Lonely Hearts (22 page)

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 café 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.

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.