An Unsuitable Death by J. M. Gregson Page A

neat?”
    Clarke looked puzzled. “She was as careful about the place as anyone else. The place was never dirty, not really.” He sounded as if he was afraid of being disloyal, of a last, petty piece of betrayal.
    Lambert smiled. “It sounds to me as if you’re saying that she was like most other young people. Not particularly tidy, except on special occasions.”
    “Well, yes, I suppose so. Is it important?”
    “It could be. I’ll tell you why. Whenever we have a suspicious death, our Scene of Crime team searches the victim’s place of residence very thoroughly, as you’d expect. Now, they found very little of value in that basement flat. Everything was very neat, very tidy. The only photographs around were the two I have showed you. Every item of clothing was neatly folded and put away in a drawer or a wardrobe. I have to say that it would be most unusual for a drug-dependent occupant to leave the place in that condition. It rather looked as if someone had been in there since Tamsin was killed, and Mrs King, the landlady, assures us that she hasn’t been into the flat. If you didn’t go there yourself, can you suggest anyone else who might have done?”
    “No. I told you, I didn’t know many people who knew Tamsin. She kept it that way, and I was happy with it. I didn’t want to know, because I was going to take her away from it all.”
    They took his address and thanked him for coming forward. It had taken him thirty-six hours since the announcement of the identity of the murder victim to do it; they asked him why he had delayed. He said it had taken him time to compose himself, to control his distress well enough to present himself. And he had really expected them to come to him, thinking they would have found lots of traces of him in Tamsin’s flat. There had been several photographs of him there, he said plaintively.
    He certainly looked thoroughly exhausted at the end of the interview. They dismissed him and sat in silence for a moment, each knowing the other and his methods too well to ask what he was thinking.
    Hook said eventually, “I liked the lad, but he’s a professional actor, so we have to allow for the fact that he might have been presenting a front.”
    “If he was, he’d had a day and more to decide on the image he wanted to project. Still, his distress seemed genuine enough. But that’s the modern method of acting, they tell me. You look for the necessary traits of character within your own personality, presenting as much of yourself as you can, finding what you want for the part from within yourself, as far as possible.”
    “Proper Stanislaysky, aren’t you?”
    “You’d never have used words like that, Bert Hook, before you did that Open University degree. Adult education has a lot to answer for.”
    “Anyway, I’m not discounting the fact that our young man might well have found he was being two-timed by the mysterious Tamsin Rennie.”
    “Or even three-timed. Heroin addicts are notoriously bad bets for relationships. I didn’t tell him about the pregnancy, and he didn’t appear to know about it himself. We may need a DNA test to establish whether it’s his or not. I fancy young Tom Clarke would make a very jealous lover. And perhaps a violent one. All those modern notions about women not being property seem to disappear very quickly when beset by the green-eyed monster.”
    The two cynical old sweats of murder had their first serious suspect.
     

 
     
    Eight
     
    On Sunday morning, they had the formal post-mortem report. It ran to six pages, but it did not add much to what they already knew.
    The girl was two months pregnant. She would certainly have known about her condition, which raised the question of why she hadn’t communicated the information to Tom Clarke. Which raised in turn the possibility that someone other than he might have been the father. Clarke might of course have known and merely withheld the information. If so, why? And what else might he have