Lonely Hearts cr-1

by John Harvey

  Along with the others, Patel enjoyed these, laughed and at the same time struggled to understand their relevance.

  Once, moving swiftly away from one of these brief alightings, Doria allowed his hand to brush against the red hair of the student seated in the middle. Patel could not see her face clearly, could only imagine that, if anything, it became more blissful.

  “Remember, for Derrida, ‘writing’ has a special meaning. For him, it denotes ‘free play,’ that part of any and all systems of communication which cannot finally be pinned down, which are ultimately undecidable. Writing, for Derrida, does not codify, it does not limit. Rather, triumphantly, wonderfully, it displaces meaning, it dismantles order, defies both the safe and the sane. It is,” Doria sang out, one arm aloft, “excess!”

  The last word echoed from the ceiling before fading to a slow silence. Seats went up, students shuffled out. At the podium Doria was reassembling his note cards into sets and placing each within a different-colored envelope.

  Patel’s head was buzzing. He looked at the top sheet of his pad, at phrases he had written down because they had struck him as important without clearly understanding why. It had been exhilarating, as he imagined skiing must be, diving beneath the Barrier Reef.

  The girl with red hair had thanked the professor softly for his lecture but if he heard her then he gave no sign.

  Patel was one of only three or four students dawdling behind. He was almost at the bottom step and heading towards the door when Doria’s voice stopped him.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you at these classes before.”

  “No,” said Patel with deference. “No, that’s correct.”

  “You are not taking one of my courses?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Another in the department, perhaps?”

  “Mechanical engineering,” said Patel hopefully.

  Doria was looking at him keenly, smiling now with his eyes. “I have long argued for a less rigid approach to inter-disciplinary studies,” said Doria with a tone of regret. “Alas, breaking down such rigid barriers…” He smiled at Patel suddenly. “What we want is a deconstructive approach to the formalism of the academic syllabus, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes,” said Patel. “Yes, I would.”

  He was conscious of the professor’s eyes watching him to the door and he made himself turn, careful to take his time. “Thank you for the lecture, Professor Doria. It was really interesting.”

  Doria made a short bow of the head and shoulders and Patel left the room.

  Thirty

  “What’s the coffee like?”

  Kevin Naylor looked beyond the T-shirts and the cassettes towards the cafeteria. “No idea, sir.”

  Resnick walked closer: it looked like a Gaggia machine to him. “Where does this Sally work?”

  Naylor pointed towards the basement. “Chart albums, all the rock stuff, it’s down below.”

  “Have a word with the manager, manageress, whatever, get the girl a break. We’ll talk over there.”

  He ordered a double espresso, which caused some confusion, and carried it to a table by the far wall. The cafeteria was raised up above the rest of the floor, spacious; there were green plants and video screens and if you could shut your ears to the inanities of the in-house DJ it was pleasant enough.

  The coffee wasn’t as strong as it could have been, not as strong as at the Italian stall in the market. They were probably using the wrong beans. He had almost finished it by the time Naylor appeared with Sally Oakes: even when you’ve got no clear expectations, thought Resnick, it’s possible to be surprised.

  For a start she was slight, her black T-shirt and jeans seemed to hang from her by default; he knew her age, nineteen, but he hadn’t expected her to look it. Her light brown hair was cut in a fuzzy stubble that suggested it would fold back against the hand like fur. There was a silver stud, shaped like a star, in her left nostril, a chunky bracelet of ornamented black leather round her left wrist.

  She looked at Resnick curiously before sitting down, as if wondering if she wanted to be there at all.

  “Are you his boss?” she asked, nodding in the direction of Naylor.

  “Sort of.”

  Sally Oakes sniffed.

  “Coffee?” Resnick asked.

  “Coke.”

  “Espresso for me,” Resnick said to Naylor. “Large.”

  When Naylor had gone to the counter, Resnick introduced himself.

  “You got a cigarette?” she asked.

  “Afraid not.”

  Sally Oakes swung up from her chair and went to where a couple of young men were sitting at a table, eating baked potatoes. Resnick watched her lean over them, asking first for a cigarette, then for a light. He was certain that she didn’t know them, nor they her.

  “So what’s he done, old William James?” she asked, letting the smoke drift up from her nostrils.

  “Has he done something?”

  “You playing me around or what?” She swallowed some of the Coke, her eyes shifting across to Naylor and back again. “First him and then you.” She sniffed. “Not me you’re interested in, is it?”

  Resnick stirred his coffee. “What do you think he might have done? Always assuming that he has.”

  “I don’t know, do I?”

  “Guess.”

  She blinked her eyes rapidly in annoyance. “Computer games for policemen, is it? Dungeons and dragons. Got to make a move or it all grinds to a standstill.”

  “Something like that.”

  She blinked again through the smoke. She knows, Resnick thought, she knows or at least she suspects, but she’s not saying.

  “How come you went out with him?” Resnick asked, switching tack. “On the surface it doesn’t seem made in heaven.”

  “I thought it’d be a laugh.”

  “And was it?”

  Sally drew on the cigarette, angling her head to one side. “No it wasn’t.”

  “Still you carried on going out with him. Over a year.”

  “He was interesting. I never said he wasn’t interesting.”

  “But?”

  “But nothing.” She shrugged.

  “But you stopped seeing him.”

  “I was going steady.”

  “You could have carried on meeting him if you’d wanted to, said he was your uncle.”

  “That what you get them to say, is it?” Resnick grinned back at her. Naylor, who had been in the act of drinking his cappuccino, spluttered bubbles into it and finished up half-choking and with a cream and chocolate mustache.

  “You’d have stopped seeing him anyway, wouldn’t you?” Resnick asked. “After that last time.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “After what happened that last time.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Only what you’ll tell me.”

  Sally Oakes showed Resnick her profile and took two, three deep drags on the cigarette. The DJ severed his love affair with himself long enough to play Nina Simone’s “My Baby Just Cares For Me.”

  “Can I have another Coke?”

  Resnick signaled for Naylor not to hurry back.

  “The first time, the first couple of times,” Sally Oakes said, “I thought he wasn’t really interested, in anything happening, you know, sex. Then I realized what he was interested in, what he wanted me to do…well, he wanted to watch me, you know. So I thought, okay, fine, he wants to play with himself. I mean, if it was good enough for Elvis…” She stubbed out the cigarette. “Then, we’d been to this bar, a couple of bands were playing, just local, he’d been doing his usual thing of listening half the time like they were, you know, God’s gift to music and the rest bending my ear about some highfalutin’ theory or other, honest, I used to switch off. So, we got to my room and I thought, okay, a quick run through the usual, but this time it’s different and he’s all over the place, trying to stick it here, there, and everywhere and, Christ, I’m wondering what I’ve got myself i
nto when all of a sudden he jumps up and he’s off in the bathroom-I don’t know what he’s doing in there except I suppose he’s jerking himself off, but when he comes back it’s all those old jokes about cold showers and he just wants to sit there with a mug of Horlicks in one hand, the other inside my knickers, and some German film boring the arse off Channel Four just for a change.”

  Sitting with her back towards Naylor, who had turned a lovely shade of puce, she reached round for the glass and drank half of the Coke right down.

  “Is that the way it went on?” Resnick asked. “After that.”

  “You’re joking! If it had’ve been, that would have been it, then and there. No, he went back to fooling around for half-an-hour at the end of the evening and going through the tapes I’d brought back from this place. Hip-hop, that’s what he seemed keen on.”

  I’ll bet, thought Resnick.

  “Tell me about the last time, Sally,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “It was like before, the one I told you about before. One minute it’s all four-syllable words and the next we’re down to four-letter ones and he’s got me rolling on the floor while he’s…” She stopped and lowered her voice still further, her eyes fixed on Resnick’s face. “There are some things I don’t mind, more than a lot of girls maybe, but I don’t mind telling you…he hurt me.”

  “You mean, he hit you?”

  “No. He hurt me.”

  Resnick wondered what Millington and Mark Divine were laughing about and quickly decided he’d rather not know.

  He’d taken Lynn Kellogg out from the University and sent her off to talk with Sally Oakes, see if there wasn’t something else to be learned. The girl would most likely agree to make a statement now, but to what avail he still wasn’t certain.

  Graham Millington turned away from Divine, still laughing, intending to answer a telephone, and spotted Resnick.

  “Got a minute, sir,” he said, hurrying forward.

  Mark Divine picked up the phone instead.

  “He’s a hot one,” Millington enthused. “No two ways about it.”

  “You thought that about our friendly neighborhood wrestler,” Resnick reminded him.

  “Sloman,” scoffed Millington. “Still wouldn’t trust him further than Big Daddy could throw him.”

  “But this is different?”

  “Inspector Grafton’s pretty set on him, any road.”

  “Graham, we all get set on anything that looks more than halfway possible. We all want to see this thing over. Either that or some other woman’s going to finish her evening like Shirley Peters and Mary Sheppard.”

  “I know, sir, but…”

  “I would have bet a couple of months’ pay away it was Macliesh, domestic violence, open and shut. You went after Sloman because some of the facts seemed to fit, because he looked as if he could have done it. What’s different here?”

  What’s the matter with the man, Millington thought? He’s beginning to sound more like counsel for the defense.

  “For one thing, sir, there’s his mental history. I mean he’s not only a psycho, he’s a self-confessed sexual maniac into the bargain.”

  “Confessed to the thought, not the deed.”

  “He says.”

  “Do we know any different?”

  “There’s a psychiatrist’s report. According to that, if he comes off his drugs then he’s likely to be as randy as a buck rabbit in season.”

  “The psychiatrist said that?”

  “More or less. I mean, that was the gist of it.”

  “Thanks for the translation.” Irony was wasted on Millington.

  “Then there’s this business with Shirley Peters. He admits writing to her, owns up to going out to meet her. Now that’s a Monday night just three weeks before she was killed.”

  “But he still hasn’t admitted more than that?”

  “Of course he hasn’t. He’s not stupid, is he?”

  “I thought he was. I thought that was the point.”

  “What I’m saying, sir, it doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t fit. All the other women he contacted, he went ahead and met. The only one we know came to any harm, the one who was murdered, oh, no, he walked away, didn’t he?”

  “Then why mention it in the first place?”

  “Sir?”

  “Why tell us he as much as knew her?”

  “The inspector reckons it was because he thought we had a list of who he’d written to, thought we’d got hold of the letters, I suppose. That way, he’d have to admit something, but no more than he hoped to get away with.”

  “And all the time you were interviewing him, he never broke down on that part of his story, that he took one look at Shirley Peters, turned tail, and never saw her again?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And your verdict on that, Graham?”

  “No doubt in my mind, sir,” said Millington without hesitation. “He’s lying.”

  Resnick wrote a memo for Lynn Kellogg, another for Patel, asking for a summary of what they’d learned as soon as possible. When he phoned Skelton, the superintendent was closeted with the chief constable, doubtless doing his best to pacify him and promise an early result. The DCl was there and Resnick asked him if they were anticipating making an arrest.

  “Simms, you mean? Grafton’s sex offender.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Unofficially, Charlie, I think the word is imminent. Unless you’ve turned up something stronger.”

  Resnick assured him that he hadn’t.

  “Not holding out on us, Charlie?”

  “Not for a minute,” said Resnick and rang off. What he would say at the next briefing session might be another matter, but for now he needed time to think.

  A little over an hour later he was sitting in his favorite chair with Bud curved round the back of his neck, purring head tucked up against Resnick’s chin while his tail coiled across it from the other side. He was listening to the animal’s contented breathing, the occasional vehicle passing too fast along the road outside. There had to be a way of pulling it all together, but as yet he couldn’t determine what that was. There had to be something he could do with a quarter of aging mushrooms and half a red pepper that was more interesting than slicing them finely and folding them into yet another omelet.

  When he allowed himself to be convinced that there wasn’t, he lifted Bud gently down and went to call Rachel.

  She came to the phone after Carole had all but given him the third degree.

  “I’ve just been interviewed for a very exclusive position,” said Resnick, “only I don’t know what it is.”

  “Sorry,” Rachel explained, “she’s interceding for me with Chris.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Oh, he was waiting for me last night when I got back.”

  “After I left you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus!”

  “It could have been worse, I suppose. He was upset. At first he was angry and then he was, well, violent, I suppose you’d have to say.”

  “He didn’t strike you?”

  “No. Nothing like that. Carole got me inside, he hung about getting wet and then disappeared. He’s tried ringing me a few times and I don’t know if it’s to be abusive or to apologize, because so far I’ve managed to avoid him.”

  “There’s nothing you want me to do?”

  “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Except what I called for.”

  “Which is?”

  “To save myself from another mushroom omelet.”

  “Charlie!”

  “You said it was my turn to ring you.”

  “I didn’t mean less than twenty-four hours later.”

  “You weren’t that specific.”

  “I know. But, anyway, I’ve eaten.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a silence and then Resnick said: “What were you going to do?”

  “An early bath and then bed.”

  Great
! thought Resnick. Do it here!

  “Did you hear what I said, Charlie?” Rachel asked when there was no reply.

  “I was just thinking about it.”

  “You’re not turning into a dirty old man on me, are you?”

  “Come over,” said Resnick.

  “What for?”

  “To meet the cats.”

  She didn’t say anything for several seconds and then what she did say was, “How can I resist?”

  The introductions went as well as could be expected. Dizzy treated her to his rear view within seconds, but that aside the cats were as polite as they usually were when Resnick had guests, which wasn’t often.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Vodka and tonic?”

  “Difficult.”

  “Gin?”

  “Ah…”

  “What have you got?”

  They sat on the settee with two glasses of Black Label and Art Pepper on the stereo playing “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” Resnick didn’t tell her the title, he thought that might be going too far, but he did point out the link with Pepper the cat and he was starting to tell her something else when she leaned across him and placed her finger to his lips.

  “Charlie…”

  “Um?”

  “Shut up and let me listen.”

  When he refilled their glasses, he found a worn copy of Sinatra’s Songs for Young Lovers. Rachel waited until it got to “Someone to Watch Over Me” before asking, “Charlie, are you trying to seduce me?”

  “Am I?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No.”

  “Are you being honest?”

  “Usually.”

  “And now?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Only if you are, trying to seduce me I mean, I haven’t got my cap in.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I don’t want you to think I’m the kind of woman who takes it with her wherever she goes.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “But I do happen to have it in my bag.”

  “Ah.”

  He took her whisky glass and she kissed him; when he had set both glasses down, she kissed him again.

  They kissed one another.

  After some time had elapsed and two of the cats had tried to find some purchase on their shifting laps and given up, Rachel took Resnick’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “Don’t you think it’s time you showed me the bedroom?”