Lonely Hearts cr-1

by John Harvey

  Leaning sideways on to the desk, Grace took off one of her high-heels and massaged the arch of her foot. She could see the young Asian talking to another man in a side office. The man was standing, listening, now sitting, pushing his chair back and getting comfortable without taking his eyes from the Asian’s face. Only once did he glance away, eyes drifting across hers, then quickly back.

  Grace pushed her other shoe free and shimmied her black trousers on to the edge of the desk. Two hours it had taken her up the motorway, sodding roadworks, panting to show Shirley the new motor, watch her face as she stood there creaming herself. What Shirley wouldn’t have done for a Porsche, red and all-likely a sight more than she’d done herself. Given the chance, poor cow!

  The door to the office opened and she pushed herself off the desk and started to wiggle back into her shoes. She caught the unmistakable smell of sweat and realized that it was coming off her own body.

  “The Inspector would like to talk to you.”

  Grace wobbled and reached out a hand to grasp Patel’s shoulder, smiling as he flinched. “Thanks, pet,” she said, jamming her heel down into her right shoe.

  Resnick was standing, gesturing for her to sit down. “Miss Kelley?”

  “That’s right.” She sat down, puffing the sides of her white fur out to the metal arms of the chair.

  Resnick looked at her appraisingly. “Grace.”

  She opened the small black bag that hung from her shoulder and took out a pack of cigarettes. “My mother had ideas above my station.”

  Resnick smiled. He looks good when he smiles, she thought, younger. She stopped, waiting for him to light her cigarette, then did it herself, using a slim gold lighter which she dropped back into her bag, drawing in the smoke as she leaned her head back before exhaling.

  “New Cross,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “My station. You’re supposed to say, when I say my station, you’re supposed to say…”

  “What station?”

  “And I say New Cross.” She wiped her left hand through a slow curve of blue-gray smoke. “Even that isn’t quite the truth. Deptford, really.” She remembered to keep her head level, hide the looseness that was starting to show beneath her chin. “D’you know London, south of the river?”

  “Not really.”

  “Haven’t missed a lot. I got out as soon as I could.”

  “Gracefully,” Resnick smiled.

  “You can’t get over that, can you?”

  “Mmm?”

  “The name.” She looked at the ash forming at the tip of her cigarette and Resnick fished an ashtray from a drawer and slid it towards her.

  “My mum used to spend every spare minute she had at the pictures. Deptford, Lewisham. Anything with Grace Kelly in it, she’d be there, three, four times in a week. Spent half of my time as a kid, I did, sitting in Greenwich Park listening to her telling me what happened, over and over again. Fourteen Hours, High Noon, Mogambo. It was only when I saw some of them later, on the telly, I realized she’d got the plots all in a twist. That one, Dial M for Murder, where Grace Kelly’s husband’s out to…”

  She leaned forward awkwardly and stubbed out the cigarette. A shiver ran through her and when Resnick saw her face again she was crying.

  “…out to murder her. Jesus!” She stood up, tried to, the pocket of her coat catching on the end of the chair so that it tore when she tugged at it. “Shirley-that bastard! — I must have talked myself hoarse trying to get her to come down to London, move in with me for a bit, anything to get clear of that pig when they let him out.” She smeared tears across her makeup. “She couldn’t see it, reckoned it’d be all right, sitting around in that poxy place waiting for some bloody Prince Charming to appear at the end of the rainbow. As if he’d ever let her have a life with someone else, not while he knew where to find them. She couldn’t live with him, and he was going to make good and sure she didn’t live with anyone else.”

  “Macliesh,” Resnick said.

  “Who bloody else?” Grace said. And then she grabbed hold of the back of the chair with both hands and said: “I don’t suppose you’ve got a drink?”

  Resnick got up and went into the main office. He took the half-bottle of Bell’s from Divine’s desk drawer and poured some into a styrofoam cup.

  “I could send for some coffee,” he said.

  “It’s just starting to sink in,” she said. “Delayed shock, isn’t that what they call it?”

  Resnick sat back down. “I think my young DC had almost as much of a shock as you did.”

  “Poor love! Don’t know what he thought I was going to do to him.”

  “I meant when he found the body.”

  There was a knock on the door and a West Indian constable came in carrying Resnick’s pizza.

  “Equal opportunities round here, isn’t it?” she said when the constable had gone.

  “Want a slice?” Resnick asked, sliding it out from the box and on to his desk.

  “I don’t think…My God! Anchovies and pepperoni, that’s disgusting!”

  Only slightly shamefaced, Resnick lifted a piece to his mouth, wondering if for once he would be able to eat it without getting strands of cheese stuck to his chin.

  “How well did you know Shirley Peters?” Resnick asked, between bites.

  “We were good mates. Good as you can be when you don’t live in the same place, not any more. I met her about six years ago. I’d been living in Birmingham and then I come over here, some sales promotion job or other, you know, poncing around between new cars in the shopping center, sticking out your tits and getting your ass felt up by the sales reps at the same time. Shirley was there too, moonlighting from the office job she had, Tony would have killed her there and then if he’d known. We just hit it off, you know, kept in touch. When she finally got rid of Tony, I came up and stayed with her for a couple of weeks.” She helped herself to some more of Divine’s whisky. “Not the place for me, though. Too quiet. Everyone’s tucked up in bed by half-twelve.”

  Resnick had had too much experience outside the city’s discos at three in the morning to believe that, but he didn’t contradict her. “She was living with Macliesh then, was she?”

  “Yeh, and he never liked me one little bit. I was always getting her to stand up to him, that’s why. One of those blokes who reckons he can wipe his hands all over you like you’re a box of Kleenex and goes spare if you as much as cough in front of another man. He hit her once in Tesco’s, not like a push, a real slap, hard across the face because she smiled at some feller pushing his trolley out of the way to let her past.”

  “Why…?” Resnick began, but he knew the question was never any good. Why did women stick with men who knocked them around? Why did so many men get off on it, need it, the owning, the forcing, the feel of skin breaking beneath their own? In twelve hours, a little more, he would be back in court, facing a man who had abused his seven-year-old daughter as if he had the right.

  “Did you ever hear him threaten her, threaten Shirley?”

  “Now you’re kidding.”

  “Incidents you can remember, clearly I mean. Things he said.”

  “And did.”

  An olive rolled off the side of Resnick’s slice of pizza. “If you wouldn’t mind coming back in the morning and making a statement?”

  “Anything to put that bastard back where he belongs.” She looked at Resnick keenly. “You have got him, haven’t you? He hasn’t done a runner?”

  “Only as far as Aberdeen. He’s in police custody.”

  “Pity he was ever allowed out of it.” She stood up. “Pity he won’t swing.”

  On the stairs, Resnick asked, “Are you all right for tonight? I mean, have you got somewhere to stay?”

  The smile was almost real, but the red gloss had been wiped across one cheek and on to her teeth. “That an offer?”

  “If it’s a matter of finding a hotel…”

  She touched his arm, but for no more than a moment
. “I’m used to finding hotels.”

  There were two half-drunken lads at the desk, nothing over their short-sleeved check shirts in spite of the weather; their eyes followed her to the door and they were about to come out with some remark until one look from her made them feel almost as young as they were and they stayed quiet.

  “What time d’you want me in the morning?”

  Resnick shrugged, aware that the desk sergeant was watching him with amusement. “Half-nine, ten.”

  “Goodnight, Inspector. Thanks for the drink.”

  The sergeant was still looking at him. “You owe me two-fifty for the pizza,” he said.

  Resnick nodded and went back up the stairs.

  Rachel Chaplin was in bed when the phone rang. Phillips called her from the bottom of the stairs. “It’s for you.”

  She came down wearing a sweatshirt and leg warmers, at least she hadn’t been asleep.

  “What time is it?” she asked, taking the receiver.

  “Nearly twelve,” Phillips said, walking away.

  “Hello,” Rachel said into the phone. “Who is this?”

  Resnick said, “I figured the chances were we’d bump into one another tomorrow and I just, well, I didn’t want it to be awkward, that’s all.”

  He didn’t say anything else.

  Rachel hung up the phone.

  Phillips looked over from where he was writing a final draft of his report, head angled to one side as if to say, who was that?

  “Nobody important,” Rachel said, and went back upstairs to bed.

  Seven

  Mark Divine sat in the reception area across from an inquiry desk that had been enclosed with contiboard, leaving space for a sliding glass window that would have admitted a man’s head but not his shoulders. Not without the head being pulled very hard. Jutting out from beneath the window was a Formica-topped counter edged with cigarette burns. Posters asking for information about missing children had been pinned to the walls beside and behind the wooden bench on which Divine sat, thumbing through the pages of the Sun. Fifteen, no, twenty minutes they’d been kept hanging about and not so much as a cup of tea.

  Kevin Naylor came through the door past the desk and Divine folded his newspaper and stood up. “About time,” he said.

  “Macliesh, is he…?”

  “I thought that’s what you’d been to find out.” Naylor shook his head. “I was on the phone.”

  “Reporting in?”

  “No. Debbie. Thought I’d give her a quick call, that’s all.”

  Divine grunted as he sat back down and shook open the paper. “Afraid she’ll disappear or something?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “If she doesn’t hear your voice, she’ll go up in a puff of smoke.”

  “Don’t be soft.”

  “Me? Soft? You’re the one who has to phone his missus every other five minutes.”

  “I don’t have to phone her at all.”

  Divine turned a page, then another. “No, you don’t have to call, of course you don’t. What d’you find to say to one another all the time, that’s what I’d like to know?” He grinned up at Naylor. “That lovey-dovey, newly wedded, darling I’m missing you I can’t live without you mush, is it? Sweetheart, I’m lost without…”

  “Stuff it, Divine!” Naylor lashed out with his arm and knocked the paper from Divine’s hands.

  “Oooh, now, now!” Divine smirked.

  “I said, stuff it!”

  Divine was on his feet with dangerous speed and looking at Naylor hard.

  “Up here we usually leave that kind of thing to the customers,” said a uniformed sergeant from the window.

  Naylor lowered his eyes first and the two men stood apart.

  “You’re here for Macliesh, aren’t you?”

  They nodded.

  “Come through with me and I’ll take you down to the cells.”

  The custody sergeant was sitting behind a small curved counter, a leather-bound book open in front of him, lines ruled and crammed with letters in black ink. Behind his right shoulder was a dark green board on which arrivals and departures were chalked in and out. The smell, freshly splashed disinfectant overlaying the sweetness of sewage, came up the steps on the cold air.

  “These two are for Macliesh.”

  “Aye.”

  Aside from the allegations they’d heard and that single photograph, neither Naylor nor Divine had any clear idea of what to expect of Macliesh. So when he walked slowly up the stone steps they were surprised to find that he was slight. Seemed it, until they saw the tightness of the muscle on arms almost without body hair, the flatness of his stomach. Not a pound of spare flesh on him.

  “That all he was wearing?” Divine asked.

  A gray pullover without sleeves, a black T-shirt beneath it; jeans from which the belt had been removed, worn-down scuffed shoes without laces.

  A hold-all was pulled up from behind the counter, an envelope opened and its contents tipped out: some coins, stub of pencil, a five-pound note, a watch on a clear plastic strap.

  The officer held out a pen.

  Naylor signed for the belongings and they were returned to the envelope, the envelope pushed down under the zip of the holdall. Naylor signed again and the sergeant handed him the custody record. “Go careful with him.”

  The sergeant clicked one cuff over Macliesh’s right wrist, the other to Divine’s left.

  “Shit!” hissed Divine as it pinched skin.

  “Sorry,” said the sergeant with a grin and loosened the ratchets before locking it fast again.

  “Right, then?” asked Naylor.

  The sergeant nodded as Naylor and Divine took their prisoner out to the waiting car; they weren’t going to get much out of him on the drive back home. Smiling, he used a bright yellow duster to wipe Macliesh’s name from the board.

  “At which point did you establish that the woman who first reported the alleged offense was not, in fact, a neighbor but the girl’s mother?”

  Resnick had briefed Millington on the procedure to be followed when Macliesh arrived: made sure he would be at the station to interview Grace Kelley and take her statement. He would far rather have been there himself anywhere rather than back in court under cross-examination.

  “Inspector?”

  Resnick finished checking his notebook. “Three days after the initial report.”

  “Three days?”

  “Detective Sergeant Pierce went back to the home with DC Kellogg and on that occasion Mrs. Taylor agreed that she had made the allegations herself. Then, after some discussion, she further agreed to bring her daughter in for a medical examination.”

  “And this examination, Inspector, where did this take place?”

  “At the City Hospital.”

  “Who was present at this examination?”

  “A consultant pediatrician, the police surgeon, Mrs. Taylor of course, and the social worker assigned to her case.”

  “But not Mr. Taylor?”

  Resnick shook his head. “No.”

  “Not the child’s father?”

  “No, for obvious…”

  “Your mind was already made up. As to his guilt? Yourself and Social Services between you had determined…”

  “Nothing,” Resnick interrupted.

  The defense counsel smiled. “You would say that you enjoy a good relationship with the Social Services department, Inspector?”

  Resnick wanted to shift his gaze to where he knew Rachel Chaplin was sitting. He knew she was wearing a dark blue suit with a fine stripe running through it, the jacket tucked in slightly at the waist, padded at the shoulders. A pale blue blouse was buttoned high at her neck. Today her hair had been pulled back off her face to be held by matt silver combs.

  “Given that our aims are not always identical, I’d say, yes, it’s a good working relationship.”

  He was looking directly at the defense counsel, face giving nothing away. The barrister hesitated, drawn to
pursue the issue of aims, wanting to, but not allowing himself, plowing on instead.

  Rachel Chaplin shifted back on the bench seat, recrossed her legs, right over left. In the quiet of the court, she could hear the sound of nylon sliding across nylon. “Not giving evidence today, are you?” Phillips had said as she was leaving. “I shouldn’t think so, why?” “Just you’re looking extra smart.”

  She had held her breath when she heard the question, waiting for Resnick to look across the courtroom and seek her out. How would you describe your relationship with Social Services? She was certain that he wanted to look in her direction, just a glance, and it impressed her that he did not. Only later did it occur to her that was his intention, the effect he’d been working on.

  Yes, she thought, all right, I’d like to sit down with you some time and talk about aims, intentions, sit down and talk some things through.

  “Now, Inspector,” counsel was saying, “I should like to draw your attention to those photographs, entered as Exhibit A, which were taken by the police photographer subsequent to the girl’s initial medical examination.”

  Resnick pinched the bridge of his nose and, for little more than the space of a second, closed his eyes.

  “Underpowered,” Divine said sideways.

  He was doing eighty-five in the outside lane, flashing full-beam at the Volvo fifteen yards in front.

  “Stop at the next services,” said Naylor.

  “Again?”

  “Again.”

  On the previous occasion, the two men had changed places, leaving Naylor in the rear with the prisoner. Almost a hundred miles of sitting less than comfortably, feeling your left leg growing numb above the knee; fidgeting your buttocks without wanting to move around too much because the man who was handcuffed to you was not moving at all, only breathing, his eyes staring through the offside window at the patches of green that rose and fell dully away between the swish of traffic.