Lonely Hearts cr-1 Page 4

  Now he pushed between a pair of frosted glass doors and found himself among a crowd of fashionable young people shouting at each other over pre-recorded music. Ah! thought Resnick knowledgeably, the Happy Hour crowd. One thing about browsing the color supplements-it kept you up-to-date with life the way some folk lived it.

  It was three-deep to the curve of the downstairs bar, so Resnick found the stairs at the back and climbed up into a “living” video. Set amongst hi-tech furniture, green plants, and cream-colored blinds was a vision of money wearing money.

  He had turned and was starting on his way back down when he saw Rachel at the foot of the stairs.

  “Don’t believe in waiting long, do you?” She was wearing a white shirt, large and loose, belted over deep blue cords, a black blouson jacket with wide epaulettes. Only the boots appeared to be the same as before.

  “I thought I might have missed you downstairs.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “D’you want to come down?”

  “Not really.”

  A smile came to the edges of her mouth. “You want to stay up there?”

  “Not really.”

  Rachel marched up the steps smartly, turned him round, and moved him towards the bar. “Come on, since we’re here, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  They found a small table at the front, looking down at the traffic driving up the hill from the city through the rain that had started to fall again.

  “Last time I came here,” Resnick said, “it was an Irish pub with cheese and onion cobs and good Guinness. The backroom downstairs was carved straight out of the rock and they had a juke box in there with the best selection of rock ‘n’ roll in the city. Played it so loud on a Saturday night, pieces used to flake off the walls and fall into your pint.”

  Rachel listened, sipping her white wine and soda. “When you phoned, I couldn’t think who you were.”

  “I know. I make that impression on people.”

  “At work sometimes, it’s impossible to think about anything else. I mean, outside.” She lifted her glass but set it down again. “It must be the same for you.”

  “With me it’s the opposite.”

  She thought about that a little and smiled. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Ah,” said Resnick, leaning back in his chair.

  Why were they talking like this?

  “Anyway,” said Rachel, “I’m sorry you don’t approve of the pub. At least it’s pretty quiet up here. You can usually get a seat if it’s early enough.” She stopped talking abruptly, struck by the thought that she was saying too much, filling the silence. She looked at him, waiting until he looked back at her. “I come here with Chris sometimes.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “He.”

  Resnick was still looking at her; he took a couple of swallows from his glass.

  “Who’s he?”

  “The man I live with.”

  He drained his glass as he stood up. “I’ll get you another.”

  “No, I’m okay,” Rachel said.

  He brought her one anyway. Typical bloody male, Rachel thought, making sure he saw her pushing the glass away and continuing to sip at the first.

  “It’s not against the law,” she said. “Living with somebody.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t approve.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “Your face didn’t.”

  “I wasn’t being moral.”

  “I’m relieved.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. He might not be too bad-looking, Rachel was thinking, if only he’d lose a little weight.

  “Maybe I was surprised. I didn’t think of you as living with someone, that’s all. It wasn’t the picture I had of you.”

  “Not the way I present myself?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t mean you have to wear purdah, you know. Being in a relationship.”

  “No,” said Resnick. “I don’t suppose it does.” More the hair shirt, he thought, sackcloth and ashes. He didn’t say so; he didn’t imagine she’d go for the poor chest-beating male routine.

  “What picture did you have of me?” Rachel asked.

  There were people standing between the tables now, uncertain whether it was more important to be overheard or overseen.

  Resnick was holding his glass against his chest; for a few moments she was afraid he was going to try and balance it there. “I don’t know.”

  “But it didn’t include myself and a man…and Chris?”

  “No.”

  “I give off that sort of aura, do I? I must watch out. Some woman on her own, just about getting along. Home at nights to hot chocolate, a moth-eaten teddy bear, and reruns of Rhoda.” She had started on the second glass of wine without really noticing. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what interests you. You thought I was some woman like the one I read about in today’s paper. The case you’re investigating. Single woman in her thirties found murdered in her own living room. What was her name?”

  “Shirley Peters,” Resnick said, leaning forward.

  “Right. Well, that’s it, isn’t it? That explains the sudden invitation to a drink. Instant analysis, part five. I thought when I put the phone down in the office, hello, Rachel, you’ve made an impression this time. But, no. What you see in me is a bit of living insight. Sex and the single girl. Well, sorry, Inspector, but I’m not volunteering. I live with a social worker so I take the job home too often as it is. I’ve had stereotypes and syndromes and role-play re-enactments with my Shreddies for so long I just cover them with sugar and they all go down the same way.”

  She was close to shouting; a few people were looking round but no one seemed to notice overmuch. Resnick didn’t respond; he sat there looking across at her as she sank back the rest of her wine, swung her bag up from the back of her chair and on to her arm, and pushed her way through the crowd.

  One hell of a way to end the day! thought Resnick. One hell of a way to start the evening! And he hadn’t even wanted to talk to her about Shirley Peters: he had hoped she might be able to get him some information about Tony Macliesh. Through the blur of the window he watched her cross the road to her car and wondered what was putting her under so much pressure.

  Patel saw the red Porsche at two hundred-plus yards, despite the rain driving in on his face. Seen anywhere else, he might not have given it a second look, but there, in that street, parked in front of that house.

  Leave this one alone, Resnick had told him that morning, get back to the break-ins. You know the routine: question and answer. The same numbing procedure that had gone on too long. Houses where all the occupants were at work, no use in calling until way after six. Now there was a pain stretching across between his shoulder blades-all those kitchen tables he had leaned over, filling in the forms. Question and answer. Officially, he’d come off duty at three that afternoon.

  “Is it Mrs. Peters you’re looking for?” Patel asked. The woman who turned from the door, sheltering beneath a transparent umbrella, surveyed him with her head held to one side.

  “Shirl, yeh. Why, sunshine?”

  Patel took out his warrant card, shielding it from the rain as best he could. The woman looked at him with surprise, her glossed mouth forming a soundless, “Oh!”

  “You are a friend, perhaps?”

  “No perhaps about it.” She nodded towards the Porsche. “Just drove up to see her.”

  “I wonder if…”

  She beckoned him with a glitter-red fingernail. “Come closer then. No point in getting wet for nothing.”

  She was wearing, thought Patel, too much perfume, too much makeup; below her short white fur coat, her legs shone in shiny black plastic trousers. For a young man of simple tastes, she was altogether too much.

  “What’s happened then?” And seeing the pain flinching at the back of Patel’s soft brown eyes, she touched his arm lightly with her free hand. “You can tell me, you know. I ain’t about to throw a wobbler or anything.”

  Patel
sucked in air. “There was a…your friend is dead. She was…”

  “Don’t be bloody stupid!”

  “I’m afraid she was murdered.”

  The umbrella slipped from the woman’s hand and, automatically, Patel caught it and held it close above her head. He looked into her face for tears and all he saw was anger.

  “The stupid, stupid bitch! The stupid sodding cow! How many times? How many times did I tell her this would bloody happen?”

  She stared at Patel hard, their faces close together, rain springing back from the plastic of the umbrella, the concrete below their feet. He watched her mouth open and for one delirious moment thought she was about to sink her teeth into the soft flesh of his lip.

  “All right,” she said. “I’d better follow you up the station.”

  She pulled her umbrella away from Patel and he turned full-face into the rain.

  Six

  Chris Phillips was stretched out on the settee in front of the fire, one leg hooked over its low back. A beige Labrador was spread across the rug between settee and fire, growling lightly into the towel that Phillips had used to dry the dog down after their evening walk. A card-index box balanced on Phillips’s stomach and a brace of pink files was clamped between his knees; pieces of stationery, all bearing the name of the local authority, were scattered within arm’s reach. If he hadn’t been writing on one of the cards when Rachel came into the room he might have looked up and seen the expression on her face, in which case he might not have spoken at all. He certainly would not have called out, “Surprise, surprise!” in his usual tone of affectionate irony.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Rachel.

  Phillips looked up at the sharpness in her voice.

  The Labrador took its piece of towel and dropped it across Rachel’s feet.

  “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon, that’s all,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I…”

  “I can sit in the kitchen if you’re working.”

  Phillips released a breath, close to a sigh. “I thought you were meeting someone.” He lifted the box and folders away and turned round. “I thought you were going for a drink.”

  “I was,” Rachel’s voice came back from the kitchen.

  “And?”

  “And I had a drink and now I’m back here.”

  He leaned forward and retrieved the card he’d been writing on, quickly finished making his annotation, slotted the card back into place. He knew how he should react to Rachel when she was like this, knew that what he had to do was leave her alone, let her sort her own way out of it.

  “I was just about to have a Scotch,” he said, leaning against the kitchen doorway.

  She swung her head towards him as if to say, good for you.

  “Want to join me?”

  “No.”

  “Might make you feel better.”

  “No.”

  Somehow he’d managed to close out the sound of the rain so completely that when he went out into the garden the fierceness of it took him by surprise. The dog had run out after him and now hunched back near some roses that were waiting to be cut back, looking at him hopefully through the gloom. You want to play ball, don’t you? You want to go for another walk?

  Through the blurred square of the window he could make out the dark twist of Rachel’s hair as she moved back and forth between the cooker and the sink.

  The Labrador’s coat was soaked already, his nose slick and his eyes bright.

  All right, he knew she was having a tough time at work, this placement breaking down on top of everything else, a kid she’d really struggled for. But why did she have to hold so much into herself, why try so hard to keep him out, as if admitting any kind of weakness was showing a crack through which he could slide his hand and hang on? And besides, his day hadn’t exactly been a cake-walk. A couple of kids with so much solvent up their noses that breathing was more or less impossible; a woman who’d barricaded herself into her flat on the thirteenth floor and threatened to chop off her fingers if she weren’t left alone; an old man all but dead from hypothermia, who’d fallen over and lain for two days with the carpet wrapped around him until Meals on Wheels raised the alarm. She wasn’t the only one with things to feel bad about.

  When he walked back into the house, water running down his face, Rachel had left the kitchen and the kettle was coming up to the boil, beginning its shrill whistle.

  In the bathroom Rachel stood quite still, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Where her cheekbones touched her skin, she was still flushed from the rain and the cold. After some moments she began to pull the comb down through her hair and then stopped. Why was she behaving like this? Because she’d allowed herself to get annoyed by a man she scarcely knew? A stupid policeman. It was ridiculous.

  “I’m sorry,” she started to say.

  “It’s okay. Nothing.” Phillips closed the living-room door with one foot, a mug in each hand.

  Rachel tried for a smile. “What is it? Coffee?”

  “Tea.”

  The smile became real. “Just because your wife told you it was what women needed when they were premenstrual.”

  “Oh, so that’s what it is.”

  “Part of it.”

  “I should have known.”

  “I told you those little red dots should be in your diary.”

  He waited until she had sat on the settee, handed her the tea and sat beside her, careful not to crowd her too close. “How did it go, the meeting?”

  “It went.”

  “No way of holding it together?”

  Rachel sat with the mug cradled between both hands. “No,” she said. “No way.”

  Resnick had driven home from the Peach Tree and fed the cats. The post comprised a letter from his bank urging him to apply for the one credit card he already had, several pieces of disposable junk mail, and a reminder that his dues to the local Polish Association had not been paid. He was tearing everything but the last in half when he noticed a leaflet offering three free trial sessions at a new health club.

  You never could tell.

  Resnick folded the leaflet neatly and slid it between the Tabasco and the Worcester sauce. Bud was sulking because Dizzy had stolen her food again, so Resnick picked the cat up and set her down near the draining board, tipping a handful of chicken Brekkies quietly out of the palm of his hand in front of her.

  A few minutes later he was back in his car and heading for the station.

  Graham Millington had a small hand mirror propped up on his desk and was using a pair of nail scissors to trim his mustache.

  “Graham. The house-to-house?”

  Millington nearly cut a generous slice out of his lip when he jumped. “Reports are on your desk,” he said, scrambling to his feet, his voice a shade muffled.

  Resnick leafed through the forms, summaries of the calls Kellogg and Patel had made that day. “Give me the gist of it,” he said, not looking up.

  “Lot more stuff about threats from Macliesh, hammering on the door at all hours, calling her all the names under the sun, at least two claim he’d wait down the end of the street for her of an evening…”

  “Recent?”

  “Most of them before he went down, but not all.”

  “This one here,” Resnick said, lifting one sheet away from the rest. “Man at 42-that’s across the street, isn’t it? — says he saw Shirley Peters leaving the house the evening she was killed. Eight o’clock.”

  “Says he knew the time because of the television.”

  “Saw a taxi pulled up and she went off in that.”

  “Thinks there was only the driver in the cab but he couldn’t swear to it.”

  Resnick glanced down at the report. “Didn’t know which taxi firm either.”

  “No particular reason for him to notice, sounds as if she was always off out, this one.”

  Resnick looked up sharply at the censorious tone in his sergeant’
s voice. “Not about to voice the opinion that she was asking for it, Graham?” he said softly.

  “No, sir.”

  “And we’re following up the taxi?”

  “DC Kellogg, she’s been phoning round. Nothing definite yet, but they’re usually pretty good, things like this.”

  Resnick pushed the reports back together, glanced at his watch. “Off duty, aren’t you?”

  Millington shrugged. “Wife’s night for her Russian class. She’s dropped the boys off at her mother’s. I’ll probably just have a quick pint and then get back.”

  Resnick nodded and the sergeant turned to leave. “Graham?”

  “Yes?”

  “Peach Tree, that’s your pub, isn’t it?”

  Millington nodded.

  “Shouldn’t go in there looking like that. You’ve got blood down the front of your shirt.”

  Resnick checked through the reports again, making notes here and there. A call had been logged from Aberdeen informing him that Tony Macliesh had been taken into custody off the train. The DS on the second shift had been called out to clear up a couple of assaults at a private family party. The owner of a second-hand shop on the Alfreton Road had called in to say that a couple of youths had been round offering him three VCRs; they were coming back tomorrow and an officer would be there to greet them. If the owner hadn’t already been sentenced twice for receiving stolen goods, it would have been altruistic.

  When Resnick realized he had been thinking about Rachel Chaplin for some minutes, he called down to the desk and asked the sergeant to send one of the uniforms past Reno’s to pick him up a pizza-pepperoni, anchovies, extra olives.

  He’d hardly put the phone down when Patel came in with the woman.

  Grace Kelley sniffed the room for the smell of Brut and was disappointed. She’d been inside police stations before but never into CID and somehow it wasn’t living up to her expectations. She’d anticipated a mixture of shower gel and Benson king-size, men with jock straps snug beneath the polyester weave of their off-the-peg blue suits, but all she got were some uncovered typewriters, a couple of dying pot plants, and, on the desk nearest to her, a photograph of a wife and two kids with a mirror resting against it. She might as well, she thought, have been back in the typing pool.