Lonely Hearts

by John Harvey

  “The one thing he did say,” Millington began.

  “Yes?”

  “When Divine and Naylor were taking him through to the cells.”

  “Yes.”

  “He said, ‘I know that cow set me up for this and I’ll fucking kill her!’”

  “Who did he mean?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Who d’you think he meant?”

  “The girl’s mother?”

  “Probably,” Resnick said, but he was thinking about Grace Kelley.

  Across the room a phone rang and Millington picked up the receiver, “CID.” Then, “Right, sir. Yes, sir. The superintendent,” he said to Resnick. “Will you pop up and see him before he goes?”

  Resnick was already on his way.

  The newspaper was spread across the superintendent’s desk, open at the report of the trial. Most of page two and a run-on to page three: child abuse was still big news. Resnick looked down at an out-of-date press photograph of himself, blurred and upside down.

  “Not a very good likeness.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And the report—any more accurate, would you say?” Resnick lifted the paper from the desk and skimmed it through. Skelton studied the station roster on the side wall. You could have fitted Resnick’s office into the superintendent’s several times and still had room to do fifty push-ups during the lunch break. Rumor had it that an overzealous inspector had come bursting in one day and found Skelton standing on his head beside the filing cabinets. But that was only rumor.

  “Yes, sir,” Resnick said, replacing the newspaper. “I suppose it’s fair.”

  Skelton made a sound pitched somewhere between a cough and a grunt. “It doesn’t usually serve our purposes to become combative in court.”

  “He was trying to steamroller me. Make an impression in front of the jury.”

  “Which you didn’t want him to do. Unopposed.”

  “He’d been practicing this one in front of the mirror. Look sharp, score points, and bugger the truth.”

  “You’ve got the monopoly, have you, Charlie?”

  Resnick didn’t answer.

  “Emotionally involved, Charlie?”

  “Yes, sir,” Resnick said. “Of course I am.”

  Skelton’s eyes grazed the picture of his wife and daughter, safe in their silver frame. “How about the jury? Any idea which way they’ll go?”

  Resnick thought about their faces, solemn, apprehensive: the bald man in the sports jacket who made notes with a ballpoint pen on the back of an envelope; the woman who gripped her handbag tighter during portions of the evidence and whose lips moved rapidly, silently, as if in prayer.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Skelton slid back in his chair and stood up, a single fluid action. He had been in the building for close to nine hours and his clothes looked as if they’d come from the dry cleaners within the past twenty minutes. Sensible shoes, sensible diet: Resnick didn’t suppose Skelton ever left the house without first buffing up his brogues and enjoying a smooth bowel movement.

  “You’ve seen Macliesh?”

  “Not yet, sir. I was just talking to Millington.”

  “Frustrating afternoon.”

  Resnick nodded.

  “I can’t delay on intimation much longer. There was the threat against a witness, the custody sergeant heard that as well, loud and clear. But I can hardly claim that we’re securing evidence by questioning—not expeditiously, at any rate. Come morning, we’re going to let him make his call and he’s got to have a solicitor. If he refuses to request one, we’ll take whoever’s duty solicitor on call.” He nodded briskly and Resnick stood up.

  “All right, Charlie. You’ll be looking after things here in the morning?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Try talking to Macliesh yourself.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, and Charlie?”

  “Sir?”

  “Do you ever do anything—in the way of exercise?” Resnick looked at the superintendent a shade blankly. Weekend before last he’d lugged that Hoover all over the house, up and down stairs, rooms whose only function was to gather dust and the dried remains of dead birds. Was that the sort of thing Skelton meant?

  “No, sir,” he said. “Not really.”

  “Maybe you should.” He looked appraisingly at Resnick’s figure. “You’re starting to look a little plump.”

  The pub was round a couple of corners from Central Police Station and Resnick had sometimes used it when he was stationed there. The road that led away from it, up the hill towards the cemetery, was a mixture of pork butchers and Chinese restaurants, secondhand shops with rusting refrigerators and Baby Bellings in the window and a dozen paperbacks outside in an apple box, ten pence each. Its clientele was a mixture of locals who lived in the narrow terraced streets that spawned off to either side and students stretching out their polytechnic grants or in for a quick half before or after their adult education classes opposite.

  Rachel Chaplin was already there, sitting at the rear of the right-hand room, squeezed up into a corner of the upholstered bench that ran along the wall. She had a book open on her lap, a glass of white wine close by her hand. The buttons at the front of her blue suit jacket were undone. All she has to do is sit there, Resnick thought, all she has to do to make me feel like this.

  Rachel was aware that he’d arrived before she glanced up, felt his eyes upon her, just as she had before. The way she’d known in court that turning towards her was what he had wanted to do. She finished the sentence she was reading, lifted the wine and soda towards her mouth.

  A group of kids from the poly pushed past Resnick as he walked towards where she was sitting. One of the girls—short skirt, gray, up around her hips over ribbed tights—collided with him and moved, giggling, away. He was nothing to her: an older man filling space. Sexless.

  Was that how she saw him? Rachel thought. Even in his best courtroom suit, his trousers were bagged at the knee, the knot of his tie had become twisted round so that the short, thinner end hung down in front.

  “Sorry I’m late.” Resnick found space beside her. “Work.”

  His leg touched hers lightly and pulling it away he banged against the table, not hard. “It’ll thin out in a bit. A lot of these’ll be off to the WEA.”

  “I know,” Rachel said. “I used to go to yoga.”

  Seeing his expression, she continued, “It’s okay. I didn’t live up to the stereotype very well. Packed it in after the first three weeks.”

  “How come?”

  “Whenever she told us to lie down on the floor and relax, I went right off.”

  “Asleep?”

  “Sound.”

  “I thought I was the one whose nights were in need of repair?”

  “When I gave up the class, I got myself a new mattress.”

  And a new man to share it with, Resnick guessed. “Yoga’s not so bad,” he said. “I was afraid you were going to own up to transactional analysis.”

  Resnick’s wife had gone to TA. Positive strokes, negative strokes, he had felt like a cat on an electric fence. He stretched an arm behind Rachel’s shoulders and pressed the button set into the woodwork.

  “I didn’t know anywhere had those any more,” Rachel said as he withdrew his arm. “Bells and waiters.”

  “Used to be all there was,” Resnick told her. “Every lounge bar in the city.”

  She looked away and immediately Resnick wished he hadn’t said it, didn’t like the way it made him sound, hankering after a past where a shilling was a shilling and all the telephone boxes were red and none of them were working. Nostalgia was arthritis of the brain.

  He ordered a Guinness, draught, in a straight glass. The woman waiting-on was wafer-thin and her back curved like old paper left in the sun. She knew Resnick by sight and nothing more: each time she served him as though it were the first.

  “Any sandwiches left?” he asked.

  “Cobs, duck.
Cheese, cheese and onion, onion.”

  “Cheese and onion.” He angled his head towards Rachel and she raised her hand, no.

  They talked about Mrs. Taylor and how she was faring, how quiet the little girl had become, furled in upon herself. She asked him how the murder inquiry was progressing and he said they’d brought in a man for questioning.

  “Husband?” Rachel asked.

  “Good as.”

  She drank some more of her wine. “One of the things I’m involved in, a women’s refuge here in the city.” She looked at Resnick carefully: “Are you married?”

  The waitress leant over them, setting down Resnick’s drink and roll.

  “Can I have another white wine and soda?” Rachel asked.

  “And Worcester sauce,” added Resnick.

  “I’m not putting that in no wine,” the woman said.

  “For the cob,” Resnick explained.

  “There’s them relishes. Mustard.”

  He shook his head. “Worcester sauce.”

  When she brought the bottle to the table, the waitress did so with her eyes squinting off to one side as if not wanting to see what use he was going to put it to.

  “So?” Rachel pressed.

  “Gives it a bit of bite,” Resnick said.

  “Why are you avoiding the question?”

  Resnick blinked. “I was married for five years. It was a long time ago.”

  “Any children?”

  “No. You?”

  “Children or married?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “Yes, I was married. That seems like a long while ago as well, although I suppose it wasn’t. We didn’t have any kids, I haven’t had any since.”

  He wanted to ask her about that, about having—not having—children. Instead he said, “Why did you get unmarried?”

  Rachel turned the wine glass round between her fingers. “It was like trying to breathe under water.”

  He watched her come back from the Ladies. She still wore her hair pinned up, silver pendant earrings like slim cylinders accentuating the line of her neck. It made her jawline seem stronger, her mouth fuller.

  Watch my lips move, she had said.

  “I shall have to go soon,” she said, sitting back down. Resnick nodded, asked her the same question that Skelton had asked him, about the jury. She didn’t know either, not for certain.

  “A year ago,” she said, “I think I would have been. Six months even.”

  “You think attitudes have changed that much?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She knew the figures: an increase in cases of reported sexual child abuse that ran close to a hundred and forty percent. Local Authorities with over three thousand children on their abuse registers. In the wake of the Jasmine Beckford case, extra staff had been appointed with special responsibilities in that area, special knowledge. The same after Cleveland.

  “The trouble is,” she said, “it became fashionable.”

  “Didn’t that encourage a lot of kids to speak out?”

  “Of course it did. But the trouble with fashions is that they change. Pop stars, styles. The big thing used to be that we were never acting quickly enough. Read a newspaper and you’d think the whole country wanted us to go charging in at the least sign of danger and whisk kids away from home.”

  “And now it’s gone the other way,” Resnick said. They thought about the police in much the same way, the public.

  “D’you know,” Rachel said, leaning a little towards him, “that, when one of those children up in Cleveland was taken off a Place of Safety Order, there was a headline in one of the papers, inches deep—THE FIRST CHILD IS SET FREE.”

  “So you think the jury’s going to find for the father if they can?”

  Rachel just looked at him.

  Resnick shifted back on the seat, drank some more of his Guinness, assumed she wanted the subject dropped. Busman’s holiday.

  “It’s the guilt they won’t accept,” Rachel said suddenly, her voice rising up a tone. “Their guilt.”

  “Theirs?”

  “It used to be, anybody who abused a child, sexually abused them, they were psychopaths. Push them off to one side, lock them up. Criminally insane. People used to think Myra Hindley, Ian Brady.” She touched her fingers to her cheek, where it was beginning to burn. “Now it’s all over the place, everywhere. Ordinary people. That’s what they don’t want to believe. It’s them, their friends, their kids. Them.”

  Rachel lifted her glass and emptied it in one long swallow. Those who had been turning round and listening went back to their own conversations, their own silences. Resnick watched as the colour slowly began to fade down again on her cheeks, the light began to leave her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said, “I didn’t mean to treat you to an outburst.”

  “That’s okay,” Resnick said.

  Rachel stood up. “I must go.”

  “Thanks for the drink,” she said, out on the pavement.

  Traffic was moving down the hill at a steady rate, twin lines of headlights sliding into the center. Groups of men and women, strictly segregated, were gathered on the far side of the street, outside Huckleberry’s, Zhivago’s, The Empire.

  “Thanks for coming,” Resnick said.

  She smiled, something of a smile. “It was supposed to help me unwind.”

  “It’s probably not too late for a yoga class.”

  She pushed both hands down into her pockets and hurried away. The same group of students who had entered the pub with Resnick emerged and stood near the doorway, laughing. The lads were all wearing long raincoats, shapeless as the one the insurance man had always worn when he’d called to collect on the penny-a-week policy his mother had taken out for him when he was born.

  Nine

  If Dizzy had been human, Resnick thought, he would have spent days meandering drunkenly around shopping centers, splashed through municipal fountains with a red and white scarf dangling from his belt. He would have traveled back and forth across the Channel barricading himself behind a wall of lager cans in the ferry bar. Resnick blinked at the insistent wailing, eased his body from beneath the covers without disturbing the somnolent Miles, and barefooted to the window.

  The leafless black of the tree yielded up the softer blackness of the cat. A soft thump against the ledge and yellowed eyes stared through the pane. Something hung down from the mouth, inert. Resnick pushed up the window and Dizzy moved with a quick pad across the room, tip of his tail crooked. Outside, the rain had not long ceased: sheen of water under the street light; soughing of wind.

  Glancing at it, Resnick had taken Dizzy’s prey for a bat, but no, a field mouse, gray in the smudged hollow of the pillow. Its back broken, a brief trail of pink and palish yellow slipped from the puncture of its underside.

  From the floor beside the bedside table Dizzy looked up at him, daring rebuke.

  Resnick used a tissue to lift the mouse away. Stripped the cover from the pillow and took it to the bathroom. Pepper was curled around the lid of the laundry basket and when Resnick switched on the light, lay one paw across his eyes.

  It was not yet a quarter-past four.

  Resnick made tea.

  He remembered his grandfather: collarless shirts and cardigans that hung past the cave of his chest; gray trousers always with a flap sewn to the front and held in place by two large safety pins. Two things he would do in the house: he would make a fire each morning in the blackened range; he would make tea. Thin fingers would rub the strands of tea between them then sprinkle them across the bottom of the enamel pan like droppings. When the water boiled, he would pour it over the leaves and let it stand. Always the pan at the side of the range, tea growing thicker and blacker. All day.

  He could scarcely recall his grandfather’s voice. Little else about him. A slow-stepping figure that would move between the kitchen and the outside lavatory, where strips of newspaper, torn in two and two again, hung from a metal skewer bent into a hook. Once,
on a Sunday, the rest of his family had brought a stranger home from church and Resnick had seen his grandfather struggle into a collar and tie—Resnick had used his young fingers to press the collar stud home, had twisted straight the knot of tie—and shiny coat and gone into the parlor with them, closing fast the door. From the hallway, between the banisters on the stairs, he had listened to the clamor of voices and then his grandfather, angry, bitter, and pitched oddly high, forcing out all argument.

  And since he knew, then, little Polish, having stopped his ears to it, old-fashioned nonsense, Resnick had never known what those heated words were about.

  Thinking back now, he did not think, in all the years they had inhabited the same house, that his grandfather had even spoken to him directly as much as a single word.

  “Jesus! What’s happening to him?”

  “All right, just take it easy.”

  “I want to know…”

  “A minute while this gets sorted.”

  “Not…”

  “Sir, I think you should take a look.”

  Resnick looked at the warning expression on the custody sergeant’s face, the solicitor standing inside his small room, alongside the desk. A uniformed constable was bringing a prisoner out of the toilet opposite the row of three cells. Inside the nearest of those a fist was being worked against the door, a metronomic rise and angry fall. A policewoman with a shining bob of fair hair was talking softly to a young black man who was handcuffed to the radiator. Divine and Naylor were standing at the furthest end of the corridor, by the open door to the third cell. Telephones were ringing: all over the building telephones were ringing.

  “Sir…”

  “Okay, Sergeant.” He squeezed his way along the corridor.

  He heard the solicitor’s voice calling after him and shut it out. Outside the cell, Naylor looked as pale as Divine was flushed. Ignoring them, Resnick pushed the door fully open. Tony Macliesh looked up at him from where he was sitting on the narrow bed and smiled.

  Blood leaked from his left cheekbone where the skin was broken; a swelling the shape and size of a blackbird’s egg already broke the hairline over his left temple. His lip was cut. Still smiling, he stood up and a channel of blood ran from nose and chin on to his black T-shirt, his jeans, the soiled suede of his shoes.