Lonely Hearts cr-1 Page 2

  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.

  Whatever in the room had been touched, had been replaced with care. Shirley Peters’s face looked like the painting of a face. When the Home Office pathologist performed the postmortem, what he did would be careful, too, and terrible.

  “Sir…”

  The constable was at the entrance to the room, more awkward now than embarrassed, fidgeting from one foot to another as if his trousers were suddenly too tight.

  “There’s somebody outside, sir…to see…” He nodded towards the corpse. “It’s…I think it’s her mother.”

  Resnick started to move. “For God’s sake, keep her out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As the constable turned, the woman slipped beneath his arm and Resnick had to set his body in front of hers to keep her from the room. She had hair that was a shade of platinum blond you didn’t see much any more, and, if it hadn’t been for the way it had been piled up on top and the size of her heels, she would have been less than five feet tall.

  “What’s happened? Shirley. Oh, my God, Shirley!”

  “I think we should go back outside, Mrs. Peters. And you,” he called over her head, “stop dithering and find DC Kellogg. Next door. Now.”

  The woman tried to wriggle past him and Resnick grasped her shoulders.

  “Let me go!”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “You’ve got no right…”

  He was slowly forcing her back along the hallway, trying not to force his fingers too hard against her upper arms, hurt her, bruise her.

  “My Shirley!” She screamed up into Resnick’s face and he loosened his grip until his hands were not quite touching her arms. They were inside the front doorway and Lynn Kellogg was waiting by the metal gate at the pavement.

  “I think we should go and sit next door,” Resnick said, talking to the DC as much as Mrs. Peters. “Maybe a cup of tea?”

  All color had le
ft the woman’s face; her eyes were blinking involuntarily and, at her sides, her hands were beginning to shake.

  “Come on,” said Resnick, touching her gently.

  “No, no…”

  “I think you might be going to faint.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m all right. I…I think I’m going to faint.”

  Resnick stooped and swept an arm behind her legs and caught her before she struck the ground.

  Four

  The sandwich was tuna fish and egg mayonnaise with some small slices of pickled gherkin and a crumbling of blue cheese; the mayonnaise kept dripping over the edges of the bread and down on to his fingers so that Dizzy twisted and stretched from his lap in order to lick it off. Billie Holiday and Lester Young were doing it through the headphones, making love to music without ever holding hands. Resnick couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that he had lied to Skelton, wondering why.

  His marriage had neither been so bad that he had stricken it from the record of his memory, nor so lacking in incident that he would have truly forgotten. Something over five years and she had walked in while he was painting the woodwork in the spare room and announced that she wanted a divorce. Each year of their marriage he had redecorated that small room at the back of their own bedroom in the hope that one day she might walk into it with a glow in her eyes and announce that she was pregnant. Why else did he use alphabet wallpaper in primary colours? Why else the paintwork in bright reds and greens?

  All she had been able to say was that she needed space to grow, room to find herself and she didn’t mean the one he was so obsessively turning into a succession of nurseries. Her horizons, she felt, were being limited, foreshortened.

  Fine, Resnick had said, let’s sell up, move. There’s nothing special to keep us here. I’ll forget about making babies for a few years and you concentrate on your career. Better still, throw in your job. Retrain. Get a place at university. Go abroad. Only last month someone from CID got a transfer to Billings, Montana; doubled his salary for the price of a ticket across the Atlantic, one way. Now he’s got a house on the edge of town that looks over miles of prairie and all he had to do was learn how to ride a horse.