John Harvey: Lonely Hearts

“On their way.”

Resnick nodded. “I want a look.”

A gray topcoat had been dropped across the back of an easy chair; from behind it the toe of a red shoe poked out. On the glass-topped coffee table were a couple of wine glasses, one with an inch of red wine at the bottom, and a single red and white earring. A thick glass ashtray held the stubs of three cigarettes. Above the fireplace, a few tan-and-orange lilies had started to throw off their petals, curled like tongues.

There were several posters on the walls, clip-framed; from one Monroe looked out, slump-backed on a stool, black clothes, white face. Resnick glanced into her empty eyes and turned away. Words from a song of Billie Holiday nudged away at his mind, images of winter through the slight distortion of glass.

Parkinson stood up and half-turned to acknowledge Resnick’s presence; he took off his bifocals and slid them down into a case he kept in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

“You’re finished?” Resnick asked.

“For now.”

“Any idea of time?”

The police surgeon blinked and sounded bored; Resnick guessed the weather had kept him off the golf course for too long. “Somewhere in excess of twelve hours.”

“Last night then?”

“The wee small hours.”

Resnick nodded and moved a little closer. The rear of Shirley Peters’s skirt had become nicked up behind her and one leg was folded beneath the other, as if she had been sitting on it and then lain slowly back. Her gray sweater had been loosened from the waist band of the skirt and was pushed up at one side towards her breast. Maybe, Resnick thought, it had first been pulled all the way up and later drawn, imperfectly, down. The dead woman’s head lolled back sideways on a cushion, angled over towards the fireplace. Her eyes-mouth-were open. The line of red, taut and twisted, ran from beneath the rich dark of her hair: a red scarf knotted at the throat and pulled tight.

“Who found her?”

Millington cleared his throat. “Patel.”

“He’s still around?”

“Supposed to be helping Kellogg with…”

“I want to see him.”

The scene-of-crime squad was filling out the corridor. During the next hour or so, a practiced search would be carried out, samples lifted with tweezers, scraped from beneath the painted fingernails of Shirley Peters’s hands; wine glasses, surfaces would be fingerprinted; photographs taken, a video film shot and prepared for Resnick’s briefing.

Clear out of the way and let them get on with it.

“We were knocking on doors, that run of break-ins, the nearest was down the street at number 62.”

“Two constables and yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

Resnick watched the slim fingers of Patel’s hands slide back and forth along his thighs, intertwine, free themselves and move again. He wondered if it was the first time Patel had come upon a dead body-and decided that probably there would have been a grandparent or an aunt, some relative back home in-where was it? — Bradford.

“I rang the bell, knocked. Nobody came to the door, so I made a note to call back and that was when the neighbor came out from number 39.”

“Neighbor?”

Patel opened the small black notebook, the right page marked by a rubber band. “MRS. BENNETT.” The name had been written in capitals, neat and black and underlined. “She said somebody should be in, Shirley, that was the name she used. She said she often slept late.”

“You tried again?”

Patel nodded. Resnick thought how different it would have been coming from any of the other officers. The young Asian’s diffidence came from years of stepping through conversation as through minefields, aware of how little it took to make everything go up in your face. Without it, he would have been unlikely to have survived in the Force.

“I went round to the back…”

“To ask a few routine questions about a burglary?”

Patel looked into Resnick’s face: the first time he had done so directly. “I thought it would do no harm to check. Only a minute. There is an entry at the end of the street.”

You followed a hunch, you bugger, Resnick thought. Good for you!

“The back door, it wasn’t quite closed. Pulled to. I tried the handle.”

“You went in?”

“There were grounds for believing…at least, I thought…”

“From what the neighbor had said, someone should have been at home.”

“Yes, sir. I opened the door wide enough to call out. Several times. Loud enough, I think, to have woken most people.”

Not this one, Resnick thought, seeing again the savage turn of the woman’s head, back against the cushion.

“With the other burglaries in the area…” Patel ceased talking, the words drained from him. Resnick knew that inside his head the officer was walking again through the kitchen, past the sink, electric cooker, the painted clipboard units, on towards the living-room door.

“Your suspicion now,” Resnick finished for him, “was that the neighbor’s assumptions were wrong, the house was empty, there had been a break-in, illegal entry through the rear, just like the rest.”

Patel nodded.

“But that wasn’t the case?”

“No.” Patel shook his head. “No, sir. It was not.”

Resnick touched him briefly on the arm. “Outside and get some fresh air. Right?”

Resnick watched him walking slowly back across the road, head bowed; if he hadn’t already vomited, he would before long.

“Graham?”

Millington walked over from where he had been watching a scene-of-crime officer loading a fresh cassette into his video camera. “Shouldn’t be too long now.”

“Where’s Lynn?”

Millington pointed beyond the ambulance. Lynn Kellogg was sitting on a low wall, talking to a couple of kids of barely school age.

“Send her over. And, listen, if there’s nothing more you can do here, run Patel back to the station. He ought to get home but he’ll as like say no.”

“If it was anybody else, I could take him to the pub and buy him a large brandy.”

“Anybody else, that body might have been moldering away in there for days.”

Millington looked at him sharply, looking for offense. “I hope you’re not including me in that?”

“You, Graham?” said Resnick, straight-faced. “You’re a sergeant.”

Lynn Kellogg was a stocky, red-faced woman of twenty-eight with soft brown hair and the still distinguishable burr of a Norfolk accent. Her mother and stepfather owned a chicken farm between Thetford and Norwich and each Christmas for the past three years Resnick had found a capon in a plastic carrier-bag inside the metal waste-paper bin beneath his desk.

Like many women officers, she tended to get shunted into certain areas: so many cases of child abuse and rape that there were whole weeks on end when she thought she’d joined Social Services. But she was good with other women, kids too, and that didn’t mean Resnick forgot seeing her wade into the crowd at the Trent End and haul out a youth in a red and white scarf who’d just hurled a half-brick at the visiting goalkeeper.

“Important witnesses?” asked Resnick, nodding in the direction of the five-year-olds.

“Public relations.”

“There’s a woman in number 39, Mrs. Bennett. Sounds as if she might be the eyes and ears of the street. According to Patel, she was pretty knowledgeable about the dead woman’s movements-or thought she was. Have a chat, will you? If you turn up anything that seems important get in touch with Sergeant Millington or myself at the station. If there’s any chance of closing this one down quickly, so much the better.”

He spoke with the officer in charge of the scene-of-crime team for no more than ten minutes. When he got their report through, there might be something to go on. The small crowd of onlookers had got cold and bored and had mostly drifted away. The street lights stood out clearly now. On the horizon the reflections of the other lights threw up an oddly violet glow over the heaped shadow of the city. Resnick shivered as he headed back towards the house; he hated those evenings where dusk hardly seemed to exist; you blinked and there it was, night.