Lonely Hearts (25 page)

“I’ve been reading through the stuff on Sloman again, Charlie,” Skelton said. “You don’t think we gave up on that too easily?”

“We’ve got half an eye on him, sir.”

“Whereas we did have him in the station. Voluntarily. No question of a charge, no solicitor, simply a chat. We thanked him very much and showed him the door.”

“It was put up or shut up, sir.”

“You don’t think somebody else might have got more out of him?”

“I think if Millington had come out of there and, say, I’d gone in, started asking more questions, putting him back over the same ground, I think then he would have got the wind up.”

“You didn’t want another Macliesh?”

“That’s part of it.”

“The rest?”

Resnick half-shrugged. “Just didn’t feel right.”

“You’ll be fingering seaweed next, Charlie. Reading tea leaves or the I Ching.”

“You want me to pull him in again, sir, then of course…”

“I don’t think so. But your sergeant does.”

“Millington? He’s been to see you about it, sir. I mean, direct?”

Skelton held out his hands in a gesture of pacification. “He’s not been behind your back, Charlie. Nothing like that. A word in the corridor, that’s all it was. In passing. A question from me, a remark from him in return. Anything more and I’d want it through the proper channels.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tendency towards the purblind, Millington, but not a bad copper for all that.”

Resnick nodded.

“I think like the rest of us—everyone except those civilians and their software—I’m hoping against hope we won’t be forced into phase two.”

“Phase two, gentlemen, brings with it a widening out of the inquiry.”

“And enough perforated bloody paper to keep a ward full of gastric cases going,” voiced Colin Rich at the rear of the room.

“On the one hand this means we start to check all of the marriage bureaux and dating agencies. To begin with we’ll restrict this to the city; if necessary we shall extend throughout the county. Nationwide agencies whose files are already computerized will allow us to access them for local names and addresses as soon as we provide them with the necessary warrants.”

Skelton paused to worry something stuck between his teeth with his tongue.

“Those little back hairs,” said Rich, “they get everywhere.”

“With surgery,” Resnick told him, “you could probably have your brain moved back above your waist.”

“The second and murkier avenue,” Skelton was saying, “is contact magazines. There are a number of these readily available in the city. Sometimes an entire magazine devoted to people looking specifically for sexual partners, sometimes a section in one of the girlie mags you can buy at any newsagents.”

“As long as they’re called Patel,” laughed Rich.

“If we broaden out the inquiry along these lines,” said Skelton, “I don’t need to spell out the size of the task. Nor the importance of stressing to your teams the need for careful work, methodical and precise.”

Outside there were streaks of cloud like skid marks across a pale blue sky. The frost that had fringed gardens and roofs that morning had barely disappeared. A couple more hours and the light would begin to go. Lynn Kellogg thought about her father, fussing around the long, jerry-built hen houses, the last half-inch of an extinguished cigarette tight between bloodless lips. Inside the house, her mother’s voice rising and fading over snatches of misremembered
Family Favourites:
“Oh, Bella Margareta”, “Shrimpboats are a-Coming”, “Buttermilk Sky”. There would be bread rising in the cupboard beneath the boiler; soup beginning to simmer on the stove. The smell of carbolic soap and chickens.

She took a tea and a cheese and onion sandwich and went to join Kevin Naylor, who was sitting with the remnants of double egg and chips, thoughtfully worrying over the entries he was making in a small black diary.

“Join you?”

“Yes, course. There.” He pushed the plate along towards one end of the table, folded the diary closed over his yellow Bic.

Lynn had seen two columns of figures, small writing, sloping backwards, alongside each. “Trying to make ends meet?”

Naylor shook his head. “I was listening to the radio driving in this morning. Some woman from the Royal College of Nursing going on about how badly they were paid compared to the police.”

“What are you saying?”

“I get fed up with hearing it.”

“Not as much as the nurses.”

“I dare say. That’s no reason for us to be passed off as earning a fortune.”

“We earn a sight more than they do. Double nearly, starting anyway.”

“It’s a different issue.” He glanced round the canteen, worried in case he’d made his point too loudly. “Debbie says all that happens is the public end up thinking we’re overpaid, when what’s happening is that the nurses are underpaid.”

“Right,” agreed Lynn. Why did they have to grate the cheese before putting it into the sandwiches? All that happened was that it fell out all over the table.

“It’s those blokes down in the City they want to go after, not…”

“Come on, Kevin, nobody’s going after us.”

“Yuppies making sixty thousand a year…”

“We get a decent wage and others should get the same.”

“A year ago, I never knew what a yuppie was. Well, did you?”

Lynn raised a hand to greet someone across the room. Usually when you sat with Kevin it was a wonder to get more than a dozen words out of him.

“Anyway,” he said, “I don’t see as it is that much. Now we’ve taken on this new house…”

“Between the two of you, though, you must be bringing in a good bit.”

Naylor mumbled something inaudible.

“Skiing in Italy as well as a summer holiday. Or was it Austria?”

“That was Debbie’s idea, not mine.”

“Still, you could afford to go.”

“Good job we did.”

“What’s that mean?”

“When we could, that’s what it means.”

“She hasn’t lost her job? Kevin, they haven’t made her redundant?”

He fiddled with the top of his pen, pushed his diary around the table. “More like I have,” he said, not looking at her.

“What are you on about? You’ve not had a row, I mean you haven’t split up? You…” She reached across the table and took hold of his arm. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

He looked around anxiously, waved his hand at her to keep her voice down. “That’s it, tell everybody.”

“Why ever not? Aren’t you pleased? You must be really chuffed. How long have you known?”

“It’s only just…I mean, we thought, she thought, you know…but for definite, just this last few days.”

“That’s great! I’m really excited for you. Both of you. How’s Debbie? I bet she’s thrilled.”

“Sick.”

“Hmm?”

“She’s sick. Every morning. Half-past four every morning, there she goes, out to the bathroom.”

“But that’ll soon pass.”

“I hope so.”

“Kevin, it’s not you that’s in there throwing up.”

“I sometimes think I might as well be.”

“Oh, Kevin, stop it! You make it sound like a disaster. She hasn’t found out she’s suffering from some fatal disease, you know. It’s a baby!”

“Keep your voice down!”

“I don’t understand this,” Lynn laughed. “You should be dead proud. Walking round telling everyone. Writing it on walls. I know I should be.”

“You haven’t been sitting here trying to balance next year’s budget.”

“No. And I haven’t been worrying myself silly over radiation levels or the next ice age or whether I’m going to be hit by a bus the next time I step out into the street.”

“I suppose you’re right. It’s just that, well, we’d begun to get on our feet, put a bit of money away.”

“Kevin, Kevin!” said Lynn, shaking her head.

“What’s wrong now?”

“Listen to yourself. You sound like my parents when I was a kid: scrimping and saving over every penny, a little in a shoe box under the bed for emergencies, coppers in an old marmalade jar for Christmas—start filling up New Year’s Day and you might have enough for presents and a bottle of brandy.”

He looked at her seriously. “I don’t see what’s so terrible about that.”

Lynn smiled ruefully and pushed back her chair. “I’ve got someone to see out at the university.”

“Better get going myself.”

“Give Debbie congratulations from me.”

“All right. Only, Lynn…”

“Um?”

“Don’t, you know, spread it about. Once Divine gets hold of it—you can imagine what he’ll say.”

Quickly, she leaned back towards him. “What Mark Divine has to say is worth less than a fart in a thunderstorm. He’s got two ideas in his head—and they’re both the same. And if you’re going to let the likes of him run your life for you, you’re less the bloke than I thought you were.”

Patel was around the corner of the CID room, typing up reports on the interviews he’d made that day—a greengrocer seeking solace from seven kids and the irregularities of the rhythm method, a refugee from Colombia who wanted to combine visits to the cinema with language lessons, a chartered accountant who was contemplating suing a dating agency after three successive mismatches by their computer.

Two others sat in a huddle over their notebooks while around them phones sputtered to life at intervals.

Lynn Kellogg came in briskly, went straight to Mark Divine’s desk by the window, lifted the calendar now displaying Miss November from where it was hanging and tore it into half, then half again. With a satisfied slap of the hands she dropped the pieces into the nearest metal wastepaper bin and left.

In her wake even the phones stopped ringing.

The narrow road that wound through the university campus was all hills, right-angle bends, and ramps. After wasting five minutes looking for a parking space, she left the car on the grass above the lake and walked up the broad stone steps to the nearest entrance.

Behind a desk and grille, a porter in a dark blue uniform was speaking into a walkie-talkie.

“Professor Doria,” she said.

Words fell apart against a hail of static and atmospherics. “Useless blasted thing!”

“I’ve an appointment with a Professor Doria.”

“Might as well give us some of them tom-tom drums, stand as much chance of making yourself understood.”

“I’m supposed to be seeing him at a quarter-past three.”

“Interview, is it?”

“Sort of.”

“We get a lot of mature students coming here these days. Can’t say as I can see why. You’d have thought ’em old enough to know better.”

Lynn searched his face for some sign that he was making a joke.

“You want the next building,” the porter said. “Out of here and sharp right, through the car park and through the arch, you want the door to your left. There’s a porter there—ask him.”

She didn’t bother. Along a corridor devoid of students or any other form of life, she found the name—Professor W.J. Doria—in white letters cut into a dark wooden strip and fastened beneath the frosted glass panel of the door.

She knocked, paused and listened, was about to knock again when the door was thrown open and she had a sudden impression of a mass of dark hair, a strong nose, two gesticulating arms ushering her inside.

“Professor Doria?”

Outside, above the building, the clock sounded the single note for the quarter-hour.

Twenty-Four

Rachel didn’t phone again. Days passed. Resnick looked up the number of the Social Services office a couple of times and went no further. The DCI got all hot and bothered about a pork butcher from Gedling with a record of petty theft that had escalated on two occasions to aggravated burglary. When he was brought in for questioning his photograph was in the local newspaper and middle-aged women threw refuse at him when he was bundled across the street. Suzanne Olds had a field day and there were threats of a suit for harassment and unlawful arrest. Pepper’s stomach blew up like a balloon and Resnick hurried him to the vet before he exploded all over the living-room carpet. Debbie stopped being sick. Behind Lynn’s back, Mark Divine swore at her viciously, but whenever she walked into the office he lapsed into an angry, wordless grumbling. Graham Millington stopped by the record shop and talked to Geoff Sloman for an hour and the only thing he came away with was a new Sandie Shaw EP that he played once and promptly forgot. Jack Skelton was now getting up at half-four, so that he could run five miles before getting into work by six, but it didn’t make any difference.

What made Lynn go down to the incident room and get a copy of the computer print-out she could never be certain. It did worry her, days and weeks afterwards, that she had waited so long. All she could put her slackness down to were the images of babies, floating effortlessly and unbidden, around and around inside her head.

That was easier to understand.

The conversation with Kevin Naylor, his reluctance either to accept or celebrate.
You should be dead proud. Walking round telling everyone. Writing it on walls. I know I should be
. If Naylor was normally taciturn, he was Bamber Gascoigne and Russell Harty rolled into one when set against her Dennis. Dennis who went through life with all the expressiveness and verbal eloquence of the Man in the Iron Mask. She thought they had last made love five weeks ago, after
EastEnders
and before he nipped down the road for an unofficial meeting of the Osprey Wheelers in the side room of the pub.

Not only a cyclist, but a cyclist whose other hobby was ornithology.

Much as she hated the old joke about the woman officer who was the station bike, Lynn thought the only way she might raise some excitement from Dennis would be to kit herself out with a racing saddle and a pair of drop handlebars.

“Do you ever think about having kids? The two of us. Together.”

He was asleep, dreaming of sighting a ptarmigan while winning the final stage of the Tour de France.

“Sir?”

She knocked and put her head round the door. Resnick was rereading a report he’d already been through twice without taking anything in. There were scores of others, milling around on the desk. It was becoming close to impossible: no way did they have the personnel to keep up with the spread of action the computer was generating.