Lonely Hearts (28 page)

Both the detective constables nodded in agreement.

“Questions at this point?”

“How did we get on to him, sir?” asked Naylor.

“Lynn here interviewed him as a matter of routine. Just one more bloke writing off to box numbers. She thought there was something funny about him.”

“That’s it?” Naylor said, surprised.

“He wasn’t what he seemed to be,” said Lynn, emphatically.

“What was he then?”

“He was…creepy.”

“We’re not so overburdened with suspects we can afford to ignore the gut reactions of detectives,” said Resnick, not wanting Naylor to show his lack of enthusiasm any further. “Especially when they’ve been proved right in the past.”

Thank you, Lynn Kellogg thought. Thank you for that.

Maybe Naylor’s spent too long teamed up with Divine, Resnick was thinking. Or perhaps that new mortgage and all that life insurance is weighing him down with care and safety.

“Is he at the poly or the university, sir, this bloke?”

“University. Linguistics and Critical Theory.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Buggered if I know for certain,” said Resnick. “But I know one thing, while you two are out snooping around, Patel is going to be finding out.”

Thinking a moment about Patel, Resnick wondered if the rye bread he was eating was the stuff they sent down by van from Bradford.

“How d’you want us to go about it, sir?” Lynn asked. Part of her wanted to take another shot at Doria, see if in some way she could confirm her initial feelings; against that, spending another twenty minutes alone with him in that office was close to the last thing she wanted to do.

“Kevin,” Resnick said, “Lynn got a list from Doria of all the women he claims to have met through these ads. It goes back two years and there are sixteen names.”

“I’m surprised he’s got the time,” said Naylor.

“No? You should see his timetable. With a workload like that he could manage sixteen women a week.”

Resnick glanced across at Lynn, worried in case he’d just said something sexist, but her expression gave away nothing. He wondered if she had been the one who’d ripped up Divine’s girlie calendar? One of these days he’d have to ask her.

“Anyway,” Resnick said, “I want you, Kevin, to go and talk to them. Just gently. Do they remember him? Where did they go, how did he strike them? Oh, and was it just the one date or more?”

“Yes, sir,” Naylor said, writing quickly in his notebook.

“Two years is a long time,” Resnick continued. “They might be in who knows what relationship by now; they might not want to be reminded. Nurse them along.”

Naylor blinked. “Urn, what, sir, am I looking for exactly?”

Did he try and strangle them with their own scarves or bash them to bits in their own back garden, Resnick said to himself.

“One,” he said aloud, “did any of them come away from this Doria with feelings in some sense similar to Lynn’s? Anything that suggests he might be a little bit odd.”

“Kinky, d’you mean, sir?”

“Not necessarily. But not necessarily not. And, yes, if there’s some way of finding out what went on sexually, if it did, that might be useful, too.”

Resnick leaned across and pointed to one name. “Marian Witczak. I know her. Seen her this morning. I’ll write it up and chuck it in with the rest, but for what it’s worth, she didn’t think he was strange at all. Bright as a button and charming as Fred Astaire.”

“I always thought he was creepy, too,” said Lynn.

“Fred Astaire?” Resnick and Naylor almost chorused.

“Yes. He’s so, oh, smarmy.”

“Tell that to Ginger Rogers,” said Resnick.

“Do you know,” Lynn said, sitting forward, “all those dances they did together, they never as much as kissed, off screen, I mean. I don’t think she even liked him.”

“Torvill and Dean,” said Naylor.

Resnick finished his sandwich and called the meeting back to order. “Lynn, spend some time hanging round the campus, use the bar, the cafeteria. Talk to some students, see if you can find anyone who takes one of his courses; even better, someone doing research, a student he’s likely to spend quite a bit of time with alone.”

Lynn looked up and nodded. “You don’t want me to go and talk to Doria again, sir?”

“No,” said Resnick. “Not yet.”

Halfway home, estate agents and clerical assistants sitting alone in their cars and inhaling one another’s lead and carbon monoxide, Resnick suddenly realized what he had failed to do. Failed to ask for. Annoyance at his own foolishness fired adrenaline through him and he swung out from the double line of traffic, warning lights flashing and headlights on full beam, one hand on the horn. Drivers heading in the opposite direction shouted and shook their fists, but moved over just the same. Resnick made a quarter of a mile before tagging across a series of residential side streets and finally skirting a roundabout that took him back into the same section of the city he had visited that morning.

“Charles,” Marian Witczak had the door held on the chain and was peering through the crack, surprise darkening her eyes. “Something is wrong?” She closed the door so as to free the chain. “Come in, come in, please.”

She looked at him anxiously, rubbing one hand against the apron she was wearing over her green dress. Instead of the soft leather shoes, there were thick multi-colored socks on her feet.

“I forgot…” Resnick began.

“About Doria? But I have already told…”

“No, but the letters. The letters he sent to you.”

“Yes?”

“You don’t happen to have kept them, I suppose?”

“Oh, Charles!” She laid her hand over his forearm, a gesture of affection. “Of course, they would have given you—what?—clues. That is what you policemen are always seeking. The one strand of yellow hair, a button torn from a jacket, the fatal footprint—see, Charles, I have read many mystery stories. Many.”

“But after you read the letters…” Resnick made an empty gesture with his hands.

Marian smiled a little, remembering. “Oh, I kept them, Charles.”

“You did?”

“My first love letters in twenty years. Almost twenty years. And I suppose I am not deluding myself to call them that. In the old-fashioned sense that is what he was doing, making love to me with his clever words, reassuring and clever—what he had been reading, seeing at the theater, exhibitions, experiences that we might share if only I would relent.”

Marian set a hand towards her face and lowered her cheek to meet it. The pendulum movement at Resnick’s back seemed unnaturally loud.

“Your visit this morning made me think—about why after that almost perfect evening he did not wish to see me again.” She let her hand slide clear of her face, not looking at Resnick now but instead at some invisible spot on the wall close by the door. “I think it was because he no longer felt it necessary. It was a game you see, a game of wits and he had won it. The moment my note to him arrived saying that, yes, I would be delighted to go to the concert with him, that was his victory. Of course, he had to carry the evening off in style, gain my approval further so that when we parted he would know that the instant he asked to see me again, I would so readily say yes.” She allowed herself a brief smile of regret. “For Doria, that was enough.”

“Not for you?” said Resnick softly.

The smile broadened, changed, faded. “Yes. No. Everything I have learned tells me that my answer should be yes, it was enough for me too.”

“But?”

“But if that had been his finger upon the bell, his face I saw when I opened the door…” She made a small shrugging movement with her shoulders. “I am sorry about the letters. If you had asked me as little as three months ago I could have taken you to the drawer and shown you them all.”

“Never mind,” Resnick said. “One of those things.”

“Those foolish things, eh, Charles?
The winds of March that make my heart a dancer
.” She half sang the lines, her accent more pronounced.
A telephone that rings, but who’s to answer?

She was standing close to him and her hands were in his; her eyes were glistening, but if there were tears waiting she was too proud to let them fall.

“Did you know an Englishman wrote that stupid song, Charles?”

“Jack Strachey,” said Resnick.

“What did he know of life?” Marian said.

Twenty-Seven

“Do you know there are idiots out there still dropping a postcard in the box, meet you by the lions eight o’clock, I’ll be the one with a ferret down me trousers, and there’s other bloody idiots trooping out there to meet ’em!”

Colin Rich had a mug of tea in one hand and a wedge of bread pudding in the other. He was leaning up against a plate-glass window, one story up. Resnick put temptation behind him and tasted the coffee from the urn.

“It’s as bad as these silly sods sticking bloody needles in themselves, or diddling some scrubber round the side of the pub without wacking a johnny on their plonker first. Daft bastards! Deserve what they bloody get!”

Resnick threw the coffee out of the window instead.

“How’s the intellectual life, Charlie?”

“Quiet, sir.”

“Did you go to university, Charlie, I can’t remember?” Skelton asked, scarcely looking up from the notes he was making with a meticulous hand.

“No, sir. Never got round to it somehow.”

“Lot of life on the campuses in those days, Charlie. Especially if you were in a bit of new red-brick. Spent more time sitting in and marching than studying, I’m afraid.”

Bet you got a First, though, didn’t you, sir? Resnick didn’t say.

“Matter of fact, anyone who dug deep enough into my record, they’d find me listed on a couple of Special Branch files—under Danger to the Security of the Realm, I shouldn’t wonder. Look at me now.”

Resnick did as he was told.

Skelton set aside his pen, screwing the cap back first. “Andy Hunt’s getting hot under the collar about the chap who works on the railway. Two women said he turned nasty when they wouldn’t let him have what he thought was his due at the end of the evening. Knocked one of them around a little, nothing too serious, though apparently she was sitting at the checkout at Sainsbury’s with a black eye for a week. The second one, however, that was nastier. Pulled a knife on her and held it to her throat while she…” the superintendent’s voice changed key…“masturbated him.”

“Didn’t report it at the time?”

Skelton shook his head. “Neither of them.”

“This second lass, any chance she’ll make a complaint now?”

“Unlikely. Doesn’t seem to think her husband will understand.”

“If it goes to court, it’ll come out whatever she wants.”

“Seems she’s prepared to take that risk. Besides…”

“You don’t reckon him?”

“Agreed to an intimate search right off. Paid no attention to his solicitor warning him not to. No comeback from forensic yet, but my bet is that the results will clear him, no matter how much Andy wants it to go the other way.”

“Somebody ought to have words with that man about his courting technique.”

“Don’t worry,” said Skelton. “Unofficially, somebody will. I thought I’d let Rich read him a sermon or two. Potential serious crime, after all.”

“At least they’ll talk the same language.”

Skelton uncapped his fountain pen, thought about writing something, stopped.

“My hopes lie with this laddie Bernard Grafton’s come up with.”

“His psychiatric case.”

“Exactly. Spent nine months in residential care after finding himself up in court for exposing himself outside the nurses’ home.”

“Wasting his time there, sir,” said Resnick. “They must be sick of it.”

“There was some doubt about his intentions; he was worried himself he might have attacked one of them on her way back off shift. Nothing happened, other than in his mind, so there wasn’t any charge. But the probation officer put in a pretty useful Social Enquiry Report and hence the treatment. Apparently…” Skelton turned over some pieces of paper on his desk until he found the correct one…“while he was a patient he asked for a drug which would curb his sexual urges and was put on a course of Androcur. Things improved, chappie was released but the medication was terminated.”

“Things deteriorated,” put in Resnick.

“Quite. Nevertheless, by this time he’d given up being a Peeping Tom for more legal diversions.”

“I think I can guess,” said Resnick.

“He wrote off to two-dozen women in the space of three months and five of them agreed to meet him. One of these he passed up on, hasn’t said why. One look at her outside the wherever it was and he scarpered. But the other four—well, they’re still being interviewed, though none of them seem to have been in any doubt that they’d got themselves saddled with a right funny one. We should have full statements by this time tomorrow.”

“Sounds interesting, sir,” agreed Resnick, almost reluctantly.

Skelton stood up behind his desk, tapping the end of his pen lightly against it. “Tell you something you’ll likely find even more interesting, Charlie.”

“Yes, sir?”

“The fifth woman, the one he walked away from, according to him she was Shirley Peters.”

The melody of “Moonlight Serenade” was unmistakable. Resnick zipped himself up and ran the tap as the toilet flushed and Graham Millington emerged, still whistling.

“It
is
you,” Resnick said, drying his hands.

“Sir?”

“Glenn Miller all over the place.”

“Yes, sir.” Millington squinted at his mustache in the mirror; why did it always seem fuller on the left than the right, no matter how carefully he trimmed it? “I’ve got this tape I play in the car.”

“Don’t you get fed up with it?”

“No, sir. That is, I don’t know really.” He shrugged, waiting for Resnick to finish with the roller towel. “Never thought about it, I suppose.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“Sir?”

“Think about it. For the sake of the rest of us.”

“Right, sir.” What is he on about, thought Millington, bemused. What’s Glenn Miller got to do with anything?

“Anything fresh on your wrestler?” Resnick asked. They were heading back towards the CID room.