An Unsuitable Death (10 page)

“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 group, 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.

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.