An Unsuitable Death Read Online Free

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