Lonely Hearts Read Online Free PDF

awake.
    “Don’t say it!” warned Resnick. “Don’t say a thing.”
    He leaned his back against the corner of the stairwell, breathing heavily, unsteadily. DC Kellogg turned her head and gazed out over the park with its pitch-and-putt course, the domed church on the hill opposite, beyond that houses and the first glimpses of open country.
    “Bloody lifts never work! It’s all right for youngsters like you. Take the stairs three at a time and keep smiling.”
    Lynn Kellogg smiled. “First time I’ve ever heard you plead getting old, sir.”
    Resnick levered himself away from the wall. “I’m not.”
    Still smiling, she followed him along the landing, negotiating their way past two prams, one holding a sleeping child, the other a half-hundredweight of coal and the inside of a television.
    Olive Peters showed them into a small living-room, dralon and plastic, a damp stain spreading out in dark, wavering rings from one corner of the ceiling. Her cheeks had sunk deep into her face and her mouth had all but disappeared, as if the dentures she normally wore had been mislaid, forgotten. Lacking yesterday’s makeup, gray creases strayed across her skin. The platinum blond hair had been pinned up haphazardly; her body shrunk inside a buttoned cardigan and skirt.
    “I could make some tea…”
    “Don’t trouble yourself.”
    “It seems wrong,” she fidgeted. “When you’ve come out, like…”
    “Mrs. Peters,” said Lynn Kellogg, getting up. “Why don’t I pop into the kitchen and make us a pot? Would you mind?”
    She leaned back into her chair, relieved. “That’s it, duck, you mash.” And then, “There’s a packet of biscuits somewhere, you’ll see.”
    “Lovely girl,” she said, turning to Resnick, and the tears began to flow again, easing themselves down her face.
    Resnick leaned across and gave her his handkerchief, looked at the photograph of mother and daughter on the mantelpiece, crooked in a perspex frame, waited for the tea and biscuits.
    Shirley Peters’s mother didn’t wait that long. “What makes me sick, when you catch the bastard he won’t swing for it!”
    Something about the way she spoke jogged Resnick awake, made him realize that when she said “he”, she didn’t mean some anonymous, still-to-be-identified killer. She meant somebody specific.
    “Tony,” she said, looking Resnick in the face, reading his thoughts in return. “He always said he’d do this to her. Tony. The bastard!”
    In the kitchen the kettle whistled and then was still; Resnick quietly took out his notebook and fingered the cap from his pen.

    DS Millington swung into the car park, driving too fast, as Resnick and Kellogg were closing the doors of the black saloon. Before there was time to climb the steps into the station, Millington was hurrying between them.
    “Six witnesses. Six. All willing to testify to Peters’s common-law husband threatening her with violence.”
    Resnick pushed through the glass door, nodded to the uniformed officer on duty and moved on towards the stairs.
    “One couple, black, but never mind, can’t have everything, they remember it clearly, date, time, everything, wedding anniversary, that’s why. Got back from some do and there was all this going on in the middle of the street. You as much as sniff another man and I’ll bloody strangle you! , that’s what he came out with. They’ll swear to it.”
    They were standing inside Resnick’s office now, Resnick’s face expressionless as he nodded, listening to the sergeant’s excited voice. Off to the side, Lynn Kellogg watching, a smile ready at the corners of her rounded mouth.
    Millington clapped his hands emphatically. “Open and sodding shut!”
    “Tony Macliesh.” Resnick’s tone was level, matter-of-fact.
    Millington’s eyes grew wide, then narrowed to a slit. Resnick continued to look at a point some six inches above his sergeant’s head.
    “If you knew…”
    “I’ve sent Naylor and Divine to bring him