John Harvey: Lonely Hearts

Whatever in the room had been touched, had been replaced with care. Shirley Peters’s face looked like the painting of a face. When the Home Office pathologist performed the postmortem, what he did would be careful, too, and terrible.

“Sir…”

The constable was at the entrance to the room, more awkward now than embarrassed, fidgeting from one foot to another as if his trousers were suddenly too tight.

“There’s somebody outside, sir…to see…” He nodded towards the corpse. “It’s…I think it’s her mother.”

Resnick started to move. “For God’s sake, keep her out.”

“Yes, sir.”

As the constable turned, the woman slipped beneath his arm and Resnick had to set his body in front of hers to keep her from the room. She had hair that was a shade of platinum blond you didn’t see much any more, and, if it hadn’t been for the way it had been piled up on top and the size of her heels, she would have been less than five feet tall.

“What’s happened? Shirley. Oh, my God, Shirley!”

“I think we should go back outside, Mrs. Peters. And you,” he called over her head, “stop dithering and find DC Kellogg. Next door. Now.”

The woman tried to wriggle past him and Resnick grasped her shoulders.

“Let me go!”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You’ve got no right…”

He was slowly forcing her back along the hallway, trying not to force his fingers too hard against her upper arms, hurt her, bruise her.

“My Shirley!” She screamed up into Resnick’s face and he loosened his grip until his hands were not quite touching her arms. They were inside the front doorway and Lynn Kellogg was waiting by the metal gate at the pavement.

“I think we should go and sit next door,” Resnick said, talking to the DC as much as Mrs. Peters. “Maybe a cup of tea?”

All color had left the woman’s face; her eyes were blinking involuntarily and, at her sides, her hands were beginning to shake.

“Come on,” said Resnick, touching her gently.

“No, no…”

“I think you might be going to faint.”

“No, I’m not. I’m all right. I…I think I’m going to faint.”

Resnick stooped and swept an arm behind her legs and caught her before she struck the ground.

The sandwich was tuna fish and egg mayonnaise with some small slices of pickled gherkin and a crumbling of blue cheese; the mayonnaise kept dripping over the edges of the bread and down on to his fingers so that Dizzy twisted and stretched from his lap in order to lick it off. Billie Holiday and Lester Young were doing it through the headphones, making love to music without ever holding hands. Resnick couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that he had lied to Skelton, wondering why.

His marriage had neither been so bad that he had stricken it from the record of his memory, nor so lacking in incident that he would have truly forgotten. Something over five years and she had walked in while he was painting the woodwork in the spare room and announced that she wanted a divorce. Each year of their marriage he had redecorated that small room at the back of their own bedroom in the hope that one day she might walk into it with a glow in her eyes and announce that she was pregnant. Why else did he use alphabet wallpaper in primary colours? Why else the paintwork in bright reds and greens?

All she had been able to say was that she needed space to grow, room to find herself and she didn’t mean the one he was so obsessively turning into a succession of nurseries. Her horizons, she felt, were being limited, foreshortened.

Fine, Resnick had said, let’s sell up, move. There’s nothing special to keep us here. I’ll forget about making babies for a few years and you concentrate on your career. Better still, throw in your job. Retrain. Get a place at university. Go abroad. Only last month someone from CID got a transfer to Billings, Montana; doubled his salary for the price of a ticket across the Atlantic, one way. Now he’s got a house on the edge of town that looks over miles of prairie and all he had to do was learn how to ride a horse.

None of that was what she had in mind.

Whatever growing Resnick might be going in for, and she made it more than clear in those last weeks that he had a lot of potential in that area, he was going to do it in his own time and company. She was going to stretch her new-found wings alone.

Within six months she was remarried, her new husband an estate agent who changed his car every year and spent weekends at a holiday cottage in Wales. Resnick used to scan the papers, eager for reports that it had been burnt down. For a while he even subscribed to the fighting fund of Plaid Cymru. Now it was as if he had never really known her, as if nothing but their bodies had ever really touched. He had realized that in all the five years they had lived under the same roof, he had never known what she had been thinking or feeling and the truly frightening thing was realizing that he had never really cared. She would have said that was why, finally, she had to leave him. He had never been able to find her, so she had better try to find herself.

But what do you find, Resnick had used to wonder, down behind the rear seat of a new Volvo or at the bottom of an exclusive estate’s swimming pool after the water has been drained away?

He used to think it very sad; then, as more years passed, he scarcely thought about it-about her-at all.

Maybe his denial to Jack Skelton had not been as much of a lie as he had thought.

He cleaned those parts of his fingers the cat had ignored, leaned forward and set the plate on the floor and then removed the headphones. As he did so, he realized that the telephone was ringing. He made a lunge towards it and lifted the receiver and, of course, the line went dead the moment it got close to his ear.

The receiver still in his hand, he dialed the station: no, no one had been trying to contact him. Lynn Kellogg was alone in the office, catching up on some paperwork. Her voice sounded more Norfolk the more tired she became and now Resnick had difficulty making out what she said.

“How’s Patel?” Resnick asked.

“White as a mucky sheet. The sergeant told him to go home.”

“Home to Bradford, or home to his digs?”

“Digs, I suppose.”

“You do the same.”

“I’ve moved on from digs long since.”

She had moved to a housing association flat in the old Lace Market area of the city, where she lived with a professional cyclist who spent most of his spare time pedaling over the Alps in bottom gear and much of the remainder shaving his legs to eliminate wind resistance.

At least it allowed her space.

“Go home yourself,” Resnick said. “Get some sleep. And remember your box of plasters as well as your sensible shoes tomorrow. You’ll be doing house-to-house.”

Resnick went into the kitchen area and shifted Pepper far enough from the stove to set the kettle on the gas. He was spooning a mixture of dark continental and mocha into the filter when he realized he had been thinking about Rachel Chaplin for some minutes. Partly it was because of the little lecture she had delivered on caffeine before bedtime, but mainly it was the way he remembered her eyes. The way they held his gaze and refused to fade away. In some way or another she meant trouble for him, this Rachel Chaplin, and Resnick was unable to resist the feeling that a little trouble was his due.

He poured the boiling water over the ground coffee, reached for a clean glass and a bottle of Scotch and poured some of that, too. If he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, at least he could enjoy staying awake.

“Don’t say it!” warned Resnick. “Don’t say a thing.”