Lonely Hearts

Twenty-One

LONELY HEARTS KILLER ON LOOSE

Terror Rapist Stalks City

Skelton’s press conference had gone down a storm. A brief paragraph detailing the setting up of the inquiry and the rest was a half-hysterical mix of warning and conjecture. There was a photograph of Jack Skelton taken that morning, the very model of modern police management. If the Force was being privatized, it would only take a few shots like that on the prospectus to send the populace scurrying for their piggy-banks and building society accounts.

There were also pictures of the victims: Mary Sheppard wearing a white dress and a little veiled hat, holding one of the children to her shoulder, a christening; Shirley Peters, a blurred head and shoulders, turning from the camera as if hearing someone call her name.

Resnick read down as far as his own name before pushing the paper aside and turning to the reports that had begun to arrive on his desk.

John Benedict had proved to be a sad-faced man with a vivid birthmark on his neck and shoes worn down by walking the streets pushing double-glazing leaflets through reluctant letter-boxes. It was the only work he’d been able to get since an allergy had prevented him from carrying on nights at the pork-pie factory.

He had responded to three advertisements in the space of as many weeks and Shirley Peters had been the only one to write back. It had been a nice letter, a note really, apologizing for the fact that she wouldn’t be meeting him, but wishing him better luck with somebody else. You sound a nice man: that’s what she had written. Considerate. Most people don’t bother. So considerate and kind and when I read in the paper what had happened…

Benedict’s eyes had filled with tears and Naylor had thought about the condition of the handkerchief in his pocket, wondering if it were clean enough to offer. But the tears hadn’t actually fallen and Naylor had made up his mind to take some tissues along with him next time.

“These three you wrote off to,” Naylor had asked, “are they the only ones ever?”

Benedict had shaken his head. There had been others, twenty-four in all over a period of eighteen months.

“I’ve still got them,” he had said as Naylor had been putting his pen away.

“Sorry?”

“The advertisements. The ones I replied to. I’ve got them. If, I mean, if you’d like to see them. I don’t know if…”

Naylor had looked at the two-dozen cuttings, each less than an inch high, sellotaped near the top of separate pages in a cheap scrapbook.

“You’ll be hanging on to this?” Naylor had said. “In case we want to look at it again.”

“Oh, yes,” John Benedict had assured him, “I like to keep a record.”

“Caring and Lively II” could not have been more different. Lynn Kellogg traced him to the food department of a supermarket, where he was in charge of the meat and delicatessen sections. Assistant manager: Peter Geraghty. He had been slicing pink salami when Lynn was taken across to him, thin folds of adulterated meat folding one over the other.

“Do people actually buy that stuff?”

“Can’t get enough!”

He had taken a piece between forefinger and thumb and offered it towards Lynn’s face. She had shuddered: Geraghty glanced around and then ate it. After only seconds, he drew the length of plastic-coated skin from between his lips and lobbed it into a nearby bin.

Lynn thought she might be ill; she thought it might be enough to turn her vegetarian. She asked Peter Geraghty about his interest in personal advertisements and he had assumed that she was the woman who received the letters.

“How did you know where to find me?” he had asked. “I only put the phone number.”

“It’s my job,” she had explained.

He lifted up the blade and removed the end of a roll of salami. “I didn’t know you could make a living at it,” he had said, and then: “Hey! This isn’t one of those visiting massage things, is it? ’Cause if I strip off and lie down on here, they’ll be fighting one another to buy me by the pound.”

“This is serious,” Lynn had said.

“So am I.”

“I doubt it.”

She had questioned him inside the manager’s office. Away from the women who worked behind the counter and provided him with a ready audience, he was calmer. More sober. Friday nights he went round the pubs with his mates, usually they’d finish up in a club or a disco, not always. Saturdays, the pictures. Sunday afternoons, ten-pin bowling. Tuesday evenings, he went to adult education classes.

“What in?” she had asked, expecting something like retail management, maybe car maintenance.

“Russian.”

Her surprise was inescapable.

“I’m not thick, you know.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“It’s not so bad when you get into it. Besides, it’s going to be needed.” She nodded: a friend of hers had been on one of the trips, three Russian cities in ten days, the food was terrible. “You know they’re going to take over the world.”

The jury in the child abuse case was out: work on the murder investigation had been so pressing that Resnick had all but forgotten it was still going on. By the end of the day, there would be a verdict. His impulse was to go down there, to the court; some part of him wanted to be there when the foreman of the jury stood forward, when the judge pronounced sentence, some part of him-knotted and hard, like a growth-that wanted to watch the expression on that man’s, that father’s face.

Was that what people got married for? Had children?

The phone went and Resnick picked up the receiver on the second ring.

“Charlie?”

“Sir.”

It was Skelton, back from lunch and checking round. If they could get somebody for this before the incident room had computer print-out like cheap wrapping paper, he would be a grateful and happy man.

“The lads from the record shop…?”

“In interrogation now, sir.”

“You’re not having a go at them yourself?”

“I thought Sergeant Millington should take first crack. I’ll spell him in a bit.”

“Don’t let up on them, Charlie.”

“No, sir.”

“One of them’s a wrestler, isn’t he?”

“Used to be, I believe, sir.”

“Big lad, then?”

“Cow-pie type, sir.”

There was a pause at the end of the line, only slight. “Those blows to Mary Sheppard’s head. A lot of force was used there, Charlie. A lot of force.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Sir.”

The receiver was on its way back to the cradle when Lynn Kellogg knocked and Resnick motioned for her to come in.

“I thought you might be going to take a look at Darren and his friend, sir.”

They had not been taken to the incident headquarters: parading them in front of a couple of bored reporters at this stage wouldn’t help anybody. Them especially, if they were eliminated from the inquiry.

“I wondered if I could tag along?”

Resnick nodded, reached for his coat. “Think you put us on to something, then?”

“I hope so, sir. I’d like to…”

She half-turned away, recalling the moment when she’d stepped into the darkness of that small garden, the cold biting at her exposed face and hands, blood drying darkly onto dark, dry earth.

“Let’s get going, then.”

They were only just out of the room when the phone sounded again.

“Forget it,” Resnick said. “You could spend the whole day answering the thing and never get anywhere. Besides,” pushing open the door, “it’s a little difficult to imagine that it’s good news.”

Graham Millington had taken the wrestler for himself, Patel was along the corridor with his friend. A uniformed PC struggled along in the corner, sweating as he tried to keep up with question and answer, flicking his eyes anxiously at the sergeant-slow down, for heaven’s sake, slow down!

Geoff Sloman seemed to be enjoying it. He leaned his considerable weight back in the chair, answering questions with all the enthusiasm of someone whose ambition in life has been to be stopped by one of those women with clipboards who haunt the streets outside Tesco’s or Sainsbury’s.

The first time they’d met the two women, they’d gone to a couple of pubs and then on for a pizza. Shirley had been quite a bit older, but he hadn’t minded that and during a quick chat with Darren in the gents they’d decided that was the way they were going to divvy them up. They’d all shared a cab from the square. Shirley had been the first to get out; he’d thought about getting out with her, the old goodnight on the doorstep routine, all the while trying to get your toe in the front door, but the prospect of having to walk home later had put him off. Besides, by then he’d already arranged to see her again.

Five nights later, the four of them again, a few beers and then into the Astoria. The music, it wasn’t Shirley’s scene at all, soon as she was inside and sitting up on the balcony she got this look on her face, like she’d got toothache in her ear. So, a quick word with Darren, do the decent thing, off out of there, and round the corner for a curry.

Well, she was grateful.

Millington wanted a cigarette. The ends of his mustache were beginning to itch and he eased them back from his upper lip with thumb and forefinger.

“Tell me about it.”

Sloman shrugged his powerful shoulders. “She asked me in for a coffee, gave us a Scotch, large one, laughing, ‘I never did know when to say when.’ Time for Frank Sinatra. No wonder The Exorcists had gone down like a barrel-load of sick.” He looked across at Millington. “That’s it, more or less.”

“Which?”

“Um?”

“More or less?”

“Wrong time of the month.”

“So it was less?”

“Definitely.”

“You’re sure?”

“Bloody certain!”

Millington nodded and stood up. He paced around a little, letting the big feller watch him, much as he would have done in the ring. It had been Sloman who had broken his opponent’s nose in the bout he’d watched: like splintering a match. Except for the scream.

“You must have been pretty pissed off.”

“No,” said Sloman carelessly, one arm hooked over the back of the chair.

“All that hanging about. Evening’s already buggered up because she doesn’t like the music. Curry’s probably given you heartburn. Gets you on the couch and pours whisky down you and then she’s making the excuses. I bet you were really pissed off.”

Sloman unhooked his arm, touched the ends of his fingers together with surprising lightness. “I wasn’t on the couch.”

“Does that matter?”

“You seem to think it does.”

“The couch, the floor…”

“I was sitting on a chair, soft-backed, solid arms, wood. She sat on the couch, when she wasn’t wandering around between the kitchen and the stereo. When she wasn’t sitting on my lap.”

“Sticking her tongue in your ear.”

“My mouth.”

“And you weren’t randy?”

“Maybe.”

“Frustrated?”

Sloman shrugged.

“Come off it, Sloman. You’re expecting me to believe there’s this woman, asks you in, all over you, gives you the old come-on, and then she looks you in the eye and says it’s off the menu-all that malarky and you says thanks very much.”

“Something like that.”

Millington leaned forward across the desk and laughed in Sloman’s face.

Sloman gave a slow smile. “See,” he said. “I’m used to it. All manner of provocation. You. Her. Blokes in the ring. How else d’you reckon I stayed in the game for even three years? You get some nasty bastards, agree to one move and do another just to make themselves look good, walk away, and then it’s the back heel into the groin, smile and spit in your eye. If you haven’t got the self-control, where are you? You can’t afford to let it get to you, can’t afford to get frustrated. If you did and really lost your temper, well…” He winked at Millington and flexed the muscles in his arms, “…whoever it was, they’d be dead. Wouldn’t they?”

Graham Millington looked as if he’d been in the ring-through the wringer, anyway. He was down to his shirtsleeves, which were rolled unevenly back over his wrists. The striped cotton was sticking darkly to his skin. He had a mug of tea in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and he wanted a stiff Scotch.

“Problems?” Resnick asked.

Lynn Kellogg stood close by the door, not certain whether she should be there at that moment or not.

“Clever bastard!” Millington spat out.

Resnick sat on the edge of a scarred table and lifted the unlit cigarette from between his sergeant’s fingers. “Tell me.”

“Sure he went out with her, once with this Darren and a couple of times on their own. Nice woman, he says, but he likes them younger. No hard feelings, no regrets; they sodding shook hands at her front door.”

Resnick smiled: without looking over his shoulder, he knew that Lynn Kellogg would be smiling too. Nothing angered his sergeant more than suspected villains and tearaways behaving like the presenters on Blue Peter. Especially if they happened to be seventeen-stone and bald as a Chinese hippie.

“Think he’s telling the truth?”

“I can’t bloody shake him.”

“Get anything out of his pal?”

“If you ask me, they’re both as bent as last year’s clockwork orange.”

“It wasn’t what I was asking.”

“No. His mate’s given us nothing.”

“Then maybe there’s nothing to give.” Millington put down the mug with a thump, stood up as he pushed his hands deep into his trouser pockets. He glowered at Lynn Kellogg, who averted her eyes but stood her ground. “He’s perfect for it!” Millington said, angry. “He met her through one of those ads, he’s built like a brick shithouse, knows his own strength and what to do with it. If he’d taken a few swings at the back of Mary Sheppard’s head she’d’ve looked like she did-bloody tinned tomatoes!”

“Christ!” Lynn exclaimed below her breath.

“Take it easy, Graham,” said Resnick, standing. “Maybe it’s too perfect. And, what you were just saying, my guess is that tells us he’s not our man.”

“What I said…?”

“According to you, we’ve got a big man who knows what he can use his body for and what he can’t. All in all pretty controlled, wouldn’t you say?”

Millington was looking at a spot on the floor midway between the inspector and himself.

“Graham?” Resnick persisted quietly.

“I suppose so, sir. Only…”

“Whoever did that to Mary Sheppard, sir,” said Lynn Kellogg, coming forward, “whatever control he might have had, he’d lost it.”

Millington glared at her hard.

“She’s right, Graham. Let it go. For now, at least. On your own admission, it doesn’t sound as if we’ve got anything to bold him on.”

The sergeant shook his head, sighed back in his throat.

“I’ll have a quick word with him, since I’m here,” Resnick said, moving towards the door. “With the pair of them. Ring through to the DCI to check, but my guess is, we’ll kick them out with our thanks.”

“I’d like to think we were going to keep an eye on them, the wrestler anyway.”

“Oh, yes,” said Resnick. “We’ll keep an eye.”

Millington sat there until the inch of tea that remained at the bottom of the borrowed mug was clinging to the sides with an orangey skin. He knew that Resnick was probably right in his judgment and was finding it difficult not to hope he would be proved wrong. You might come out of this better placed than if you stayed back in the station with your boots under my desk, that was what the inspector had said. He hoped he would be proved right.

Graham Millington hoped for a lot of things.

He never quite understood why they didn’t happen; at least, not until way after they should. And, sooner or later, he was going to have to go home to a wife who was understanding enough to realize that something was troubling him and who would bide her time before asking him, oh so gently and reasonably; what it was. And, reasonably and gently as he could, Millington would tell her. She would sit there, listening, nodding her head, reaching out from time to time to touch his hand, run her fingers down the side of his face. She would listen and nod and yes, it was a shame the way things were sometimes but it would all work out in the end. After which she would offer to make him a cup of tea, or, if things were especially bleak, to pour him a small malt whisky.

All the while, Millington keeping it screwed up tight inside, like a fist wanting something to strike out against, something to hurt, to damage.

The phone broke his thoughts.

“Inspector Resnick? No, he’s not here. No idea where you can find him. Sorry.”

It was a petty thing to do, but right then it was all Graham Millington had.