Lonely Hearts Read online

  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 left 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.

  None of that was what she had in mind.

  Whatever growing Resnick might be going in for, and she made it more than clear in those last weeks that he had a lot of potential in that area, he was going to do it in his own time and company. She was going to stretch her new-found wings alone.

  Within six months she was remarried, her new husband an estate agent who changed his car every year and spent weekends at a holiday cottage in Wales. Resnick used to scan the papers, eager for reports that it had been burnt down. For a while he even subscribed to the fighting fund of Plaid Cymru. Now it was as if he had never really known her, as if nothing but their bodies had ever really touched. He had realized that in all the five years they had lived under the same roof, he had never known what she had been thinking or feeling and the truly frightening thing was realizing that he had never really cared. She would have said that was why, finally, she had to leave him. He had never been able to find her, so she had better try to find herself.

  But what do you find, Resnick had used to wonder, down behind the rear seat of a new Volvo or at the bottom of an exclusive estate’s swimming pool after the water has been drained away?

  He used to think it very sad; then, as more years passed, he scarcely thought about it—about her—at all.

  Maybe his denial to Jack Skelton had not been as much of a lie as he had thought.

  He cleaned those parts of his fingers the cat had ignored, leaned forward and set the plate on the floor and then removed the headphones. As he did so, he realized that the telephone was ringing. He made a lunge towards it and lifted the receiver and, of course, the line went dead the moment it got close to his ear.

  The receiver still in his hand, he dialed the station: no, no one had been trying to contact him. Lynn Kellogg was alone in the office, catching up on some paperwork. Her voice sounded more Norfolk the more tired she became and now Resnick had difficulty making out what she said.

  “How’s Patel?” Resnick asked.

  “White as a mucky sheet. The sergeant told him to go home.”

  “Home to Bradford, or home to his digs?”

  “Digs, I suppose.”

  “You do the same.”

  “I’ve moved on from digs long since.”

  She had moved to a housing association flat in the old Lace Market area of the city, where she lived with a professional cyclist who spent most of his spare time pedaling over the Alps in bottom gear and much of the remainder shaving his legs to eliminate wind resistance.

  At least it allowed her space.

  “Go home yourself,” Resnick said. “Get some sleep. And remember your box of plasters as well as your sensible shoes tomorrow. You’ll be doing house-to-house.”

  Resnick went into the kitchen area and shifted Pepper far enough from the stove to set the kettle on the gas. He was spooning a mixture of dark continental and mocha into the filter when he realized he had been thinking about Rachel Chaplin for some minutes. Partly it was because of the little lecture she had delivered on caffeine before bedtime, but mainly it was the way he remembered her eyes. The way they held his gaze and refused to fade away. In some way or another she meant trouble for him, this Rachel Chaplin, and Resnick was unable to resist the feeling that a little trouble was his due.

  He poured the boiling water over the ground coffee, reached for a clean glass and a bottle of Scotch and poured some of that, too. If he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, at least he could enjoy staying awake.

  “Don’t say it!” warned Resnick. “Don’t say a thing.”

  He leaned his back against the corner of the stairwell, breathing heavily, unsteadily. DC Kellogg turned her head and gazed out over the park with its pitch-and-putt course, the domed church on the hill opposite, beyond that houses and the first glimpses of open country.

  “Bloody lifts never work! It’s all right for youngsters like you. Take the stairs thre
e at a time and keep smiling.”

  Lynn Kellogg smiled. “First time I’ve ever heard you plead getting old, sir.”

  Resnick levered himself away from the wall. “I’m not.”

  Still smiling, she followed him along the landing, negotiating their way past two prams, one holding a sleeping child, the other a half-hundredweight of coal and the inside of a television.

  Olive Peters showed them into a small living-room, dralon and plastic, a damp stain spreading out in dark, wavering rings from one corner of the ceiling. Her cheeks had sunk deep into her face and her mouth had all but disappeared, as if the dentures she normally wore had been mislaid, forgotten. Lacking yesterday’s makeup, gray creases strayed across her skin. The platinum blond hair had been pinned up haphazardly; her body shrunk inside a buttoned cardigan and skirt.

  “I could make some tea…”

  “Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “It seems wrong,” she fidgeted. “When you’ve come out, like…”

  “Mrs. Peters,” said Lynn Kellogg, getting up. “Why don’t I pop into the kitchen and make us a pot? Would you mind?”

  She leaned back into her chair, relieved. “That’s it, duck, you mash.” And then, “There’s a packet of biscuits somewhere, you’ll see.”

  “Lovely girl,” she said, turning to Resnick, and the tears began to flow again, easing themselves down her face.

  Resnick leaned across and gave her his handkerchief, looked at the photograph of mother and daughter on the mantelpiece, crooked in a perspex frame, waited for the tea and biscuits.

  Shirley Peters’s mother didn’t wait that long. “What makes me sick, when you catch the bastard he won’t swing for it!”

  Something about the way she spoke jogged Resnick awake, made him realize that when she said “he”, she didn’t mean some anonymous, still-to-be-identified killer. She meant somebody specific.

  “Tony,” she said, looking Resnick in the face, reading his thoughts in return. “He always said he’d do this to her. Tony. The bastard!”

  In the kitchen the kettle whistled and then was still; Resnick quietly took out his notebook and fingered the cap from his pen.

  DS Millington swung into the car park, driving too fast, as Resnick and Kellogg were closing the doors of the black saloon. Before there was time to climb the steps into the station, Millington was hurrying between them.

  “Six witnesses. Six. All willing to testify to Peters’s common-law husband threatening her with violence.”

  Resnick pushed through the glass door, nodded to the uniformed officer on duty and moved on towards the stairs.

  “One couple, black, but never mind, can’t have everything, they remember it clearly, date, time, everything, wedding anniversary, that’s why. Got back from some do and there was all this going on in the middle of the street. You as much as sniff another man and I’ll bloody strangle you!, that’s what he came out with. They’ll swear to it.”

  They were standing inside Resnick’s office now, Resnick’s face expressionless as he nodded, listening to the sergeant’s excited voice. Off to the side, Lynn Kellogg watching, a smile ready at the corners of her rounded mouth.

  Millington clapped his hands emphatically. “Open and sodding shut!”

  “Tony Macliesh.” Resnick’s tone was level, matter-of-fact.

  Millington’s eyes grew wide, then narrowed to a slit. Resnick continued to look at a point some six inches above his sergeant’s head.

  “If you knew…”

  “I’ve sent Naylor and Divine to bring him in.”

  Lynn Kellogg excused herself, hand to her mouth, bottling up the laughter as best she could until she reached the privacy of the ladies.

  “Open and shut, Charlie. Is that what you think?”

  Resnick was sitting in Skelton’s office, trying not to get annoyed at the way both in-tray and out-tray were arranged a precise quarter-inch from the edges of the desk, the blotter with its fountain pens, each containing different colored inks, pointing towards it at an angle of forty-five degrees. Equidistant from tile silver-framed calendar, photographs of Skelton’s wife and daughter, also silver-framed and smiling.

  “Looks that way.”

  Skelton nodded. “Run me through it.”

  Resnick uncrossed his legs, crossed them again the other way. “Shirley Peters, thirty-nine. Last four years she’d worked for a computer software company near the old market square. Typist, switchboard, nothing specialized. Up till about eighteen months ago she’d been living with this Tony Macliesh. Her mother says they were together the best part of three years—though to hear her tell it, the best part was when she finally chucked him. He went off to Aberdeen to work on the rigs, she got on with her life and inside six months he was back and making a nuisance of himself. Arguments, threats; he’d be banging on the door in the middle of the night. She changed the locks, spent some nights with her mum, only of course that made it worse because he thought she’d been with a bloke.”

  “Any complaints through us?” Skelton interrupted.

  “Kellogg’s checking the files. There must have been something; a little over a year back she got a restraining order against him.”

  “Effective?”

  “Didn’t need to be. Macliesh got lifted for aggravated burglary and earned himself nine months in Lincoln. He’s not long out. One of the neighbors told Millington she saw him pacing up and down the street no more than two days back.”

  Skelton leaned backwards, flexing his fingers and then cupping his hands behind his head. “File it away under domestic violence.”

  “I think so.”

  “No need to panic.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll get your other evidence?”

  “Scene-of-crime turned up some hairs on the woman’s sweater that weren’t hers, scraping of skin under the forefinger of the right hand, male pubic hair around the pelvic…”

  “I understood her to be fully clothed?”

  Resnick looked at him. “Some people prefer it that way.”

  The look he got in return was of no great interest, only mild surprise. Resnick had worked with Skelton for almost two years and if his superior’s self-control had slipped during that time, Resnick had not been aware of it.

  “How does this fit in with your theory about Macliesh?” Skelton asked.

  “If what was driving him was sexual jealousy, anything’s possible. And all traces of semen were outside the body, her abdomen, her…” Resnick left it there; if Skelton wanted to use his imagination, he could give it a try.

  “All right, then, Charlie. You’re bringing him in?”

  “I sent two men down to his digs. He’d got himself a room in Radford. They phoned in an hour ago to say he wasn’t there, but most of his stuff’s still in the room. They’re nosing around, other lodgers, the local. They’ll turn something up.”

  Skelton stood up, glancing at his watch. Resnick wondered if, the second the door to the office was closed, Skelton would be logging the exact time the interview had finished in his Filofax.

  Kevin Naylor spread the color charts across his desk and couldn’t remember whether Debbie had said peach or apricot. What was the difference anyway and how much did it matter? Something to do with the way it had to match the terracotta she’d already chosen for the tiles. Jesus! He’d always thought that getting married was a matter of finding a girl with the best qualities of your mother, but who wasn’t going to turn into her own at half-time. Then it came down to choosing your moment, plucking up courage, will you…? A bucketful of tears and a gold ring later and you put the deposit down on one of those new houses across from the canal.

  All of which showed how naive a young DC could be once clear of his own territory.

  Drawing the down payment out of the Nationwide had been simply the beginning. Now every weekend, every off-duty moment, was filled with papers and paints, carpet samples, swatches of curtain material—he could have described the layout of every large furnitu
re store and warehouse, every DIY emporium within a fifteen-mile radius of the city.

  He refolded the charts as Mark Divine came into the office with two mugs of tea. Why couldn’t he be like Divine? The world divided into three equal parts: you drank it, fly-tackled, it or got your leg over it.

  “Boss back?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Think we’ll get to go up to Scottyland?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Good beer. Heavy, they call it. Pint of heavy. First time I heard that I thought…”

  Both men stood up as Resnick came in, biting into a cream-cheese and gammon sandwich and balancing one styrofoam cup of black coffee on top of another. He nodded in the direction of his office and a chunk of gammon squeezed out and bounced from Resnick’s cuff to his trouser leg and then to the floor.

  “Where is he?” Resnick asked, using a brown envelope to swab up the spilt coffee.

  “Aberdeen, sir,” Naylor and Divine answered, more or less in unison.

  Resnick closed his eyes for a moment. “Am I supposed to say good work?”

  “Bloke across the hall,” Divine stepped in swiftly, “bumped into him the other night after the pubs turned out. Macliesh said something about going back up to work on the oil rigs.”

  “There was a train from Midland Station this morning,” said Divine. “Quarter-past eight. Booking clerk recognized him from the photograph.”

  Resnick remembered the picture the dead woman’s mother had lifted out from beneath worn cardigans folded into a drawer. Shirley Peters wearing a white suit and holding a bouquet of pink flowers in front of her. Had she caught them, Resnick wondered, when the bride had tossed them through the air? “Three times she were bridesmaid,” Mrs. Peters had said. And then: “At least she never married the lousy sod!” Tony Macliesh stood beside her in a borrowed suit, his eyes unable to focus. If the clerk had known him from that, he was doing well.