Lonely Hearts (6 page)

In the bathroom Rachel stood quite still, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Where her cheekbones touched her skin, she was still flushed from the rain and the cold. After some moments she began to pull the comb down through her hair and then stopped. Why was she behaving like this? Because she’d allowed herself to get annoyed by a man she scarcely knew? A stupid policeman. It was ridiculous.

“I’m sorry,” she started to say.

“It’s okay. Nothing.” Phillips closed the living-room door with one foot, a mug in each hand.

Rachel tried for a smile. “What is it? Coffee?”

“Tea.”

The smile became real. “Just because your wife told you it was what women needed when they were premenstrual.”

“Oh, so that’s what it is.”

“Part of it.”

“I should have known.”

“I told you those little red dots should be in your diary.”

He waited until she had sat on the settee, handed her the tea and sat beside her, careful not to crowd her too close. “How did it go, the meeting?”

“It went.”

“No way of holding it together?”

Rachel sat with the mug cradled between both hands. “No,” she said. “No way.”

Resnick had driven home from the Peach Tree and fed the cats. The post comprised a letter from his bank urging him to apply for the one credit card he already had, several pieces of disposable junk mail, and a reminder that his dues to the local Polish Association had not been paid. He was tearing everything but the last in half when he noticed a leaflet offering three free trial sessions at a new health club.

You never could tell.

Resnick folded the leaflet neatly and slid it between the Tabasco and the Worcester sauce. Bud was sulking because Dizzy had stolen her food again, so Resnick picked the cat up and set her down near the draining board, tipping a handful of chicken Brekkies quietly out of the palm of his hand in front of her.

A few minutes later he was back in his car and heading for the station.

Graham Millington had a small hand mirror propped up on his desk and was using a pair of nail scissors to trim his mustache.

“Graham. The house-to-house?”

Millington nearly cut a generous slice out of his lip when he jumped. “Reports are on your desk,” he said, scrambling to his feet, his voice a shade muffled.

Resnick leafed through the forms, summaries of the calls Kellogg and Patel had made that day. “Give me the gist of it,” he said, not looking up.

“Lot more stuff about threats from Macliesh, hammering on the door at all hours, calling her all the names under the sun, at least two claim he’d wait down the end of the street for her of an evening…”

“Recent?”

“Most of them before he went down, but not all.”

“This one here,” Resnick said, lifting one sheet away from the rest. “Man at 42—that’s across the street, isn’t it?—says he saw Shirley Peters leaving the house the evening she was killed. Eight o’clock.”

“Says he knew the time because of the television.”

“Saw a taxi pulled up and she went off in that.”

“Thinks there was only the driver in the cab but he couldn’t swear to it.”

Resnick glanced down at the report. “Didn’t know which taxi firm either.”

“No particular reason for him to notice, sounds as if she was always off out, this one.”

Resnick looked up sharply at the censorious tone in his sergeant’s voice. “Not about to voice the opinion that she was asking for it, Graham?” he said softly.

“No, sir.”

“And we’re following up the taxi?”

“DC Kellogg, she’s been phoning round. Nothing definite yet, but they’re usually pretty good, things like this.”

Resnick pushed the reports back together, glanced at his watch. “Off duty, aren’t you?”

Millington shrugged. “Wife’s night for her Russian class. She’s dropped the boys off at her mother’s. I’ll probably just have a quick pint and then get back.”

Resnick nodded and the sergeant turned to leave. “Graham?”

“Yes?”

“Peach Tree, that’s your pub, isn’t it?”

Millington nodded.

“Shouldn’t go in there looking like that. You’ve got blood down the front of your shirt.”

Resnick checked through the reports again, making notes here and there. A call had been logged from Aberdeen informing him that Tony Macliesh had been taken into custody off the train. The DS on the second shift had been called out to clear up a couple of assaults at a private family party. The owner of a second-hand shop on the Alfreton Road had called in to say that a couple of youths had been round offering him three VCRs; they were coming back tomorrow and an officer would be there to greet them. If the owner hadn’t already been sentenced twice for receiving stolen goods, it would have been altruistic.

When Resnick realized he had been thinking about Rachel Chaplin for some minutes, he called down to the desk and asked the sergeant to send one of the uniforms past Reno’s to pick him up a pizza—pepperoni, anchovies, extra olives.

He’d hardly put the phone down when Patel came in with the woman.

Grace Kelley sniffed the room for the smell of Brut and was disappointed. She’d been inside police stations before but never into CID and somehow it wasn’t living up to her expectations. She’d anticipated a mixture of shower gel and Benson king-size, men with jock straps snug beneath the polyester weave of their off-the-peg blue suits, but all she got were some uncovered typewriters, a couple of dying pot plants, and, on the desk nearest to her, a photograph of a wife and two kids with a mirror resting against it. She might as well, she thought, have been back in the typing pool.

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.”