Nineteen
“Well, Inspector?”
That well-groomed smirk was just what Resnick didn’t need. Suzanne Olds got up lithely to her feet, the folds of her beige suit skirt falling back against her knees. She followed him into his office and sat without waiting to be asked.
She watched Resnick making space enough on his desk to rest an elbow.
“It’s unfair to say, ‘I told you so…’” She smiled brightly, arched her hand towards her hair, gleam of fine gold at the wrist. “But impossible to resist.”
Liverpool CID had finally tracked Mottram down. Millington had driven up to see him: a fiery little man with a head like a polished walnut and hands like an angel. He had been plying his trade in a former cinema in Wallasey; instead of bingo, it alternated between smoking concerts and prize fights, same audiences, same reactions. Mottram was looking after a lean youngster with a walleye and a skin like smoke. When he threw in the towel midway through the fifth, the crowd went mad; he had to push the kid back to the dressing room through a hail of coins and spittle and cans.
Millington had to look away as Mottram’s needle joined the ruptured skin over the eyelid, a flap of it hanging free. Mottram talked while he worked, his concentration never breaking, hands never less than steady.
“It was a foolish thing I know,” his voice was oddly gentle, like his touch, somewhere at the back of it a Gallic lilt, “but there are times you can’t help but think…easy money, it’s the old story I suppose. One night’s work and you can walk away a rich man.” He used scissors to cut the thread. “I was there right enough, your friend Macliesh and the big feller, Warren.” He patted the boxer lightly on the arm. “You’ll do.”
Turning towards Millington, he added, “Now, Warren, if he should ever chance to go into the ring…Ah, there’s a prospect.”
“You’ll make a statement?”
“You write it and I’ll sign it.”
It was there on Resnick’s desk: somewhere.
“How do you find anything?” Suzanne Olds asked, amused.
“I’m a detective.”
“This new murder-are you, um, getting anywhere?”
“We’re pursuing our inquiries.”
“Let’s hope they’re more fruitful than this.”
Resnick glanced towards the door. “Why don’t you have a word with the custody sergeant downstairs?”
“Talking to you is so pleasant.”
“I think the custody sergeant…”
“Sometimes,” said Suzanne Olds, standing, “it’s hard to be gracious in defeat.”
“Is that what this is?”
She looked at Resnick coolly. “When you pushed my client over the edge in that interview room, you thought you had it gift-wrapped.”
“I was doing my job.”
“My God!” she laughed. “I don’t believe you said that!”
“How about doing yours?”
“Police liaison,” she said at the door. “Part of the job specification.”
“They say it’s never too late to apply for retraining.”
“Good day, Inspector.”
“Ms. Olds.”
He had turned towards the roster on the bulletin board behind his desk when she swung back into the room.
“Is it true both these women met whoever attacked them through some kind of advertisement?”
Resnick hesitated before answering. “It’s possible.”
She shook her head, frowning. “The same man?”
“We don’t know.”
“My God!”
“What is it?”
“I’ve got a friend. She works in my office. Once every few months she starts to feel restless, decides it’s time to try again. The last occasion we made up the advertisement over a bottle of wine at lunch.”
“Tell her,” Resnick said.
Suzanne Olds nodded, abstracted.
“And maybe you should tell me her name.”
It was the day of the funeral. Lynn Kellogg sat near the back of the high-vaulted church while, in the pulpit, the vicar remembered Shirley Peters from hastily written notes. It was cold-the stone floor, smooth wood of the pews-and the voices had all but disappeared before the hymn’s third verse had come to an end.
Olive Peters was helped along the aisle of the church, up through the welter of graves towards the freshly opened ground. In that temperature it would have been hard digging. The blond of her hair was growing out around the edges of a black felt hat, bought in haste by a relative who had misjudged the size. There were few enough of them there: a sister, cousin perhaps; a man with steel-gray hair who walked with the aid of a stick; a dumpy girl with red cheeks forever dabbing at her eyes; an undermanager from the office where Shirley had worked, pushing back the sleeve of his thick black coat to look at his watch. The sheath of flowers sent by Grace Kelley was rich with lilies and Christmas roses and whoever had written the note had misspelled her name.
Last in a ragged line, Lynn hesitated before going forward to the grave. She thought of her own mother, fussing in the kitchen, busy with the fire, head turning towards her at the sound of a door opening, ready to smile. She took a crumble of cold earth between her fingers and threw it down, surprised at the hollow sound it made.
“Ought to put that bugger in charge of MI5. Wouldn’t be any Spycatcher if he had anything to do with it.” Graham Millington was sitting on the corner of a desk in the CID room. There were six others present and Resnick was the only one who was listening. “Official bloody Secrets Act wasn’t in it! Insisted on speaking to the super on the phone.”
“You got what we wanted.”
Millington sighed and started to pat his pockets for his cigarettes. “Names and addresses of all their Lonely Hearts advertisers over the past two months.”
“Men as well as women?”
“Yes.”
“Replies?”
The sergeant opened the flip-top pack and shook down a cigarette. “Difficult.”
“Difficult?”
“Impossible.”
Two telephones at different points of the room began to ring almost simultaneously.
“I thought you weren’t smoking?” Resnick said.
“I’m not,” said Millington, pushing the cigarette down into his breast pocket.
“For you, sir,” called one of the officers.
“Who is it?”
“DCI Parker, sir.”
“Ask him, can I ring back in five minutes.” Resnick looked back at his sergeant. “How impossible?”
“He’ll hang on, sir,” said the man at the phone.
“Right.”
“Letters come through sealed,” Millington explained. “Often just the one, sometimes up to half a dozen. All that’s on the envelope is the box number, whichever ad’s taken their fancy. The paper forwards them twice a week in batches. No way of knowing where they’ve come from.”
“There’s one way,” Resnick said.
Millington grinned and shook his head. “That won’t help us with replies they’ve already received, sir. Whoever the bastard was wrote to Shirley Peters, Mary Sheppard.”
Resnick was starting to move towards the phone. “He’ll try again,” he said. Hoping that he would not; hoping that he would.
“Not without a warrant, sir. Confidentiality, you’d think it kept him in a state of grace. And him working for a bloody newspaper. They’d put a periscope up your waste pipe if they thought it’d give them something to splash across the front page.”
Resnick took the receiver from the DC. He listened for a few moments to Tom Parker before interrupting: “Sir, it looks as if we’re going to need a court order.”
“Mrs. Peters…”
“She doesn’t want to be bothered.”
“Mrs. Peters…”
“Can’t you see she doesn’t want to be bothered?”
“Mrs. Peters, if…”
“Look! How many more times…?”
“It was good of you to come,” Olive Peter’s voice was hardly above a whisper, but in any case Lynn Kellogg was no longer crouched down and listening. With as few as seven people the room was overcrowded; the vicar looked up anxiously from the red and gray settee as the man tried to force Lynn towards the door.
“I’ll break this bloody stick over your head!” he was shouting.