Lonely Hearts (37 page)
Rachel left the phone off the hook.
“Sir! Sir!”
The yellowing eyelids flickered, stilled, flickered again; finally, Sally Oakes’s eyes stayed open and slowly tried to focus.
“You must be careful,” the doctor warned, touching Resnick’s arm as he went forward. “She’s in a critical condition.”
Resnick nodded. He sat opposite Lynn Kellogg, both of them watching anxiously as Sally Oakes’s eyes fixed first on one, then the other. Recognizing them, she began to cry.
Rachel was leaning back on the settee, stroking Bud and reading through some typed pages she had found on the table, somebody’s notes about Professor Doria, an explanation, of sorts, of a lecture he had given at the university.
Excess is essential in literature, in art as well as society, because of its power to challenge from the inside and help to dismantle traditional and hidebound structures. It is for this reason that Repression, with its opposition to Excess, is always to be fought against and denied.
She felt the cat tense against her hand and a moment later the knock at the door.
Oh, come on, Charlie! Give me your spare keys and then forget your own.
“Excuse me, little one,” Rachel said, depositing Bud on the back of the settee, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The slight hesitation of warning that Rachel felt as she was turning the handle was too little and too late.
“Miss Chaplin. Rachel. Such a surprise.”
“Professor.”
He already had one foot across the threshold. “I called to speak with the inspector.” His eyes were reaching past her. “He’s here?”
“Is it important?”
“Oh, yes. Yes. I’m afraid it is. Otherwise…” He placed his hand against the frame of the door. “…one doesn’t like to call unannounced.”
Rachel’s mind was racing too fast for her to think with any clarity. “If you wouldn’t mind call back later. An hour perhaps.”
Doria’s face slid into a lingering smile. “An hour, Rachel. What difference would an hour make now?”
“We were just going to eat.”
“He’s here then. Call him. No need for good food to go cold and spoil.”
Rachel brought the door back towards her and then pushed it forward fast, throwing all her weight against it. Doria’s arm braced and slowly started to straighten: he was surprisingly strong.
Resnick knew that within minutes the doctor would insist on their leaving and there would be nothing he could do to resist. A nurse sat with her arms behind one of the pillows, holding Sally so that her back was clear of the bed. Lynn Kellogg held a notebook in front of her, Resnick steadied the pencil as she struggled to write.
Sounds came intermittently from behind the wired jaw but unintelligibly. All they could do was share the girl’s pain as she forced letters through their crazed journey across the page.
The first Resnick understood immediately, watched with impatience as Sally’s fingers forced down on the book.
DORIA
She began to write her own name then, partway through, the pencil slipping with a thick stroke diagonally across the page. Her eyes found Resnick’s, willing him to understand. He nodded, waiting for her to continue. Again a line through her name, an emphatic dropping of her head that made her moan and had the doctor stretching past Resnick with concern.
“You’ll have to leave.”
“One more minute.”
“Tomorrow, when she’s rested.”
“Look, there. She wants to say something.”
Sally tapped pencil against paper, her eyes moved imploringly towards Lynn Kellogg, the doctor, back to the paper. Falteringly, her fingers shifted their grip and began another word.
R
Me, Resnick thought, she’s going to write my name?
RA
What’s going on?
RACH
“Rachel!” Resnick said, face close to hers. “Is that it, Rachel?”
Sally Oakes’s eyes moved up and down inside their sockets, saying, yes, yes.
“What about her, Sally? What about her?”
“Inspector! You must leave the girl alone.” Resnick shrugged away the doctor’s hand. Sally Oakes was willing him to look at the pages on which she had written. Her eyes were beginning to close though. The doctor signaled to the nurse, who carefully began to lower the pillow back down against the others.
“Doria and Sally,” Lynn Kellogg said. “Then why somebody else, why…?”
Resnick was staring at the lines the girl had scored through her own name before writing Rachel’s in its place.
“When this happened,” he said, leaning now right across the bed, “he wasn’t doing it to Sally, he didn’t call you Sally, but Rachel. Is that it? Is that what you’re saying?”
Yes, said Sally Oakes’s eyes, just once before they closed. Yes.
Resnick was already running down the ward, Lynn Kellogg in his wake.
Rachel was backed up against the empty fireplace. The sound of her breathing was unnaturally loud, lips slightly parted. If she made a dash back towards the front door, to her right in the direction of the kitchen where she might find a weapon with which to defend herself, she knew that Doria would attack.
Whereas now he sat on the arm of a comfortable chair, that confident smile across his face and the teasing quality in his voice that was clear to her from the disguised call to her office.
With one hand he was loosely holding Patel’s notes, while the fingers of the other pushed into Dizzy’s fur, the cat purring with pleasure.
“It seems I misjudged him, this young man from the great subcontinent, there are errors here, naturally, but for one new to the subject, he shows a good understanding.” The smile froze, the fingers ceased to move and the cat went up on to its hind legs, pushing his head against Doria’s hand. “Deconstruction, possibly you have a little knowledge of it yourself? No? Ah, well. It seems there are others who do. More understanding than I might have wished. Yourself, for instance, the nature of your profession—understanding. Wouldn’t you say?”
Rachel nodded.
“What you and your kind like to call the weaknesses of others. To be treated with compassion, therapy. Not like the answer our mutual friend, the inspector, lives by. Punishment. Incarceration. Repression.” Dizzy nuzzled against him again and smartly, with the back of his hand, Doria knocked him away into the center of the room.
The cat squealed, spat, and ran.
Rachel gasped and made half a move forwards.
“He does know, doesn’t he, your inspector? He does know.”
“Yes,” Rachel breathed.
“And you,” said Doria. “You know.”
Rachel ran for the kitchen. She heard him behind her, glimpsed him from the corner of her eye. With a slam she threw two doors closed and each, in turn, was pushed open. She banged her hip painfully against the table, jerked open a drawer, another, too far, the contents spilling out around her feet and across the floor.
Inside the room, watching, Doria leaned back on the door and laughed.
Rachel, shuddering, saw the bread knife beside the board and seized it between the fingers of her right hand.
“Carole,” Resnick said, his voice unnaturally high, “Rachel, is she there?”
“Who is that?”
“Christ! Resnick, Charlie Resnick. Is she with you?”
“I thought she was at your house. She told me she was going to take back the keys you…”
He ran for the car; Lynn Kellogg was behind the wheel with the engine running.
“My place,” he said. “Fast. I’ll call through to the station as we go.”
He imagined, he didn’t know what he imagined, trying to blank out the worst excesses of his imagination and never quite being able, all through that drive that seemed endless but was less than ten minutes. All the while wanting to be driving himself, yet knowing that they would arrive no more quickly and, besides, trusting Lynn’s co-ordination more than his own.
“Which side of the street, sir?”
“There, left. There!”
Resnick jumped clear of the car too soon, buckled over and was close to losing his footing. Stumbling, he steadied himself against the open gate; stopped, finally, where Rachel was standing, quite still, looking back towards the house with Bud cradled within her arms.
At the first movement of his arm about her shoulders, she flinched.
“Are you okay?”
Her head moved up and then down, slowly.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“He was here, Doria?”
“Oh, yes.” Rachel continued to stare back at the house.
Resnick moved his arm away and motioned for Lynn Kellogg to come and look after Rachel. Police sirens could be heard, distant but getting closer.
There was blood on the hall carpet and Resnick thanked God that it was not Rachel’s blood. There was blood in thick clusters on the treads of the stairs, blood smeared over the walls and along the banister. Blood darkening the length of the landing until it stopped at the door to the small bedroom at the back of the house.
With the outside of his shoe, Resnick pushed at the door. Something stopped it and it would open no further. He set his weight against it, just enough to squeeze inside the room.
Doria lay, what seemed like pieces of him, close against the small bed. Where he had hacked at himself with that blunt, serrated weapon more blood had splashed up on to the walls, to join the paint Resnick had so zealously applied. Even so, here and there, fragments of the nursery showed through.
The final thing Doria had done was to slice open his throat.
Resnick, sick, pushed open the window and saw, below, Rachel Chaplin being led towards a waiting ambulance.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The lines on page 91 are from
I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good
, by Keith Jafrate, published in
Jump!
(Slow Dancer Press 1988).
The lines on page 189 are from
I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You
, © 1932 American Academy of Music Inc. reprinted by permission of Columbia Pictures Publications/International Music Publications.
The lines on page 220 are from
These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)
, by Harry Link, Eric Maschwitz, and John Strachey, reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
copyright © 1989 by John Harvey
This edition published in 2012 by
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