An Unsuitable Death (18 page)

And so had that of Tamsin Rennie’s witch of a mother.

Nineteen

“Try the hospitals, but try them last. My guess is that if you do have any success, it will be in an old people’s home or a centre for the disabled. And give it priority; put three or four DCs on to it straight away.” While Rushton was trying to put Paul Dansen at his ease at the beginning of their meeting, Lambert was giving urgent orders to another section of his team.

By the time Rushton came in excited with his news about the Rennies, Lambert had a result of his own. He held up his hand for a moment as he spoke on the phone. Russell, Baldwin and Bright, local estate agents, confirmed that the property was for sale and offered to send him the details. The Superintendent turned to his DI with an expression which Rushton found confident, and thus depressing; it meant his news was not going to have the impact he had expected and hoped for.

He plunged in nevertheless. “The young man who was put down by Arthur Rennie at his prayer meeting last night has turned up. He’s given me the details of how his Gran was conned by Rennie. He’s also been able to tell me where Rennie was at the time when his stepdaughter was murdered. And he wasn’t at home, as he claimed.”

“Good,” said Lambert. “Very good work, Chris. It’s time someone nailed the bugger. Follow it up. We should have enough on him now to get the details of his bank accounts, to find just where his money is coming from. When some of his donors find exactly what has been happening to their money, they’ll be prepared to act as witnesses, I’m sure.”

Lambert wasn’t as good an actor as young Tom Clarke. Chris Rushton could tell his chief’s mind was running on autopilot, that his real thoughts were elsewhere. He said, “You’ve got a breakthrough on this murder, haven’t you, Guv’nor?” He relapsed into the copper’s traditional form of address, a form not encouraged by Lambert and rarely used by his juniors, as if he was acknowledging that the two of them were just going through the motions.

“I think so, yes. I’m wondering how to set about proving it.”

If Lambert was at the stage where he thought about the lawyers for the defence, about giving the Crown Prosecution Service a watertight case, then he was sure in his own mind who had done it, thought Chris. They might be at opposite ends of the CID continuum in many respects, but he had worked with this detective dinosaur long enough now to know the way his mind worked.

Lambert left Rushton with a series of phone calls to make and went out to the car where Bert Hook was already waiting in the driving seat. They were old hands at this game. Just like husband and wife, Christine Lambert and Eleanor Hook said when they compared notes and exchanged sympathy. They had been driving for some minutes before Bert said, “What put you on to it?”

Lambert did not smile. He had been trying to work out the very same thing himself: when had the first seed of suspicion been sown? Perhaps more important, when had it germinated in his dull mind? He stared unseeingly at the flying hedgerows as they drove on the road from Oldford to Hereford. “Did you ever read Sherlock Holmes as a lad?” he said unexpectedly.

Hook grinned. Typical of John Lambert to be oblique when you were screaming out for straight facts, whereas he was such a Grad-grind about facts and not opinions among his juniors. “Assemble all the relevant facts and the solution will be crystal clear,” the Superintendent always told new members of his team. “Grub away at the facts, and only speculate when you are satisfied there are no more facts available to you.” Now here he was talking about a fictional character who had operated a century earlier.

Bert played his part. Playing golf with the chief had taught him that even Lambert could be fallible. And ordinary, fallible people sometimes needed to be indulged. “I’m sure I did. But Dorothy L. Sayers was my adolescent favourite. When you were a lad living in a home, Lord Peter Wimsey and Oxbridge colleges were a world as different as that of a fairy tale.”

“‘Observation and deduction’,” Lambert quoted, almost as if his sergeant had not spoken, thought Bert irritably. “Everyone can observe. It’s what every young copper is taught to do, as soon as he enters the force. Deduction is more difficult. It’s the difference between routine plodding and good CID work. Well, in the less straightforward cases, it is, anyway,” he added defensively. “What I’m saying is that the vital thing was there for us all to observe. But it was placed within a thousand other details. Once you spot the right one, which is the difficult part, the deduction becomes easy.”

He’s getting worse, thought Bert. I’m sure as the old boy gets nearer to retirement, he’s becoming more self-indulgent. But it’s only when he relaxes, when he’s got a result, so we might as well put up with it. And he was practical enough to set all the right things in motion before we left the station. The Drugs Squad is well aware of what we’re about. The old fox is as careful of procedure as Chris Rushton, when he knows it’s important.

At that moment, as if to confirm this thought, the radio buzzed with the news that the chief had been right to set his other inquiry in train before he left the station: the Leonard Cheshire Home had accepted the gift on the previous Friday evening.

It was almost four o’clock by the time Hook turned the car carefully into Rosamund Street. The sun was fully on the front of the house at this hour, making the newly painted front door of the Georgian house seem an even brighter blue, illuminating the normally shadowed steps down to the basement and the brass figures of 17a on the door of the flat where the ill-fated Tamsin Rennie had lived out the last months of her life.

Jane King opened the door no more than a foot. “It really isn’t convenient. You should have rung before you came if—”

“If we wished to find the bird had flown when we arrived?” said Lambert fiercely. He pushed roughly past her, almost causing her to lose balance as she tried to hold the door against him, and strode into the ground-floor drawing room where they had talked to her on the two previous occasions. She followed him reluctantly, trapped between this suddenly belligerent man and the watchful Bert Hook, feeling as though she were already under arrest.

She stood facing them in the room, wondering if she could challenge this sudden entry into her house, noting that all three of them were breathing heavily, expectantly. It was a bizarre place for melodrama, this room with its tall Georgian windows looking out on the beds of salvias and geraniums beyond the green lawn. This garden could scarcely have changed since it was laid out two and a half centuries ago. She tried to think, to form some sort of plan, and found that her mind was not working with its normal swiftness under this sudden pressure.

That in itself was disconcerting. She must play for time; time to gather her resources, to try to assess how much they knew. Sugden might get her out of this, out of the country, somehow, if she could give him the time, if she could convince him that his own interests demanded it.

She said, “I suppose as you’re here you’d better sit down,” and did so abruptly, sending a shock through her own trunk with the forcefulness of her descent into the upright armchair. She could not even time her own physical movements now, she thought. She needed time to recover her poise and her thoughts, to organise her resistance to this confident assault.

She did not get it. Lambert sat down without taking his eyes from her face. “When did you clean the flat out?” he said.

“You mean the basement flat? The one where Tamsin—”

“You know what I mean.”

“All right, then. The basement flat. Well, I suppose it was after your policemen had finished in there. The Scene of Crime team, you called them, I think. You said it would be all right to change the locks after they’d finished, and with the decorators waiting to start work I thought I’d better—”

“You cleaned it out before the Scene of Crime team got in there, didn’t you? More than that, you removed whatever might incriminate you, left behind whatever you thought might lead us to other people.”

Lambert had often felt sorry for murderers, when the hunt was over and they were safely in a cell. Many of the people he had taken for the gravest of all crimes had been pathetic rather than hateful, wandering out of their depth into stormy emotional seas and floundering there. But not this time: he found himself wanting to grab this composed woman by the shoulders, to shake the truth out of her, to force her to contemplate the enormity of the crime she had planned and executed so calmly.

Jane King’s outward calm held, though panic was racing within her, pounding the brain which had been so cool into hot confusion. She said foolishly, “I don’t know what you mean. I asked you when I could move into the flat to clean it. I didn’t go in there until then.”

Lambert looked at her contemptuously. “If you insist on a string of lies, we might as well have them on record.”

He nodded to Bert Hook, who stepped forward, put his hand lightly on the woman’s shoulder, and said, “Jane King, I arrest you for the murder of Tamsin Elizabeth Rennie. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not state material which may later be used in court. Anything you do say will be recorded and may be used in evidence against you.” Without taking his eyes from her face, Hook resumed his seat on the edge of the chair opposite her, his face not more than six feet from hers, his notebook and ball-pen moving automatically into his hands.

The colour drained from her face with the formal words of arrest. But still she contrived somehow to keep the fear out of her widening blue eyes. She too was on the edge of her chair now, and Hook had the fantasy for a moment that her form, squat but trim in its tight-fitting blue sweater and navy trousers, might launch itself at one of them in a tigerish attack.

Lambert played his limited cards skillfully, striving to give the impression that they knew all about the background to this crime, that the whole of a vast drugs empire was being brought to heel at the same time as he was confronting Jane King with her crime. He said quietly, “Keith Sugden has been under investigation by our Drugs Squad for years. More to the point, from your point of view, his organisation has been infiltrated and his lines of communication have been revealed. We are ready to arrest the major players now, which is what we have been waiting for. You have helped to expose your particular section of the organisation by your murder of Tamsin Rennie.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Who on earth is this Keith Sugden you’re trying to make so much of
?
”

But she had started on the name when it was mentioned, and four watchful eyes had noted that. Lambert went on as if she had not spoken, “Your crime was useless, you see, as an attempt to conceal your involvement as a supplier. It will, however, secure you a life sentence for murder, as well as whatever you are given for supplying drugs.” He spoke as if that thought gave him great satisfaction.

The brittle calm which King had preserved shattered with the mention of a life sentence. Her face now white as paper, she spoke harshly, as though the phrases were wrung from deep within her by some agency beyond her control. “I had no alternative. That little tart was going to betray us. She knew the score, knew I couldn’t just let her walk out of here. Stupid bitch!”

“Tamsin was going to give up working as a supplier, to go for a cure and inform on the drugs world you’d got her into.”

He made it a statement, not a question; it was a guess, but the only one that fitted the facts. Jane King said with a flash of her old contempt, “She’d got herself into it. Once they’re addicts, they don’t have a choice, do they? She needed her fix twice a day, and eventually the only way she could pay for that was by agreeing to peddle coke and smack for us. Of course she said she was going to give up, they always do. When you tell them what the cure involves, they can’t face the throwing up, the sweats, the constipation followed by the shits. They just reach for the next fix. At a hundred and fifty pounds a gram for smack, that costs.”

“But some do manage to come off smack. Just a few, with help. The heroin clinics have a high percentage of success, once they get people in there. And if they know where their supplies are coming from, as Tamsin Rennie did, cured addicts mean trouble for people like you.”

The bright blue eyes glittered with hatred as she glared at him, and he knew now that he had convinced her that he knew the whole of this. King said bitterly, “She said this time she was going to go away with that actor fellow, to get married eventually, she hoped. Stupid little tart! She said she’d keep her mouth shut about what she’d been doing and where she’d got the gear from, but I knew she wouldn’t. Not when you lot got at her.”

“And so you killed her. And it’s all for nothing.”

She started half to her feet on that, as though she would spring upon him with her nails flailing. Hook abandoned his shorthand and prepared to restrain her, but Lambert moved not a fraction, his chin jutting aggressively at her, his lined face full of what seemed a real loathing. She sank back upon her chair. In a low voice, she said, “There was no other way. And that man, that maniac they called the Sacristan, made me think I might add her to his list of victims. I knew I could get her into the Cathedral, because of the choir rehearsal. She’d told me about that herself, because she was so proud of her idiot boyfriend being in it.”

“But you didn’t kill her there. She died here.”

There was no attempt at concealment now. Only an awful smirk at the recollection. “She died in the chair you’re sitting in. She was trying to get me to join her in coming clean, as she called it. Stupid little bitch. I tried to tell her that neither of us could do that, that she was committed to us now, whether she liked it or not, but she was full of this new life she was going to have. I got her up here and pretended I’d just come in from the garden, walked up behind her as she sat where you are. I pretended to be caressing her neck, massaging her as part of my persuasion not to do what she was threatening. She was too busy anticipating the fix she was due to take much notice of what my hands were doing, until it was too late. I just squeezed, and kept on squeezing. She died in less than a minute, I should think. Without even a sound!”

There was an awful pride in her handiwork; she seemed unable to prevent herself from piling detail upon detail, once she started, as if this single act of murderous violence had now a fascination for her. Lambert, usually loath to interrupt any confession, was actually glad to terminate her account of what had happened in this quiet room. He said evenly, “So you had a corpse in this chair, which you had to get into the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral.”

“Yes. And you don’t know how I did that.” For an instant, satisfaction stole back into her square face, as if she had forgotten her situation.

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.