Lonely Hearts cr-1

by John Harvey

  Across from him, the other detective chief inspector, Howard Colwin, sat upright and looked directly to the front. He had less hair than Tom Parker and what there was had been greased and brushed until it looked no more than a thin line drawn tight across his scalp. His suit was dark brown with a light stripe, but his shoes were black. He breathed tightly, as if begrudging the air.

  Skelton cleared his throat and looked at his watch. Resnick glanced round the room: two other DIs apart from himself, Andy Hunt and Bernard Grafton; Paddy Fitzgerald was the inspector in charge of uniforms.

  “We’ll make a start,” Skelton said, lacing his hands together and pressing down so that the knuckles cracked.

  Colin Rich came through the door, head turned away, finishing a conversation with someone in the corridor outside. His brown leather jacket was fashionably loose, its wide belt undone and hanging free. He wore thick green cords, cut wide at the hips, dark brown desert boots. When he realized that Skelton was staring at him, he mouthed a quick “Sir” and moved towards a seat.

  “I thought perhaps the Serious Crimes Squad had decided against joining us,” Skelton said.

  “We did think about it, guv,” said Rich, settling into an immediate slouch. “Only we thought you’d miss us.”

  “More like you nearly missing us.”

  “Sir?”

  “Perhaps you were misinformed as to the time.”

  Rich shook his head. “No, sorting out my team, that’s what it was.”

  Skelton nodded. “Who’s sorting you out, Inspector?” Rich looked quickly at the others, pushed brown hair forward over his forehead, and grinned. “Don’t know, sir.”

  “Think again, then.”

  “Sorry, sir, afraid I don’t quite…”

  “Who’s sorting you out, Inspector?” Skelton asked a second time.

  Colin Rich wasn’t so preoccupied with himself that he failed to see which way it was going. Let them out of the station for half a minute and they reckon Montgomery’s their bloody uncle. He sat up straight. “You are, sir,” he said.

  “How many men?” Skelton asked, looking down at one of the lists.

  “Three, sir.”

  Skelton checked, frowned, but let it go.

  The CID teams led by Resnick and the other two inspectors would be five-handed: Resnick would have Millington for his sergeant, Naylor and Divine, Lynn Kellogg and Patel. There could be as many as ten or a dozen uniformed constables, depending on need-here and elsewhere. The task of routine checking, house-to-house verification, would fall in the main to them. Everything would pass through here, here and the computer room. There were a couple of uniformed officers in there, also, but most of the job was done by trained civilians, experts. Every scrap of information gathered and thought to be even marginally useful was fed in, checked through the giant Holmes computer, and for all of that information fresh action was generated. If the days were allowed to turn into weeks, the possible leads would multiply endlessly so that, even if more officers were drafted in, checking everything became less and less possible.

  But, since the Peter Sutcliffe case, that had to be the way of it. If the ongoing results of that investigation into the so-called Yorkshire Ripper had been pulled together in a more readily comprehensible form, lives would have been saved, a murderer would have been stopped sooner, that was the consensus. But Sutcliffe had been interviewed by the police and talked his way clear-whatever might have been lacking there could not have been provided by high technology. And when, finally, he was caught it was as the result of a piece of common-or-garden practice, a couple of working coppers suspicious about a stolen car.

  “Coincidence or otherwise,” Jack Skelton was saying, “both of these murders were turned up by members of Inspector Resnick’s team and it’s fair to say that he’s got a march on the rest of us when it comes to a sense of what’s going on. Once we’re through looking at the videos shot by scene-of-crime, I intend to ask the inspector to fill us in on background. Doubtless there’ll be questions you’ll want to ask at that stage.”

  “Yeah,” said Colin Rich under his breath. “Like where’s the bloody coffee? When can we expect to get out of here and get a drink? They open at eleven.”

  Nineteen

  “Well, Inspector?”

  That well-groomed smirk was just what Resnick didn’t need. Suzanne Olds got up lithely to her feet, the folds of her beige suit skirt falling back against her knees. She followed him into his office and sat without waiting to be asked.

  She watched Resnick making space enough on his desk to rest an elbow.

  “It’s unfair to say, ‘I told you so…’” She smiled brightly, arched her hand towards her hair, gleam of fine gold at the wrist. “But impossible to resist.”

  Liverpool CID had finally tracked Mottram down. Millington had driven up to see him: a fiery little man with a head like a polished walnut and hands like an angel. He had been plying his trade in a former cinema in Wallasey; instead of bingo, it alternated between smoking concerts and prize fights, same audiences, same reactions. Mottram was looking after a lean youngster with a walleye and a skin like smoke. When he threw in the towel midway through the fifth, the crowd went mad; he had to push the kid back to the dressing room through a hail of coins and spittle and cans.

  Millington had to look away as Mottram’s needle joined the ruptured skin over the eyelid, a flap of it hanging free. Mottram talked while he worked, his concentration never breaking, hands never less than steady.

  “It was a foolish thing I know,” his voice was oddly gentle, like his touch, somewhere at the back of it a Gallic lilt, “but there are times you can’t help but think…easy money, it’s the old story I suppose. One night’s work and you can walk away a rich man.” He used scissors to cut the thread. “I was there right enough, your friend Macliesh and the big feller, Warren.” He patted the boxer lightly on the arm. “You’ll do.”

  Turning towards Millington, he added, “Now, Warren, if he should ever chance to go into the ring…Ah, there’s a prospect.”

  “You’ll make a statement?”

  “You write it and I’ll sign it.”

  It was there on Resnick’s desk: somewhere.

  “How do you find anything?” Suzanne Olds asked, amused.

  “I’m a detective.”

  “This new murder-are you, um, getting anywhere?”

  “We’re pursuing our inquiries.”

  “Let’s hope they’re more fruitful than this.”

  Resnick glanced towards the door. “Why don’t you have a word with the custody sergeant downstairs?”

  “Talking to you is so pleasant.”

  “I think the custody sergeant…”

  “Sometimes,” said Suzanne Olds, standing, “it’s hard to be gracious in defeat.”

  “Is that what this is?”

  She looked at Resnick coolly. “When you pushed my client over the edge in that interview room, you thought you had it gift-wrapped.”

  “I was doing my job.”

  “My God!” she laughed. “I don’t believe you said that!”

  “How about doing yours?”

  “Police liaison,” she said at the door. “Part of the job specification.”

  “They say it’s never too late to apply for retraining.”

  “Good day, Inspector.”

  “Ms. Olds.”

  He had turned towards the roster on the bulletin board behind his desk when she swung back into the room.

  “Is it true both these women met whoever attacked them through some kind of advertisement?”

  Resnick hesitated before answering. “It’s possible.”

  She shook her head, frowning. “The same man?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “My God!”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve got a friend. She works in my office. Once every few months she starts to feel restless, decides it’s time to try again. The last occasion we made up the advertisement over a bottl
e of wine at lunch.”

  “Tell her,” Resnick said.

  Suzanne Olds nodded, abstracted.

  “And maybe you should tell me her name.”

  It was the day of the funeral. Lynn Kellogg sat near the back of the high-vaulted church while, in the pulpit, the vicar remembered Shirley Peters from hastily written notes. It was cold-the stone floor, smooth wood of the pews-and the voices had all but disappeared before the hymn’s third verse had come to an end.

  Olive Peters was helped along the aisle of the church, up through the welter of graves towards the freshly opened ground. In that temperature it would have been hard digging. The blond of her hair was growing out around the edges of a black felt hat, bought in haste by a relative who had misjudged the size. There were few enough of them there: a sister, cousin perhaps; a man with steel-gray hair who walked with the aid of a stick; a dumpy girl with red cheeks forever dabbing at her eyes; an undermanager from the office where Shirley had worked, pushing back the sleeve of his thick black coat to look at his watch. The sheath of flowers sent by Grace Kelley was rich with lilies and Christmas roses and whoever had written the note had misspelled her name.

  Last in a ragged line, Lynn hesitated before going forward to the grave. She thought of her own mother, fussing in the kitchen, busy with the fire, head turning towards her at the sound of a door opening, ready to smile. She took a crumble of cold earth between her fingers and threw it down, surprised at the hollow sound it made.

  “Ought to put that bugger in charge of MI5. Wouldn’t be any Spycatcher if he had anything to do with it.” Graham Millington was sitting on the corner of a desk in the CID room. There were six others present and Resnick was the only one who was listening. “Official bloody Secrets Act wasn’t in it! Insisted on speaking to the super on the phone.”

  “You got what we wanted.”

  Millington sighed and started to pat his pockets for his cigarettes. “Names and addresses of all their Lonely Hearts advertisers over the past two months.”

  “Men as well as women?”

  “Yes.”

  “Replies?”

  The sergeant opened the flip-top pack and shook down a cigarette. “Difficult.”

  “Difficult?”

  “Impossible.”

  Two telephones at different points of the room began to ring almost simultaneously.

  “I thought you weren’t smoking?” Resnick said.

  “I’m not,” said Millington, pushing the cigarette down into his breast pocket.

  “For you, sir,” called one of the officers.

  “Who is it?”

  “DCI Parker, sir.”

  “Ask him, can I ring back in five minutes.” Resnick looked back at his sergeant. “How impossible?”

  “He’ll hang on, sir,” said the man at the phone.

  “Right.”

  “Letters come through sealed,” Millington explained. “Often just the one, sometimes up to half a dozen. All that’s on the envelope is the box number, whichever ad’s taken their fancy. The paper forwards them twice a week in batches. No way of knowing where they’ve come from.”

  “There’s one way,” Resnick said.

  Millington grinned and shook his head. “That won’t help us with replies they’ve already received, sir. Whoever the bastard was wrote to Shirley Peters, Mary Sheppard.”

  Resnick was starting to move towards the phone. “He’ll try again,” he said. Hoping that he would not; hoping that he would.

  “Not without a warrant, sir. Confidentiality, you’d think it kept him in a state of grace. And him working for a bloody newspaper. They’d put a periscope up your waste pipe if they thought it’d give them something to splash across the front page.”

  Resnick took the receiver from the DC. He listened for a few moments to Tom Parker before interrupting: “Sir, it looks as if we’re going to need a court order.”

  “Mrs. Peters…”

  “She doesn’t want to be bothered.”

  “Mrs. Peters…”

  “Can’t you see she doesn’t want to be bothered?”

  “Mrs. Peters, if…”

  “Look! How many more times…?”

  “It was good of you to come,” Olive Peter’s voice was hardly above a whisper, but in any case Lynn Kellogg was no longer crouched down and listening. With as few as seven people the room was overcrowded; the vicar looked up anxiously from the red and gray settee as the man tried to force Lynn towards the door.

  “I’ll break this bloody stick over your head!” he was shouting.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Really,” said the vicar, putting a sandwich back on the plate, jam or bloater paste, it was difficult to tell which. “Really, I think this is less than appropriate.”

  “You’ve no business here.”

  “That’s not true, sir, I’m afraid.”

  “You should be out after the bastard ’as done this, not coming round here worrying the life out of the woman. What in God’s name d’you think you’re playing at, round here worrying the life out of her now?”

  “If I might suggest…” attempted the vicar.

  “You can keep your bloody nose out of it an’ all!”

  “I merely…”

  “I should think we’ve had enough of your claptrap for one day.”

  “Take it easy now,” said Lynn, moving so as to place herself between them.

  At the far side of the room, the dumpy girl with red cheeks pulled open a door seeking a way out and a broom toppled forward from the cupboard and struck her on the side of the face.

  Olive Peters held the framed photograph of her daughter and herself tighter, cradling it to her chest.

  “Rejoice that she’s gone to a better place! Shoveled underneath that sodding ground, that’s where she is.” He raised the walking stick towards the ceiling. “You must think we’re all bloody soft!”

  “Give me the stick,” said Lynn Kellogg.

  “Will I, hell as like!”

  “Yes,” said Lynn firmly. “You will.”

  Never taking her eyes off his, she held out her hand and kept it there until he put the stick, with slow care, between her fingers.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Graham,” said Resnick.

  They were on their way down to the incident room, snarled up in the first flow of homegoing traffic. Millington had been wondering what his wife had bought for supper and what his chances were of finding out before it was dried up or cold or both.

  “Len Lawrence gets the chance to get his boots under the super’s desk for as long as this takes. Why haven’t you been treated the same? Senior sergeant in terms of years, experience, surely you ought to be in my office, getting the feel of things, establishing yourself? Something along those lines?”

  “Something like that, sir.”

  “There’s another way of looking at it,” Resnick continued.

  Isn’t there bloody always! thought Millington. Driving over in Resnick’s car, that was practically the only time he hadn’t been thinking about it since the teams had been announced.

  “If we get a good result here…”

  “Us and all the rest,” said Millington.

  “…that might end up looking more impressive on your record than a week shuffling bits of paper across the surface of my desk.”

  And it might not, Millington thought. We might not. Resnick applied the brakes too sharply as a youth on a skateboard swerved out in front of him. Both Resnick and Milhington were thrown forwards against their seat belts as the engine cut out.

  Immediately horns sounded behind them.

  “Those things should’ve been broken up and burned the first time round,” said Millington savagely.

  “In a hurry to get home,” said Resnick, turning the key in the ignition.

  “Can’t wait to spend his social security.”

  In the end it was the girl with plump cheeks and now a strip of plaster over her right eye. Lynn had offered her a lift back int
o the city; too late to be worth going back to the office, she was meeting her boyfriend in the Pizzaland on the Market Square.

  Lynn sat there with her, toying with a coffee while the girl drank Diet Pepsi and complained about not losing weight.

  “Trouble is Darren likes to eat here of an evening, but I only ever have the vegetarian. Thin and crispy, not the deep pan. And the salad. Darren gets through a double portion of garlic bread as well as most of a regular pizza and he never puts on a pound.” She looked at the door as if she couldn’t wait for him to arrive. “I even went to aerobics for a couple of months but all that happened was I got short of breath.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lynn reassured her. “It’s more difficult for us than it is for men.”

  “But don’t you wish you weren’t so big?” asked the girl, leaning back to get a better look at her. “I bet you do.”

  Lynn shook her head. “In my job it’s useful.”

  “I don’t know how you can,” the girl said, thoughtfully.

  “Do what I do?”

  “Not want to lose weight.”

  “I suppose I never think about it.”

  “What about your feller? You have got one, a bloke?”

  “He doesn’t seem to think about it either,” Lynn said. Probably, she carried on the thought, because he’s too busy thinking about his lightweight bike to notice.

  “You’re lucky. Ever since I met Darren…”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “You’ll never guess,” the girl said, her cheeks growing redder than ever, “but I met him through the paper. Sort of, you know, a blind date. It was Shirley’s idea. We put it in together, two girls want to meet two smart fellers who’ll show them a good time. It was Shirley’s idea. She used to do it all the time.”

  Rachel made a final note in her work diary and closed her eyes. Only for a moment. It wasn’t until her colleague touched her lightly on the shoulder that she realized she had fallen asleep.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine,” Rachel said, yawning and smiling self-consciously at the same time. “Nothing a few good nights wouldn’t cure.”

  “Better get off home then. It’s way past any sort of time.”