Lonely Hearts cr-1

by John Harvey

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’d better point me at the bathroom on the way.”

  “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”

  Rachel waited fully fifteen seconds and when the bathroom mirror didn’t provide her with an answer she flushed the toilet and switched out the light.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Mmm.”

  “No, really?”

  “I suppose not.”

  Resnick sighed and rolled over on to his side; his eyes were closed and his breathing was loud and too fast. He waited until it had steadied and then opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling.

  “Charlie…” Rachel snuggled beneath the crook of his arm, laying her arm across his body, the curve of her hand on his belly. “…it doesn’t matter.”

  Resnick didn’t reply.

  “Honestly.”

  “Um.”

  She turned her head in towards him and kissed first his side and then, slowly, his chest, all the way to the hair that gathered thickly at the middle of his rib cage and tasted of salt and sweat.

  “Don’t think about it.”

  What Resnick was thinking about was Sally Oakes, her scrubbed face and her skinny body and her voice. No. He hurt me. And behind that, like an echo that was off-key but always present, a little girl sitting in a room with dolls: Yes. It hurt me.

  Rachel moved until she was lying with her body half covering his and he softly stroked her back from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine.

  “Charlie,” she said in a murmur, “don’t stop. That’s lovely.”

  And after that she didn’t say anything because she was asleep.

  When she woke it was pitch dark, she was alone in the bed and the luminous hands of her watch told her it was close to half-past two. She slipped out from under the covers without disturbing the cat that slept near the foot of the bed, curled in on itself.

  She found Charlie in the nursery, with his face up against the window, gazing out into the dark. Rachel pressed her cheek into the middle of his back and her arms wound around him. After a little while he turned to her and when she kissed him, she could feel the tears, not yet dry on his face.

  “What are you crying for, Charlie?” she said.

  “The children.”

  “Which children?”

  “All of them.”

  Thirty-One

  “Charlie.”

  “Um?”

  “Charlie.”

  He turned against her, no more than half awake and startled by her voice, her closeness, the warmth and smoothness of her skin.

  “There’s something on my head.”

  “Oh.” Reaching up, one of Resnick’s hands inadvertently brushed against her breast. “Dizzy, come down. Come on.”

  He prized the cat carefully away, wary that Dizzy’s claws would become entangled with the curls of Rachel’s hair. Setting the cat down on the floor, Resnick waited for him to jump back and when he did, pushed him more energetically away. The fur of his tail fluffed out, Dizzy sulked out of the room.

  “Jealous,” Resnick said.

  “He’s no need to be.”

  “He’ll get used to it.”

  Rachel ran a finger down the inside of Resnick’s arm. “He won’t have to.” Looking at her, close enough to see himself reflected in her eyes, Resnick’s fingers closed around hers.

  “What time is it, Charlie?”

  He brought her arm up in the bed until he could read the hands of her watch. “Ten-past six.”

  “I have to leave by seven.”

  It was already five-to and Rachel was drinking coffee and putting on her eye shadow; in the bedroom, Resnick was sorting through his shirts.

  “You were married, Charlie. Why didn’t you have any kids?”

  “The only time we might have was right afterwards, the first year or so. But then it was me, I was the one who wasn’t sure, wanted to wait. I was just getting into the job, I suppose, maybe I was frightened of the disruption, the responsibility, I don’t know. Later, well, later it was different. There were other things on her agenda.”

  She could see him through the mirror, loosening the top of his trousers to tuck in his shirt, watching her.

  “How about you?” Resnick said.

  Rachel was checking her diary, one arm in her coat: they were standing in the hall.

  “Young professionals; it wasn’t an issue.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, I don’t think about it, not often, and, when I do, I still don’t know if I want any. Sometimes…” She pushed the diary down into her bag and finished fastening her coat…“But then I’ve never been sure enough or I suppose by now I would have done something about it.”

  She felt him looking at her and knew what he was thinking. It didn’t make her feel comfortable.

  “Bye, Charlie.” She opened the door. Outside it was still quite dark.

  “I’ll call you.”

  “No.”

  Rachel watched as anxiety narrowed his eyes. “It’s my turn to call you.”

  Jack Skelton had either found the time to buy a new suit or discovered one in the back of his wardrobe that Resnick didn’t remember. He went through the briefing session even more briskly than usual. The blowups of the bodies were still tacked to the wall; the map enlargements with their annotations in red and blue marker; now two ten by twelve photographs of Leonard Simms, one a right profile, the other frontal. In both he looked startled, his eyes protruding slightly from their sockets, cheeks drawn in as if catching breath.

  “What I shall say to the press is this: a man has been helping us with our inquiries into the deaths of Shirley Peters and Mary Sheppard, neither he nor anybody else has been charged, but we do confidently expect an arrest will be made shortly.”

  “Shortly,” said Colin Rich. “Why not now?” As usual it was difficult to tell whether he was asking a specific question or thinking aloud.

  The superintendent chose to answer. “To present, Simms has been here voluntarily. He asked to see his doctor and that was arranged, but always said he didn’t want a solicitor. Now he seems to be changing his mind on that score and I’m not convinced we have enough evidence on which to charge him. He’s still denying any actual contact with the Peters woman and in no way have we been able to link him with the second murder.”

  “That aside,” put in the DCI, “laddie’s very much our best bet.”

  “But in the meanwhile,” said Skelton, “we continue to explore other avenues.”

  “Or blind alleys, eh, Charlie?” Colin Rich winked.

  Resnick knew that, when he talked to Skelton, the superintendent would tell him to put at least two more of his team back on to the main inquiry. Contact magazines, dating agencies, singles clubs: action was continuing to be initiated, paper work still piling up.

  Patel had typed his report with the usual painstaking application of Tipp-Ex and an uncertainty, shared by the majority of the population, about the use of the apostrophe. Resnick held the sheets folded back against the counter and spooned the sprinkling of chocolate from the surface of his cappuccino. Names of publications, academic posts held, bits and pieces of biography culled from slender sources, what did it all add up to? Repression, defacement. He wondered if Patel’s page of notes outlining Doria’s lecture on Derrida and Deconstruction meant any more to him than a collection of words, shuffled together. Repression and defacement: provocation and closure.

  “Moonlighting, Inspector?”

  Suzanne Olds was standing behind him, reading over his shoulder. Resnick refolded the papers and slid them back into their envelope.

  “A little heavy for before lunch, isn’t it?” she said, taking the stool next to him.

  “Research,” Resnick explained.

  “A closet intellectual.” She took a pack of cigarettes from her shoulder bag and then a lighter. “You’re a surprising man.” She lit a cigarette. “Open University, is it? Career move or just a hobby?�
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  “I didn’t know you came here?” Resnick said.

  “I must be honest, I prefer the espresso bar downstairs at Next but there wasn’t a spare seat.”

  “Coffee’s better up here.”

  “It’s stronger.”

  “Exactly.”

  Suzanne Olds put a 50p coin on the counter and told the girl to keep the change. “How’s the inquiry coming along?”

  “We confidently expect an arrest to be made shortly.”

  “Thanks,” she said, averting her head to release a film of gray smoke, “I read the first edition.”

  “Then you know.”

  “From what I hear you’ve got some half-witted flasher doing his best to talk himself into the High Court.”

  “You’re not representing him?”

  “I didn’t think anybody was.”

  “Besides,” said Resnick, “if you read the rest of the piece, you’ll know we let him walk away.”

  “How far and for how long?”

  Resnick gave his coffee a stir and drank it down in three swallows.

  “You don’t think he did it, do you?” She was leaning her head towards him and he still didn’t like her perfume. There was, though, something about the way her skin stretched tight over high cheekbones…

  “Don’t I?”

  “Inspector, I’ve seen you when you’re convinced a man’s guilty. That interrogation of Macliesh…”

  “I regret that.”

  “Why?” Her hand was resting on his sleeve. “I thought you were very impressive.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Resnick said, putting the envelope into his inside pocket, getting down from the stool.

  “You know,” Suzanne Olds said, “you could be an attractive man if ever you decided to take the trouble.”

  Resnick had no trouble in not looking back.

  For Christmas they had pork: slices of it a quarter-inch thick that her father would slice away from the bone, golden-yellow crackling, roast parsnips and potatoes, applesauce to which her mother had added a thimbleful of brandy at the last moment. Her mother had been on to her about it since her last letter, this Sunday’s eleven-thirty phone call.

  “You will be home? You will be here? Christmas Eve, your dad says. He could do with some help on the last delivery. Can’t trust that lad to come in. Oh, and the bird for that inspector of yours…”

  Lynn wondered how difficult it would be to arrange for a spell of duty that would carry her across into the New Year.

  “Problem?”

  She hadn’t noticed Resnick coming into the office.

  “No, sir,” shaking her head.

  “You look guilty about something.”

  “Christmas, sir.”

  Resnick grinned. “Didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”

  Across the room two phones rang almost simultaneously and Mark Divine picked up one with each hand and said into the pair of them, “CID.”

  One caller he asked to hold a moment, cupped his hand over the mouthpiece of the second and gestured towards Resnick, who shook his head.

  “He’s busy at the moment. Can you call back later?”

  Divine shrugged and set the receiver back on the cradle. “Hung up, sir.”

  Resnick turned back to Lynn Kellogg. “You went to see the girl?”

  “Sally Oakes. Yes, sir.”

  “What did you make of her?”

  “Weird. I mean, really strange. Brittle as a stick and that look of hers…I’m ten years older than her and she made me feel like I was back at school.”

  It was interesting, thought Resnick, the way that her Norfolk accent came back more strongly whenever she’d been thinking about home.

  “And all that carrying-on with Doria, I don’t understand how she could…I don’t see how she could bring herself to tell me about it, never mind mess around like that with a man…” She sensed the way her line of thought was taking her and veered away with as much grace as she could. Noticing, Resnick gave her room, impressed.

  “I’ll say this for her, though, she sent him packing and she meant it. That’s not easy at the best of times.” Look at me, she thought, sharing a flat and a bed with a man I no longer have any feelings for, simply because it’s less of a problem than finding a way of telling him to pick up his bike and walk. “She gave him his marching orders and according to her he’s accepted it; she doesn’t seem to have been intimidated by him at all.”

  “Whereas you were, a little, on your own admission.”

  “More than a little. He overwhelmed me, I think.”

  “With words.”

  “That and the whole setup, the cozy little room, all those books I’d never read and never will, the sherry. It’s a long way from Norfolk.”

  “So are most places,” Resnick smiled.

  “Sally Oakes, though,” Lynn continued after a moment, “none of that seemed to bother her at all.”

  “She switched off.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Until he came out from behind all the talk, the language.”

  Inwardly, Lynn Kellogg shivered and, as if sensing it, Resnick reminded her of what she had said about Doria after their meeting, what she’d said about his eyes.

  “Yes, sir. Like he was looking at me from behind a mask.”

  “If that’s right, he doesn’t let it slip often. From your report, there doesn’t seem to be any gossip about him at the university at all.”

  “Nothing sexual, sir. No rumors about affairs with students, though from what I heard he must be about the only lecturer who isn’t having one.”

  “It’s all that reading,” said Resnick. “Gives them a taste for it.”

  “Really, sir? I don’t see how.” A boyfriend had given her a well-thumbed copy of The Story of O once; she’d hit him with it.

  “Just a theory. Talking of which, no sign of Patel, I suppose?”

  “I think he’s at the Never-Too-Late Club for the Widowed and Divorced, sir. They’re having a tea dance.”

  “If he comes in, tell him I’d appreciate a quick tutorial, will you?”

  By the end of Resnick’s shift there was still no Patel; perhaps he’d fallen for a matron with a holiday home in France and a winning way with a foxtrot.

  He slipped across the road to buy a paper and the headline informed him: DOUBLE MURDER-ARREST NEAR. Divine was going down the stairs three at a time and had to push out his hand against the wall to stop himself.

  “Another call for you a minute ago, sir. Pretty anxious to know where you could be contacted. I thought you’d already left, so I advised him to try the station tomorrow.”

  Resnick nodded. “Any time?”

  “I asked him, sir, but he said it didn’t matter. But I think it was the same person as earlier.”

  “Thanks,” said Resnick and carried on to his office.

  He dialed Social Services and Carole answered. Rachel had gone out to see a client and was intending to go straight home from there. Resnick thanked her and said he’d ring her there later, if that was all right.

  “You’re welcome to try,” Carole said, “but you might be lucky to catch her. I know she’s driving up to Sheffield to see a friend as soon as she’s changed.”

  “Maybe I’ll leave it till tomorrow then,” said Resnick. “If you’ll just say I called.”

  “Of course,” said Carole. And then, “You didn’t phone earlier, did you?”

  “No, why?”

  “No special reason. Only the switchboard took a couple of calls but they didn’t get a name.”

  “Not me.”

  “Ex-boyfriend, probably.”

  “Probably.”

  “Pest!”

  Resnick turned over to the back page to discover that County were playing at home.

  Even after Resnick had transferred his allegiance back over the Trent, he had stayed away for months on end. When he started going regularly again, the team began losing. His most regular period in front of the Londo
n Road stand coincided with a drop of two Divisions in as many seasons. Gloriously, he remembered a floodlit game when Villa stuck eight past them and their blond winger ran riot. This was under the lights, too, but that was where the comparison ended.

  On this present occasion, the visitors had brought a couple of dozen supporters with them, lost in the spaces of their enclosure and looking as if they’d have difficulty summoning up enough enthusiasm between them to club together for a cup of Bovril and a warmed-over sausage roll.

  Resnick stood on the edge of the usual knot of fortnightly acquaintances, for whom a fondness for County’s flaws and misdemeanors had made cynicism an art form. Straightforward abuse was reserved for referees under five-foot four, and former English internationals; the most abusive remarks of all were shouted in Polish.

  It was hard keeping warm during a first half that produced seventeen off-sides, three corners, and no shots on goal at either end. During the interval Resnick glanced at Patel’s notes, folded now inside his program. The second forty-five minutes were pure County: a through ball out of nowhere, a man on the overlap, and a first-time cross that was met at the gallop and clattered into the net; after that, they left one player upfield, pulled back the rest, and held out until the last five minutes when they conceded two goals, one to bad luck, the other to bad marking; with sixty seconds remaining, they were awarded a penalty and the final chance to equalize was ballooned over the bar.

  “Any other side, you could have been sure of three points.”

  Hands in pockets, Resnick nodded without turning his head, moving with the small crowd towards the exit.

  “But, then, that’s what makes them so exciting to watch.”

  Something in the voice made Resnick look to his side then, slowing down.

  “I didn’t take you for a County man, Inspector. More of a Forest supporter.”

  “A long time back.”

  “We learn the error of our ways.”

  They were standing opposite the entrance to the cattle market, people continuing to spill round them. A single constable on horseback was guiding the straggle of visitors across the road to their coach.