Lynn looked up and nodded. “You don’t want me to go and talk to Doria again, sir?”
“No,” said Resnick. “Not yet.”
Halfway home, estate agents and clerical assistants sitting alone in their cars and inhaling one another’s lead and carbon monoxide, Resnick suddenly realized what he had failed to do. Failed to ask for. Annoyance at his own foolishness fired adrenaline through him and he swung out from the double line of traffic, warning lights flashing and headlights on full beam, one hand on the horn. Drivers heading in the opposite direction shouted and shook their fists, but moved over just the same. Resnick made a quarter of a mile before tagging across a series of residential side streets and finally skirting a roundabout that took him back into the same section of the city he had visited that morning.
“Charles,” Marian Witczak had the door held on the chain and was peering through the crack, surprise darkening her eyes. “Something is wrong?” She closed the door so as to free the chain. “Come in, come in, please.”
She looked at him anxiously, rubbing one hand against the apron she was wearing over her green dress. Instead of the soft leather shoes, there were thick multi-colored socks on her feet.
“I forgot…” Resnick began.
“About Doria? But I have already told…”
“No, but the letters. The letters he sent to you.”
“Yes?”
“You don’t happen to have kept them, I suppose?”
“Oh, Charles!” She laid her hand over his forearm, a gesture of affection. “Of course, they would have given you-what? — clues. That is what you policemen are always seeking. The one strand of yellow hair, a button torn from a jacket, the fatal footprint-see, Charles, I have read many mystery stories. Many.”
“But after you read the letters…” Resnick made an empty gesture with his hands.
Marian smiled a little, remembering. “Oh, I kept them, Charles.”
“You did?”
“My first love letters in twenty years. Almost twenty years. And I suppose I am not deluding myself to call them that. In the old-fashioned sense that is what he was doing, making love to me with his clever words, reassuring and clever-what he had been reading, seeing at the theater, exhibitions, experiences that we might share if only I would relent.”
Marian set a hand towards her face and lowered her cheek to meet it. The pendulum movement at Resnick’s back seemed unnaturally loud.
“Your visit this morning made me think-about why after that almost perfect evening he did not wish to see me again.” She let her hand slide clear of her face, not looking at Resnick now but instead at some invisible spot on the wall close by the door. “I think it was because he no longer felt it necessary. It was a game you see, a game of wits and he had won it. The moment my note to him arrived saying that, yes, I would be delighted to go to the concert with him, that was his victory. Of course, he had to carry the evening off in style, gain my approval further so that when we parted he would know that the instant he asked to see me again, I would so readily say yes.” She allowed herself a brief smile of regret. “For Doria, that was enough.”
“Not for you?” said Resnick softly.
The smile broadened, changed, faded. “Yes. No. Everything I have learned tells me that my answer should be yes, it was enough for me too.”
“But?”
“But if that had been his finger upon the bell, his face I saw when I opened the door…” She made a small shrugging movement with her shoulders. “I am sorry about the letters. If you had asked me as little as three months ago I could have taken you to the drawer and shown you them all.”
“Never mind,” Resnick said. “One of those things.”
“Those foolish things, eh, Charles? The winds of March that make my heart a dancer.” She half sang the lines, her accent more pronounced. A telephone that rings, but who’s to answer?
She was standing close to him and her hands were in his; her eyes were glistening, but if there were tears waiting she was too proud to let them fall.
“Did you know an Englishman wrote that stupid song, Charles?”
“Jack Strachey,” said Resnick.
“What did he know of life?” Marian said.
Twenty-Seven
“Do you know there are idiots out there still dropping a postcard in the box, meet you by the lions eight o’clock, I’ll be the one with a ferret down me trousers, and there’s other bloody idiots trooping out there to meet ’em!”
Colin Rich had a mug of tea in one hand and a wedge of bread pudding in the other. He was leaning up against a plate-glass window, one story up. Resnick put temptation behind him and tasted the coffee from the urn.
“It’s as bad as these silly sods sticking bloody needles in themselves, or diddling some scrubber round the side of the pub without wacking a johnny on their plonker first. Daft bastards! Deserve what they bloody get!”
Resnick threw the coffee out of the window instead.
“How’s the intellectual life, Charlie?”
“Quiet, sir.”
“Did you go to university, Charlie, I can’t remember?” Skelton asked, scarcely looking up from the notes he was making with a meticulous hand.
“No, sir. Never got round to it somehow.”
“Lot of life on the campuses in those days, Charlie. Especially if you were in a bit of new red-brick. Spent more time sitting in and marching than studying, I’m afraid.”
Bet you got a First, though, didn’t you, sir? Resnick didn’t say.
“Matter of fact, anyone who dug deep enough into my record, they’d find me listed on a couple of Special Branch files-under Danger to the Security of the Realm, I shouldn’t wonder. Look at me now.”
Resnick did as he was told.
Skelton set aside his pen, screwing the cap back first. “Andy Hunt’s getting hot under the collar about the chap who works on the railway. Two women said he turned nasty when they wouldn’t let him have what he thought was his due at the end of the evening. Knocked one of them around a little, nothing too serious, though apparently she was sitting at the checkout at Sainsbury’s with a black eye for a week. The second one, however, that was nastier. Pulled a knife on her and held it to her throat while she…” the superintendent’s voice changed key…“masturbated him.”
“Didn’t report it at the time?”
Skelton shook his head. “Neither of them.”
“This second lass, any chance she’ll make a complaint now?”
“Unlikely. Doesn’t seem to think her husband will understand.”
“If it goes to court, it’ll come out whatever she wants.”
“Seems she’s prepared to take that risk. Besides…”
“You don’t reckon him?”
“Agreed to an intimate search right off. Paid no attention to his solicitor warning him not to. No comeback from forensic yet, but my bet is that the results will clear him, no matter how much Andy wants it to go the other way.”
“Somebody ought to have words with that man about his courting technique.”
“Don’t worry,” said Skelton. “Unofficially, somebody will. I thought I’d let Rich read him a sermon or two. Potential serious crime, after all.”
“At least they’ll talk the same language.”
Skelton uncapped his fountain pen, thought about writing something, stopped.
“My hopes lie with this laddie Bernard Grafton’s come up with.”
“His psychiatric case.”
“Exactly. Spent nine months in residential care after finding himself up in court for exposing himself outside the nurses’ home.”
“Wasting his time there, sir,” said Resnick. “They must be sick of it.”
“There was some doubt about his intentions; he was worried himself he might have attacked one of them on her way back off shift. Nothing happened, other than in his mind, so there wasn’t any charge. But the probation officer put in a pretty useful Social Enquiry Report and hence the treatment. Apparently…” Skelton turned over some pieces of paper on his desk until he found the correct one…“while he was a patient he asked for a drug which would curb his sexual urges and was put on a course of Androcur. Things improved, chappie was released but the medication was terminated.”