John Harvey: Lonely Hearts

He leaned his back against the corner of the stairwell, breathing heavily, unsteadily. DC Kellogg turned her head and gazed out over the park with its pitch-and-putt course, the domed church on the hill opposite, beyond that houses and the first glimpses of open country.

“Bloody lifts never work! It’s all right for youngsters like you. Take the stairs three at a time and keep smiling.”

Lynn Kellogg smiled. “First time I’ve ever heard you plead getting old, sir.”

Resnick levered himself away from the wall. “I’m not.”

Still smiling, she followed him along the landing, negotiating their way past two prams, one holding a sleeping child, the other a half-hundredweight of coal and the inside of a television.

Olive Peters showed them into a small living-room, dralon and plastic, a damp stain spreading out in dark, wavering rings from one corner of the ceiling. Her cheeks had sunk deep into her face and her mouth had all but disappeared, as if the dentures she normally wore had been mislaid, forgotten. Lacking yesterday’s makeup, gray creases strayed across her skin. The platinum blond hair had been pinned up haphazardly; her body shrunk inside a buttoned cardigan and skirt.

“I could make some tea…”

“Don’t trouble yourself.”

“It seems wrong,” she fidgeted. “When you’ve come out, like…”

“Mrs. Peters,” said Lynn Kellogg, getting up. “Why don’t I pop into the kitchen and make us a pot? Would you mind?”

She leaned back into her chair, relieved. “That’s it, duck, you mash.” And then, “There’s a packet of biscuits somewhere, you’ll see.”

“Lovely girl,” she said, turning to Resnick, and the tears began to flow again, easing themselves down her face.

Resnick leaned across and gave her his handkerchief, looked at the photograph of mother and daughter on the mantelpiece, crooked in a perspex frame, waited for the tea and biscuits.

Shirley Peters’s mother didn’t wait that long. “What makes me sick, when you catch the bastard he won’t swing for it!”

Something about the way she spoke jogged Resnick awake, made him realize that when she said “he”, she didn’t mean some anonymous, still-to-be-identified killer. She meant somebody specific.

“Tony,” she said, looking Resnick in the face, reading his thoughts in return. “He always said he’d do this to her. Tony. The bastard!”

In the kitchen the kettle whistled and then was still; Resnick quietly took out his notebook and fingered the cap from his pen.

DS Millington swung into the car park, driving too fast, as Resnick and Kellogg were closing the doors of the black saloon. Before there was time to climb the steps into the station, Millington was hurrying between them.

“Six witnesses. Six. All willing to testify to Peters’s common-law husband threatening her with violence.”

Resnick pushed through the glass door, nodded to the uniformed officer on duty and moved on towards the stairs.

“One couple, black, but never mind, can’t have everything, they remember it clearly, date, time, everything, wedding anniversary, that’s why. Got back from some do and there was all this going on in the middle of the street. You as much as sniff another man and I’ll bloody strangle you! , that’s what he came out with. They’ll swear to it.”

They were standing inside Resnick’s office now, Resnick’s face expressionless as he nodded, listening to the sergeant’s excited voice. Off to the side, Lynn Kellogg watching, a smile ready at the corners of her rounded mouth.

Millington clapped his hands emphatically. “Open and sodding shut!”

“Tony Macliesh.” Resnick’s tone was level, matter-of-fact.

Millington’s eyes grew wide, then narrowed to a slit. Resnick continued to look at a point some six inches above his sergeant’s head.

“If you knew…”

“I’ve sent Naylor and Divine to bring him in.”

Lynn Kellogg excused herself, hand to her mouth, bottling up the laughter as best she could until she reached the privacy of the ladies.

“Open and shut, Charlie. Is that what you think?”

Resnick was sitting in Skelton’s office, trying not to get annoyed at the way both in-tray and out-tray were arranged a precise quarter-inch from the edges of the desk, the blotter with its fountain pens, each containing different colored inks, pointing towards it at an angle of forty-five degrees. Equidistant from tile silver-framed calendar, photographs of Skelton’s wife and daughter, also silver-framed and smiling.

“Looks that way.”

Skelton nodded. “Run me through it.”

Resnick uncrossed his legs, crossed them again the other way. “Shirley Peters, thirty-nine. Last four years she’d worked for a computer software company near the old market square. Typist, switchboard, nothing specialized. Up till about eighteen months ago she’d been living with this Tony Macliesh. Her mother says they were together the best part of three years-though to hear her tell it, the best part was when she finally chucked him. He went off to Aberdeen to work on the rigs, she got on with her life and inside six months he was back and making a nuisance of himself. Arguments, threats; he’d be banging on the door in the middle of the night. She changed the locks, spent some nights with her mum, only of course that made it worse because he thought she’d been with a bloke.”

“Any complaints through us?” Skelton interrupted.

“Kellogg’s checking the files. There must have been something; a little over a year back she got a restraining order against him.”

“Effective?”

“Didn’t need to be. Macliesh got lifted for aggravated burglary and earned himself nine months in Lincoln. He’s not long out. One of the neighbors told Millington she saw him pacing up and down the street no more than two days back.”

Skelton leaned backwards, flexing his fingers and then cupping his hands behind his head. “File it away under domestic violence.”

“I think so.”

“No need to panic.”

“No.”

“You’ll get your other evidence?”

“Scene-of-crime turned up some hairs on the woman’s sweater that weren’t hers, scraping of skin under the forefinger of the right hand, male pubic hair around the pelvic…”

“I understood her to be fully clothed?”

Resnick looked at him. “Some people prefer it that way.”

The look he got in return was of no great interest, only mild surprise. Resnick had worked with Skelton for almost two years and if his superior’s self-control had slipped during that time, Resnick had not been aware of it.

“How does this fit in with your theory about Macliesh?” Skelton asked.

“If what was driving him was sexual jealousy, anything’s possible. And all traces of semen were outside the body, her abdomen, her…” Resnick left it there; if Skelton wanted to use his imagination, he could give it a try.

“All right, then, Charlie. You’re bringing him in?”

“I sent two men down to his digs. He’d got himself a room in Radford. They phoned in an hour ago to say he wasn’t there, but most of his stuff’s still in the room. They’re nosing around, other lodgers, the local. They’ll turn something up.”

Skelton stood up, glancing at his watch. Resnick wondered if, the second the door to the office was closed, Skelton would be logging the exact time the interview had finished in his Filofax.

Kevin Naylor spread the color charts across his desk and couldn’t remember whether Debbie had said peach or apricot. What was the difference anyway and how much did it matter? Something to do with the way it had to match the terracotta she’d already chosen for the tiles. Jesus! He’d always thought that getting married was a matter of finding a girl with the best qualities of your mother, but who wasn’t going to turn into her own at half-time. Then it came down to choosing your moment, plucking up courage, will you…? A bucketful of tears and a gold ring later and you put the deposit down on one of those new houses across from the canal.