Lonely Hearts (5 page)

“What are the chances of finding him a hostel place?” asked one of the other workers.

Rachel picked up her phone on the second ring. “Social Services,” she said.

“Hello, this is Charlie Resnick.”

“I’m sorry. Who did you say?”

“Resnick. We met in court. You were there with Mrs. Taylor.”

Charlie, Rachel was thinking. His name is Charlie!

“What can I do for you, Inspector?”

“I was just wondering…”

“Look, I’m in a meeting at the moment. Can I ring you back?”

“A drink,” Resnick said. “How about a drink after work?”

“We might be able to get one of the project foster parents to take him on short-term,” someone near her suggested.

“I don’t know what time this will get sorted,” Rachel said into the phone.

“You don’t think there’s any chance at all of keeping things as they are?” Rachel said into the room. “Are we all saying that that’s just not on?”

“How about six-thirty?” asked Resnick.

“Make it seven.”

“Where?”

“Could we try Buxton?” Rachel said.

“Isn’t fifty miles rather a long way to go for a drink?” said Resnick.

“I wasn’t talking to you. Unless you’d like to foster a wayward but charming teenager.”

“Not tonight.”

“All right then. You know the Peach Tree?”

“Yes.”

“Seven o’clock.”

She put down the phone and got on with her meeting.

All over the city, these past few years, local pubs had been stripped and gutted, painted and refitted, finally re-emerging as wine bars, cocktail bars, theme bars, simply bars. Resnick reckoned the manufacturers of strip lighting and nostalgia posters must have their Christmas holidays in the Bahamas on permanent reservation. This place was less than two hundred yards from his station, yet he hadn’t been inside it since the day the refurbishers had moved in.

Now he pushed between a pair of frosted glass doors and found himself among a crowd of fashionable young people shouting at each other over pre-recorded music. Ah! thought Resnick knowledgeably, the Happy Hour crowd. One thing about browsing the color supplements—it kept you up-to-date with life the way some folk lived it.

It was three-deep to the curve of the downstairs bar, so Resnick found the stairs at the back and climbed up into a “living” video. Set amongst hi-tech furniture, green plants, and cream-colored blinds was a vision of money wearing money.

He had turned and was starting on his way back down when he saw Rachel at the foot of the stairs.

“Don’t believe in waiting long, do you?” She was wearing a white shirt, large and loose, belted over deep blue cords, a black blouson jacket with wide epaulettes. Only the boots appeared to be the same as before.

“I thought I might have missed you downstairs.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “D’you want to come down?”

“Not really.”

A smile came to the edges of her mouth. “You want to stay up there?”

“Not really.”

Rachel marched up the steps smartly, turned him round, and moved him towards the bar. “Come on, since we’re here, I’ll buy you a drink.”

They found a small table at the front, looking down at the traffic driving up the hill from the city through the rain that had started to fall again.

“Last time I came here,” Resnick said, “it was an Irish pub with cheese and onion cobs and good Guinness. The backroom downstairs was carved straight out of the rock and they had a juke box in there with the best selection of rock ‘n’ roll in the city. Played it so loud on a Saturday night, pieces used to flake off the walls and fall into your pint.”

Rachel listened, sipping her white wine and soda. “When you phoned, I couldn’t think who you were.”

“I know. I make that impression on people.”

“At work sometimes, it’s impossible to think about anything else. I mean, outside.” She lifted her glass but set it down again. “It must be the same for you.”

“With me it’s the opposite.”

She thought about that a little and smiled. “I don’t believe you.”

“Ah,” said Resnick, leaning back in his chair.

Why were they talking like this?

“Anyway,” said Rachel, “I’m sorry you don’t approve of the pub. At least it’s pretty quiet up here. You can usually get a seat if it’s early enough.” She stopped talking abruptly, struck by the thought that she was saying too much, filling the silence. She looked at him, waiting until he looked back at her. “I come here with Chris sometimes.”

“Who’s she?”

“He.”

Resnick was still looking at her; he took a couple of swallows from his glass.

“Who’s he?”

“The man I live with.”

He drained his glass as he stood up. “I’ll get you another.”

“No, I’m okay,” Rachel said.

He brought her one anyway. Typical bloody male, Rachel thought, making sure he saw her pushing the glass away and continuing to sip at the first.

“It’s not against the law,” she said. “Living with somebody.”

“No.”

“You don’t approve.”

“Don’t I?”

“Your face didn’t.”

“I wasn’t being moral.”

“I’m relieved.”

He shrugged his shoulders. He might not be too bad-looking, Rachel was thinking, if only he’d lose a little weight.

“Maybe I was surprised. I didn’t think of you as living with someone, that’s all. It wasn’t the picture I had of you.”

“Not the way I present myself?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t mean you have to wear purdah, you know. Being in a relationship.”

“No,” said Resnick. “I don’t suppose it does.” More the hair shirt, he thought, sackcloth and ashes. He didn’t say so; he didn’t imagine she’d go for the poor chest-beating male routine.

“What picture did you have of me?” Rachel asked.

There were people standing between the tables now, uncertain whether it was more important to be overheard or overseen.

Resnick was holding his glass against his chest; for a few moments she was afraid he was going to try and balance it there. “I don’t know.”

“But it didn’t include myself and a man…and Chris?”

“No.”

“I give off that sort of aura, do I? I must watch out. Some woman on her own, just about getting along. Home at nights to hot chocolate, a moth-eaten teddy bear, and reruns of
Rhoda
.” She had started on the second glass of wine without really noticing. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what interests you. You thought I was some woman like the one I read about in today’s paper. The case you’re investigating. Single woman in her thirties found murdered in her own living room. What was her name?”

“Shirley Peters,” Resnick said, leaning forward.

“Right. Well, that’s it, isn’t it? That explains the sudden invitation to a drink. Instant analysis, part five. I thought when I put the phone down in the office, hello, Rachel, you’ve made an impression this time. But, no. What you see in me is a bit of living insight. Sex and the single girl. Well, sorry, Inspector, but I’m not volunteering. I live with a social worker so I take the job home too often as it is. I’ve had stereotypes and syndromes and role-play re-enactments with my Shreddies for so long I just cover them with sugar and they all go down the same way.”

She was close to shouting; a few people were looking round but no one seemed to notice overmuch. Resnick didn’t respond; he sat there looking across at her as she sank back the rest of her wine, swung her bag up from the back of her chair and on to her arm, and pushed her way through the crowd.

One hell of a way to end the day! thought Resnick. One hell of a way to start the evening! And he hadn’t even wanted to talk to her about Shirley Peters: he had hoped she might be able to get him some information about Tony Macliesh. Through the blur of the window he watched her cross the road to her car and wondered what was putting her under so much pressure.

Patel saw the red Porsche at two hundred-plus yards, despite the rain driving in on his face. Seen anywhere else, he might not have given it a second look, but there, in that street, parked in front of that house.

Leave this one alone, Resnick had told him that morning, get back to the break-ins. You know the routine: question and answer. The same numbing procedure that had gone on too long. Houses where all the occupants were at work, no use in calling until way after six. Now there was a pain stretching across between his shoulder blades—all those kitchen tables he had leaned over, filling in the forms. Question and answer. Officially, he’d come off duty at three that afternoon.

“Is it Mrs. Peters you’re looking for?” Patel asked. The woman who turned from the door, sheltering beneath a transparent umbrella, surveyed him with her head held to one side.

“Shirl, yeh. Why, sunshine?”

Patel took out his warrant card, shielding it from the rain as best he could. The woman looked at him with surprise, her glossed mouth forming a soundless, “Oh!”

“You are a friend, perhaps?”

“No perhaps about it.” She nodded towards the Porsche. “Just drove up to see her.”

“I wonder if…”

She beckoned him with a glitter-red fingernail. “Come closer then. No point in getting wet for nothing.”

She was wearing, thought Patel, too much perfume, too much makeup; below her short white fur coat, her legs shone in shiny black plastic trousers. For a young man of simple tastes, she was altogether too much.

“What’s happened then?” And seeing the pain flinching at the back of Patel’s soft brown eyes, she touched his arm lightly with her free hand. “You can tell me, you know. I ain’t about to throw a wobbler or anything.”

Patel sucked in air. “There was a…your friend is dead. She was…”

“Don’t be bloody stupid!”

“I’m afraid she was murdered.”

The umbrella slipped from the woman’s hand and, automatically, Patel caught it and held it close above her head. He looked into her face for tears and all he saw was anger.

“The stupid, stupid bitch! The stupid sodding cow! How many times? How many times did I tell her this would bloody happen?”

She stared at Patel hard, their faces close together, rain springing back from the plastic of the umbrella, the concrete below their feet. He watched her mouth open and for one delirious moment thought she was about to sink her teeth into the soft flesh of his lip.

“All right,” she said. “I’d better follow you up the station.”

She pulled her umbrella away from Patel and he turned full-face into the rain.

Six

Chris Phillips was stretched out on the settee in front of the fire, one leg hooked over its low back. A beige Labrador was spread across the rug between settee and fire, growling lightly into the towel that Phillips had used to dry the dog down after their evening walk. A card-index box balanced on Phillips’s stomach and a brace of pink files was clamped between his knees; pieces of stationery, all bearing the name of the local authority, were scattered within arm’s reach. If he hadn’t been writing on one of the cards when Rachel came into the room he might have looked up and seen the expression on her face, in which case he might not have spoken at all. He certainly would not have called out, “Surprise, surprise!” in his usual tone of affectionate irony.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Rachel.

Phillips looked up at the sharpness in her voice.

The Labrador took its piece of towel and dropped it across Rachel’s feet.

“I wasn’t expecting you back so soon, that’s all,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean that. I…”

“I can sit in the kitchen if you’re working.”

Phillips released a breath, close to a sigh. “I thought you were meeting someone.” He lifted the box and folders away and turned round. “I thought you were going for a drink.”

“I was,” Rachel’s voice came back from the kitchen.

“And?”

“And I had a drink and now I’m back here.”

He leaned forward and retrieved the card he’d been writing on, quickly finished making his annotation, slotted the card back into place. He knew how he should react to Rachel when she was like this, knew that what he had to do was leave her alone, let her sort her own way out of it.

“I was just about to have a Scotch,” he said, leaning against the kitchen doorway.

She swung her head towards him as if to say, good for you.

“Want to join me?”

“No.”

“Might make you feel better.”

“No.”

Somehow he’d managed to close out the sound of the rain so completely that when he went out into the garden the fierceness of it took him by surprise. The dog had run out after him and now hunched back near some roses that were waiting to be cut back, looking at him hopefully through the gloom. You want to play ball, don’t you? You want to go for another walk?

Through the blurred square of the window he could make out the dark twist of Rachel’s hair as she moved back and forth between the cooker and the sink.

The Labrador’s coat was soaked already, his nose slick and his eyes bright.

All right, he knew she was having a tough time at work, this placement breaking down on top of everything else, a kid she’d really struggled for. But why did she have to hold so much into herself, why try so hard to keep him out, as if admitting any kind of weakness was showing a crack through which he could slide his hand and hang on? And besides, his day hadn’t exactly been a cake-walk. A couple of kids with so much solvent up their noses that breathing was more or less impossible; a woman who’d barricaded herself into her flat on the thirteenth floor and threatened to chop off her fingers if she weren’t left alone; an old man all but dead from hypothermia, who’d fallen over and lain for two days with the carpet wrapped around him until Meals on Wheels raised the alarm. She wasn’t the only one with things to feel bad about.

When he walked back into the house, water running down his face, Rachel had left the kitchen and the kettle was coming up to the boil, beginning its shrill whistle.