Lonely Hearts

Twenty-Four

Rachel didn’t phone again. Days passed. Resnick looked up the number of the Social Services office a couple of times and went no further. The DCI got all hot and bothered about a pork butcher from Gedling with a record of petty theft that had escalated on two occasions to aggravated burglary. When he was brought in for questioning his photograph was in the local newspaper and middle-aged women threw refuse at him when he was bundled across the street. Suzanne Olds had a field day and there were threats of a suit for harassment and unlawful arrest. Pepper’s stomach blew up like a balloon and Resnick hurried him to the vet before he exploded all over the living-room carpet. Debbie stopped being sick. Behind Lynn’s back, Mark Divine swore at her viciously, but whenever she walked into the office he lapsed into an angry, wordless grumbling. Graham Millington stopped by the record shop and talked to Geoff Sloman for an hour and the only thing he came away with was a new Sandie Shaw EP that he played once and promptly forgot. Jack Skelton was now getting up at half-four, so that he could run five miles before getting into work by six, but it didn’t make any difference.

What made Lynn go down to the incident room and get a copy of the computer print-out she could never be certain. It did worry her, days and weeks afterwards, that she had waited so long. All she could put her slackness down to were the images of babies, floating effortlessly and unbidden, around and around inside her head.

That was easier to understand.

The conversation with Kevin Naylor, his reluctance either to accept or celebrate. You should be dead proud. Walking round telling everyone. Writing it on walls. I know I should be. If Naylor was normally taciturn, he was Bamber Gascoigne and Russell Harty rolled into one when set against her Dennis. Dennis who went through life with all the expressiveness and verbal eloquence of the Man in the Iron Mask. She thought they had last made love five weeks ago, after EastEnders and before he nipped down the road for an unofficial meeting of the Osprey Wheelers in the side room of the pub.

Not only a cyclist, but a cyclist whose other hobby was ornithology.

Much as she hated the old joke about the woman officer who was the station bike, Lynn thought the only way she might raise some excitement from Dennis would be to kit herself out with a racing saddle and a pair of drop handlebars.

“Do you ever think about having kids? The two of us. Together.”

He was asleep, dreaming of sighting a ptarmigan while winning the final stage of the Tour de France.

“Sir?”

She knocked and put her head round the door. Resnick was rereading a report he’d already been through twice without taking anything in. There were scores of others, milling around on the desk. It was becoming close to impossible: no way did they have the personnel to keep up with the spread of action the computer was generating.

“Have you got a minute?”

Resnick laughed. “Don’t suppose the kettle’s on, is it?”

“It could be, sir.”

“Here,” he said, sliding open the bottom drawer and taking out a jar. “Thee and me and then it goes right back in here.”

Lynn smiled, redder-faced than ever.

Nescafe Cap Colombie-she frequently lifted it off the shelf at Tesco’s, but it had never got as far as her trolley. At that sort of price it would have given Kevin and Debbie Naylor serious heartburn. It tasted okay, though; not bitter but more flavour than most instant coffee she’d tried. Trust Resnick to have his priorities sorted out. A man who looked after his stomach first and foremost, Lynn decided, even if his clothes did come a poor second.

“It’s a call I made, sir. I’m not sure what or why but it’s been nagging at me, off and on ever since.” She pushed the print-out towards him. “Probably nothing. Probably a waste of time.”

Resnick unfolded the paper. “It’s detectives who don’t listen to the little nagging voices that put the wind up me. Like wing-halves who’ll only pass square instead of putting a foot on the ball, getting their head up and seeing what might be on.”

Lynn Kellogg looked faintly puzzled.

“Wing-halves,” Resnick said. “Call them something else now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Lynn, uncertain.

It was quiet while the inspector read the dot-matrix print as well as he could. He went back over a few lines and then said: “So tell me about him, Professor Doria.”

“He’s been at the university nine years, before that he was at Hull. Three years ago he was given…” She hesitated, worrying about her choice of verb, “…the Chair in Linguistics and Critical Theory. He’s…”

Resnick was shaking his head and continued to do so until Lynn Kellogg’s voice faltered to a stop.

“Come on, Lynn.”

“Sir?”

“I want you to tell me about him. Not give me what I can get from the university prospectus and Who’s Who. He isn’t making you wake in the middle of the night with your scalp itching because he’s got the Chair in anything.”

She cradled the mug in her hands. How did you put things like this into words?

“I think…part of it, he was this odd kind of mixture of over-friendly and distant, both at the same time. I mean, he sat me down, fussed about whether I was comfortable enough, warm enough, seemed in quite a state about my not being in a draught. He was like-I don’t know, I’ve never met one, but from the television-those dons-is that what they’re called? — living their lives in book-lined rooms in Oxford or Cambridge.”

“Open-toe sandals and sherry and a copy of Wittgenstein casually open on the easy chair,” suggested Resnick.

“Behind it all, though, all the time, he didn’t mean it. Not any of it.”

“And the sherry?”

“On his desk.”

“Sweet or dry?”

Lynn smiled and shook her head. “I didn’t have any, sir.”

“But he did?”

“He said he always had-“took” was the word he used-always took a glass at four in the afternoon. Part of his daily ritual.”

“It was four o’clock?”

Lynn shook her head again. “He said in honor of my visit he’d make an exception. A member of CID.” She flushed, remembering. “That’s what I mean, sir. That’s pretty much what he was like all the time, what he sounded like.”

“Bit much to be suspicious of a man for that. In his circles it probably counts as being polite.”

“He was. And helpful. Couldn’t have been more so. He agreed that from time to time he wrote off in reply to Lonely Hearts ads, confirmed the names we had and offered another that somehow we’d missed.”

“That’s been checked out?”

“It’s gone into the system. I don’t know if it’s led anywhere special.”

Resnick drained his mug of coffee. “So there he is, this effusive academic, not a great deal for you to like about his manner, but that’s not enough, Lynn, is it? That’s not all.”

She looked towards the floor. The lace of Resnick’s left shoe had come undone and for an instant she had to suppress her instinct to bend down and retie it for him.

“The fuss, the showing-off, I’m not going back on what I said, there was something false about it, but at the same time I think he was excited.”

“Excited?”

“It’s not quite right, but it’s the only way I can describe it.”

“And what by?”

“By my…” she turned her head away, towards the door, then slowly back. “By my being there.”

“He must have young women in that room all of the time, tutorials.”

“It was more than that.”

“Even so that was part of it?” said Resnick, not wanting to let the idea go.

“Yes, yes. But more, well, why I was there.”

“The investigation?”

“I think so, yes, I suppose that’s what it was.”

“He was interested in the investigation?”

Lynn bit gently down into the center of her lower lip. “Maybe, this sounds daft, it was something to do with me being in the Force.”

“A police officer?”

“Yes.”

“That was what was exciting him?”

Lynn sighed. “It makes it sound as if he was kinky for handcuffs and uniforms.”

“Which you weren’t wearing?”

“No.”

“And presumably you didn’t brandish a pair of cuffs under his nose?”

She laughed. “No.”

Resnick looked down at the print-out again, looked across at her. “Go on.”

“All the while he was talking, telling me what I wanted to know, what I didn’t, great long sentences and one word in every dozen I didn’t understand, it was as if-yes, as though he was in another part of the room, listening to himself. Thinking how clever he was sounding.”

“Admiring himself?”

“Yes, sir. And…”

“And?”

“I’d be making notes, book on my knee, and a couple of times I looked up when he wasn’t expecting it and…the way he was watching me. It was as if there were these eyes, set back, staring, staring out at me as though they were behind a mask.” She looked towards Resnick, plainly troubled. “Looking at me from behind a mask,” she said.

“Clutching at straws a bit, aren’t we?” said Tom Parker.

“Straw man, Charlie?” said Skelton.

“There’s not a lot else, sir,” Resnick observed.

“Exactly,” said Parker.

“You’re running a check on him, of course?” asked Skelton.

Resnick nodded.

“You don’t think there’s a danger of letting the girl overreact to the situation?” Parker said.

They were walking across the Forest, the three of them, glad for the chance to get some fresh air, which is what it certainly was. All three of them were wearing overcoats, Resnick had a blue scarf knotted at his throat, hands pushed deep into his pockets. Jack Skelton and Tom Parker were both wearing trilby hats, Resnick was bareheaded. On the slope to the left, two kids who should have been at school were playing chase, in and out of the trees. Further over towards the road, a middle-aged man was trying to fly a kite which the wind, contrary, refused to accept. A steady stream of cars and vans passed each way along the boulevard.

“She’s a woman,” said Resnick. “A sensible one. She’d not be knocked sideways by a bloke in a gown gawping at her knees.”

“Was he wearing a gown?” asked Parker, surprised.

“Probably not.”

“What does seem strange,” Skelton ventured, fifty yards later, “is that he bothers with answering those kind of things at all. I mean, other staff aside, the place must be crawling with young women and from what I hear, liaisons of that nature are no longer frowned upon.”

Resnick looked at the superintendent keenly, wondering what his reaction would be if his daughter came home and announced she was having an affair with one of her lecturers.

“Could be that’s the thing,” suggested Parker. “How’s the saying go? Don’t spill milk on your own doorstep.”

“Something like that.”

“Instead of charvering his students, he looks further afield.”

Skelton was looking far from happy. “It still doesn’t sound anything close to a case. Not even reasonable grounds for suspicion.”

“All I’m asking, sir, is permission to scratch around a little.”

“Charlie, we’ve got paperwork like dogs have fleas,” said Parker.

“I won’t use the whole team,” said Resnick.

“Too bloody right!”

“You’re a wonder for following hunches!” said Skelton, slapping his arms across his chest. “Even when they’re not your own.”

“She’s got the makings of a good copper,” said Resnick. “I think she deserves this one.”

“Just a couple of officers, Charlie.” Skelton was striding away again, leaving the others in his wake. “We can’t spare any more. We shouldn’t.”

“No, sir.”

“And the minute it looks like a dead end,” said Parker, “we’re out.”

“Yes, sir.”

They were back at the station when across their shoulders the first few flakes of snow began to fall.

“Kellogg’s report aside,” said Jack Skelton, letting Tom Parker go on into the building ahead of them, “have you got anything else making your blood pump a little faster?”

“Not really, sir.”

Skelton stood there, snow fluttering against his face, and waited.

“One of the names on the list,” Resnick said. “The women our professor admitted to meeting…I know her.”