. They seemed surprised to see him, but Chris was sure that Arthur Rennie at least had been aware of his patient, watchful presence in the shadows.

“I am Detective Inspector Rushton from Oldford CID. And that was an impressive performance, Mr Rennie,” said Chris. “You had them eating out of your hands by the end, didn’t you?”

Rennie refused to take offence. “The Lord speaks, not me, Inspector Rushton. He expresses himself through me: I am merely his channel. If you are saying that on this occasion those who were drifting along the paths of unrighteousness saw the error of their ways, then I am gratified.”

“Gratified to the tune of several hundred pounds, from what I saw. With the prospect of more to come, from covenants and legacies. Quite a profitable business, evangelism. For some.”

“Whatever we collect will be diverted swiftly to the work of the Lord,” said Sarah Rennie stiffly.

“I wonder whether the people of East Sussex would agree with that,” said Rushton.

The reaction was disappointing. He had expected bluster, denials, indignation. Instead, Arthur Rennie said quickly and calmly, “We have nothing to answer for to you about East Sussex, Inspector. If you have anything more to say on the subject, then charge us. Otherwise, the subject is closed.”

“‘Put up or shut up’, as they say. Well, you know that the police there haven’t a case to take to court.”

“Then I suggest you leave the matter, Inspector Rushton, before you get yourself into trouble with the laws of slander,” said Rennie.

Arthur Rennie had collected considerable sums of money in the area around Chichester by mounting a revivalist campaign on the lines of his present “Mission to Herefordshire”. There had been copious gifts from ageing widows, deeds of covenant a-plenty, and two useful legacies. The police had prepared a case and been ready to move. Then one of their key witnesses, a ninety-one-year-old man who had been tricked into making a gift much larger than he intended, had died suddenly and inopportunely of natural causes, and two others had been bought off by having most of their money returned. No one enjoys going into court and saying under oath that he has been a gullible fool, and that makes it difficult to mount a case against people like the Rennies. The case had collapsed like a house of cards, and now Arthur Rennie was bold enough to taunt Rushton with that knowledge.

The DI said hastily, “I wanted to talk to you about a much more serious crime. The murder of your daughter, Tamsin Rennie.”

Sarah Rennie bristled with anger. “We have said all we have to say about Tamsin. She was a child of Satan, and it is with Satan that she will now spend eternity.”

“She was your child, Mrs Rennie. And it was not Satan but some human being who is still walking about the streets of our city who killed her and has to be apprehended for that crime.”

“And what is that to do with us?”

Rushton resisted the impulse to say that any mother must surely be concerned to locate her daughter’s killer. They had been down that road before; it led nowhere that was profitable. “I wish to check out some of the details of your statements.” He made it plural, hoping to imply that their statements contradicted each other at some points, though there were in truth no significant differences. “We have now interviewed over fifty other people, and you may be able to illuminate some things for us.”

Arthur Rennie said coolly, “Inspector, it seems to me you may be casting your net over too small an area, if you are presuming that Tamsin’s murderer is walking free on the streets of Hereford. As I understand it, she was involved with drugs. Was, I believe you told us, a heroin addict. Surely that means it is possible that her killer comes from that violent world, which stretches far beyond the walls of Hereford.”

It was cool and reasoned, far removed from the high-blown Messianic vein in which he had conducted the public part of the evening. A calculating, intelligent opponent, this man; Rushton was interested to note that his only comment so far on the death was to point to something which led suspicion away from him and his extraordinary wife. Chris said, “That is a fair enough point. How much do you know of Tamsin’s addiction and its consequences?”

Sarah Rennie said fiercely, “Nothing! We did not want to know of it. She defied us and cut us off when she sold her soul to Satan.”

Rushton said, almost as if she had not spoken, addressing his question directly to Arthur Rennie, “We now know that she was dealing in drugs. Have you any idea who her supplier might have been?”

“No.” Was it someone coming to her flat in Rosamund Street?”

“That would be unusual, but not impossible. The short answer is that we do not know, as yet. Did Tamsin herself give you any indication, perhaps unwittingly, of who might have been providing her with drugs? It’s likely, you see, that the same person eventually provided the supplies for her to sell on.”

“No.” His answer came promptly, too promptly, and Rushton realised that he was anxious to prevent any discussion of his own visits to his dead stepdaughter. “What about this boyfriend she seemed to have acquired, this actor or whatever he was?”

“Tom Clarke? No. We’ve questioned him extensively, and are satisfied that he has no connections with the supply of heroin.”

“Then we can’t help you any further. That’s right, isn’t it, Sarah?” He invoked his wife nervously, at odds with his previous confidence, anxious to be rid of this line of questioning, and Rushton was certain in that moment that the wife knew nothing of her husband’s sexual encounters with her daughter.

Sarah Rennie said harshly, “My daughter ceased to be mine over a year ago. She had become an instrument of the devil, using her flesh to further the designs of Satan. Now we hear that she was using illegal substances to further her evil pleasures and descend deeper into the pit of hell. Do not ask me to show compassion for her. I showed her the paths of righteousness, and she rejected them.”

“That does not prevent you from showing her some compassion in death. Surely you would wish whoever killed her to be brought to justice?”

There was a burning intensity about Sarah Rennie as she said, “‘If thy right hand scandalise thee, cut it off’. She scandalised me, and I cut her off.”

She’s driven by the same fanatical fury as those masochistic saints who enjoyed torturing their own flesh, thought Chris. She genuinely believes all this claptrap, genuinely worships the man who has brought it to her. Arthur Rennie is a charlatan through and through, but this mistaken woman is that most dangerous of creatures, a fanatic who believes she has discovered the truth.

Rushton turned to Arthur Rennie and said, “We’re checking again on everyone’s whereabouts at the time when Tamsin died. I believe that you claim to have been at home with your wife on the evening of Wednesday, August 17th.”

“Not claim, Inspector Rushton. I was. We even watched a little television. A thing we rarely do, but it pays us to be acquainted with the ways of the world we spend so much of our time fighting. And some of the programmes are innocent enough, if trivial and demeaning to the human spirit. In fact, we watched
Coronation Street
that night, purely because it is the soap opera most popular with the people of this country. It seemed innocent enough, though much of the action is set around a back-street public house. A girl who owned a newsagent’s shop married her boyfriend, much to the disgust of nearly everyone around them, so far as I could gather. Later on we watched a documentary programme about the conflict between Russia and Germany in the 1939-45 war.
The Descent into Hell
, someone called it, and it was indeed grim stuff. A warning of the evil that lurks in all human beings.”

He’s giving me the documentation of their evening, thought Rushton, though I haven’t asked him for it. The two of them have rehearsed this. I wonder what they are trying to hide. He said, “Are you saying that you were at home from early in the evening?”

“Yes. From six o’clock onwards.” This was Sarah Rennie, at her husband’s side, with her hand on his forearm.

“And you didn’t go out again that night?”

“No.” This formidable creature was suddenly almost skittish. “If you must know, Inspector, we went to bed early that night. We enjoyed each other’s bodies. Sex may be a weakness, but within the bond of marriage it is an innocent one. The Lord gave us our bodies, and the Lord is happy that we should enjoy each other. Arthur and I were in bed before ten that night.” She entwined her arm in her husband’s, looked up into his face for a moment as he smiled down at her, and then gazed steadily back at Rushton. Her dark eyes glittered with pleasure in the pale oval of her face at the thought of her husband’s body.

DI Rushton found her smile the most disturbing of all the strange things he had seen that evening.

Sixteen

The Sacristan had been caught. The man who had committed the serial murders of four women around Shrewsbury was in custody.

Lambert heard the official announcement of the news on the radio on Thursday morning, but it was clear that the information had been released to the press on the previous evening. SACRISTAN IS ARRESTED was all his
Times
had to offer in its headline, but the other papers were less restrained. They recalled the sexual assaults and the bizarre arranging of the bodies in country churchyards, then went on to remind the world that “the whole of the West Country, which has suffered under the Sacristan’s reign of terror, will sleep more easily tonight”.

They were driven to recall the retrospective horrors, for they had no details yet of the man arrested, though they speculated that he was a local resident. Desperate for copy, deprived now of the suspense and fear they had built for weeks around the hunt for the Sacristan, the fourth estate turned to another dramatic mystery, which had the advantage from their point of view of being still unsolved.

“Attention is now turning to the Copycat Killer, the man who aped the methods of the Sacristan and deposited his victim so daringly on the altar of the Lady Chapel in Hereford Cathedral last week. Police were last night still baffled about the identity of the man who chose to tease them by imitating the macabre methods of the Sacristan. Top Cop Superintendent John Lambert and his extensive team remain tight-lipped and uncommunicative about his investigation, which we understand has so far come up against a wall as stout and unyielding as that of the Cathedral itself”

There was more in the same vein, and some of the tabloids repeated their dramatic pictures of the scene of the discovery of Tamsin Rennie’s body to accompany their theme of police bafflement. All good knockabout stuff, but it would no doubt turn nastier if there was no arrest in the next few days, thought Lambert, as he drove to work.

He looked at his watch as he went into the Murder Room at Oldford CID on the morning of Thursday, August 25th. It was exactly a week to the minute since the body had been discovered on the altar of the Lady Chapel.

Lambert decided it was time to put a little pressure on Thomas Clarke, apprentice actor and murder suspect. He called him into the Oldford CID headquarters, had him ushered into an interview room, and left him to kick his heels there for twenty minutes.

Tom had been directed into a spot in the walled car park of the police station when he arrived. Whilst he waited in the windowless room to find out why he had been summoned, a sergeant and two constables examined the seats and the boot of his car for any sign that the body of Tamsin Rennie had rested there. By the standards of the forensic experts, it was a cursory search. But the two men and the woman knew what they were looking for: principally, fibres from the clothing the dead girl had worn when discovered in the Lady Chapel, and secondly, any other chance evidence that had fallen from the dead girl and gone unnoticed. Serendipity can help detection as it aids other facets of life, but you have to help it along by diligent searching.

If anything to suggest a connection with the body was found in this unofficial search of the vehicle, the car would be passed on to the forensic crime laboratory staff for a more detailed and systematic searching. The sergeant and the constables found nothing significant. The car was splashed with the mud of the country lanes of Herefordshire on the outside. Its interior had been thoroughly cleaned at some time in the last few days.

Tom Clarke sat in the ten foot square airless room with the single bulb set behind a wire cage in the low ceiling and became more nervous. On the watch he consulted too frequently, the minutes ticked blank and busy. That was a quotation from somewhere, he thought, probably some poem from the First World War. He cudgelled his brains to try to pinpoint the source, but the answer would not come, and the attempt to divert his mind from his present predicament failed.

They knew the big thing he had concealed. He felt certain of that. But how much more did they know, or fancy they knew, about him and Tamsin and what had happened last week? His palms were sweating. He found that however much he rubbed them on his handkerchief or the sleeves of his jacket, they were moist again within seconds.

Beyond the walls of this room, which seemed at every moment more like a prison cell, he could hear muffled sounds. The bleeping of telephones; shouts of enquiry down an unseen corridor; the opening of drawers in metal filing cabinets; the sound of voices, calling words he could never distinguish; the sound, twice, of female laughter. He wondered how much of this activity revolved around him, how much of it was preparation for the ordeal he was now sure was in store for him.

He speculated on who would confront him across the small table which was screwed to the floor. Probably it would be different men from the grave Superintendent and the burly Sergeant who had listened to him so attentively at his first interview. He rather hoped it would be, if he was to be confronted with his lies. It would be less embarrassing if it was different people; he might even be able to make out it was some kind of misunderstanding, that the wires of exchange had been a little crossed.

It was the same men.

Tom stood up automatically when the door of the room finally opened and the two big plain-clothes officers came briskly into it. He was ready to shake hands, to smile and be smiled at, to begin the exchange in a civilised manner. They scarcely even looked at him until they were sitting opposite him on the other side of the table. Then he thought their eyes looked like those of lions surveying a tethered goat. The weather-beaten sergeant pushed a cassette into the tape recorder at the right-hand edge of the table and said, without taking his eyes off his prey, “Second interview with Thomas Clarke, Thursday, August 25th at ten eighteen. Present: Superintendent Lambert and Detective Sergeant Hook.”

Lambert looked at Tom for a long ten seconds before he said, “You were less than honest with us when we talked to you last Saturday, Mr Clarke.”

Tom, usually so ready with words, found now that he could not produce them. He faltered eventually into, “I don’t know what you mean,” and then immediately regretted it. He had put on the leather jacket his mother had bought him under careful guidance for his last birthday. His friends had joked about the macho image the jacket gave him; he felt anything but macho here, isolated under the relentless scrutiny of two men who were professionals in a world which was alien to him.

Lambert did not smile. “Help the boy, Sergeant Hook,” was all he said.

Hook flicked open the pages of his loose-leaved notebook, referred to the information he knew by heart, and looked back into the pale, handsome face. “You said that you were at home on the evening of Wednesday, August 18th.”

“Did I?”

Hook studied him for a moment, then dropped his eyes to his notebook. “To be precise, you said: ‘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.’ There were no witnesses to this; your mother was at a yoga class, you said.”

Hell, thought Tom. It seemed worse, with all that detail he had thrown in to make the lie convincing. He could hardly say it was a simple mistake, that he had got his nights mixed up, when he had thrown in that bit about ringing the flat at eight o’clock and getting no reply from Tamsin. He said, “I’d like to change my statement. I — I was mistaken.”

Lambert said, “We don’t believe that, Mr Clarke. You must take us for fools if you think we might.”

“Yes. Well, I’d better tell you where I really was on that night, then, hadn’t I?” Tom attempted a dismissive laugh, but none came. “May I ask who informed you that I was not at home that night?”

“No, Mr Clarke, you may not. And I should remind you that you are now in the position of having told us a deliberate lie in a serious crime inquiry. A crucial lie, because it was an attempt to establish an alibi for the time of a murder. You have wasted quite enough of our time. You had better tell us immediately where you were and what you were doing on that Wednesday evening.”

“I was in the Cathedral. In the nave of the Cathedral, to be exact. With two hundred other people. Rehearsing for the Three Choirs Festival. We sang for over two hours There was one chorus we couldn’t get right. We tenors were too strident, the conductor told us.” He wanted to go on and on, with fact after innocent fact. While he was talking they could not press him. And they did not interrupt, but merely studied him, as if his behaviour under stress was a matter of captivating interest to them. But eventually he had to come to a stop.

Lambert said, “You will understand that once you have lied to us, we shall treat each one of your subsequent statements with caution. How did you get to this rehearsal?”

“I came by car. In my little old Fiesta. Well, it’s my mother’s actually, but she lets me use it almost whenever I need it. She’s very—”

“Where did you park this vehicle?”

“In the car park at the rear of the Cathedral. It’s private really, for Cathedral employees, but they don’t mind members of the choir using it in the evenings.”

“Behind the Lady Chapel, in fact.”

Tom felt the colour draining from his face. “Yes. Yes, I suppose it is, right behind the Lady Chapel.”

“Within a few yards of the spot where Tamsin Rennie’s body was discovered the next morning. We’ve inspected the spot where your Fiesta was parked, Mr Clarke. It is thirty yards from the St John’s door entrance to the Cathedral at the rear. The nearest access to the Lady Chapel. We’ve measured the distance exactly: it might prove to be important, to someone carrying a body.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose so, but — but that is the entrance that all the choir members use for evening rehearsals. It’s left open when the main door and all the other entrances to the Cathedral are locked at the normal time, you see.”

“You were parked in the spot nearest to the St John’s door. You must have been there early to get that.”

“Yes. I was there thirty-five minutes before the rehearsal was scheduled to begin.”

“Because you had a body to dispose of
?
”

“No! That’s ridiculous. I wanted to marry Tamsin. To take her away from all her troubles and—”

“And she was resisting that idea, Mr Clarke. Becoming more and more a slave to heroin. Supplying heroin to others, becoming a dealer, with all that that implies. Perhaps choosing to make her future with another man rather than with you. And so you killed her, in your frustration that she would not do what you wanted.”

“No! No, I didn’t! You must see that I would never have killed my Tamsin.” Tom found himself almost weeping in his need to convince them.

Lambert’s voice went on steadily, inexorably. “No. I don’t see that. I see certain facts, Mr Clarke. I see that you secured for yourself the parking spot from which you could most easily transfer a body weighing one hundred and ten pounds to the Lady Chapel. And with the least danger of being detected in doing so. I see that you lied about all this when we spoke to you five days ago; that you directly misled us; that you fed us information which has delayed the progress of a murder inquiry.”

“I know. That’s all true. But I didn’t kill Tamsin.”

“Then you had better set about convincing us of that. Why did you tell us you were at home on that Wednesday evening, when you were in fact in the very place where the body had been found?”

“I was stupid. I knew when I saw you that the body had been found in the Lady Chapel. And I knew that the boyfriend is always a suspect. I thought if I told you that I’d been around at both the time and the place of the killing, you’d not look any further for a murderer.”

“You underestimate us, Mr Clarke. In more ways than one. You don’t know much about the thoroughness of a murder hunt if you thought you were going to get away with that.” He spoke witheringly, but he was uncomfortably conscious that they had been made aware of Clarke’s presence in the Cathedral on that fatal evening not by diligent police work but through the chance observation of his car by another suspect in the case. A police officer had been pursuing the tedious task of checking out the hundreds of choristers involved in the rehearsal for the Three Choirs Festival, just in case any of them had connections with the dead girl, but no one so far had come to him with Clarke’s name. Lambert said, “Have you always sung in the Cathedral choir?”

“No. I sang as a youngster, then went off to RADA. I can’t be a regular member because well, because when I’m working, I’m obviously not available for rehearsals in the evenings. But six weeks ago someone said if I was ‘resting’, they were short of tenors for the Three Choirs Festival. I jumped at the chance. I was lucky to get in like that, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.” Just for an instant, he had forgotten his perilous situation in the joy of making music.

Possibly he isn’t on the official lists, thought Lambert. Amateur organisations are notoriously tardy with the paperwork. Cancel the rocket to the DC combing through that list. He said heavily, “You had better tell us exactly what you did that evening; accurately this time, please, and with nothing conveniently omitted. Begin with why you were parked in such an advantageous position behind the Cathedral, thirty-five minutes before the rehearsal began.”