Lonely Hearts Read Online Free PDF Page B

in.”
    Lynn Kellogg excused herself, hand to her mouth, bottling up the laughter as best she could until she reached the privacy of the ladies.
    “Open and shut, Charlie. Is that what you think?”
    Resnick was sitting in Skelton’s office, trying not to get annoyed at the way both in-tray and out-tray were arranged a precise quarter-inch from the edges of the desk, the blotter with its fountain pens, each containing different colored inks, pointing towards it at an angle of forty-five degrees. Equidistant from tile silver-framed calendar, photographs of Skelton’s wife and daughter, also silver-framed and smiling.
    “Looks that way.”
    Skelton nodded. “Run me through it.”
    Resnick uncrossed his legs, crossed them again the other way. “Shirley Peters, thirty-nine. Last four years she’d worked for a computer software company near the old market square. Typist, switchboard, nothing specialized. Up till about eighteen months ago she’d been living with this Tony Macliesh. Her mother says they were together the best part of three years—though to hear her tell it, the best part was when she finally chucked him. He went off to Aberdeen to work on the rigs, she got on with her life and inside six months he was back and making a nuisance of himself. Arguments, threats; he’d be banging on the door in the middle of the night. She changed the locks, spent some nights with her mum, only of course that made it worse because he thought she’d been with a bloke.”
    “Any complaints through us?” Skelton interrupted.
    “Kellogg’s checking the files. There must have been something; a little over a year back she got a restraining order against him.”
    “Effective?”
    “Didn’t need to be. Macliesh got lifted for aggravated burglary and earned himself nine months in Lincoln. He’s not long out. One of the neighbors told Millington she saw him pacing up and down the street no more than two days back.”
    Skelton leaned backwards, flexing his fingers and then cupping his hands behind his head. “File it away under domestic violence.”
    “I think so.”
    “No need to panic.”
    “No.”
    “You’ll get your other evidence?”
    “Scene-of-crime turned up some hairs on the woman’s sweater that weren’t hers, scraping of skin under the forefinger of the right hand, male pubic hair around the pelvic…”
    “I understood her to be fully clothed?”
    Resnick looked at him. “Some people prefer it that way.”
    The look he got in return was of no great interest, only mild surprise. Resnick had worked with Skelton for almost two years and if his superior’s self-control had slipped during that time, Resnick had not been aware of it.
    “How does this fit in with your theory about Macliesh?” Skelton asked.
    “If what was driving him was sexual jealousy, anything’s possible. And all traces of semen were outside the body, her abdomen, her…” Resnick left it there; if Skelton wanted to use his imagination, he could give it a try.
    “All right, then, Charlie. You’re bringing him in?”
    “I sent two men down to his digs. He’d got himself a room in Radford. They phoned in an hour ago to say he wasn’t there, but most of his stuff’s still in the room. They’re nosing around, other lodgers, the local. They’ll turn something up.”
    Skelton stood up, glancing at his watch. Resnick wondered if, the second the door to the office was closed, Skelton would be logging the exact time the interview had finished in his Filofax.
    Kevin Naylor spread the color charts across his desk and couldn’t remember whether Debbie had said peach or apricot. What was the difference anyway and how much did it matter? Something to do with the way it had to match the terracotta she’d already chosen for the tiles. Jesus! He’d always thought that getting married was a matter of finding a girl with the best qualities of your mother, but who wasn’t going to turn into her own at half-time. Then it came down to choosing