Lonely Hearts

by John Harvey

  “Okay, Graham,” said Resnick, standing. “Let’s get to it.”

  Superintendent Skelton had not returned from Central Police Station, so, after briefing his men, Resnick had reported to Chief Inspector Lawrence, together with the uniformed inspector in charge. Both men had kept it as short as possible and by a quarter-past nine, Resnick was back in his own office, phoning through to the detective chief inspector at headquarters.

  “Lively night down your way,” the DCI observed, pleasantly caustic.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Getting any help from uniform on this?”

  “Two men for house-to-house, sir.”

  “Right you are, then, Charlie. Talk to you tomorrow. You’ll likely have a result by then.”

  Resnick set the receiver down and the door to his office opened.

  “Didn’t know if I should remind you,” said Graham Millington. “You’re in court this morning, aren’t you?”

  Resnick closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb. The door to his office closed quietly. Beyond it phones rang and were answered. Somebody swore, softly, repeatedly, and no one appeared to notice.

  He had been trying to wipe from his mind the fact that he was due, that morning, to give evidence. There were cases that seemed to make no impact at all, others that brought their share of sleepless hours, and then there were those that bit deep.

  This had started with a call to the station. A child’s mother had rung in, pretending to be a neighbor. She had alleged that her husband was consistently forcing their daughter to take part in sexual acts. That was what it had come down to, when all the pretence, the play-acting were over. Remembering, Resnick’s mouth went tight. It all seemed a long time ago, the first stumbled words, the investigation, the child who had sat quietly before a video camera and played with dolls. Yes, he did, he took this and he put it there. Seven years old. Was that what people got married for, Resnick asked? Had children?

  On his way into the city center he tried not to answer the questions, tried to clear his mind of the case altogether. Once in the witness box it would come back soon enough.

  There was time to walk up to the indoor market and take his usual seat at the Italian coffee stall. The girl slid an espresso in front of him without waiting to be asked and Resnick drank it down in two and ordered another.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  Resnick slid the coins across the counter and shrugged. How was it going? Phones rang and were answered. It was part of the job, it was what he did.

  The courthouse had been newly built from pink stone and smoked glass, and from the foyer entrance you could watch the buses pulling out of the station and into the traffic, one every couple of minutes. Hiss of brakes, hiss of rain. Resnick turned and saw the couple, child and mother, sitting on a bench seat, clear space between them. Had he thought about it, he would have known they would be there, known he would see them, but he had stopped himself thinking about it. These things took a long time. He wondered if the little girl would recognize him and how she would react if she did.

  A woman stood beside them, bending down to talk to the mother, her hand brushing the fall of the child’s hair as she straightened away. Resnick dismissed her as being a relative, put her down as a social worker, not the same one who had been at the station when they had been asking their questions.

  “Yes, it hurt me.”

  This woman was tall, tall enough; she had a way of standing that said I know who I am and what I’m doing here and if you don’t, well, I don’t give a damn. The deep collar of her camel coat was pulled high, the belt looped loosely over. Resnick caught sight of tan boots with a heel, a glimpse of blue skirt where the hem of the coat separated out.

  When he realized she was looking back at him, Resnick slid one hand inside his jacket and left it there, resting on the fastened button, covering the stain on his tie.

  He felt the need to walk over and talk to the mother, say something calming and trite. What stopped him was not knowing how to speak to the little girl, sitting there plucking at a button on her sleeve and tapping her toes against that newly polished floor. What stopped him was knowing that his reason for doing it was to appear sympathetic in front of the woman in the camel coat.

  Rachel Chaplin rested her right hand on the back of the bench and watched Resnick walk away towards the door of the court. She didn’t know his name, but knew his rank; she knew him for a police officer. She knew that he had been looking at her and not at the clients who were sitting on the bench. When he had been about to approach them she had guessed that he had been involved in the arrest and in a moment she would ask Mrs. Taylor if that had been so. Meanwhile, she was wondering what had made him change his mind.

  He was an overweight man in his early forties, whose narrow eyes were bagged and tired, and who couldn’t find the time to drop his tie off at the cleaners.

  Now Rachel Chaplin was wondering just why she was smiling.

  Giving evidence, Resnick stumbled over a date and had to flick back through the pages of his notebook for verification. Yes, that did mean that the child was examined by a doctor precisely seven days after he had received the initial call. Yes, the delay was in part due to the manner in which the mother had elected to inform the authorities. Did he think that the mother had been to any degree complicit in the father’s behavior towards their daughter?

  Only once did Resnick allow himself to look directly at the man standing between two officers in the dock. He had been asked to describe the accused’s emotions when faced with the offense. Had he shown unusual emotion? Had he broken down? Wept? Asked for forgiveness? He stood there now much as a man might stand, bored, in the Friday-night queue at the supermarket.

  “Detective Inspector?”

  Resnick’s eyes never left the father’s face as he answered. “The accused said, ‘She’s just a bloody kid!’ And then he said, ‘The lying little bitch!’”

  Rachel could have been waiting for him, but she wasn’t. She was by the exit, talking to a ginger-haired man Resnick recognized as the probation officer to the court. She was talking earnestly, her oval face serious amidst curls.

  “Inspector…” The soft leather bag that hung from her right shoulder hit against the glass door as she moved.

  Resnick turned towards her, nodding to the probation officer as he did so.

  “I won’t keep you a moment,” Rachel said. There was an uneven-ness at the bottom of her front teeth, as though a piece had been chipped away.

  “I’m Rachel Chaplin, I’m…”

  “You’re the Taylors’ social worker,” Resnick interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  The probation officer raised a hand that neither acknowledged and walked between them, down and into the street.

  “How are they coping?” asked Resnick.

  “In the circumstances it’s difficult to say.”

  “The girl…”

  A barrister hurried behind Resnick, stuffing his gown down into a sports bag as he went. The step which the inspector automatically took forward placed him close enough to Rachel Chaplin to see his reflection clearly in the red-framed glasses that she wore.

  “Ask me again in six months, a year. I might have an answer for you. Ask me after the father comes out of prison, after therapy. I don’t know.” She looked away from him and then back and asked, “How are you?”

  Taken by surprise, Resnick didn’t know what to say. “You seem tense,” Rachel said. “You’ve got frown lines cluttering up your eyes and you haven’t been sleeping properly.”

  “I haven’t?”

  “Uh-huh. You’ve probably got a bed that isn’t firm enough to take your weight and if you told me you drank Scotch before trying to sleep, I’d believe you.”

  “Suppose it’s coffee?”

  “The effect’s the same.”

  He couldn’t decide if her eyes were more green than blue.

  He said: “Is this why you called me
over?”

  She said: “It’s what I’ve ended up saying.”

  “But when you stopped me…?”

  “I wanted to tell you that Mrs. Taylor…this morning, before court, I asked her about you.”

  “Yes?”

  “She said how understanding you’d been.”

  “Then she’s wrong,” Resnick said. “I don’t understand at all.”

  Instead of leaving the building with her, the two of them walking down the steps side-by-side, Resnick was on his own. The corner outside the court was jammed with people waiting for the lights to change. He hadn’t thought about turning away from her, he had just done it.

  He was heading for the underpass that would take him through the shopping precinct and back into the city center when the bleeper clipped inside his jacket sounded and sent him in search of the nearest telephone.

  Three

  Resnick had lived here, this part of the city, when he had been a uniformed sergeant, straining to get back into CID, eager to improve his status, move on up. Now the terraced streets had two-tone 2CVs parked at the curb and, through painted blinds, glimpses of parlor palms and Laura Ashley wallpaper: maybe he should have stuck around a little longer.

  There was an ambulance outside number 37 and Resnick pulled in between it and a maroon saloon which he recognized as belonging to Parkinson, the police surgeon.

  The rain had stopped but the air was still damp enough to make aging bones ache. A few people stood around on the opposite side of the street, hands in their pockets, shuffling their feet and speculating. Faces stared out from windows, several with lights already switched on in the rooms behind.

  DC Kellogg stood talking to a youth with a shaft of black gelled hair in the doorway of number 39, listening and making notes. By the entrance to number 37, a young constable stood with hands clasped behind his back, embarrassed to be the temporary focus of so much attention.

  Millington met Resnick in the narrow hallway.

  “How did it go at court?”

  Resnick ignored the question, looked past his sergeant at the partly open doorway ahead. “Scene-of-crime here yet?”

  “On their way.”

  Resnick nodded. “I want a look.”

  A gray topcoat had been dropped across the back of an easy chair; from behind it the toe of a red shoe poked out. On the glass-topped coffee table were a couple of wine glasses, one with an inch of red wine at the bottom, and a single red and white earring. A thick glass ashtray held the stubs of three cigarettes. Above the fireplace, a few tan-and-orange lilies had started to throw off their petals, curled like tongues.

  There were several posters on the walls, clip-framed; from one Monroe looked out, slump-backed on a stool, black clothes, white face. Resnick glanced into her empty eyes and turned away. Words from a song of Billie Holiday nudged away at his mind, images of winter through the slight distortion of glass.

  Parkinson stood up and half-turned to acknowledge Resnick’s presence; he took off his bifocals and slid them down into a case he kept in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

  “You’re finished?” Resnick asked.

  “For now.”

  “Any idea of time?”

  The police surgeon blinked and sounded bored; Resnick guessed the weather had kept him off the golf course for too long. “Somewhere in excess of twelve hours.”

  “Last night then?”

  “The wee small hours.”

  Resnick nodded and moved a little closer. The rear of Shirley Peters’s skirt had become nicked up behind her and one leg was folded beneath the other, as if she had been sitting on it and then lain slowly back. Her gray sweater had been loosened from the waist band of the skirt and was pushed up at one side towards her breast. Maybe, Resnick thought, it had first been pulled all the way up and later drawn, imperfectly, down. The dead woman’s head lolled back sideways on a cushion, angled over towards the fireplace. Her eyes—mouth—were open. The line of red, taut and twisted, ran from beneath the rich dark of her hair: a red scarf knotted at the throat and pulled tight.

  “Who found her?”

  Millington cleared his throat. “Patel.”

  “He’s still around?”

  “Supposed to be helping Kellogg with…”

  “I want to see him.”

  The scene-of-crime squad was filling out the corridor. During the next hour or so, a practiced search would be carried out, samples lifted with tweezers, scraped from beneath the painted fingernails of Shirley Peters’s hands; wine glasses, surfaces would be fingerprinted; photographs taken, a video film shot and prepared for Resnick’s briefing.

  Clear out of the way and let them get on with it.

  “We were knocking on doors, that run of break-ins, the nearest was down the street at number 62.”

  “Two constables and yourself.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Resnick watched the slim fingers of Patel’s hands slide back and forth along his thighs, intertwine, free themselves and move again. He wondered if it was the first time Patel had come upon a dead body—and decided that probably there would have been a grandparent or an aunt, some relative back home in—where was it?—Bradford.

  “I rang the bell, knocked. Nobody came to the door, so I made a note to call back and that was when the neighbor came out from number 39.”

  “Neighbor?”

  Patel opened the small black notebook, the right page marked by a rubber band. “MRS. BENNETT.” The name had been written in capitals, neat and black and underlined. “She said somebody should be in, Shirley, that was the name she used. She said she often slept late.”

  “You tried again?”

  Patel nodded. Resnick thought how different it would have been coming from any of the other officers. The young Asian’s diffidence came from years of stepping through conversation as through minefields, aware of how little it took to make everything go up in your face. Without it, he would have been unlikely to have survived in the Force.

  “I went round to the back…”

  “To ask a few routine questions about a burglary?”

  Patel looked into Resnick’s face: the first time he had done so directly. “I thought it would do no harm to check. Only a minute. There is an entry at the end of the street.”

  You followed a hunch, you bugger, Resnick thought. Good for you!

  “The back door, it wasn’t quite closed. Pulled to. I tried the handle.”

  “You went in?”

  “There were grounds for believing…at least, I thought…”

  “From what the neighbor had said, someone should have been at home.”

  “Yes, sir. I opened the door wide enough to call out. Several times. Loud enough, I think, to have woken most people.”

  Not this one, Resnick thought, seeing again the savage turn of the woman’s head, back against the cushion.

  “With the other burglaries in the area…” Patel ceased talking, the words drained from him. Resnick knew that inside his head the officer was walking again through the kitchen, past the sink, electric cooker, the painted clipboard units, on towards the living-room door.

  “Your suspicion now,” Resnick finished for him, “was that the neighbor’s assumptions were wrong, the house was empty, there had been a break-in, illegal entry through the rear, just like the rest.”

  Patel nodded.

  “But that wasn’t the case?”

  “No.” Patel shook his head. “No, sir. It was not.”

  Resnick touched him briefly on the arm. “Outside and get some fresh air. Right?”

  Resnick watched him walking slowly back across the road, head bowed; if he hadn’t already vomited, he would before long.

  “Graham?”

  Millington walked over from where he had been watching a scene-of-crime officer loading a fresh cassette into his video camera. “Shouldn’t be too long now.”

  “Where’s Lynn?”

  Millington pointed beyond the ambulance. Lynn Kellogg was sitting on
a low wall, talking to a couple of kids of barely school age.

  “Send her over. And, listen, if there’s nothing more you can do here, run Patel back to the station. He ought to get home but he’ll as like say no.”

  “If it was anybody else, I could take him to the pub and buy him a large brandy.”

  “Anybody else, that body might have been moldering away in there for days.”

  Millington looked at him sharply, looking for offense. “I hope you’re not including me in that?”

  “You, Graham?” said Resnick, straight-faced. “You’re a sergeant.”

  Lynn Kellogg was a stocky, red-faced woman of twenty-eight with soft brown hair and the still distinguishable burr of a Norfolk accent. Her mother and stepfather owned a chicken farm between Thetford and Norwich and each Christmas for the past three years Resnick had found a capon in a plastic carrier-bag inside the metal waste-paper bin beneath his desk.

  Like many women officers, she tended to get shunted into certain areas: so many cases of child abuse and rape that there were whole weeks on end when she thought she’d joined Social Services. But she was good with other women, kids too, and that didn’t mean Resnick forgot seeing her wade into the crowd at the Trent End and haul out a youth in a red and white scarf who’d just hurled a half-brick at the visiting goalkeeper.

  “Important witnesses?” asked Resnick, nodding in the direction of the five-year-olds.

  “Public relations.”

  “There’s a woman in number 39, Mrs. Bennett. Sounds as if she might be the eyes and ears of the street. According to Patel, she was pretty knowledgeable about the dead woman’s movements—or thought she was. Have a chat, will you? If you turn up anything that seems important get in touch with Sergeant Millington or myself at the station. If there’s any chance of closing this one down quickly, so much the better.”

  He spoke with the officer in charge of the scene-of-crime team for no more than ten minutes. When he got their report through, there might be something to go on. The small crowd of onlookers had got cold and bored and had mostly drifted away. The street lights stood out clearly now. On the horizon the reflections of the other lights threw up an oddly violet glow over the heaped shadow of the city. Resnick shivered as he headed back towards the house; he hated those evenings where dusk hardly seemed to exist; you blinked and there it was, night.