Lonely Hearts

Twenty

The principal item at the morning briefing was a confirmation from forensic: analysis of semen deposited at the scene of both crimes yielded a positive comparison. Male pubic hair found on the body of Shirley Peters and in Mary Sheppard’s bed was also of the same type. Skin samples from beneath Shirley Peter’s fingernails were not a conclusive match with those taken from Mary Sheppard. A small number of wool fibers removed from the carpet of the room in which Shirley Peters was found as well as from the settee neither matched each other nor anything connected with Mary Sheppard.

“The assumption we are working on, therefore,” said Skelton, “is that both murders were the work of the same man.”

“Bloody brilliant!” said Colin Rich to no one in particular.

“What about the different MO?” asked Grafton.

“Forensic evidence and now the apparent link through personal columns, which seems to have been confirmed by a member of Inspector Resnick’s team, seem more important. But not conclusive.”

“As long as we’re aware of the dangers of tunneling our vision too soon,” put in Tom Parker, “that’s the line we’re taking. We’re looking for one man.”

The names and addresses of female advertisers were being entered on the computer and each would be contacted and, as far as possible, a list of those from whom they had received replies would be taken and accessed. These names would be crosschecked and then matched with the criminal records file; any who were known, for whatever reason, would be seen first-in addition to men who had, for one reason or another, aroused suspicion in the women they had eventually met.

“How about the letters, sir?” Andy Hunt looked up at the superintendent, pen resting on the almost full page of his notebook.

“In what regard?”

“Well, we’ve all seen copies of those that Charlie found in the Sheppard house…”

“Good old bloody Charlie!” said Colin Rich with quiet scorn.

“…and we’d probably all agree that some of them seem a sight more chancey than others.”

“It’s not always the ones as come out and say it,” said Tom Parker.

“That whining bugger,” said Grafton. “What’s his name? Minors?”

“Myers,” corrected Resnick.

“He’s the one I’d put my money on.”

Colin Rich leaned across to the uniformed inspector. “One weekend course up at the university and he thinks he’s Sigmund Freud.”

“Give him his full title, then.”

“Professor?”

“Bloody. You forgot the bloody. Sigmund bloody Freud.”

“Funny!” said Rich, sitting back. “Very bloody funny!”

“We have acquired the services of a Professor Ramusen from the polytechnic’s psychology department, who will look at letters with a view to picking out any which seem to suggest any kind of abnormality or deviancy. Any tendency towards violence.” Skelton paused, as if waiting for comments which were unforthcoming. “I’ve been in touch with the Yard this morning about the services of a handwriting expert and I’m waiting on their response.”

After that it was wrapped up quickly. Uniforms were going back over the house-to-house checks in the area of the two incidents. The Serious Crimes squad would start picking up anyone thrown up by the computer as being previously known. Grafton and Hunt would divide the remainder between them, beginning with those who had made multiple replies. It was down to Resnick and his team to follow up the letters that Graham Millington had discovered in Mary Sheppard’s bedroom, also the lead that Lynn Kellogg had picked up after Shirley Peters’s funeral.

A warrant would enable them to add the identities of all those responding to personal advertisements from first post that morning, although, once Skelton’s press conference, scheduled for eleven, had been reported, it was expected that the numbers of both replies and new advertisers would drop. Initially, however, it meant more legwork, more reports to be filed, more time.

“This time next week we’ll be up to our collective arses in astrologists and bloody clairvoyants!”

Colin Rich leant against the wall beside the coffee urn, looking at the expression of distaste on Resnick’s face at the sight of the coffee.

“Wait till you taste it, Charlie.”

Resnick lifted up the lid of the urn and poured it back.

“Champagne soon for you, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“How’s that?”

“Regular golden bollocks on this show, aren’t we?”

Resnick shrugged and turned away. The sooner he got back to the station, the sooner the team could get to work.

“Too good for the rest of us already, Charlie?” Rich was standing close behind him, but his voice was loud enough to be heard by the rest.

Resnick continued walking.

“That’s it, Charlie. You keep going. That way we can all see the way the sun shines out of your arse!”

“So what do they say about plumbers?”

It was a conversion job. Take an old house, large, garden on two levels with birch trees and wild strawberries thatching themselves across what had passed for lawns; gut it, aside from the central sweep of staircase and main load-bearing walls; fillet out the dry rot; spray for fungus and drill for damp; matching kitchen units, pine’s out so this is a job lot in heavy wood and dark. Executive apartments in highly sought-after residential area, excellent amenities, easy reach of the city center. Penthouse flat with superb views available now for immediate viewing.

Dave Beatty had his head behind the waste disposal, most of his body to the waist out of sight beneath the sink. A small transistor was not quite tuned to the local commercial station and too loud. Divine reached over and turned it off.

“Hey!”

The shout was muffled. Divine kicked the toe of his polished black shoe against the sole of Dave Beatty’s worn-down Adidas sports shoe. Not hard.

“What the hell d’you…”

“Come on out from there.”

“Who…?”

“Do yourself a favor, take a break.”

Beatty swung himself from under the sink and on to his feet. A wrench was gripped tightly in his left hand. Divine looked at him levelly, glanced at the wrench with a dismissive grin, and lifted up the kettle, testing the weight.

“Electrics working?”

“Yes. What’s going on?”

Divine switched on the kettle and picked up a jar of instant coffee, setting it right back down again. “No tea?”

Dave Beatty moved the wrench to his other hand and opened a cupboard; inside was a large packet of tea bags and some sugar. He was conscious of Divine looking at him again, weighing him up.

“Five-seven,” Divine said.

“Look…”

“About eleven stone.”

“This is bloody silly.”

Mark Divine reached out slowly and took the wrench from Beatty’s hand. “But I still don’t know what they say about plumbers.”

“If someone’s sent you round here to check on me, you can tell them they’re wasting their time. I said the end of the week and the end of the week’s what I meant.”

Divine smiled and switched off the kettle. “You want to be mum, or shall I?”

Dave Beatty didn’t move.

“Fair enough.” Divine dropped a bag into a clean mug and went towards the sink to rinse another.

“Don’t,” warned Beatty.

“You don’t want one?”

“If you run the tap it’ll go right through.”

Divine shrugged. “Not very clever.” He put the tea bag into the dirty mug, poured water into both of them. “You know what you’re doing, I suppose?”

Beatty gave a short, humorless laugh, almost a snort. “I’m fitting a sodding disposal unit, I don’t know what you think you’re pissing around at.”

Mark Divine stirred, added milk, pushed one mug-the used one-towards Beatty. “Better put in your own sugar.”

Divine allowed himself another smile. This was fun: he was enjoying himself. Almost as much as he would have been if Beatty had decided to have a go at him with the wrench.

“Don’t know what you’re getting shirty about. Thought you said you could always squeeze in a quick hour in the daytime.”

“Said?”

“Well, be more accurate, wrote.”

Beatty’s right eye blinked shut and a little nerve began to beat beside it; some of the color drained from his face. He glanced at where the wrench lay close to the kettle, closer to Divine than to himself.

“Remember?”

“Listen, all that stuff…”

“Yes?”

“That stuff I wrote…”

“Yes?”

“It was just a laugh, you know, just for…”

“A laugh.”

“Yeh, you know. I mean, wasn’t as if I meant anything by it.”

“Getting right down to it.”

“Eh?”

“Isn’t that what you like to do? No monkeying around beforehand, strictly wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, now where was that other little plumbing job you wanted fixing?”

“Jesus! All I did was write to her.”

“All?”

“Yes! Well, ask her. Ask her, for Christ’s sake! It was just a bit of fun. You know…”

“A laugh.”

“Yeh, a laugh.”

“You said.”

Beatty was looking smaller, younger by the second-a kid from the estate just starting on his City and Guilds. His age was what he’d lied about, Divine thought, probably wanted to convince her of his maturity, man of the world, no make of faucet that can’t be fixed.

Divine was staring him out the way he stared out the opposition across the other side of the scrum; the way he faced down a belligerent drunk after closing.

“Your tea.”

“What?”

“Don’t let it get cold.”

“W-what?”

“Nothing worse than mashing good tea and watching someone let it get cold.”

Beatty brought the mug up towards his mouth and Divine feinted towards him. The edge of the thick mug banged against Beatty’s teeth and the mug started to slide between his fingers.

“Easy!”

Divine steadied it before a drop could be spilt; he pressed the plumber’s fingers tight around the circumference of the mug and held them fast.

“The truth?”

Dave Beatty drew in air too fast and began to choke but still Divine didn’t release his grip. He knew that all he had to do now was wait.

“All right, all right, only it was just the one time, after I’d been round there. To the house. You got to believe that. I mean, we kidded around, you know how it is. Joking, sort of thing. But she had, well, the kid was with her and so she couldn’t, we couldn’t…that was when I wrote them letters. Didn’t even think, you know, she’d take them serious. Not till, till she called me. Got home one night from this job, emergency, bloke with five inches of water in his bathroom and half a hundredweight of sewage backed up right out to the street. She’d left this message on the answerphone. How she’d, she’d meet me. In the van. It was the only time. Honest. Honest.”

If the vein alongside Beatty’s eye didn’t calm down pretty soon, Divine was thinking, he’d hemorrhage all over the newly sanded wood floor.

“Is that where you did it?” Divine asked, beginning to picture it. “The van?”

Beatty didn’t speak, angled his head aside and nodded.

“Say again?”

“Yes.”

“You did her in the van?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“Say it again.”

“Yes,” Beatty sighed. “In the van.”

“Parked up some back alley somewhere, were you?”

“Jesus! What does it matter?”

“I want to know!”

“All right. We were down behind the Raleigh works, that cut-through that comes out by the pub. If you want any more details, ask her.”

“Ask her?”

“She’s your bloody wife!”

“Is she?”

“And she’s already opened her bloody mouth a sight too much or you wouldn’t be here now.”

“My wife?”

“How else did you get on to me? I don’t advertise that in Yellow Pages.”

“I haven’t got a wife.”

“Chucked her out, have you? Serve her sodding right! I suppose you’ll be after me for the divorce next.”

“I’ve never had a wife.”

“Come off it!”

Divine moved his hand close to Beatty’s face, close enough to make him flinch, enough to get all of his attention.

“What the fuck’s going on, then?” Beatty said.

“You’re telling me exactly that.”

“But if you’re not…”

Mark Divine took his warrant card from his inside pocket and held it out long enough for Beatty to read it. After taking another swallow of tea, he exchanged it for a notebook and ballpoint.

“This woman you’ve been diddling, what’s her name?”

“Melissa.”

“Not Mary?”

“Melissa.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Course.”

Divine grinned with anticipation. “All right, then, let’s see how much else you can remember-and I do mean exactly. Then we’ll get round to your interest in another kind of advertising, also not in Yellow Pages.”

Martin Myers worked as a volunteer for a Church of England charity that provided soup, second-hand clothes, and temporary accommodation for destitute men. Three afternoons a week, two lunchtimes, and one overnight every other weekend. For a spell he had worked mornings in a healthfood shop, but there had been arguments with the full-time members of the collective and he had been asked to leave. While his mother had still been alive, there had been the attendance allowance, but now…well, his needs were small and since they had opened a cafe upstairs in the library he had something there most mornings and that seemed to last him through the day.

“I thought, since Mother passed on, someone to talk to, someone nice and sympathetic. There are so many things that concern us, so much that has to be discussed; Mother and I did, of course, she was wonderful, so alert, right up to, well, almost to the end. And now…”

Patel wrote it all down diligently, scarcely needing to prompt or interrupt, the whole meager litany.

“…I did so want to be able to make contact, in some way to touch her, but, of course, she never wrote back.”

The man in the doorway stank. His clothing was more rags than tatters, bits of cloth wrapped round and round, only here and there a garment that could be recognized as such-trousers with a gaping rent in the upper leg, a cable-knit sweater as matted as the underside of a moorland sheep. He saw Graham Millington and smiled.

“Get on home,” the sergeant said.

“Spare us something for a cup of tea,” the man replied, the look on his face positively benign.

Millington stepped over him and went into the shop. Both knew the man hadn’t had a drop of tea since VE Day: then it had been a mistake, as he liked to explain it, the hysteria of the moment. He didn’t have a home to go to either.

Millington frowned at the insistence of the heavy bass, words walked over like ground glass. If he remembered he’d pick up that Julio Iglesias his wife wanted on CD. Not in this place, though, he wouldn’t.

“Why d’you put up with that?” Millington asked the girl behind the counter. “Enough to put off any customers that survive the sound barrier.”

“What?” the girl said, angling one side of her face towards him.

A tiny curve of stars ran round her ear, each smaller than the last.

“Him in the door, why don’t you have him moved on?”

“Maurice? He’s our unofficial doorman. Autumn till the first day of spring.”

“Goes south for the summer, does he?”

“Eastbourne.”

“He must be a public health hazard.” Millington was having to shout to be heard. “Put in a call to the station, get him disinfected.”

The girl’s face screwed up into a frown. All the while she was talking to Millington, she continued to take records from a cardboard box, check them off against a printed list. “Rather have him in here than the police.”

Millington took out his wallet and showed her his warrant card. “Darren Jilkes,” he said, hard-faced.

“Downstairs,” she said, pointing. “Singles.” Millington was surprised to observe that she was blushing, high red.

The basement had posters on the walls, singles in their sleeves in browsing racks and behind the counter. One of the assistants was wearing a Smiths sweatshirt and drumming along with his hands, using the ring on his little finger for rim shots. He had short brown hair, rather more than his fair share of acne and, even though the lighting was subdued, he was wearing dark glasses. His companion, bending to find something on a shelf near the floor, was almost as fat as he was thin. He was also quite bald save for a wisp of hair that hung down from the folds of his scalp and was graced at its end by a black bow.

“You Darren?”

No reply.

Millington reached over and lifted the arm from the record, more carefully than it deserved.

The second assistant stood up and when he did Millington saw that he wasn’t only fat, he was tall.

“Not keen on The Fall, then?” he said.

“I saw you,” Millington said. “Tag team match at Heanor Town Hall. Winter before last. The Oblivion Brothers. One arm out of joint and a broken nose. When the trainer pushed it back into place I got blood and snot all over my shirt.”

“Front row, was you?”

“Third.”

“Wondered. Usually women in the front. Lapping up all the sweat and grunt and squeezing their handbags further and further down between their legs.”

“You given it up or just resting?”

“Moved on to higher things. Got to be more to life than sex and violence, hasn’t there?”

Graham Millington could feel a familiar nervous squirming in his stomach so clearly he was worried that they might have heard it across the counter.

“That’s how come you’re down here, is it? The search for higher things.”

“It’s in the music. Always has been. Isn’t that so, Darren?”

If it was, Darren wasn’t saying.

“What’s your real name then?” Millington asked. “Always assuming it isn’t Oblivion.”

“Sloman. Geoff.”

Millington nodded. “And you’re Jilkes, Darren?”

“What d’you want?” asked Jilkes.

“Always assuming,” said Sloman, “that it isn’t a record.”

“A colleague of mine was talking to young Darren’s girlfriend last night. She mentioned something about meeting on a double-date.”

“So?” said Sloman, a touch belligerent.

Darren had gone back to not talking.

“The friend she went with on this date, her name was Shirley Peters. That afternoon, she’d just come from helping to bury her.”

Darren stumbled back a couple of paces, looking as if his legs were going to give way under him; they might have done if Sloman hadn’t placed his open hand against the small of his back and held him up.

“I was wondering, Darren, who your friend was on this occasion; this cozy little double-date?”

Only a flick of the eyes, still it was a dead giveaway.

“Maybe,” Millington said to Sloman, “you’d like to finish work early today and come down to the station with Darren here-always assuming you haven’t got anything more important in hand.”

And in case the former wrestler decided against coming quietly, Millington lifted his walkie-talkie out from beneath the lapel of his raincoat and called in for some support.