Lonely Hearts cr-1

by John Harvey

  All the while, Millington keeping it screwed up tight inside, like a fist wanting something to strike out against, something to hurt, to damage.

  The phone broke his thoughts.

  “Inspector Resnick? No, he’s not here. No idea where you can find him. Sorry.”

  It was a petty thing to do, but right then it was all Graham Millington had.

  Twenty-Two

  Downstairs Billie Holiday was wearying her way through “Ghost of a Chance.” Resnick had put on the record and at the first sound of the voice known that he couldn’t listen. Up here at the back of the house it was little more than remembered sound. Softly, he moved towards the window. Bud’s head nestled against his neck; his fingers stroked the side of the cat’s belly as the purring grew louder close to his ear. Louder till it blocked out everything but his thoughts.

  Sharon Taylor had smiled the first time that the social worker had shown her the dolls. Warily, not openly trusting, already she had learned that much. Still she had smiled, even as she took the dolls into her hands. Seven years old. Resnick turned back into the room. He had painted over the wallpaper, two coats, yet here and there the figures showed through: the arms and baggy suit of a clown; a horse with a dancer on its back, careening; the face of a bear.

  Can you show me, Sharon…?

  Slowly, but without hesitation, the little girl had pointed at the other doll, the girl doll, and when the tip of her finger touched the place she had winced with the memory of the pain.

  Resnick’s face had struck the coldness of the glass through which he watched.

  The lying little bitch! Almost the only time her father had shown any emotion in the dock….just a bloody kid!

  Bud began to wriggle and Resnick bent forward and set him down, watching him trot from the room on silent paws. Resnick moved aside a bundle of old newspapers and sat on the bed. The whitewood chest of drawers he had painted, using stencils for decoration, had boxes piled on top of it. Carrier bags stuffed with who knew what rubbish leaned against its sides and each other. Dust had gathered in clots against the skirting. Resnick pushed himself to his feet. Hire a skip, clear it out, all of it.

  You ought to get married again, Charlie.

  He thought about Jack Skelton’s well-satisfied life, fitting him like his three-piece suits, the family photograph framed on his desk. Where were his kids now? College? University? As well-adjusted as their father’s ties.

  Making coffee earlier that evening, Resnick had switched on the national news. In the north-east, a man had been arrested on charges of indecently assaulting a girl of ten, of gross indecency with another, younger. These had not been isolated incidents: police and Social Services were working on the assumption that other adults and as many as fifty other children were involved, the youngest of the children was believed to be the same age as Sharon Taylor. The same news bulletin gave details of a telephone hotline that had been set up in London following the discovery of a child sex ring, offering refuge and advice to abuse victims. So far one hundred and forty had been interviewed: so far.

  The children, from deprived backgrounds, were caught up in a maelstrom not of their own making. They have been abused and chosen because of their poverty.

  Resnick looked again around the shriveled room.

  yes, it hurt me.

  The telephone was ringing and he hurried downstairs.

  “Charlie, are you crying?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then you’re getting a cold.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “What you need, increase your vitamin C. You do take it, don’t you?”

  Resnick moved the receiver away from his mouth a little so that she wouldn’t hear his breathing.

  “Are you still there?”

  “I should have thought you had enough of looking after people.”

  “I do.”

  “Am I getting enough sleep, eating enough oranges?”

  “Oranges aren’t enough on their own, you need the tablets.”

  “Rachel…”

  “Okay.” He heard the smile in her voice. “I’m sorry. Goes with the job. You get trained for it, paid for it. Sometimes it’s hard to switch off. Chris says…” She broke off; it didn’t matter what Chris said.

  “Charlie, I’ve been trying to get hold of you half the day. Nobody seemed to know for certain where you were.”

  “This inquiry, you get shuffled around.”

  “I thought perhaps…I wondered if you wanted to talk.”

  “Talk?”

  “Yes.”

  Resnick glanced away across the room. He hadn’t switched on the light and the red dot on the stereo glowed brightly. One of the cats settling and resettling in its basket was the only sound.

  “I didn’t know how you’d be feeling.”

  “No.”

  “Sorry, I’m not…”

  “I don’t know what I’m feeling either.”

  There was a slight sigh at the other end of the line. “I shouldn’t have phoned.”

  “No. No, I’m glad you did.”

  For several seconds neither of them spoke.

  “All right,” Rachel said eventually. “Maybe later in the week.”

  “Yes,” said Resnick. “Sure.”

  There was another, briefer silence.

  “If you do want to get in touch,” Rachel said, “you’d better call me at work.” And she hung up.

  The newspaper was on the kitchen table, folded to favor the sports page: team selection, transfer speculation. Resnick took the whisky bottle from the shelf and put it back down; there was a bottle of Czechoslovakian Budweiser in the fridge, cold. He poured it into a long glass. The double murder was still on the front page, but now it was boxed, bottom left. The photograph of Taylor, head and shoulders, was half life-size: the headline alongside it, two inches deep, GUILTY! At the end of a two-hour summing up by the judge, the jury had only taken twenty-seven minutes to arrive at their verdict. When Taylor heard the sentence of three years he had smiled.

  Resnick read the paragraph again, remembering the way Taylor had stood in the dock with a careless, bored arrogance. And at the end of it all he had smiled.

  “Castrate the bastard!” a woman had shouted from the public benches and a police officer had escorted her, struggling, from the court.

  In a side interview with Mrs. Taylor, a reporter asked her what she had felt when she heard the verdict.

  “Glad that Sharon hadn’t gone through all that for nothing.”

  And the sentence?

  “Stunned. Just stunned.”

  At the leniency of it? The severity? The smile?

  “And when your husband is released, Mrs. Taylor, are there any circumstances in which you might have him back?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know. It’s too early to say. I’m not saying I never would, but now…My daughter and I have got to get on with our lives.”

  Three years, Resnick thought, and he’ll be out on parole in two. Some probation officer with the task of resettling him back into society, his debt paid. The possibility of returning him to the family home. Sharon almost ten, almost grown. All of them together, hour-long sessions in a windowless room, therapy. “I’m not saying I never would…” What did Resnick want? Castrate the bastard! There would be those in prison who would be less uncertain: they would take the smile off his face and no mistake.

  Yes, it hurt me.

  He pushed the paper aside again and stood up. An eye for an eye, is that what he wanted? If ever he had got close to Taylor after his arrest, alone with him, how hard would it have been not to take a swing at him? In court he had wanted to catch hold of him and shake him to make him understand what it was he had done. Resnick didn’t think Taylor knew, really knew, but then, as he had said to Rachel, it was beyond his understanding also. All of it. That girl…

  Carole’s son had taken a rucksa
ck and his father’s dog-eared copy of Kerouac and set off round the world. However far he got, a place was waiting for him to study medicine the following autumn. “I think he’ll be a better doctor because of it,” Carole had said. “I truly do. And as for being worried, of course, I’m his mother, but, heavens, you can’t fuss about them all their lives, can you? Or all of your own. Besides, he’s got his head screwed on…and his credit card.”

  Rachel doubted if Kerouac had stuck his thumb in the air with an American Express card in the back pocket of his jeans.

  There was a poster of James Dean on the wall, another which proclaimed I Ran the World. In the corner of the room, opposite the window and close to the head of the single bed, stood an anatomical model, one half of the body lifted away to expose the pale coils of plastic bowel, the workings of a plastic heart.

  Rachel was trying not to stare at it. When she heard the footsteps on the carpeted stairs, she opened the file close by and picked up her pen.

  “Rachel?” A soft knock at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I come in a minute?” The door was opening.

  “For goodness’ sake, Carole,” Rachel smiled. “It is your house.”

  “Conditioned response,” Carole said. “Mark had me knocking on his door and waiting to be admitted the day he got to secondary school.”

  “Not all parents would have paid much attention.”

  “I think they should. Don’t you?”

  “We all need our own space.”

  Carole glanced back over her shoulder. “Somebody’s here to see you.”

  Chris Phillips stood waiting in the living room. The lines around his eyes were heavy and dark and his face was devoid of color.

  “Carole says we can talk in here.”

  “Talk?”

  “I’ll make some coffee,” Carole said, passing behind Rachel’s back. Rachel stood at the entrance to the room, not yet going in. “I’ve got the dog in the car,” Chris Phillips said.

  The trumpet, tightly muted through four bars of introduction, pianist quietly chording behind; the same phrase repeated, inverted, the last note fading into the fall of wire brush against the snare and there, tight to the beat, Billie’s voice.

  I need your love so badly

  The last word of the line is broken by the way she phrases, by the first of the saxophone’s cold spirals, grace notes that glide and lift around her without ever once touching.

  I love you oh so madly

  When she was ten years old she was abused by her stepfather; within too short a time she had left home and was selling her sex on the streets. This is 1954 and she is turning forty but not very far. Dead in a hospital bed she will have a police guard close by and the money for her next fix of heroin tied to her wasted leg.

  But I don’t stand

  A ghost of a chance with you

  Twenty-Three

  So much for the obvious. Photographs of Mary Sheppard and Shirley Peters were taken round to all of the clubs, pubs, and restaurants within a mile radius of the city center; officers also checked with staff at all four of the cinemas and both theaters. One theater usher, three bar staff, the relief DJ at Madison’s and the assistant manageress at the Odeon were sure they remembered seeing Mary Sheppard on the night that she was murdered. Pretty sure. Well, of course it was dark, bright, there was an awful crowd, I was rushed off my feet. After more questioning, two of the bar workers and the woman from the cinema were sticking to their guns. According to them she was accompanied by a tallish man with long hair wearing a dark hip-length coat, alternatively by someone of medium height, balding, a gray check sports jacket, and blue jeans, or a man quite a bit older with a local accent and a beard.

  No one recollected seeing Shirley Peters on the date that she was killed; no one once she had left from outside her house in a taxi, other than the driver himself, who claimed to have dropped her on the north side of the main square outside Pizzaland. According to the staff who’d been on shift at the pizza place that evening, she hadn’t eaten there. They were certain enough to be believed. Several people did recognize Shirley’s picture, however, but none could tie it in with the date in question.

  Who was she here with?

  “In a crowd, crowd of girls, you know the way it is.”

  “Never with a man?”

  “Yeh, sure, with a man? Which man? Come on, just men. Yes, men. Nothing funny, you know, just it never seemed to be the same man. Yeh, shame, she was all right. Fun, you know. Fun.”

  One of those who reacted positively to Shirley Peter’s photograph was Warren. Resnick dropped in at the gym and found him working out on the heavy punch bag.

  “Getting ready for a fight?” Resnick asked.

  “Mug’s game.” Warren straightened and swung his head towards Resnick, spraying sweat.

  “I thought maybe your friend the cuts man had talked you into it. He seemed to think you’d be something special.”

  “Something special for him to practice on, fine. But no, thanks.” He flexed his shoulders and started to arch his back, moving his legs a little on the spot, limbering down. “You’re not still running around after that Macliesh business?”

  Resnick shook his head. “Shirley Peters.”

  “Shirley?”

  “You identified her.”

  “Right,” said Warren, realizing. He rubbed at his head with a towel. “Couple of places I’m on the door, she used to go down a few times. I mean, enough so’s I knew the face, but no more than that. Like I said to your bloke, I never knew her name, nothing about her.”

  “Nor who she went around with?”

  Warren let the towel fall across his shoulders, shook his head. “Not the one bloke. Least, I don’t think so.” He began wiping at the sweat glistening on his thighs.

  “You know she was a friend of Grace Kelley’s?”

  Warren looked puzzled.

  “From London. Came up to see Shirley but too late. She stayed around long enough to enjoy the hospitality of a mutual acquaintance of ours.”

  “Georgie Despard?” grinned Warren.

  “The same.”

  “Small world,” said Warren, still grinning.

  Resnick nodded. “Thanks for your time.”

  “That I’ve got plenty of.” Warren looked across the room at the assorted pullers and pushers and pounders. “Any day you want to come down and work out for an hour…”

  “Thanks. I’ll think…” He stopped, a thought striking him. “Don’t suppose you know a Geoff Sloman by any chance?”

  Warren gave it a moment before shaking his head.

  “He used to wrestle. The Oblivion Brothers.”

  “He was both of them?”

  Resnick smiled. “He’s big enough.”

  “No. You don’t get the likes of them down here. Acting class, makeup-that’s more their style. But I’ll ask around if you like. Think he might have been throwing his weight about in the wrong places, do you?”

  “Not really. But if you do pick up anything…”

  “I’ll give you a bell.”

  Advertisers with the local newspaper’s personal columns were still being interviewed and not without embarrassment. Strapping toy boys turned out to be holders of bus passes; the secretary of the Mothers’ Union kept the photographs sent in response to “sexy redhead seeks man hot enough to put out the flame” between the pages of her Bible. Husbands blushed on being confronted before their wives and vice versa. One married couple realized they had both had advertisements for new partners printed on the same day. It was slow, but it was methodical.

  Gradually men who had responded to adverts were being tracked down and questioned. Skelton and the rest of the inquiry team felt without knowing why that it was starting to slip away from them. They wanted something more positive, a lead towards somebody they could begin to lean on. Mary Sheppard’s double-date had seemed to be it; the former wrestler, for all too short a time, had been an ideal suspect.

  “I’ve
been reading through the stuff on Sloman again, Charlie,” Skelton said. “You don’t think we gave up on that too easily?”

  “We’ve got half an eye on him, sir.”

  “Whereas we did have him in the station. Voluntarily. No question of a charge, no solicitor, simply a chat. We thanked him very much and showed him the door.”

  “It was put up or shut up, sir.”

  “You don’t think somebody else might have got more out of him?”

  “I think if Millington had come out of there and, say, I’d gone in, started asking more questions, putting him back over the same ground, I think then he would have got the wind up.”

  “You didn’t want another Macliesh?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “The rest?”

  Resnick half-shrugged. “Just didn’t feel right.”

  “You’ll be fingering seaweed next, Charlie. Reading tea leaves or the I Ching.”

  “You want me to pull him in again, sir, then of course…”

  “I don’t think so. But your sergeant does.”

  “Millington? He’s been to see you about it, sir. I mean, direct?”

  Skelton held out his hands in a gesture of pacification. “He’s not been behind your back, Charlie. Nothing like that. A word in the corridor, that’s all it was. In passing. A question from me, a remark from him in return. Anything more and I’d want it through the proper channels.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tendency towards the purblind, Millington, but not a bad copper for all that.”

  Resnick nodded.

  “I think like the rest of us-everyone except those civilians and their software-I’m hoping against hope we won’t be forced into phase two.”