“I’m all right, sir. Honest.”
“You’ll be better after a few hours’ sleep.”
“My report…”
“You made it to me. Write it up when you come in tomorrow.” Resnick corrected himself. “Today. The only thing I’ll need before you go, the mother’s address.”
Lynn Kellogg, careful to get up from the chair slowly, opened her notebook.
“Hello? Who is this?” Chris Phillips’s voice was thick with sleep.
Resnick told him that he wanted to speak with Rachel Chaplin.
“It’s half-past bloody five!”
“So it must be important.”
“Not so important it can’t wait.”
Resnick sensed he was about to be cut off, but he heard the receiver changing hands and then it was Rachel’s voice.
“Hello?”
“It’s Resnick,” he said.
There was a pause before she replied. “I presume this is more than a social call.”
He told her, evenly, about the murdered woman, the two young children, the invalid grandmother.
Rachel listened carefully, without interrupting, and then said, “We do have an emergency duty team, you know.”
“I didn’t think they’d do much more at this time than send out a message to the nearest office.”
“So?”
“I thought maybe someone should get out to the grandmother’s house before the kids wake up.”
“You mean she hasn’t been told yet?”
“That’s right.”
“And you want me to do it?”
“I’d like somebody else to be there when I do. Someone professional, who’ll know how to cope with her and can cope with the kids as well.”
“Why me?”
Resnick didn’t answer.
“Give me the address,” Rachel said. And then she said, “I’ll meet you outside in twenty minutes.”
“Right,” Resnick said. He could hear Chris Phillips’s voice raised in the background. “And thanks,” he added, but by then Rachel had put down the phone.
Fourteen
Superintendent Skelton was wearing a light gray suit with the finest of red stripes; the jacket was on a hanger behind his office door. Resnick was surprised that it had not been covered in polythene. The superintendent had allowed the top button of his waistcoat to be undone. His shirt was a pale blue with a white collar, the tie darker blue with a red stripe a shade darker than the one in the weave of his suit. Resnick felt relieved he could not see his superior’s socks.
“Take a seat, Charlie. You look knackered.”
Resnick had had the same clothes on since clambering out of his bed in the early hours of that morning. When Rachel Chaplin had pointed it out to him, he had tucked in the flap of his shirt. Graham Millington had lent him a spare tie. His underpants were beginning to itch and he remembered that he had climbed back into the pair he had taken off the night before. He hadn’t even fed the cats.
“Coffee?”
“Thanks.”
He tried not to watch as Skelton, not slowly but with care, measured out an amount of beans, tipped them into the electric grinder, from there into the fresh filter paper he had slipped into the top of the machine. Skelton measured water up to the proper calibration on the side of the jug and poured it into the rear. He pressed a switch on the base and a light glowed red.
“Be ready in a couple of minutes.”
Resnick nodded; he was nursing an irrational desire to jerk the electric lead from the wall socket and chuck the whole business through the window, kit and caboodle.
“How’s DC Kellogg?”
“Downstairs writing up her report.”
“Making it a bit of a habit, that team. Turning up dead bodies.”
Resnick looked at the superintendent, but made no reply. Coffee was dripping through at a steady rate.
Skelton shuffled paper across his desk. “You’ve read Parkinson’s report?”
“Sir.”
“Whoever did this, he wasn’t just trying to kill her. Whoever did this…” Skelton paused, as if trying-somehow-to picture the murderer in his mind…“was after something more. Those blows were sufficient to…” Skelton paused to glance again at the report…to “puncture the cerebral cortex over the left hemisphere, splinter the left ventricle and the anterior horn. Damage to the medulla oblongata had impaired the passage of the spinal cord along the central canal. All that’s without serious bruising to the rest of the body.”
“Someone with a lot of strength,” Resnick observed.
“Or anger.” Skelton rose and poured the coffee. Resnick was just in time to wave no to milk. “If this had been Shirley Peters, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Jealous man, violent, strong-we know how much damage he can do when his temper is roused. His own face is evidence enough of that.” Skelton tasted his coffee and gave a little nod of satisfaction. “Instead he uses a woman’s scarf.”
Did it matter, Resnick wondered, woman’s or man’s?
“It takes a deal of effort, sir,” Resnick said, “to throttle the life out of someone.”
“All the same, to cave in a person’s skull…”
“But the scarf, sir. Maybe it was important-to Macliesh, I mean.”
“Go on.”
“If what was getting at him was her attractiveness to other men, well, mightn’t he have chosen that on purpose?” Resnick shrugged, not too happy with the idea himself, now that he’d given it voice.
“Red, you mean? The color. Part of making her attractive to other men. Signaling that she was available.”
“Something like that.”
“Been brushing up on your psychology of crime, Charlie?”
Sarcastic bugger! thought Resnick. “No, sir,” he said. “I think I saw it once…in a film.”
“Didn’t think symbolism was much in your line.” An echo sounded in Resnick’s mind. He wondered how Divine and Naylor were getting on looking for Macliesh’s alibi down at the Victor Gym. And whether simply sitting with George Despard and sharing his brandy had been enough to earn him the information or if there had been any more to it.
“Think there’s any connection, Charlie? Couple of single women, thirties. Both…”-Skelton hesitated before finishing the sentence, his mouth suspended in a prim circle-“…sexually active. Apparently.”
“Not a crime, sir.”
“I’m not suggesting it is.” Skelton’s response was just a little too quick, forcing his voice up a register.
“No, sir.”
“What I am pointing to is a connection.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Shirley Peters was strangled, concurrent with or soon after engaging in sex…”
“Or immediately before.”
Skelton hurried on. “The scene-of-crime report on Mary Sheppard shows that intercourse had taken place at roughly the same time as her murder.” He looked steadily at Resnick. “On this occasion certainly prior to her death. Since it seems that one occurred upstairs in the bedroom, the murder in the garden.”
On the cabinet to the side of the double bed, a used condom had been found squashed up into a couple of tissues, presumably for throwing away later. Other tissues, used, were scattered across the carpet; another had been pushed under the edge of the pillow. There were traces of semen down the inside of Mary Sheppard’s thighs, not a great deal. Splashes perhaps. Before or after? There was also staining on the sheet which might, when analyzed, or might not match.
“Any luck getting Macliesh to agree to giving us a sample?”
Resnick shook his head. “The blood he gave us inadvertently: there was enough splashed round the police cell. His semen and his pubic hair, he’s being more prudent with. And I’m sure his solicitor’s advising him to keep it that way.”
“She doesn’t think it would disprove his involvement then?”
“No more than we do, I should imagine.”
“How’s that alibi holding up?”
“I’m having it checked out now, sir. It looks as though we’ve found one of the men Macliesh put up.”
“And this Mary Sheppard’s ex-husband? Not another man scorned, I suppose?”
Resnick shook his head. “It doesn’t sound like it.”
“Too much to hope for.”