Lonely Hearts Read Online Free PDF Page A

here. I’ll forget about making babies for a few years and you concentrate on your career. Better still, throw in your job. Retrain. Get a place at university. Go abroad. Only last month someone from CID got a transfer to Billings, Montana; doubled his salary for the price of a ticket across the Atlantic, one way. Now he’s got a house on the edge of town that looks over miles of prairie and all he had to do was learn how to ride a horse.
    None of that was what she had in mind.
    Whatever growing Resnick might be going in for, and she made it more than clear in those last weeks that he had a lot of potential in that area, he was going to do it in his own time and company. She was going to stretch her new-found wings alone.
    Within six months she was remarried, her new husband an estate agent who changed his car every year and spent weekends at a holiday cottage in Wales. Resnick used to scan the papers, eager for reports that it had been burnt down. For a while he even subscribed to the fighting fund of Plaid Cymru. Now it was as if he had never really known her, as if nothing but their bodies had ever really touched. He had realized that in all the five years they had lived under the same roof, he had never known what she had been thinking or feeling and the truly frightening thing was realizing that he had never really cared. She would have said that was why, finally, she had to leave him. He had never been able to find her, so she had better try to find herself.
    But what do you find, Resnick had used to wonder, down behind the rear seat of a new Volvo or at the bottom of an exclusive estate’s swimming pool after the water has been drained away?
    He used to think it very sad; then, as more years passed, he scarcely thought about it—about her—at all.
    Maybe his denial to Jack Skelton had not been as much of a lie as he had thought.
    He cleaned those parts of his fingers the cat had ignored, leaned forward and set the plate on the floor and then removed the headphones. As he did so, he realized that the telephone was ringing. He made a lunge towards it and lifted the receiver and, of course, the line went dead the moment it got close to his ear.
    The receiver still in his hand, he dialed the station: no, no one had been trying to contact him. Lynn Kellogg was alone in the office, catching up on some paperwork. Her voice sounded more Norfolk the more tired she became and now Resnick had difficulty making out what she said.
    “How’s Patel?” Resnick asked.
    “White as a mucky sheet. The sergeant told him to go home.”
    “Home to Bradford, or home to his digs?”
    “Digs, I suppose.”
    “You do the same.”
    “I’ve moved on from digs long since.”
    She had moved to a housing association flat in the old Lace Market area of the city, where she lived with a professional cyclist who spent most of his spare time pedaling over the Alps in bottom gear and much of the remainder shaving his legs to eliminate wind resistance.
    At least it allowed her space.
    “Go home yourself,” Resnick said. “Get some sleep. And remember your box of plasters as well as your sensible shoes tomorrow. You’ll be doing house-to-house.”
    Resnick went into the kitchen area and shifted Pepper far enough from the stove to set the kettle on the gas. He was spooning a mixture of dark continental and mocha into the filter when he realized he had been thinking about Rachel Chaplin for some minutes. Partly it was because of the little lecture she had delivered on caffeine before bedtime, but mainly it was the way he remembered her eyes. The way they held his gaze and refused to fade away. In some way or another she meant trouble for him, this Rachel Chaplin, and Resnick was unable to resist the feeling that a little trouble was his due.
    He poured the boiling water over the ground coffee, reached for a clean glass and a bottle of Scotch and poured some of that, too. If he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, at least he could enjoy staying