Read An Unsuitable Death Online
Authors: J. M. Gregson
An Unsuitable Death
© J.M.Gregson 2000
J.M.Gregson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2000 by Severn House Publishers Ltd.
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
To Patricia, a source of inspiration over a quarter of a century.
Even in a secular age, Britain’s medieval cathedrals inspire awe. Some of the people who work in them are no longer sure what they believe in, yet these massive stone monuments to a vanished age maintain their power over the imagination.
Emily Waters hurried into the centre of Hereford after depositing her two children at their primary school. On this bright August morning, she was conscious only of a fear that she might be late for work again, after the warning she had received last month. Yet when she rounded a corner and confronted the Cathedral, with its massive central tower soaring towards that heaven which had been so bright and clear for its original worshippers, the great building took her breath away.
Emily was a busy, unimaginative woman. Her reactions might well have been dulled by the familiarity of this daily routine. But with the sun behind the tower and the trees thick with the green of high summer, the scene still impressed her. Silently, she repeated to herself the well-worn platitude: this was a good place to be working, even as a humble cleaner. And she wasn’t late. She smiled her relief as she hurried to collect her mops and brushes.
The choir had been here last night, rehearsing for the Three Choirs Festival, that musical celebration which moved among the Cathedrals of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester, and brought a swell of pride to the breasts even of those local residents who never listened to a note of the performances. Kept the place on the map, they said. Reminded the country at large that these three cities had been here, and been important, long before some of the great modern conurbations were even thought of. This was the kind of sentiment which made people like Emily Waters determined that the Cathedral should be spotless for its triennial honour of hosting the Festival in a week’s time.
The choir members wouldn’t have made much of a mess, she thought. They were a tidy lot, on the whole, and they took their litter away with them. There might be a few chairs out of place, the odd hymn book knocked on to the floor, but nothing sticky spilt. And certainly nothing damaged or stolen; none of those awful depredations which meant that the ancient house of God had to be locked against the sinful thefts and thuggish violence of the devil’s modern-day battalions.
In any case, Emily this morning was to clean the altar and the brasses of the Lady Chapel, her favourite part of the building. Behind the high altar, at the back of the Cathedral, this beautiful bywater of worship was almost invariably quiet. The Chapel would certainly be deserted at this early hour, with the morning sun filtering wonderfully through the five great windows of stained glass behind the altar. Emily looked forward to a steady, rhythmical polishing of the brasses beneath the benign gaze of the Virgin, to an easing away of the tensions that were endemic to her busy family life.
She was so unprepared for the new presence she found on the steps before the altar that her first reaction was not one of alarm. This supine figure, as still and graceful as a carefully finished waxwork, did not at first carry any menace. Emily thought initially that it must be part of some pageant, some celebration of a particular feast. She was familiar with the children displaying their work within these high stone walls at Christmas and Easter, and her first feeling was that this was some more adult version of pious celebration.
It was a reaction which lasted no more than an instant. For this figure was life-sized, and too excellent a representation of reality to be even a waxwork. A girl, perhaps ten years younger than Emily’s thirty-two years. Her face looked serene, with her eyes closed and her lips relaxing into the half-smile of a Gioconda. She lay on her back, with her hands clasped reverently in prayer across her breast, exactly in the manner of the carved effigy on the tomb fifteen feet left of the Lady Altar. Joan de Bohun, Lady of Kilpeck, died 1327: Emily, who had dusted that ancient effigy so often, knew the details by heart. This modern girl’s hands were clasped in the same way, but the rest of the figure was much nearer to life than the stone one with the dog at its feet on the top of the tomb. The girl’s dress fell in demure folds about her legs, falling away towards her small, shapely, shoeless feet.
Emily slowly crept forward with dawning realisation, set the back of her fingers with infinite, reluctant tenderness upon the un-furrowed brow, and found it as cold and unfeeling as any of the marble that lay around her.
Where always before Emily Waters had spoken in whispers within the confines of the Cathedral, she now screamed, and went on screaming until others rushed to her side and beheld what so disturbed her.
People react to death in different ways. Police personnel are trained to take it in their stride, to respond to even such a bizarre death as the one discovered in Hereford Cathedral with calmness and intelligence.
Yet the men and women who staff the police service are human enough, as they are constantly at pains to remind those members of the public who expect them to be both infallible
and
pillars of moral rectitude. Murder brings a chill of interest to a police station, even in our own violent age. And there was no doubting from the start that this was murder, and murder of a particularly sinister kind.
The phrase that ran round the various CID sections of the West Mercia police within minutes of Emily Waters’ sinister discovery in front of the Lady Altar was, “There’s been another one!” Another, in other words, in a chain of murders, another one in the series of apparently motiveless killings that all police forces fear most.
Nearly always the serial killer is a psychopath who delights in making the forces of law and order look inept. Usually the victims are women, and nearly always the killer acquires a label which increases his publicity — such murderers are invariably male — and intensifies the terror the public feel. This man, who had deposited all four of his previous victims in quiet country churches, had been dubbed ‘the Sacristan’ by a media grateful for the evolving melodrama he was providing in the quiet news months of July and August.
Nearly always the serial killer selects his victims at random, and thus proves difficult to track down and arrest. The sorry tale of the bunglings committed in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper still looms large in the public mind as well as in CID instructional videos. And in the Severn and Wye valleys there are always the grim shadows of the awful Gloucester killings of Fred West to remind people of the depths to which evil minds can sink.
Within minutes of the death being registered on police computers, Superintendent John Lambert received a phone call from his Chief Constable informing him of the details of the time and place of the discovery. “It’s another killing by this bugger the papers have taken to calling the Sacristan. The first one on our patch. The Serious Crime Squad will be on their way there as I speak, but I’d like you to look in, John. See what you can pick up before the body’s moved. I’ll clear it with Billy Griffith.”
Lambert sighed. He knew Billy Griffith, a heavy Welshman who had cut his teeth in the casual violence of Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. They had worked together years before, when Lambert was a CID sergeant making his way in detection. “All right, sir, if you really think it’s necessary. But they’ve already got the experience of the four previous murders to bring to this. They won’t take kindly to a new boy muscling in.”
The Chief Constable grinned despite himself at the thought of his grizzled Superintendent, veteran of many a murder investigation, being thought of as a greenhorn who might get in the way of the experienced team. “Just take a look, John. You’re too old a hand to get in anyone’s way. We need to be fully informed, that’s all. The press will be on to me within the hour: I can guarantee that. If I can tell them John Lambert’s been to the scene, that will keep them happy, for today at least.”
Lambert smiled sourly at the vision of himself as a local celebrity. He was glad it wasn’t his job to keep the press and the other media satisfied. This was mainly a public relations exercise, then. He would show his face, pick up what he could to relay back to the CC, and then leave the formidable team already pursuing the Sacristan to get on with their work. But as he went out into the bright sun of the car park at Oldford Police Station, he could not suppress a small sense of exultation in his experienced breast. The instinct of the hunter, an essential property of all CID men, thrilled a little even now as he went to the scene of this latest in a bizarre chain of deaths. Already he was beginning the familiar routine of pitting his mind against that of the man who had perpetrated this strange killing.
***
Different profession, different reaction. The journalist who was on the spot within minutes of this latest revelation of the Sacristan’s horrors did not disguise his excitement. Might make the nationals, this. Might even get him his own byline. To a man who had toiled for thirty years on flower shows and traffic accidents, the body of this young woman revived thoughts of the scoop which lurks deep in the imagination of even the most disillusioned reporter.
The Lady Altar was already cordoned off when Joe Roper got into the Cathedral, but he quickly assured himself of an interview with the finder of the body. Whilst Emily Waters sipped her cup of reviving tea, he rang his office on the other side of the town and secured the services of the paper’s single photographer. Cathedrals were always photogenic. They’d have a shot of the North Porch and the great central tower, then one of the nave, then one of the transept as you turned towards the Lady Chapel.
The idea was to lead the reader onward into this solemn place, emphasising the appalling and sacrilegious character of a murder in such a spot. Even the roped-off Lady Chapel would be worth a shot, if they could include the uniformed constable who stood beside it. THE SENTRY OF DEATH, his headline over this section would run; Joe was sure he could get the fresh-faced young officer to adopt a suitably solemn expression for the camera. The lad’s mum would be quite thrilled to see him standing in authority in this awesome setting.
Joe picked up a postcard of the Lady Chapel in the Cathedral shop: it might be worth superimposing an artist’s impression of the corpse lying solemnly and shockingly in front of the altar of the gentle Mother of God. They said this killer rigged up his corpses to look like the figures on medieval tombs; Joe’s quick eyes began to seek out examples in the marble effigies around him, which the artist could parallel in his impression.
Phrases tumbled like clothes in a washing machine round Joe Roper’s active mind. THE SACRISTAN STRIKES SOUTH would make a good headline. This was the psychopath’s first murder outside a tight ten-mile circle around Shrewsbury, fifty miles to the north. Joe would point out how this meant the widening of the reign of terror for the women of the West Country. It would be his duty to do it, he decided. Terror and sex always sold newspapers.
This was a young woman — he would get some telling details of her dress and any hints of disarray from Emily in a few minutes. No doubt the police would refuse to reveal yet whether this girl had been sexually assaulted, like the others. But he could make something even of that refusal, especially if he could get his artist to draw a short skirt and suggest a hint of interference in his impression.
And the Sacristan was getting bolder. He had placed his first three victims in the graveyards of country churches. The fourth had been positioned just inside the portals of such a church, by the ancient baptismal font. Now the maniac — that word must surely come into Joe’s copy somewhere, but he would place it tellingly — had deposited his fifth victim in one of the high temples of the Christian faith, the ancient Cathedral of Hereford.
The contrast of madness with the solemn stillness of these unchanging stones would offer some splendid phrases for his columns in the nationals. Joe Roper made a note to brush up on his hazy notions of the history of this place, in which he had only once set foot before.
***
The body looked as cold and chaste as that of a sleeping nun. John Lambert wondered if it was the setting which had suggested this image.
The corpse had not yet been removed from its religious context. The Lady Chapel altar was about thirty feet wide, with pews in front of it. A notice at the point of entry read,
Here the Blessed Sacrament is reserved
.
Please keep this Lady Chapel as a place of quiet for prayer
. Lambert wondered if the awful irony of the words had appealed to the warped mind of the killer. More likely it was just the fact that this was the quietest and most remote part of the Cathedral, where his handiwork might remain undiscovered longest.
There were two wide steps in front of the altar. The body lay upon the lower of these, between two six-foot-high candlesticks. Through the rich reds and blues of the five great panels of stained glass on this eastern extremity of the church, the sun threw globules of soft colour upon the unlined face. The limbs might have been merely resting, for there was no visible sign of how this woman had died. She lay on her back with her hands joined, arranged like a pagan sacrifice in this ancient Christian place.
But already she was surrounded by the lay business of detection. The police surgeon had been and gone, having conducted the brief legal ritual of certifying that this cold and motionless figure was indeed dead. The civilian fingerprint team were spreading their powder on the rails, the steps and any smooth surface which the murderer might have briefly touched. Soon the pathologist would begin his necessary assault upon the dignity of death to take the rectal temperature and search beneath the clothing for any supplementary clues about the context of this dying.
Lambert, so used to taking a central role as the investigation got under way, stood this time upon the fringe of the activity, an observer rather than a participant. He walked down the tiled aisle of the chapel, passed the notice which said,
Visitors are requested not to pass beyond this point
, and stood at the altar itself. He introduced himself when the opportunity arose to the officer who was directing operations. “John Lambert, Oldford CID. It’s on our patch and the Chief Constable—”
“Yes, Chief Superintendent Griffith said you’d be coming. Said I was to offer you whatever information I could. I’m Derek Cocker.”
He was not unfriendly, had even afforded this tall, grave-looking man a brief smile. But his body language said that this was one more unnecessary diversion for a busy man with a major problem. He turned back to a survey of the dead woman.
From Lambert’s height, Cocker looked small and lean, not much like a policeman at all. He seemed almost too short, but then to recruitment that had been waived since the time when a young PC Lambert had joined the force and trodden the beat. This man was certainly young for a Detective Inspector; Lambert tried hard not to resent the fact.
Cocker glanced at him from beside the body, remembered the wily old fox Billy Griffith had described, recalled his chief ‘s old association with this man, and said as pleasantly as he could, “Come and have a look at close quarters, if you like. Not that there’s much to be seen.”
Lambert stepped on to the brown marble of the altar steps. He had to reject an impulse to kneel and pray, which burst through with startling strength from his childhood. Instead, he went down on one knee beside the corpse, studying the unlined young face, resisting an unexpected impulse to touch the skin stretched tight across the forehead. He said, feeling that he was stating the obvious but needing confirmation, “She died last night?”
“Yes, she’s cold as mutton.” The brutality of the younger man’s language was an assertion of his familiarity with death. “The police surgeon confirmed it must have been last night. Perhaps we’ll get something more precise in due course.” His tone said that he didn’t hold out much hope of that. The time of death was usually much more difficult to establish in fact than in fiction, and pathologists were more cautious than ever now that they knew their professionalism was likely be challenged in court. Usually the digestive state of the stomach contents in the post-mortem gave a fairly accurate idea of how long after the last meal death had occurred, but it would be up to the investigation to establish when that meal had been eaten.
“How did she die?”
Cocker looked at him sharply. “She was strangled. Like the other victims of this man.” He was reluctant to afford the killer his label of ‘the Sacristan’, loath to afford this anonymous opponent the tabloid glamour of the appellation. He placed finger and thumb on the thin material and carefully drew back the chiffon scarf from around the slim neck, revealing the livid purple marks of violent death, the broad print of a thumb upon the point where the carotid artery had yesterday pulsed with life.
“Here?”
Derek Cocker shrugged. “Maybe. It would have been easy enough, if she had been taken unawares. She wouldn’t have had the chance to make any noise. And this sign had been moved from the north transept to the entrance to the Lady Chapel.” He pointed to a trestle with a notice in red capitals upon a white background which read,
Work in progress
.
Please do not proceed beyond this point
.
“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?”
