An Unsuitable Death by J. M. Gregson Page B

withheld from them? For a man who had been planning to spend the rest of his life with Tamsin Rennie, he had known very little about the detail of her life. Or had claimed to know very little.
    There was hypostasis of the blood in the shoulders, buttocks and calves, showing that the body had been lying flat on its back for many hours before discovery, confirming in effect that the corpse had been in the Lady Chapel of Hereford Cathedral overnight. Death had been by strangulation, almost certainly by someone wearing gloves, but it was impossible to say whether the girl had been killed in the Lady Chapel itself or had been taken there shortly after death.
    The stomach contents of the corpse indicated that a meal of fish and chips had been eaten approximately sixty to ninety minutes before death. That would tend to place the death some time during the evening, perhaps between seven and nine. That timing was supported by the evidence of heroin injection. There had been no intake for about ten hours before death — presumably the last injection had been early on the morning of the day of her death. Her degree of dependency would have necessitated a further shot in the evening, but she had presumably been killed before that fix.
    There had been no heroin found in the flat. That left the question of where her next supply would have come from. But perhaps Tamsin Rennie had possessed ample quantities, which had disappeared from her rooms after she had been killed.
    Lambert and his team were increasingly convinced that someone — whether the murderer or someone else entirely — had been through the flat and removed evidence before Jack Johnson and his SOC team reached it.
    ***
    Tom Clarke walked by the Wye on that gloriously sunny Sunday morning. There had been no appreciable rain for over a fortnight, and the low river ran softly between banks lush with the green of high summer. It was still only nine o’clock and there were not many people about. He could see a family half a mile away, where the river curved out of sight to the left; he watched the father helping the smallest child over a steep rise in the path, heard the excited voices of the children calling through the still, clear air.
    The very innocence of this rural scene seemed a rebuke to him, not the consolation he had hoped for. But there never was any escape from facts. Tamsin was dead, and he was walking alone here, wrestling with his guilt.
    He greeted the family as they passed him, forcing a false cheerfulness into his voice, taking care not to catch the eyes of the parents. Then he walked faster, on round the curve of the river, watching a village church disgorge its congregation from beneath its square stone tower on the other side of the river. It was a scene which could hardly have changed much since Gray wrote his elegy, and Tom recited aloud a few of the verses he had committed so easily to memory as a child. The lines had simple rhythms, and the fine cadences beloved of an actor exploiting the range of his voice; they did not calm his racing mind.
    He walked a long way in the attempt to exhaust himself: ten or eleven miles, without a stop, he reckoned, when he looked at his watch. But his spirit when he returned to his mother’s old Fiesta was as restless as when he had started. He drove northwards slowly, hoping against hope that some solution would present itself to him before he got back to the familiar house. He wished for the first time in many months that the father who had left them ten years ago was there now for him to consult. But in his heart, he knew that this was a problem he would have confided to no one.
    His mother was glad to have him home for Sunday lunch. She couldn’t remember when they had last eaten a formal meal together at this hour. She knew he was only here now because that awful girl was dead, but she had enough sense to bite her tongue and say nothing about her. Tom had talked to the police yesterday afternoon; she knew that