An Unsuitable Death Read online

  Lambert said, “It was drawn yesterday or the day before. From memory. I think it is a good likeness: the artist has skill, and he has observed you on several occasions.”

  “And then depicted me without my permission. Where did this anonymous artist get his sightings of me?” Rennie tried to force contempt into his voice, but his bearing was that of a man who knew the game was up.

  “He is a man who is confined to his home, which is opposite the flat in Rosamund Street where your stepdaughter spent the last year of her life. He watched you visiting her there. Frequently, he says. He is quite clear about that. I’m told he would make an excellent witness in court, if it should come to it.”

  Rennie leaned forward, made a show of studying again the likeness he had thrown back on to Lambert’s desk, without picking it up again. After giving himself time to think, he dropped his declamatory style and said, “All right. So this anonymous artist of yours saw me going into Tamsin’s place. What of it?”

  “What of it, Mr Rennie? Well, first of all, it means you’ve been telling us a pack of lies about your contacts with a murder victim. And secondly, it throws doubt on the veracity of any other statement you may choose to make to us. The most interesting thing for us, of course, is why you chose to lie to us.”

  “All right, all right! I wasn’t proud of seeing her, was I? No man in my position could afford to admit to being in contact with a little whore who was taking drugs!”

  “And what exactly is your position, Mr Rennie?”

  “I’m the leader of a religious sect. You know that. A man to whom people look for leadership, in whom they have placed a certain trust.” Despite his strong features, his striking blue eyes on each side of the prominent Roman nose, he looked shifty rather than trustworthy at that moment.

  “We raise funds to further the work of the Lord! This is my business and the Lord’s, not yours!”

  “It may well become our business, Mr Rennie, if we find that you are refusing to cooperate with us. If you are a suspect in a murder inquiry, it will be our duty to investigate your financial situation.” Lambert allowed a massive satisfaction in the thought of that duty to creep into his tone.

  The Born Again Christian who had begun in Messianic vein now looked thoroughly shifty. “All right. I’ll tell you why I was seeing Tamsin. But for God’s sake, don’t let it go any further!”

  “You must know we can make no promises about that. If confidences are irrelevant to our investigation, we do our best to respect them. But there can be no guarantees. Nevertheless, I would advise you to be completely honest with us now.”

  “All right, spare me the cant! Tamsin was an attractive young woman. More so, I can assure you, before she became a junkie in the last few months. I am a man, fallible like other men. I have made mistakes.”

  And you now want the sort of compassion you were so ready to deny to others, thought Lambert. Any assertion that someone was an attractive young woman was a prologue to a sexual confession, in his experience. He said wearily, “So you slept with your stepdaughter. We meet it too often to be shocked. When?”

  Rennie looked for a moment as if he would deny it. Then he said abjectly, “The first time? Before she left home.”

  So advances from her stepfather rather than the Puritan fervour of the Born Again sect had probably been the last straw which caused the girl to leave home, thought Lambert. But the reason scarcely mattered now. Unless this wretched parody of a religious zealot had killed her.

  Lambert realised now that he would like his killer to be this stone-faced hypocrite who had been so willing to condemn others when he came into the room. He promptly checked himself. You had to remain objective, if you were not to overlook important facts. This man might be a phoney, might be milking well-meaning innocents of their cash, but there was nothing yet to make him a murderer. Lambert tried to keep the distaste out of his voice as he said, “And when she had set herself up with her own room, no doubt you visited her again for sex.”

  There was no resistance left in the man now. Probably he thought they knew much more than they did. “Yes. I even helped her a little with the rent, and I encouraged her to move into the basement flat when the opportunity arose. Mr Lambert, I’m not proud of what I did, but you should know the circumstances. A man has weaknesses. Tamsin was a willing party to what we did. And my wife is—”

  “Spare us the excuses, please!” Lambert had spoken louder than he meant to. He realised that his contempt for this despicable creature would come through if he did not control himself. With an effort, he went on more quietly, “We have established that you were visiting your stepdaughter to have sex with her, that you were paying her a certain amount of money for the pleasure this gave you. What went wrong with the arrangement?”

  “I found there were other men coming to pay her for her services. She was no better than a common prostitute!”

  “And you were the one who had introduced her to prostitution, by your own account. How sad a story that is! And how harmful to you it would have been, had that been revealed to your wife and your religious followers!”

  He looked up at them sharply, taking the suggestion in their words, but not caring to challenge it. Again he probably thought they knew all about this, were merely waiting for him to confirm the details. The idea of police omniscience was a very useful one, which Lambert rarely chose to correct. Rennie nodded, licked his wide lips, and said, “She hinted in the last months that she would tell Sarah about it, if I did not give her money. I gave her what I could, to shut her up.”

  “How much?” To anyone with experience of blackmail, there was a weary inevitability about this.

  “A few hundred, three times. Just over a thousand pounds in all.”

  “And when was the last time?”

  “A few days before her death. I gave her four hundred pounds in cash. She promised me it would be her last demand.”

  “But you didn’t believe that.”

  “No. I don’t suppose I did, by then. She’d said she wouldn’t ask for any more on each of the previous occasions. And she was on the heroin by then, an addict. Addicts are notoriously unreliable, aren’t they?”

  That was true enough. So was the fact that blackmailers almost always came back for more. Gathering money in this way was so easy that it made them greedy. And quite often provoked their victims to violence. Perhaps all three men in the room were aware of that.

  It was Hook who asked, “When did you cease paying your stepdaughter for sex, Mr Rennie?”

  He looked desperate at the blunt statement. “It wasn’t quite like that, you know. Or at least it didn’t seem so, at the time. We made love, she told me afterwards she was in financial straits, I did what I could to help.”

  Hook, in the same even, patient tone, insisted, “You haven’t answered my question.”

  Arthur Rennie sighed. The high evangelistic style of his earlier statements was now completely gone. “About three months ago. I stopped doing it when I found she was selling sex to other people. I said she was simply a prostitute; and she said I had taught her the trade. Apart from the times when I went there to give her money in the hope of keeping her quiet, I didn’t see her after that.”

  It tallied, more or less, with what the watchful Bert Parker had told Di Curtis. Hook made a note of it, then said, “Where were you between six and ten last Wednesday night, Mr Rennie?”

  “When Tamsin was killed, you mean?” Arthur Rennie tried a sardonic laugh, but what emerged was a strangled, mirthless sound. “I was at home with my wife, Sarah. With Tamsin’s mother.”

  That was what Sarah Rennie had told them also. The old spouses’ alliance, so familiar to the police, with each accounting for the other’s whereabouts at the time of a crime. Whatever the CID scepticism about such stories, they were notoriously difficult to disprove.

  But to Bert Hook’s experienced mind, it left each of the pair without a reliable alibi.

  ***

  They were a cheerful grou
p, the five men who collected the refuse. The foreman never tired of telling the four younger lads how much easier and cleaner the job was now than in the old days, when you had to hump dustbins down the path on your shoulders and you dropped ashes and God knew what else down your neck if you didn’t keep a perfect balance. His repetitions had become a joke with them, but they realised nevertheless that the job was cleaner and easier than it had ever been.

  It was Monday, so you might not have expected any great merriment among the team. But by now it was also early on Monday afternoon, and this estate of new houses was the last job of the day: if they got on with things, they would be finished in forty minutes, with many hours of the bright day still before them. So the youngest man among them whistled as he carried the black plastic bags of rubbish away from the gates.

  That was another good thing nowadays: most of the punters put the bags out for you at the edge of their properties. It might be because they feared you casing the joint for a break-in if you got round the back, as some of his more cynical older colleagues thought, but whatever the reason it saved you a lot of walking. And walking meant time, which meant you could finish your day well early if you got on with it. Damian caught the eye of a young housewife assessing the muscles beneath his T-shirt, whistled more loudly, and strutted his stuff with the bags. Racing hormones turn staid young men into optimists.

  There were plenty of cars parked around these houses. They had garages, but fewer and fewer people used them for cars — they were too useful as storage places, especially if you had kids. Damien didn’t notice the blue Astra which eased into the road behind him, nor the driver who watched his movements from a distance of fifty yards. Mind your own business was the code refuse disposal operatives lived by — unless the occasional totty showed interest, and you got twenty minutes when life stood still and everything else ran like a two-stroke.

  The others knew the score; they covered for you, if it happened. And it did happen, sometimes, though not anything like as frequently as the lads back at the depot boasted it did.

  Damian dropped the three bags he had just collected into the heap of fifteen on the corner and turned into the cul de sac of eight houses which ran off this quiet crescent. Bert, the foreman, had said there was a thirty-year-old housewife gagging for it down here, but Damian was still too young to be quite sure when his leg was being tugged. He glanced sideways at the front windows of each house, whistling his repetitive tune with desperate intensity to announce his presence, but saw no trace of the voluptuous nymphomaniac of his fantasies.

  Behind him, the blue Astra eased forward silently. No one would have objected to a couple of extra dustbin bags — it would have been taken to be merely a householder being helpful. In the event, no one even saw the hand that quietly added two black plastic sacks to the pile on the corner.

  Two minutes later, the Biffa lorry eased its way down the avenue. Damian emerged disappointed from the cul de sac, joined his colleagues, and vented his frustration by flinging the collection of bags on the corner with extra vigour into the savage steel jaws of the destroyer which churned to pulverise the rubbish at the back of the van.

  From behind the screen of the Astra, keen eyes watched the items so carefully

  removed from the flat in Rosamund Street disappear into the destructive maw of this mechanical monster. The driver watched until those powerful steel blades removed forever the evidence of who had killed Tamsin Rennie.

  Then the Astra moved quietly forward and disappeared unnoticed in the direction whence it had arrived.

  Eleven

  Life goes on, even for policemen in the middle of a complex murder investigation. “Never forget you have a life outside the job,” the young John Lambert’s first CID mentor had told him, and twenty years later the mature Lambert passed on the same idea to his juniors. Christine would have reminded him that he was past forty before he seemed to realise it. It was his obsession with the taking of villains that had once almost split up a marriage most now thought rock solid. Nowadays he tried to practise in his own life what he preached for others, to look for the diversions of a life outside the job.

  On Monday evening he engineered such a diversion from routine for Bert Hook, and his Sergeant soon decided that pursuing the murderer of Tamsin Rennie would have been much less onerous. They were playing in the Oldford Golf Club’s knockout competition for the President’s Prize: it was the last day for second-round matches and they had to play that evening or give the game to their opponents. Bert, who had never given a match away in a long and successful cricketing life, swiftly decided that in golf a walkover for the opposing pair would have been the better option.

  Being new to golf, a game he had despised for many years, he had not appreciated that this was a foursomes competition. He and his chief had been given a bye in the first round, so the full horror of the situation had not been clear to Bert until now. With the air of one teaching multiplication to an eight-year-old, Lambert explained that each pair had only one ball, with which they hit alternate shots. “You drive at the odd holes and I’ll take the evens. Just keep the ball on the fairway,” said Lambert loftily, as if nothing in the world could be easier.

  Bert found it exceedingly difficult. His nervous drive from the first tee bounced crazily into the cedars on the left. When Lambert had bent himself double and managed to chip the ball ten yards forward, Bert put it in the face of the greenside bunker. The hole was swiftly conceded to their opponents. “You’ll soon get the hang of it,” said Lambert. Bert felt that his tone lacked conviction, that his cheerfulness was already a little forced.

  By the third hole Lambert, the man so rarely ruffled at work, was saying through clenched teeth, “I expect you’re a bit tense, Bert, this being your first game of foursomes. Try to relax.” Bert tried hard. He tried so hard that he shot his long putt eight feet past the hole. Lambert gave him the sort of look he usually reserved for child molesters, studied the putt back with elaborate care, and then missed it. They were three down and their opponents were trying not to smile.

  Hook actually produced a fine shot on a short hole, much to his own surprise, leaving a five-iron within five feet of the hole. Lambert holed the putt and became for a little while as sunny as the tranquil August evening. The little while extended to his own fine tee shot on the next hole, which deposited their ball in the very centre of the emerald fairway. It ended when Hook’s nervous snatch at the second shot dragged the ball into the ditch on the left and his chief slid up to his ankles in mud in retrieving it.

  Nerve is a strange thing, and it is tested in a different way in golf than in any other activity. Bert Hook, the man who had once walked forward and calmly disarmed a lunatic with a shotgun, who had been intrepid on a cricket field in bowling to Viv Richards and batting against Courtney Walsh, found he did not have the nerve for this ridiculous game. The contest ended when he missed a putt of under two feet on the fifteenth and the opposition won four and three.

  They shook hands with the victors and repaired briefly to the bar before getting back to the real world. The sun had set, but there remained the serene stillness and scarlet sky of a perfect summer evening as the losing pair separated in the car park. Lambert told Hook through clenched teeth that it was all useful experience, then forced a ghastly smile. Hook, regarded at work as an oddity because he so rarely swore, said it was a bastard bloody game and he didn’t want anything more to do with it.

  Golf, they say, is a wonderful game for cementing friendships.

  ***

  The most dangerous task in modern British police work is undertaken by those who infiltrate the drug culture, in the attempt to discover and trap the faceless men who control it.

  It is easy enough for the police to seize the users of drugs — so easy that opportunities for arrests are often passed by. It is only slightly more difficult to discover and take the lowest level of “pushers”, those minor drug dealers who trade in drugs and are paid for it by those immediately above them
in the ghastly hierarchy. Payment is often made to these people in the form of drugs themselves, for they have become dependent and are desperate for their supply. They are arrested frequently and fined or imprisoned, but only rarely are they willing or even able to reveal people further up the pyramid than themselves.

  The difficulty for the police is that in this dark world of drugs, where the profits to be made are outstripped only by the human suffering caused, the junior ring of dealers know very little about where their supplies come from. They may know their immediate contact — though even that is sometimes kept secret and they merely know their pickup points — but they will not know any name beyond that, and if they know what is good for them they will not try to discover one.

  For the whole of the grisly industry is infused with violence, with men whose trade it is to maim or to kill for money. Any challenge to the authority of the anonymous directors, even any undue curiosity about their identity, is met with swift and savage retribution. The drug culture is like a small, contained police state, whose weapons are fear and punishment. In many of Britain’s major cities, up to four-fifths of murders outside the family are gangland killings, most of them with a connection with drug empires.

  In the last decade, a small number of male and an even smaller number of female police officers have had the temerity and the bravery to infiltrate this criminal industry. Once they have committed themselves to the venture, they live in a strange half-world. They are beyond any immediate help from their police colleagues if they get into difficulties. Often, to convince those who supply drugs that they are genuine, they have to become users themselves, with the inevitable dulling of their senses and reactions. Yet the price of survival in this world is eternal vigilance. The apprehension about killing a police officer which still pervades the rest of the criminal fraternity does not apply in the world of drugs: the officer whose cover is blown is as likely as any other wretched tool to end up as a corpse in a canal.