An Unsuitable Death Read online

  “Someone who knew the Cathedral and what was going on within it, then?”

  “Or an opportunist who saw his chance of a little more protection. The sign was only fifty yards away. If he brought her here to kill her, or even brought her body here to dump it, he might just have seen the sign and used it.”

  A resourceful killer, cool in a crisis, however unbalanced his mind might be. Every one of the scanty facts seemed more depressing. Lambert reminded himself that this was not his case and tried to be grateful.

  Lambert looked down at the girl. With her muscles relaxed into the tranquility of death, she looked very young, probably younger than she had actually been in life. She lay on her back upon the marble floor, with her hands joined on her breast. He felt anger rising within him at this obscene parody of the image of serenity in death, as he saw how it echoed the figure on the ancient tomb to his left and many others of the carved marble effigies upon the Cathedral’s tombs. “Do we know who she is?”

  “Not yet. The other victims were all local girls, living within a few miles of where their bodies were discovered. But no one in the Hereford area has reported a girl who didn’t come home last night. If she’s a registered missing person, we should know who she is by the end of the day.”

  Without even thinking about it consciously, Lambert had set about establishing the policeman’s automatic framework for suspicious deaths: who, how, when and where. He glanced automatically at the joined hands, at the slender, ringless fingers. In all probability, no distraught husband looking for his young wife. But this was a pretty girl whose life had been so abruptly halted. There would be a partner, perhaps, male or female — one had always to make that rider nowadays.

  Cocker saw the older man studying the pale hands, hesitated for a moment, then remembered Billy Griffith’s injunction that he was to give this old colleague all the information he required. The younger officer took a ball-pen from his pocket and carefully lifted back the unbuttoned sleeve of the girl’s blouse. The flesh of the forearm was white and smooth for the first few inches. Then there was the mottling and roughening of the skin which every modern police officer has come to know, the result of hundreds of tiny needle marks. Heroin, probably: that was the most commonly injected drug. They would have to wait for the post-mortem to be certain of the drugs and the quantities.

  In spite of himself, Lambert was shocked by the revelation of a modern decadence in this place that was so unchanging. He glanced automatically at the face, now so untroubled in death, wondering what agonies the mind behind that visage had gone through in its short life. Cocker said quietly, “The other arm’s the same, and she’s started on her thighs. She was a user, at least. Maybe a dealer. No doubt we’ll know soon enough. That’s probably why no one’s reported her missing.”

  Lambert knew what he meant. It was not good news for any murder inquiry. A victim from that nightmare half-world of drug addiction, where people lived strange, desperate lives in the pursuit of their cravings. He felt a selfish relief that he was not involved in this investigation.

  This was a world where violence was never far away. And a world in which the purveyors of that violence were too often able to remain both brutal and anonymous.

  Three

  Detective Sergeant Bert Hook had had an unexpectedly good result. He drove back into the car park at Oldford Police Station with a smile upon his broad and rubicund features.

  He had feared that he might have to spend most of a stifling day in the Crown Court, but his case had been moved up the schedule because of the non-appearance of the defendant in the case above his. Moreover, the villain who had necessitated Bert’s presence had pleaded guilty to armed robbery, asked for two other offences to be taken into account, and been sent down for a seven stretch. All in a commendably brisk thirty-one minutes. Bert, who knew at firsthand about the law’s delays and had found out during his Open University degree that man-of-the-millennium William Shakespeare agreed with him, was both surprised and delighted.

  It wasn’t until he got back into the CID section that Hook heard about the body in Hereford Cathedral. Police people being only human, a death as lurid as this one had the place buzzing with speculation. Bert was as interested as anyone. The Sacristan had killed on his patch; CID personnel can become intensely territorial about crime, and his arrival here was treated as if it were an attack upon their personal space.

  Bert was glad to hear that the serial killer was the problem of the Regional Crime Squad, who already had a bulging but so far unsuggestive file on his activities. Bert’s chief and friend, Superintendent John Lambert, had visited the scene of the crime at the behest of the Chief Constable, but that was apparently merely a matter of keeping the local force informed. Keeping the Chief Constable informed more like, thought Bert, so that he wouldn’t look a prat when the radio and TV asked him to comment. Lambert was closeted with the CC now, they said, giving his report.

  Bert set about using this last hour of the morning, when he had expected to be kicking his heels and waiting to be called for his evidence, to catch up on his paperwork. It was fashionable to deride that aspect of the job, and it could be boring, but on the whole Bert Hook didn’t mind it. He had an orderly mind, a grasp of language that came surprisingly from his solid frame, and he liked to dispatch routine work that had to be done rather than let it accumulate. “Procrastination is the thief of time” they had taught him in his youth. And “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today”. Bert was a Barnardo’s boy, and they had been hot on proverbs in the home.

  He had been working quietly for ten minutes when he was told that a Mrs Rennie was asking for him at the station desk. Bert went thoughtfully through to the front of the station, where the public had access to their service, trying desperately to remember who this woman might be. Members of the public you had seen for ten minutes four or five years ago sometimes expected you to remember them instantly.

  Bert didn’t claim to be as good as some on names, but he rarely forgot a face, even when time wrought its inevitable changes. But he didn’t recognise this woman. She was about forty-five, he conjectured automatically. She was tall and slim; she had an oval, rather wan face; its whiteness was accentuated by the absence of make-up and by hair that was straight and very black. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved navy blue top, its simplicity set off by a pewter pendant with a cross in a circular framework. The dominating feature of her appearance was an air of intensity. She gave the impression of a woman operating under either great stress or burning conviction, so that there was no time to spare for the social niceties most people use to grease the wheels of conversation.

  She said, “You don’t know me. We’ve never met, as far as I know. But I remembered your name. My daughter remembered it. You went to her school, to warn them about the dangers of drugs.”

  Bert smiled, hoping to provoke the reaction of a small relaxing smile in response. The pale lips did not relax. He said, “I did use to go round schools doing that, yes. Our officers still do it. But it’s a few years since I was last in a school.”

  She nodded impatiently. “Seven years ago. That’s when you spoke to Tamsin. When she was in her GCSE year.”

  “Yes. Most of the groups I spoke to were about that age. Unfortunately, the officers who do the talks now have to get in when the kids are younger, while there’s still—”

  “I think it might be Tamsin. This girl.” Her dark eyes widened a little as if trying to fix him with their urgency.

  “What girl, Mrs Rennie? You must excuse me, but I’ve been out in court this morning, and I’m not quite up to date on all the—”

  “The girl in the Cathedral at Hereford. The one they found this morning. The dead girl.” She delivered each staccato sentence more abruptly, as if by the mere force of words she could galvanise this heavy man into action.

  Hook said, “You’d better come in here, Mrs Rennie,” and led her into an interview room. He prevailed upon her to sit down and went to fetch John Lam
bert, whom he intercepted fortuitously on his way out of the Chief Constable’s suite.

  Lambert took one look at the taut face of the woman sitting on the other side of the square table and dispensed with any preliminaries. He said simply, “I’ve come here from Hereford less than an hour ago, Mrs Rennie. I saw the young woman who was dead in the Cathedral.”

  “Has she been identified yet?”

  “No. Not as far as I am aware.”

  “I think it’s Tamsin.”

  “And Tamsin is?”

  “My daughter. Tamsin Rennie.” She spoke impatiently, almost angrily, as if so much should have been obvious.

  “When did you last see Tamsin, Mrs Rennie?”

  His catalogue of routine questions should have been emollient, were designed to take the edge off her fierceness. They seemed if anything to intensify it. She snapped, “I don’t know. Not for months now. That doesn’t matter.”

  “But what makes you think this might be Tamsin?”

  “The kind of life she was leading, that’s what. And she had digs near the Cathedral. Five minutes’ walk from it, she said.”

  “Can you give us the address?”

  “No. I didn’t visit her there. Didn’t wish to.”

  Lambert wanted to ask her a whole string of questions. Why had she not seen her daughter for so long? Had Tamsin been an addict? What did she know about this life Tamsin had been leading that her mother thought so dangerous? Why had she not sought to protect the child whom she now thought lay dead in the Cathedral? What did she know of the girl’s companions and associates?

  But any delay seemed cruel. Lambert snapped, almost as curtly and impatiently as the woman confronting him, “This dead girl may not be your daughter at all. I dearly hope for your sake that she isn’t. But she’s certainly someone’s daughter. Are you willing to try to identify the body for us, Mrs Rennie?”

  “Of course I am. That’s what I came here to tell you.”

  “Wait here. I’ll be as quick as I possibly can.”

  Bert Hook had more sense than to try to make small talk with Mrs Rennie while Lambert made three urgent phone calls from his office. They sat together silently in the small, square room. Ten minutes later, he set out with that intense presence in the back of his police Mondeo to drive to the mortuary at Hereford.

  The relative, if such she proved, could identify the body before the knives of the post-mortem got to work. It was kinder that way.

  ***

  It was still not much after midday when John Lambert was called into the Chief Constable’s office. Douglas Gibson, immaculate as always in his tailored uniform, was the confident face of the police service which the public wanted to see. His thinning hair was silvering now at the temples, but that was all to the good: people didn’t want their senior policemen to be young or frivolous. Gibson’s face and bearing said that he took all crime seriously, but was never baffled by it. Whatever his inner thoughts, his public persona said that he was confident that he and his men would win in the end.

  Yet today in the privacy of his office he looked uncharacteristically ruffled. “You’d better hear this, John,” he said. Then, as if he realised his anxiety had taken over from

  his normal courtesy, he glanced at the man standing on the other side of his desk and said apologetically, “I think you know Chief Superintendent Griffith.”

  Lambert looked at the deeply lined face of the heavy man who had stood up when he came into the room. Griffith had put on a lot of weight and a lot of age since they had worked together twenty-odd years ago as young Detective Sergeants. He wondered if those years had treated him as harshly as this man, three inches shorter than his six feet four but now markedly heavier. He wanted to ask how his old colleague had acquired the livid scar on his forehead above his left eye, which even hair brushed forward could now no longer disguise. Instead, he said, “Yes. Chief Superintendent Griffith and I go back a long way. Good to see you, Billy!” and shook hands warmly.

  As if anxious to forestall any nostalgic exchanges, Gibson said, “I’m afraid Mr Griffith has brought us some rather disturbing news about the body found in Hereford Cathedral this morning.”

  “Aye. It sounds daft and all, but it’s true. We’re sure of that.” Griffith spelt his name the Welsh way, without an s, and his native South Wales accent came out strongly on the phrases, as if his puzzlement had suddenly stripped away the veneer of standard English elocution.

  There was an awkward pause and Lambert, trying to help things along, said, “I went over there this morning, just to keep us briefed. Spoke to your Inspector Cocker. It looked like another killing by this man the media have taken to calling the Sacristan.”

  “Aye, it did. But it wasn’t. We’re pretty sure of that now. There are differences, you see, with this one.”

  “But she was strangled. I saw the marks on her throat. And laid out in the same way as the bodies round Shrewsbury.”

  “Aye. Not exactly the same way, though. There are certain details we’ve never released about the other killings. The Sacristan — I’m calling him that myself now, to distinguish him — has always used an elastic band to keep the hands of his victims together when they were laid out. He winds it tightly round their wrists, so that it’s invisible beneath the sleeves, but holds the wrists and the hands firmly together.”

  “And there was no elastic band used this time?”

  “No. The little fingers of each of this girl’s hands were tightly interwoven to keep them together, that’s all.”

  Lambert said, “It’s a small difference. The killer might simply have been in a hurry to get away. The Cathedral’s a much more public place than any of those he’s used previously.”

  For the first time since they had shaken hands, Billy Griffith allowed himself a smile. It was a fleeting and mirthless one. “Yes, John. But there was no evidence of haste on that Lady Altar. The girl’s body was laid out with elaborate care, with every fold of the dress diligently arranged; it even looks as if the hair was carefully combed back to make the effect intended. And there are other things as well. We haven’t publicised it, but the Sacristan has left notes with each of his other victims. Obscene notes, handwritten, with spelling errors — we hope they’ll eventually help to convict him. There was no note with this one.”

  “Anything else?” Lambert knew now what the implications of this were, but he might as well have the full catalogue of items.

  “Yes. Perhaps the most significant of all. The other women had all been sexually assaulted before they were killed. And their underclothing removed. This girl had not been assaulted. And her — her undergarments were not disturbed.”

  Lambert smiled grimly at his fellow officer’s hesitation. Strange what taboos death brought. The Billy Griffith he remembered had been notable for his lurid and uninhibited language and for a rampant sex drive. Now, in the context of murder and in a Chief Constable’s office, he even hesitated to speak of the girl’s knickers.

  It was Douglas Gibson who said heavily, “So it looks as if we have a copycat killer.”

  The room was silent for a moment as the three heavily experienced men let the implications of this sink in. A second damaged mind turning to violence. A man probably as unhinged as the Sacristan himself. Perhaps bolder, for the Cathedral was a more outrageous and certainly a more dangerous place than any of the country graveyards and churches chosen for the Sacristan’s killings.

  And a man just as likely as the Sacristan to go on to further murders if he was not caught quickly.

  ***

  In the small reception area at the mortuary in Hereford, Sarah Rennie gave her name coldly and clearly to the clerk at the desk. Bert Hook, standing behind her, realised that it was the first time he had heard her forename.

  She was as crisp and seemingly unemotional on the rest of the routine information required from her, even delivering her possible relationship to the corpse she was to view as “Mother” without a tremor. Bert Hook had seen a lot of identi
fications in a quarter of a century as a policeman. His first reaction to her control was a selfish one of relief. And he was well aware that shock took many forms, including an icy calm.

  Somehow this woman did not seem to him to be in shock. Her directness, her imperious desire to dispense with the fripperies of social exchange, struck him as more a trait of personality, perhaps a little accentuated by the stress of this situation, than the effect of shock. She dispensed with the bureaucratic formalities as impatiently as she had dismissed every other obstacle between her and the viewing of this girl she seemed so sure was her daughter. Hook had more sense than to offer her the moment to compose herself before entering the viewing area that he would normally have suggested at this point.

  The body’s hands were clasped still in the pastiche of medieval marble in which they had been found, but the pose was now mercifully obscured by the all-covering sheet. Sarah Rennie’s control held, even at the moment when that sheet was drawn gently back from the serene, nun-like face.

  There was not even the sudden gasp of horror and dismay that Hook had thought was inevitable. Nor even the tears of relief that this was not after all her daughter. Mrs Rennie looked down at the tranquil face for a long moment, her eyes taking in its every detail. She was as calm as a woman contemplating the purchase of a piece of exquisite porcelain.

  Then she said quietly, “Yes. That is my daughter. That is Tamsin Elizabeth Rennie,” and signalled to the attendant that the sheet should be replaced.

  Almost, thought DS Bert Hook, as if she had known all about this death.

  ***

  In the brightly lit Hereford Council Chamber on that night of Thursday, August 18th, the meeting of the full council was almost over. One of the Independent members raised a point of order, and the Chair dealt with it painstakingly, anxious to show that his political allegiance was not colouring his reaction.