by John Harvey
“A success, then?”
“Ah, that depends.”
“You had found your man with fine tastes.”
“Oh, yes.”
Marian stood up and moved across the room in the direction of the piano.
“You saw him again?” Resnick asked.
“The next day, the day after that,” Marian replied, “the telephone it was ringing constantly. All the friends who had forgotten me when I had been so lonely. What a wonderful man, such a charmer, who is he, where did you meet him, you lucky woman, what a catch!” She folded her arms across her chest, switched them behind her back, fingers linked.
“The catch was this—amongst all those telephone calls, there was not one from him. Nor was there a letter. Only, the next morning there had been a card, thanking me for being such a good companion and suggesting that perhaps we might go together again, one suitable evening, to a concert.” She paused. “Evidently, no such evening has proved suitable.”
After a while Resnick asked, “You’ve had no further contact with him?”
Marian shook her head.
“And you’ve made no attempt to contact him?”
“Of course not,” she said sharply.
“Nor would you?”
“No.”
“But if he had called, you would have seen him again?”
“Yes, I think so. After all, wasn’t he, as you say, what I had been looking for?”
“Really?” Resnick asked, shifted forward in the chair.
“What do you mean?”
“All the charm, the knowledge, you thought it was real?”
“As far as I knew.”
“Sincere?”
“Certainly.”
“And yet he never wrote or phoned? Doesn’t that call all that sincerity into question?”
“Charles, he was honest with me, this man. I think so. He did not make a secret of the fact that this was the way he met women, a number of women. He liked, he said, the excitement of meeting someone for the first time, getting to know them in that way. He was not looking for something more permanent than that suggests.”
Resnick stood up. “I’m grateful, Marian. For what you’ve told me as well as the coffee.”
“You are not suspicious of him…these awful crimes?”
“I don’t think so.”
He took his overcoat from her in the hall; wound his scarf about his neck. “Did you find him attractive?”
Something seemed to pass across her face, across her mind.
“Oh, Charles, be sure of this, he is an attractive man. To women, I think so.”
“He’s good-looking?”
“He listens; he makes you think that you are important. That you matter.”
Resnick hesitated: he wanted to ask Marian if anything had taken place between them, anything sexual. She stood there, like a governess, watching him as he put on his gloves. He couldn’t ask her.
“Charles,” she said when he was out on the step, “at the end of the evening he took my hand, he kissed it, so quick I barely felt it. That was all.”
Resnick nodded, wondering if he were really blushing. “Goodbye, Marian.”
“Next time,” she said after him, “come only for the coffee.”
At the gate he raised a hand and walked quickly from sight, leaving her standing there, alongside the flag.
Twenty-Six
Rachel gulped at her tea, swore when the toast splintered apart as soon as she pressed the butter knife against it. On the shelf behind, Radio Four was moving from the weather forecast to the news headlines via a trailer for that afternoon’s play. Through the voices she could just hear Morning Concert on Radio Three coming to an end in the bathroom. Files, diary, letters to be posted. She swept the pieces of toast from the table into her hand and deposited them in the plastic bin.
“Why don’t you hang on? I’ll give you a lift.”
“Thanks, Carole, but I can’t. I promised I’d look in on the Sheppard kids first thing.”
“No problem, is there?”
“I don’t think so. But if I show my face, Grannie can have a moan at me instead of taking it out on the home-help.”
“You’ll be in tonight?”
“Not sure. But I’ll see you in the office later.”
“I’ve got a case conference all afternoon.”
“Carole, if I miss you I’ll phone.”
“Just want to make sure I don’t make too much lasagna.”
“Bye!”
There was a slam as Rachel closed the door. Her car was parked thirty yards along the road and she was about to climb into it as Chris Phillips got out of his.
Rachel thumped her bag down against the roof of the car and glared.
“Well,” Chris said, “when else do I get a chance to see you?”
“I thought that was the point.”
“Jesus! How long were we living together? One week we’re talking about moving out of the city and buying a new place together…”
“You were talking.”
“…and the next…”
“You were talking.”
“All right, I was talking about getting somewhere else, and the next we’re not talking at all.”
“We talked the other night when you came round uninvited, have you forgotten that? We didn’t only talk, we got to walk the dog round the block.”
“How can…? You used to love that dog.”
“I still do.”
“You used to say you loved me.”
“What do you want, Chris? I’m already late.”
“Oh, God!”
Rachel opened the car door and threw her bag across on to the passenger seat.
“I thought, well, I haven’t seen you for a bit, I thought we could go out for a meal.”
“We don’t go out for meals.”
“It looks as if we don’t do anything.”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
“Rachel,” he said, standing close against the car. “You said this was a temporary thing, while you thought things through, sorted yourself out.”
“And if I’d wanted to sort them out with you, Chris, I would have done it while we were still together.”
“Come and talk to me, for Christ’s sake!”
“I can’t talk to you.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“Is it?”
“Absolute bloody nonsense!”
Rachel looked at him, her fingers round the door handle.
“You know you can talk to me. You can talk to anybody. It’s not something you have problems with.”
“All right, then. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Wonderful!”
“I don’t want to talk to you, Chris, and that’s why. That’s a great example of why. Because whenever I say anything that goes against what you want to hear, you don’t like it.”
“Do you? Does anyone?”
“There’s a difference between disagreeing and refusing to hear what somebody’s saying.”
“I can hear you all right.”
“Yes, but you don’t acknowledge it.”
“Oh, fine!”
“You don’t accept it and move on. How on earth you manage at work I can’t imagine. Not if that’s the way you act.”
“My work’s perfectly okay, thanks very much. The difference is that I know when I’m there and when I’m not, I can tell where one starts and the other finishes.”
“Meaning that I can’t?”
“Meaning that if I react to you the way I do, it’s because my emotions are involved.”
“And they’re not at work, not with your clients?”
“No! Not in the same way, for Christ’s sake!” Rachel looked at her watch. She pulled the door open wider, got in and closed it firmly behind her. She turned the key in the ignition, gave it some more choke, tried again and put the engine into gear.
“You won’t change your mind?” Chris said, bending towards the window.
“Something quick to eat…”
He stood in the middle of the road, watching her car get smaller until it turned right into the main stream of traffic.
“How’s Debbie?” Lynn Kellogg asked.
“Fine,” said Naylor, a little too hastily.
“She’s been seeing the doctor?”
“Honestly, she’s okay. She wasn’t even sick this morning. That is, not really sick. Just…”
Resnick had half a pastrami and mustard on dark rye and a quarter of potato, onion, and chive salad. What he didn’t have was a fork. Lunching on his own he wouldn’t have thought twice about using his fingers, but in front of his subordinates he had to set an example. He’d save the salad for later.
He bit into the sandwich and lifted up a brown A4 envelope with forefinger and thumb of his other hand, shaking it gently until three copies of a photograph slid down on to the desk.
“William James Doria, academic of this parish.”
Lynn Kellogg’s already red cheeks deepened a tone. So he had taken her seriously. Well, good for him.
“I don’t know if this is going to be any more than an irrelevant little side-show,” Resnick was saying. “But I’ve had a word with the superintendent and he says we can take it a little way, see if anything shows. If we haven’t got anything after, say, three days at the most, we’ll chuck him back on the pile with the other also-rans and join the main party. Right?”
Both the detective constables nodded in agreement.
“Questions at this point?”
“How did we get on to him, sir?” asked Naylor.
“Lynn here interviewed him as a matter of routine. Just one more bloke writing off to box numbers. She thought there was something funny about him.”
“That’s it?” Naylor said, surprised.
“He wasn’t what he seemed to be,” said Lynn, emphatically.
“What was he then?”
“He was…creepy.”
“We’re not so overburdened with suspects we can afford to ignore the gut reactions of detectives,” said Resnick, not wanting Naylor to show his lack of enthusiasm any further. “Especially when they’ve been proved right in the past.”
Thank you, Lynn Kellogg thought. Thank you for that.
Maybe Naylor’s spent too long teamed up with Divine, Resnick was thinking. Or perhaps that new mortgage and all that life insurance is weighing him down with care and safety.
“Is he at the poly or the university, sir, this bloke?”
“University. Linguistics and Critical Theory.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Buggered if I know for certain,” said Resnick. “But I know one thing, while you two are out snooping around, Patel is going to be finding out.”
Thinking a moment about Patel, Resnick wondered if the rye bread he was eating was the stuff they sent down by van from Bradford.
“How d’you want us to go about it, sir?” Lynn asked. Part of her wanted to take another shot at Doria, see if in some way she could confirm her initial feelings; against that, spending another twenty minutes alone with him in that office was close to the last thing she wanted to do.
“Kevin,” Resnick said, “Lynn got a list from Doria of all the women he claims to have met through these ads. It goes back two years and there are sixteen names.”
“I’m surprised he’s got the time,” said Naylor.
“No? You should see his timetable. With a workload like that he could manage sixteen women a week.”
Resnick glanced across at Lynn, worried in case he’d just said something sexist, but her expression gave away nothing. He wondered if she had been the one who’d ripped up Divine’s girlie calendar? One of these days he’d have to ask her.
“Anyway,” Resnick said, “I want you, Kevin, to go and talk to them. Just gently. Do they remember him? Where did they go, how did he strike them? Oh, and was it just the one date or more?”
“Yes, sir,” Naylor said, writing quickly in his notebook.
“Two years is a long time,” Resnick continued. “They might be in who knows what relationship by now; they might not want to be reminded. Nurse them along.”
Naylor blinked. “Urn, what, sir, am I looking for exactly?”
Did he try and strangle them with their own scarves or bash them to bits in their own back garden, Resnick said to himself.
“One,” he said aloud, “did any of them come away from this Doria with feelings in some sense similar to Lynn’s? Anything that suggests he might be a little bit odd.”
“Kinky, d’you mean, sir?”
“Not necessarily. But not necessarily not. And, yes, if there’s some way of finding out what went on sexually, if it did, that might be useful, too.”
Resnick leaned across and pointed to one name. “Marian Witczak. I know her. Seen her this morning. I’ll write it up and chuck it in with the rest, but for what it’s worth, she didn’t think he was strange at all. Bright as a button and charming as Fred Astaire.”
“I always thought he was creepy, too,” said Lynn.
“Fred Astaire?” Resnick and Naylor almost chorused.
“Yes. He’s so, oh, smarmy.”
“Tell that to Ginger Rogers,” said Resnick.
“Do you know,” Lynn said, sitting forward, “all those dances they did together, they never as much as kissed, off screen, I mean. I don’t think she even liked him.”
“Torvill and Dean,” said Naylor.
Resnick finished his sandwich and called the meeting back to order. “Lynn, spend some time hanging round the campus, use the bar, the cafeteria. Talk to some students, see if you can find anyone who takes one of his courses; even better, someone doing research, a student he’s likely to spend quite a bit of time with alone.”
Lynn looked up and nodded. “You don’t want me to go and talk to Doria again, sir?”
“No,” said Resnick. “Not yet.”
Halfway home, estate agents and clerical assistants sitting alone in their cars and inhaling one another’s lead and carbon monoxide, Resnick suddenly realized what he had failed to do. Failed to ask for. Annoyance at his own foolishness fired adrenaline through him and he swung out from the double line of traffic, warning lights flashing and headlights on full beam, one hand on the horn. Drivers heading in the opposite direction shouted and shook their fists, but moved over just the same. Resnick made a quarter of a mile before tagging across a series of residential side streets and finally skirting a roundabout that took him back into the same section of the city he had visited that morning.
“Charles,” Marian Witczak had the door held on the chain and was peering through the crack, surprise darkening her eyes. “Something is wrong?” She closed the door so as to free the chain. “Come in, come in, please.”
She looked at him anxiously, rubbing one hand against the apron she was wearing over her green dress. Instead of the soft leather shoes, there were thick multi-colored socks on her feet.
“I forgot…” Resnick began.
“About Doria? But I have already told…”
“No, but the letters. The letters he sent to you.”
“Yes?”
“You don’t happen to have kept them, I suppose?”
“Oh, Charles!” She laid her hand over his forearm, a gesture of affection. “Of course, they would have given you—what?—clues. That is what you policemen are always seeking. The one strand of yellow hair, a button torn from a jacket, the fatal footprint—see, Charles, I have read many mystery stories. Many.”
“But after you read the letters…” Resnick made an empty gesture with his hands.
Marian smiled a little, remembering. “Oh, I kept them, Charles.”
“You did?”
“My first love letters in twenty years. Almost twenty years. And I suppose I am not deluding myself to call them that. In the old-fashioned sense that is what he was doing, making love to me with his cl
ever words, reassuring and clever—what he had been reading, seeing at the theater, exhibitions, experiences that we might share if only I would relent.”
Marian set a hand towards her face and lowered her cheek to meet it. The pendulum movement at Resnick’s back seemed unnaturally loud.
“Your visit this morning made me think—about why after that almost perfect evening he did not wish to see me again.” She let her hand slide clear of her face, not looking at Resnick now but instead at some invisible spot on the wall close by the door. “I think it was because he no longer felt it necessary. It was a game you see, a game of wits and he had won it. The moment my note to him arrived saying that, yes, I would be delighted to go to the concert with him, that was his victory. Of course, he had to carry the evening off in style, gain my approval further so that when we parted he would know that the instant he asked to see me again, I would so readily say yes.” She allowed herself a brief smile of regret. “For Doria, that was enough.”
“Not for you?” said Resnick softly.
The smile broadened, changed, faded. “Yes. No. Everything I have learned tells me that my answer should be yes, it was enough for me too.”
“But?”
“But if that had been his finger upon the bell, his face I saw when I opened the door…” She made a small shrugging movement with her shoulders. “I am sorry about the letters. If you had asked me as little as three months ago I could have taken you to the drawer and shown you them all.”
“Never mind,” Resnick said. “One of those things.”
“Those foolish things, eh, Charles? The winds of March that make my heart a dancer.” She half sang the lines, her accent more pronounced. A telephone that rings, but who’s to answer?
She was standing close to him and her hands were in his; her eyes were glistening, but if there were tears waiting she was too proud to let them fall.
“Did you know an Englishman wrote that stupid song, Charles?”
“Jack Strachey,” said Resnick.
“What did he know of life?” Marian said.
Twenty-Seven
“Do you know there are idiots out there still dropping a postcard in the box, meet you by the lions eight o’clock, I’ll be the one with a ferret down me trousers, and there’s other bloody idiots trooping out there to meet ’em!”
