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.
“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?”