An Unsuitable Death by J. M. Gregson

enough to say, “Is there no room for weakness in your creed? People make mistakes; humanity is venal. People, especially young people, need help.”
    “That is true enough. But if they are shown the paths of righteousness and choose not to follow them, there is no help that one can give. Arthur and I are the leaders of our little sect among the Born Again Christians. Tamsin’s harlotry was an abomination in the face of the Lord, a disgrace to us as leaders. We had no alternative but to cut her off.”
    She spoke with real passion, and at last she had revealed emotion. It was her own pride in the image of herself that she had created which had been threatened by her daughter. Her anger stemmed from the damage the girl had threatened to the moral pinnacle her mother had built for herself.
    Lambert said calmly, “Where were you on Wednesday night, Mrs Rennie?”
    She stared back at him equally calmly. Her dark eyes registered the import of his question, but there was no fierce reaction to the idea that a mother should be asked to account for her own movements on the night of her daughter’s death. “I was in this house, Superintendent Lambert.”
    “For the whole of the evening?”
    “For the whole of the evening.”
    “And is there anyone else who can confirm this for us?”
    Perhaps there was the slightest hesitation before she answered. If there was, her eyes did not flicker, nor her expression alter. “My husband was here with me. For the whole of the evening.” There was the glimmer of an ironic smile on her repetition of the phrase.
    But there was no passion: the only time she had revealed that was when she had spoken of her mission to spread the Word of the Lord, and of how her daughter had threatened that mission and her own place in it.
    They wondered as they drove away from the stark modern house how far this clearly unbalanced woman would have gone in the defence of her image.
     

 
     
    Nine
     
    On Sunday evening, Sarah Rennie confronted her husband across the dinner table. “They’ll ask you where you were on Wednesday night, you know, Arthur.”
    It was the first time they had spoken about her visit from the two senior CID men. He hadn’t broached the subject himself: he was finding it increasingly difficult to talk to Sarah about her dead daughter. He said, trying to sound as if it hardly mattered to him, “That must be when Tamsin was killed. They asked you to account for yourself at that time, did they?”
    “Yes. They asked me about how we came to cut Tamsin off so completely and I told them about her ungodliness. It seemed straightforward enough to me. I expect it was to them, once I had explained.”
    She was so sure of herself and her views that Arthur found it unnerving. He wished that she would occasionally show some sign of weakness or uncertainty in private. In the early days they had had conversations with each other, real exchanges of views and emotions. Now, though she supported him unswervingly in their public work, they never did. It was usually women who complained when the only real displays of personal emotion were in bed. Now, he felt himself willing her to follow up her wild and unrestrained coupling of the previous night with some tender and intimate words of recall, so that he could feel there was more between them than the raw cries of her orgasms.
    Unnerved as usual by her certainty, he said awkwardly, “You were very certain that Tamsin was acting in a wicked way. You don’t think that might make the police think that you killed her, do you?”
    “No. You and I saw how she was walking the ways prepared for her by Satan. I made the police see that too.”
    “Yes. Well, I expect you did. Your conviction is one of the things which helps us to convince others, Sarah.” He put his hand on hers, pressed it gently, intertwined his fingers with hers. She gave him a quick smile, but he felt no answering pressure on his fingers. “So where did you tell them you were on