Lonely Hearts (34 page)

“He gave you a theory, Charlie. Like any other tuppenny-ha’penny academic. It only takes a dolphin to be washed up on a beach somewhere in the world for some expert to inform us that they’re doing it to warn us we’re damaging the ecology of the planet. Child abuse has become a growth industry for sociologists and child psychologists from Aberystwyth to Scunthorpe. Do you know how much a QC gets paid to chair a panel which will take two years to tell us what was right before our eyes in the first place?

“We’re surrounded by people with theories for all and sundry, Charlie, and the best we can hope to do is steer a course between them and use their knowledge when we’ve told them exactly what we want and nothing more.”

“With respect, sir, I don’t think this is the same. It isn’t abstract. He knew what he was saying, Doria, knew who he was saying it to.”

“Now what, Charlie? He was watching for you, waiting for you? Maybe he went to the match for the express purpose of seeking you out, striking up a conversation? Great shot! That bloke’s a load of rubbish! Oh, by the way, I’ve got this confession I want to make if you can hang on till they’ve taken this corner.”

Facetious sod! thought Resnick. His All-Bran can’t be working.

“I don’t think it’s impossible, sir,” he said.

Skelton moved towards his desk. “I know it’s not easy to find acceptable reasons for watching that miserable team, but this might be taking it a bit far.”

Resnick turned and started towards the door, smarting under his superior’s sarcasm.

“Inspector…” Skelton began,

“What about the girl?” Resnick asked, stopping, his voice unusually loud. “Oakes—what about her? We’ve her description of…”

“A bit of rough, isn’t that what they call it, Charlie? You’re always so much more in tune with these terms than I seem to be. If we started pulling in every bloke who treated his wife like that, we’d have more inside than out on the street. And don’t waste that look of disapproval, I’m not condoning anything, you know that. I’m saying there’s a certain kind of world out there and we’re paid to work in it. Unfortunately, we have to live in it, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Resnick spoke flatly, looked back at Skelton tight-lipped.

The superintendent drummed his fingers across the papers on his desk before sitting down. “Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“And there’s nobody still wasting their time round the campus, playing at being students?”

“No, sir.”

Skelton lowered his head. Dismissed, Resnick opened and closed the door with respect.

“Someone asking to see you, sir.”

Resnick snapped at Naylor so sharply that the DC collided with the door when he withdrew.

Certain that nothing now was going to make the day better, Resnick finished what he was doing before quitting his desk. There seemed to be more than usual activity around him, but he felt no part of it. Better to push away at the routine, keep his head down, sooner or later he’d stop feeling sorry for himself. Just about the last thing he wanted to do was talk to another human being. And he knew that it was neither of the people he would have been interested in seeing: had it been either Doria or Rachel he felt he would have known. It was Marian Witczak.

She was wearing a burgundy cape and her hair was tied back into a bun. She looked like Resnick’s idea of a piano teacher with perfect pitch and a mother in a nursing home in the country.

She waited until she was sitting opposite Resnick, until she had made a slow and careful survey of his office, until she had politely declined coffee, before taking an envelope from her bag and placing it on the desk before him.

Like somebody depressing middle C.

Resnick looked at her questioningly for a moment.

“Open it.”

The card was the same as he had seen before, the same color, size, texture.

My Dear Marian
,

I am beginninq to regret, quite strongly, that so many months have elapsed since we met. I find I am in urgent need of mature and stimulating company and conversation
.

I wonder if you can bring yourself to overlook my inexcusable tardiness in communicating and agree to spend an evening with me?

Shall we say this coming Saturday?

Your sincere friend—

William Doria

Neatly printed, below the embossed name, were his address and telephone number.

“I discovered it when I went downstairs,” Marian said. “It had been put through the letter-box early this morning.”

Or very late last night, thought Resnick.

“It was certainly delivered by hand. You see, it bears no stamp.”

Resnick read the note through again, as Marian would have said, searching for clues. He could find none.

“I thought—after the interest you showed before—I thought, Charles, that you would wish to know of this.”

“You’re right,” said Resnick. “I’m grateful.” And then, “What do you intend to do about what he says?”

“My first intention, this will not surprise you I think, was to tear this up, this beautiful calling card. My second, and I do not think this will surprise you either, was to accept.” She looked at Resnick, as if waiting for a comment that didn’t come. “Do you think I am foolish?”

“Not necessarily.”

“That I have no pride?”

“Certainly not that. I know you have.”

She lifted up the card and glanced at it once again, although she must have been able to picture it by then with her eyes closed tight.

“This last evening, the one I told you about, it was such pleasure to me. He is so diverting a companion.”

“You’ve made up your mind,” Resnick said.

“Unless you tell me otherwise.”

“How can I do that, Marian? What you do is your own affair.”

“Unless you wish to warn me.”

“Of what?”

“Charles, that I do not know.”

Resnick tried to unscramble all of the voices that were vying for attention inside his head.

“You said that when you were with him before you felt no danger?”

“Of course not. Are you saying I should have done so?”

“The important thing is that you didn’t.”

“I have said this.”

“Then…where would you go?”

“I don’t know, I thought he might choose. He seems to have so many interests. Except…”

“Yes?”

“There is a dance, at the Polish Association.” For a moment her severe face softened into a smile. “You remember those dances? Of course they are not the same, but I could suggest it.” She studied his face. “What do you think?”

“Yes,” Resnick said with a certainty he had no right to feel. “I think that would be the best idea.”

He didn’t see Jack Skelton for the remainder of that day, suppressing his inclination to go to him with the copy he had made of Doria’s card and say, “There. What do you think all that’s about?”

But what was it about? An educated man who liked the company of women, who liked to take them out and impress them with his erudition and, just occasionally, take them to bed. As the superintendent had said, if that tended to get a little excited, wasn’t that the same for all of us at some point in our lives?

Doria liked to play verbal games, that was what words were to him: like “writing” he used them to disturb the ordinary, the run-of-the-mill, and the commonplace. Where was the harm in taking hold of conformity and shaking it by the scruff of its rigid neck?

And the evidence—instead of evidence all that Resnick had were voices: Patel’s describing his charisma; Lynn Kellogg, the way his eyes had held her from an otherwise immobile face; Doria himself, the knowingness that had accompanied the placing of his finger to his heart.

Voices:
hurt me

hurt me

At three minutes past eleven the following morning (the officer at the desk would remember that time exactly), Leonard Simms walked into the station and said he wanted to confess to the murders of both Shirley Peters and Mary Sheppard.

Thirty-Three

“Don’t do it, Charlie.”

The band was taking a breather and the disco had taken its place immediately below the stage, patterned lights and sixty-watt speakers. They had found a table in a side room, where most of the others were families, grandmothers left with the smaller children while their parents danced. To saxophone and accordion, Rachel and Resnick had waltzed, quickstepped, simply walked around the floor, slowly, in each other’s arms. It had been the jiving that had finished them, a breakdown of arms and good intentions during a version of “La Bamba” that had owed more to the polka than to a bar out in the
barrio
.

“Don’t keep looking at me like that.”

Resnick had not steered Rachel far past the entrance before vodkas had been thrust at them, amidst cries of surprise and greeting: back-slapping and kisses and the pumping of hands. “You’re supposed to swallow it straight down,” Resnick had explained, leading by example. After the second, Rachel had, politely but firmly, refused. Now Resnick was drinking beer and Rachel white wine, but every now and again someone would pass by their table and set down another glass of vodka, close by Resnick’s elbow.

Rachel reached across and took hold of his hand. “Stop trying to make me fall in love with you.”

Marian Witczak allowed Doria to pin the corsage to the bodice of her black dress; his hands were supple and confident, but there was a flush of excitement in his eyes which she could not remember. He accepted the offer of sherry and they sat facing one another, he leaning back in the worn comfort of the armchair, Marian at the edge of the settee, running the rings round and round her fingers.

He talked about the courses he was teaching, the brilliance of one of his students—“the most striking red hair, she would have Rossetti painting in his grave”—and the dullness of the others. He had visited London and Manchester to attend the theater, exhibitions; a flight to Dubai, first-class, all expenses paid, to deliver a paper on Paul de Man. Most perfect of all had been a recital in Bath: “Fauré, Debussy, of course, Ravel—I have never heard anyone achieve the sensuality of the final section of the
Sonatine
in such a way. A cliche it may be, my dear Marian, but I am willing to swear here and now that she did become as one with her piano during that interpretation. A perfect fusion!”

Doria smiled, finished his sherry and sprang smartly to his feet. “Now! Shall we go to the ball!”

Resnick’s suit, Rachel recalled, was the one he had been wearing that first occasion she had seen him, walking across the entrance of the courthouse. She smiled to herself, remembering the way he had stared at her, tried to hide what he was doing, disguise it, embarrassed; the way he had carried on looking at her, nevertheless, as if having no alternative.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Oh, nothing special.”

“You were smiling.”

“Was I?”

“I hope it means you’re having a good time?”

“Charlie, of course I am. I don’t understand why you don’t come here more often.”

He grinned, boyishly. Another woman, Rachel thought, would be reaching across to push his hair back from his eyes, straighten his tie. “I can only take this much alcohol once every six months.”

“Are you drunk, Charlie?”

“Probably.”

A boy, fair-haired, no more than three or four, lost his balance playing chase between the tables and fell against Resnick’s chair. Turning, Resnick swept him up from the floor and held him at arm’s length, looking at Rachel past the child’s laughing face.

No, Charlie, Rachel thought, I’m not falling for that one, either.

“Charlie, how nice to see you.”

Resnick set down the boy and got to his feet. Marian was wearing long black gloves with her short-sleeved gown, which was tightly belted at the waist. Doria, alongside her, had on a cream suit with a loose, deeply-pocketed jacket, a white shirt and a midnight-blue bow tie.

Resnick kissed Marian lightly on the cheek.

“Charles,” Marian said, “allow me to introduce Professor Doria.”

“William,” said Doria, shaking Resnick’s hand. “William Doria.” He gave no sign that they had already met.

Resnick stood back, gesturing towards where Rachel was sitting.

“Marian Witczak, William Doria, this is Rachel…”

“Chaplin,” said Doria, making a slight bow and offering her his hand. “Rachel Chaplin, of course.”

When he straightened again, the academic’s eyes were bright but gave away nothing. “Perhaps we might join you?” he said.

Resnick glanced quickly towards Rachel before answering. Doria fetched two chairs and he and Marian sat opposite one another.

“A drink?” Doria said. And, with a smile at Rachel, “Some more wine.”

“Thank you, no.”

“But…”

“Later, perhaps.”

The muscles of Doria’s face were immobile, but his eyes were never still, never leaving Rachel for more than a second.

“Charlie,” Rachel said standing, head inclined towards the music. “Let’s dance. It’s a shame to waste Stevie Wonder.”

“Excuse me,” said Resnick, following her through to where the disco was still playing.

One dance led to another.

“You didn’t take to him, then, the professor?” Rachel had realized by now that if she covered twice as much ground as Resnick did, and let her arms swing wide, they didn’t look a bad couple.

“You’ve met him before?”

“Never.”

“You’re sure?”

“I don’t think I’d forget.”

“He knew your name.”

Rachel swung away from him through a dipping circle and then back, one hand pressed to his chest. Her skin was glowing.

“Charlie?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up and dance!”

A shout went up from across the room as the last of the winning numbers was called from the raffle. Resnick crumpled up a crocodile of salmon pink tickets.

“I had a new student in one of my lectures the other day,” Doria was saying. “A nice boy, Asian, not enrolled in the department, auditing, I suppose you would say. But it’s flattering when people know who you are, your reputation. He seemed to want to stay behind at the end, some clarification he was seeking, I don’t know. He was too shy, finally.” Doria hooked one leg over the other at the ankle. “The reverse side of reputation, I suppose, it can place others in awe of one. But, then, you must find the same yourself, Inspector?”