Lonely Hearts

by John Harvey

  Lynn nodded and looked through what she’d written. He was a nice enough bloke, Jim, but, God, didn’t he rattle on! Sort of bloke her folks would wet themselves over if ever she invited him home to Norfolk for the weekend, perish the thought. She could just imagine him walking around with her father, nodding with interest as the relative merits of White Rock and White Cornish broilers were explained in great detail. Pretty soon they’d have graduated to the lesser types of fowl pest and her mother would be counting the months as well as her chickens.

  “I’ll get it!”

  Jim Peel rocked his chair forward and pushed himself off the wall with the flat of his hands, but all Lynn had to do was stretch sideways.

  “CID. DC Kellogg speaking.”

  Vera Barnett was fifty-eight and looked twenty years older; thinning gray hair was sticking to her scalp with perspiration and her facial skin was loose and sallow. The knuckles of her hands were purple and swollen. She sat in a tall armchair, high-backed, high-sided. One of her feet rested on a cushion.

  “The children…” Lynn asked.

  “I’ve told you, they’re in my bed, sleeping. Poor lambs!”

  “But how old…?”

  “Luke’s just seven and little Sarah, she’s four.”

  “They’re all right?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to them while I’m here.” Lynn glanced round at the uniformed officer, standing patiently to one side.

  “Your daughter has left them with you before?” Lynn said.

  “Every week.”

  “The same evening?”

  Vera Barnett nodded and Lynn winced as she heard bones creak and grate.

  “Do they often stay the night?”

  “Never.”

  “Not even for a special occasion? I mean…”

  The mouth tightened. “She’s their mother and they’re her children. She’s no right. No right.”

  “So you were expecting her to collect them?”

  “Always.”

  “What time would that be, Mrs Barnett? Usually, I mean.”

  “Half-past eleven.”

  “But the children would already be asleep…”

  “They’re no trouble. Wake up without a fuss. Go off when she gets them back home again, fast as anything.”

  “So your daughter comes to collect them at half-past eleven…”

  “Or earlier. Makes me a bedtime drink, helps me into the bedroom, and off she goes till the next time. Brings them over on the bus, two buses really, but she always gets a taxi home. Phones through for it the minute she arrives.” She dabbed at a damp patch of hair. “I’ve known her have to ring back two, oh, three times; give some excuse like they couldn’t find the number, rang the bell and nobody answered. I’ve got nothing against them, of course, but they’re all, you know, these Asians. I don’t know if I should like to be driving home with them, last thing at night.”

  There was a lot worse, Lynn thought.

  “I rang the hospital,” Vera Barnett said. “In case, you know, she’d been in an accident. Well, you hear about such things.”

  “Why are you so certain something’s happened to your daughter?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “It is only…” Lynn checked her watch.

  “Two fifty-two,” said the constable.

  “It isn’t three yet. If she’s with friends. A party.” Lynn tried to smile reassuringly, but more and more she had a sense that the woman’s fears were grounded. Cold was starting to seek out her stomach. “There’s plenty of time for her to turn up.”

  “She’s only once been late, really late, and then she rang.”

  “Maybe, wherever she is, she was having such a good time, she forgot.”

  “With the children here?”

  Lynn rubbed the palms of her hands along the slightly rough wool of her skirt. If the woman was right, then all they were doing here was wasting time. Trying to reassure her wasn’t working anyway: her mind was too firmly set on disaster.

  “You’ve phoned round her friends?” the constable asked.

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Even so. If you’re worried.”

  “Besides, she doesn’t have friends. Not like that. Not that she goes out with. People to talk to at work, but that’s all.”

  They had already had the story of a marriage gone wrong, blame liberally sprinkled, one thing they could be sure of, wherever Mary was she wouldn’t have gone gallivanting off to see him.

  “And you’ve no idea where she was going this evening, Mrs Barnett?”

  Again the set mouth, eyes narrow with disapproval. “None whatsoever.”

  “Where she usually went on her evening out?”

  “She didn’t tell me her business and I never asked.” With effort she shifted round in her chair, arms resting along the wings, fingers gripped. “Though I knew what she was up to, of course.”

  Lynn looked at her expectantly.

  “She was with a man.”

  “Getting really worked up about it, wasn’t she?”

  “Her daughter gone missing? Hardly surprising.”

  “Her daughter having it off.”

  “Is that what you think this is about?”

  “Don’t you? If you’ve only got one chance a week.” Lynn blinked and gave a quick shake of the head: another bloke whose ideas about sex were based upon the letters pages in Penthouse and mutual masturbation sessions in the showers after games.

  “What would your mum say, then? You and sex.”

  “Not a lot.”

  “How’s that then?”

  “They don’t believe in sex in that part of Norfolk.”

  The house was in a short road, cars parked close at either side. A light was on inside number 7, probably the stairs. All of the other houses in the street were dark.

  “What d’you reckon?”

  Lynn shrugged, tightened the wool scarf across her neck, and rang the bell. It sounded, off-key, inside the house. Through the letter-box there was nothing special: a plastic ball on the carpet, most of the air gone out of it, a piece of Lego.

  “Want me to try the back?”

  Lynn took from her coat pocket the key Mrs. Barnett had given them. “Why bother?”

  “Look, you’re sure about this?”

  The backs of her legs were sure; her arms, all the places where the chill touched her, tensing the nerves beneath the skin. The key fitted the lock almost too easily and the door swung open with the first pressure of her hand. Lynn stepped around it and looked—it had been held on the catch, but the lock had not been slipped down.

  The light that had been left on was on the landing.

  With her gloved hand she depressed the switch on the wall, close by a line of pegs bunched with coats.

  “Hello!” The constable called. “Anybody home?”

  Lynn opened the door to the first room on the left, turned on the light. Somebody had gone round in a hurry, tidying up. Papers and magazines, Ladybird books, scooped up and set down again in uneven piles; toys squashed up into a corner. Clear across the top of the television, the curve of dust left after a single sweep with the duster.

  “Shall I check upstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  She did not want to go upstairs. Not first.

  “Careful what you touch.”

  The back room led into the kitchen. Mugs on the table, plates stacked on the draining board, a pan soaking in cold water in the sink, rimed with orange. She heard him coming down the stairs too fast and turned to face him.

  “This Mary—houseproud, would you call her?”

  “Not exactly. Why?”

  “That bed up there’s a proper tip.”

  “She’s not…?”

  The constable shook his head.

  “The bathroom?”

  “Not anywhere.”

  For several seconds, neither spoke nor moved.

  “What d’you reckon?” the constable asked, anxious to be doing so
mething.

  “Hang on a minute.”

  She walked back into the front room, remembering something she’d only half-noticed. On the floor in the corner alcove, close by the drawn curtains, a handbag. Lynn used finger and thumb to ease it open. Makeup bag, purse, a pair of black flat-heeled shoes, bent double and squashed down. She gave the bag a slight shake. A packet of contraceptives, Durex Elite. Thought about taking it to the table and emptying it out then thought against it.

  “Reckon we should phone in?”

  She nodded, setting the bag back down where she had found it. Going through the hall, past the crowded pegs, something stopped her. Underneath matching yellow plastic children’s coats, different sizes, hung two pairs of blue and yellow Wellington boots, threaded together at the top with string. Muddy at the bottom.

  “Wait here a minute.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Just wait.”

  Back in the kitchen, a step down from the rest of the house, Lynn remembered the cold and knew it had been more than the cold of anticipation. The door to the garden had not quite been pulled to. She touched it open and stepped outside. Stray ends of cloud moved gray across the moon. A bicycle without a rear wheel leaned against the wall. Her toe touched against something and she bent to pick it up. A high-heeled shoe, black, new.

  A shape higher up the garden, stretching away.

  “A torch! Get me…”

  He had been standing closer than she’d realized and the sudden beam of light made her jump.

  Oh, God! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, God!

  Mary Sheppard was wearing nothing above her waist, a halfslip, coffee or beige, below. The other shoe stuck up from the ground, holding stubbornly to the toes of a foot that angled too sharply aside. One arm bent out sideways, the other reached in a curve above her head as though she had been trying to swim to safety. Dark lines like ribbons drawn through her hair.

  “Get through to the station. Tell Jim Peel to come out here. I’ll ring my DI.”

  “Sure you’re…?”

  “Do it.”

  Resnick was dreaming about a child playing with dolls: it was not a pleasant dream. The first sound of the telephone woke him with relief. Ten-past four. Dizzy jumped soundlessly down from somewhere above Resnick’s head, instantly hungry.

  “Hello?”

  “Sir, it’s DC Kellogg. Sorry to disturb you, but I think you’d better come out…”

  As he listened, Resnick pushed his fingers into Dizzy’s short fur, the cat walking and turning so that the length of his body could be stroked without Resnick’s arm having to move.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Resnick said, standing, setting down the phone. Dizzy’s high, crooked tail slipped around the door before him.

  He arrived in twelve. One flap of his shirt hung down below a gray pullover and a sleeve of his jacket was bunched up beneath his herringbone overcoat. He wore a dark brown scarf but was bareheaded.

  The ambulance had pulled in close to the line of parked cars and a police car sat in the center of the street, blue light flashing, blocking traffic. A few lights had been switched on in the adjacent houses.

  Resnick nodded to the constable at the front door and went inside. Lynn Kellogg was standing in the living room, in the semi-darkness. That was not where he had to go. Jim Peel was talking with one of the ambulance men in the back room, a second man had the kettle on and was making tea. Out in the garden, Mary Sheppard’s body had been covered over with plastic, a couple of coats.

  Resnick reached out a hand and Peel, who had followed him, gave him a torch. First one coat and then the other, top then bottom. He guessed at the temperature. Thirty-odd degrees? The ground was hard beneath his feet in ridges. Earlier that evening it had rained and this would have been mud. A rough circle of it crowned the heel of the dead woman’s shoe.

  The upstretched arm, the fingers that were like marble.

  Resnick guessed that by now they would be quite stiff, solid.

  He did not need to touch them and so he did not.

  He turned and looked at the tall DC, who blinked at him before angling his head away. Resnick switched off the torch and passed it back. The police surgeon was taking off his gloves in the kitchen, watching the ambulance man pour boiling water over several tea bags.

  “Why’s it always the middle of the night, Charlie?”

  Resnick shrugged and Parkinson eased the gloves into the side pockets of his Barbour.

  “Can we get some light fixed up out there?”

  “On its way, sir,” said Jim Peel. “Being organized.”

  The surgeon nodded and accepted a mug of tea. From an inside pocket he took a small leather-covered flask. “No point in catching my death,” he said, unscrewing the top and tipping a shot of brandy into the tea.

  “Sir?”

  Resnick spooned two sugars into the offered cup and carried it through to the front of the house. Lynn Kellogg had moved across the room to be close to the window, as if she had considered opening the curtains but decided against it.

  “Here,” Resnick said quietly.

  At first he thought she wasn’t going to turn around. When she did, he held out the cup and she took it automatically in both hands.

  “How you feeling?”

  She didn’t answer, watching the surface of the tea, lightly rocking towards the rim of the cup.

  “Lynn?”

  The cup fell through her fingers and before she could fall also, Resnick had hold of her, the side of her face squashed up against his chest. The fingers of one hand were pressing hard into the corner of Resnick’s mouth. In that light her hair looked no longer brown but black. Resnick thought about the woman lying under those coats in the cold of the garden; thought of Parkinson’s stethoscope, the gilt edges of his bifocals, the rolled gold of the propelling pencil with which he would make his notes.

  The strange sound that vibrated through him was Lynn Kellogg’s breathing. The tip of her little finger was hooked over the edge of his lower lip.

  DC Peel appeared for a moment in the doorway and went away again.

  Only when the breathing had begun to steady, did Resnick say, “You okay?”

  She leaned her head back and then to one side, eyes closed and then open. Suddenly embarrassed, she pulled her hand back from Resnick’s face.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I…”

  “Best sit down.”

  “No, I…”

  He led her to the nearest chair. Called for somebody to bring two more teas. Lot of sugar in one. When he pulled back the curtains it was still dark, the soft gray darkness that seeks to swallow you up. Back along the street, the police car still leaked blue light.

  “Charlie,” Parkinson spoke from the hallway. “A word?”

  The pathologist’s report would have to confirm it, but cause of death appeared to be numerous blows with a heavy instrument to the skull. There were also signs of bruising on the neck, around the windpipe and immediately below the jaw. Bruising to the tummy area and above the hips.

  “How many?” Resnick asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “How many is numerous?”

  Parkinson pursed his lips. “Ten or twelve, I’d say. It’s hard to be exact. I expect you’ll get a better idea later on.”

  Resnick thanked him and turned back into the room where Lynn Kellogg was sipping her tea, staring at the bundle of toys in the corner of the room.

  “You didn’t ask?” said Parkinson.

  Resnick’s head swung back.

  “Somewhere between midnight and one.”

  Resnick nodded and went on into the room. The scene-of-crime team was just arriving outside; one or two neighbors were standing on the pavement in dressing gowns and slippers.

  “There are two kids,” Lynn said.

  Resnick had to bend low in order to hear her.

  “Boy and a girl.”

  “Where?”

  “At her mother’s. The dead…at her mother’s. It was her that called i
n.”

  “I see.”

  “Worried that something had happened…” The voice choked and Resnick thought she was going to go again, but she caught herself and continued. “She was worried her daughter hadn’t come to fetch the children. I went out to see her. Promised I’d call round, check; she gave me a spare key.”

  Resnick took the cup from her hand and set it down on the carpet. “Will they be all right with her, d’you think? The kids.”

  Lynn wiped a hand across her face. “I don’t know. She’s…there’s something wrong with her, arthritis, I don’t know. I don’t think she could cope for long.”

  Especially not, Resnick thought, after someone has told her about this.

  “All right,” Resnick said, straightening. He rested a hand lightly on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I’ll sort something out.”

  Slowly, she turned her face towards his.

  “Before, sir, I’m sorry. I…”

  “Is that boyfriend of yours at home?”

  “I expect so. I…”

  “Give him a ring. He could come out and fetch you.”

  Resnick was surprised to see Lynn Kellogg’s face break into a smile.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’d have to ride on the crossbar.”

  Resnick smiled too. “I’ll get someone to give you a lift.”

  “I’m all right, sir. Honest.”

  “You’ll be better after a few hours’ sleep.”

  “My report…”

  “You made it to me. Write it up when you come in tomorrow.” Resnick corrected himself. “Today. The only thing I’ll need before you go, the mother’s address.”

  Lynn Kellogg, careful to get up from the chair slowly, opened her notebook.

  “Hello? Who is this?” Chris Phillips’s voice was thick with sleep.

  Resnick told him that he wanted to speak with Rachel Chaplin.

  “It’s half-past bloody five!”

  “So it must be important.”

  “Not so important it can’t wait.”

  Resnick sensed he was about to be cut off, but he heard the receiver changing hands and then it was Rachel’s voice.