Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  I nod. “You okay?”

  He nods. Attempts a grin. Not a brilliant attempt but more than passable.

  I take the card back to my desk, pulling the plastic bag tight around my finger and tracing the outline of the card with the thumb and forefinger of my free hand.

  Somebody killed a young woman. Somebody dropped a heavy sink onto a little girl’s head. And this card—belonging to a dead millionaire—was there as it happened.

  Routine is fine. Secrets are better.

  The briefing room next morning, where sharp means sharp.

  One side of the Incident Room is taken up with notice boards in pale buff that are already starting to swarm with names, roles, assignments, questions, and lists. The bureaucracy of murder. The star of the show is a set of photos. Crime scene images which are all about documentary accuracy, not careful lighting, but there’s something about their bluntness which gives them an almost shocking truthfulness.

  The woman lies on a mattress on the floor. She could be sleeping, or in some drug-induced coma. She doesn’t look either happy or unhappy, peaceful or unpeaceful. She just looks like the dead look, or like anyone at all looks when they’re sleeping.

  The child is another matter. You can’t see the top half of her head, because it isn’t there. The kitchen sink stretches right across the photo, out of focus on its upper edge, because the photographer was focusing on the face, not the sink. From beneath it peep the child’s nose, her mouth and chin. The force of the sink has ejected blood through her nose and sprayed it downward, like some joke shop trick gone wrong. Her mouth is pulled back. I imagine that the weight of the sink caused the skin or muscle to pull backward. What I’m looking at is simple mechanics, not an expression of feeling. Yet humans are humans and what looks like a smile is interpreted as a smile, even if it’s no such thing, and this girl with the top of her head missing is smiling at me. Smiling out of death, at me.

  “Poor little thing.”

  The coffee-breathed speaker behind me is Jim Davis, a veteran copper, in uniform for most of his time on the force and now a sturdily reliable D.S.

  “Yes, poor little girl.”

  The room is full now. Fourteen of us, including just three women. At this stage of an investigation, these briefings have an odd, jumpy energy. There’s anger and grittiness on the one hand, a kind of remorseless male heartiness on the other. And everywhere, people wanting to do something.

  Eight twenty-eight. D.C.I. Dennis Jackson motors out of his office, jacket already off, sleeves already rolled up. A D.I. Hughes, Ken Hughes, who I don’t know very well, follows him, looking important.

  Jackson gets up front. The room falls silent. I’m standing by the photo wall and feel the presence of that little girl on the side of my face as intensely as I would if it were a real person. More intensely, maybe.

  The case is less than twenty-four hours old, but routine inquiries have already thrown up a good pile of facts and suppositions. Jackson goes through them all, speaking without notes. He is possessed by the same jumpy energy that fills the room, snapping off his phrases and throwing them out at us. Iron pellets of information.

  No one on the electoral roll registered at that address.

  Social Services appear to know the woman and child, however. Final identification is hoped for later in the day, but the woman is almost certain to turn out to be Janet Mancini. Her daughter is April.

  Assuming those identifications are confirmed, then the backstory is this. Mancini was twenty-six at the time of her death. The child just six.

  Mancini’s home background was lousy. Given up for adoption. Taken into care. A few foster families, some of which worked better than others. Started at adult education college. Not bright, but trying to do her best.

  Drugs. Pregnancy. The child moving in and out of care, according to whether Mancini or her demons were on top at the time. “Social Services pretty sure that Mancini was unstable but not a lunatic.” A grin which is more of a grimace. “Not a sink dropper, anyway.”

  The last contact with Social Services was six weeks back. Mancini had been apparently drug-free. Her flat—not the address where she’d been found but one in one of the nicer bits of Llanrumney—was reasonably tidy and clean. The child was properly dressed, fed, and attending school. “So. Last contact, no problems.”

  The next time Social Services come round to visit, Mancini is a no-show. Maybe at her mam’s. Maybe somewhere else. Social Services are concerned but not hitting alarm buttons.

  “The house where they’re found is a squat, obviously. No record of Mancini having any previous connection with it. We’ve got a statement from the neighbor on one side. Nothing helpful.” Jackson stabs at the notice boards. “It’s all there and on Groove. If you haven’t got up to speed already, then you should have.” Groove is our project management and document-sharing system. It works well, but it wouldn’t feel like an incident room unless there were notice boards fluttering with paper.

  Jackson then stands back to let Hughes rattle on through other known facts. The evidence from utility bills, police records, phone use. The things that a modern force can acquire almost instantly. He mentions Rattigan’s debit card, without making a big thing of it. Then he finishes, and Jackson takes over.

  “Initial autopsy findings later today, maybe, but we won’t have anything definitive for a while. I suggest, however, we proceed on the assumption that the girl was killed by a kitchen sink.” His first attempt at humor, if you can call it that. “The mother. OD, possibly. Asphyxiation? Heart attack? Don’t yet know.

  “Focus of the investigation at this stage is: Continue to gather all possible information about the victims. Past. Background. Known associates. Query drug dealing. Query prostitution. House-to-house inquiries. I want to know about anyone who entered that house. I want to know about anyone that Mancini met, saw, talked to, anything in those six weeks since Social Services last saw her. Key question: Why did Mancini move to that squat? She was drug-free, looking after her kid, doing well. Why did she throw all that away? What made her move?

  “Individual assignments here”—meaning the notice boards—“and Groove. Any questions, to me. If you can’t get hold of me, then to Ken. If you uncover anything important or anything that might be important, let me know straightaway, no excuses.”

  He nods, checking he hadn’t left anything out. He hadn’t. Briefings like this, early on in any serious crime investigation, are partly theater. Any group of coppers will always treat murder as the most serious thing they ever have to deal with, but team dynamics demand a ritual. The haka of the All Blacks. Celtic woad. Battle music. Jackson puts his weary-but-determined look to one side and puts on his grim-and-resolute one instead.

  “We don’t yet know if Janet Mancini’s death was murder, but we’re treating it that way for now. But the girl. She was six years old. Six. Just started at school. Friends. At their Llanrumney flat, the one she left six weeks ago, there were paintings of hers hanging up on the fridge. Clean clothes hanging up in her bedroom. Then this.” He points to the photo of her on the notice board, but none of us look at it, because it’s already inside our heads. Around the room, the men are clamping their jaws and looking tough. D.C. Rowland, Bev Rowland, a good friend of mine, is crying openly.

  “Six years old, then this. April Mancini. We’re going to find the man who dropped that sink, and we’re going to send him to jail for the rest of his life. That’s our job. What we’re here to do. Now let’s get on with it.”

  The meeting breaks up. Chatter. A charge for the coffee machine. Too much noise.

  I grab Bev. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine really. I knew today wasn’t going to be a mascarary kind of day.”

  I laugh. “What have they got you doing?”

  “Door-to-door, mostly. The woman’s touch. How about you?”

  There’s a funny kind of assumption in her answer and her question. The assumption is that I don’t quite count as a woman,
so I don’t quite get the jobs which female D.C.s are usually assigned. I don’t resent that assumption. Bev is the sort to cry when Jackson puts on his gravel-voiced tearjerker finale. I’m not. Bev is the sort of comfortable soul that people will happily open up to over a cup of tea. I’m not. I mean, I can do the door-to-door stuff. I’ve done it before and asked the right questions and sometimes obtained valuable information. But Bev is a natural, and we both know I’m not.

  “I’m mostly on the Brian Penry case. Bank statements and all that. In my spare time, if I stay sane, I’m meant to track down that debit card thing. Rattigan’s card. Funny place for it to show up.”

  “Stolen?”

  I shake my head. I called the bank yesterday after talking with Brydon and—once I’d managed to clamber through all the bureaucracy to someone who actually had the information—got answers fairly easily. “Nope. The card was reported lost. It was duly canceled and a replacement issued. Life goes on. It could literally be just that. He dropped it. Mancini or whoever picked it up. Kept it as a souvenir.”

  “Brendan Rattigan’s platinum card? I would have kept it.”

  “You wouldn’t. You’d have handed it in.”

  “Well, I know, but if I wasn’t the handing-in type.”

  I laugh at her. Trying to use the inner workings of Bev Rowland’s mind as a model for guessing at the inner workings of Janet Mancini’s mind doesn’t feel to me like an obvious recipe for success. Bev makes a face at me for laughing but wants to rush off to the ladies’ so she can sort her face out before hitting the road. I tell her to have a good day, and she says, “You too.”

  As she leaves, I realize that what I said to her wasn’t true. Janet Mancini couldn’t have picked up Rattigan’s debit card from the pavement. It wasn’t possible. Mancini and Rattigan didn’t walk the same streets, didn’t go to the same pubs, didn’t inhabit the same worlds. The places where Rattigan might have dropped his card were all places that would, explicitly or otherwise, have forbidden Mancini entry.

  And as soon as this thought occurs to me, I understand its implication. The two of them knew each other. Not casually. Not by chance. But meaningfully, in some real way. If you asked me to take a bet on it right now, I’d bet that the millionaire killed the drug addict. Not directly, I assume—it’s hard to kill someone when you’re dead—but indirect killing is still killing.

  “I’m going to get you, you fucker,” I say out loud. A secretary looks at me startled as she walks past. “Not you,” I tell her. “You’re not the fucker.”

  She gives me a little smile. The sort that you slip the schizo type muttering swearwords in the street, the sort you offer park-bench drunks quarreling over cider. I don’t mind. I’m used to that kind of smile by now. Water. Duck’s back. Paddle on.

  I head upstairs.

  My desk stares balefully at me, flaunting its cargo of numbers and sheets of paper. I go over to the kitchenette and make myself a peppermint tea. Me and one of the secretaries drink it, no one else. Back to my desk. Another sunny day. Big windows full of air and sunshine. I lower my head over my mug of tea and let my face warm up in the perfumed steam. A thousand boring things to do and one interesting one. I’m reaching for the phone, even as I pull my face away from the steambath. It takes me a couple of calls to get Charlotte Rattigan’s number—widows of the superwealthy are unlisted, inevitably—but I get it anyway and make the call.

  A woman’s voice answers, giving the name of the house, Cefn Mawr House. She sounds every inch the servant, the expensive sort, titanium-plated.

  “Hello, my name’s Detective Constable Griffiths calling from the South Wales Police. May I speak with Mrs. Rattigan, please?”

  Mention of the police causes a moment’s hesitation, as it almost always does. Then the training kicks in.

  “Detective Constable Griffiths, did you say? May I ask what it’s regarding?”

  “It’s a police matter. I’d prefer to speak to Mrs. Rattigan directly.”

  “Mrs. Rattigan isn’t available right now. Perhaps if I could let her know the issue …?”

  I don’t really need to see Rattigan’s widow in person. Talking to her on the phone would have been just fine, but I don’t respond well to titanium-plated obstructiveness. It makes me come over all police-forcish.

  “That’s quite all right. Will she be available for an interview later on today?”

  “Look, if you could just let me know the matter at hand …”

  “I’m calling in connection with a murder inquiry. A routine matter, but it needs to be dealt with. If it’s not convenient for me to come to the house, then perhaps we could arrange for Mrs. Rattigan to come down to Cardiff, and we can talk to her here.”

  I enjoy these little power contests, stupid as they are. I like them because I win. Within two minutes, Titanium Voice has given me an 11:30 appointment and directions to the house. I put the phone down, laughing at myself. The round trip will take me an hour and a half, and what could have been a three-minute phone call will end up wasting half my morning.

  I spend the next hour working through Penry’s hateful bank statements, lose track of time a bit, then find myself bolting downstairs for my car. It’s a white Peugeot coupe cabriolet. Two seats. Soft top. High-pressure turbocharger that gets you from 0 to 60 in a shade over eight seconds. Soft leather seats in pale fawn. Alloys. My dad gave me my first car when I got my job three years ago, then insisted on replacing it with the new model this year. It’s a totally inappropriate car for a junior detective constable, and I love it.

  I throw my bag—notebook, pen, purse, phone, dark glasses, makeup, evidence bag—onto the passenger seat and nose out of the car park. Cardiff traffic. Classic FM inside the car, pneumatic drills ripping up the A4161 Newport Road. Carpet stores and discount bed places. Clearer on the A48, the music turned up for the motorway and its views out over Newport—just possibly the ugliest town in the world—before snaking up past Cwmbran toward Penperlleni.

  Because of the traffic and the roadwork, and because I’d set off late in the first place, and because I got myself lost in the lanes beyond Penperlleni, I’m about twenty-five minutes late when I do manage to find the entrance to Cefn Mawr House. Big stone pillars and fierce yew topiary. Posh and English-feeling. Out of place.

  I make the turn and, shades on against the sunlight, I speed up the drive in a stupid attempt to minimize my lateness. A last twist in the way catches me out, and I emerge into the large graveled parking area in front of the house doing about thirty miles an hour, when under ten would have been more appropriate. I brake hard and go for a long, curving slide on the gravel until my speed falls away. I only just manage to stop the engine stalling. A wide spray of ocher dust hangs in the air to mark the maneuver. Silent applause. Fi Griffiths, rally driver.

  I give myself a few seconds to get my head together. Breathing in, breathing out, concentrating on each breath. My heart’s going too fast, but at least I can feel it. These things shouldn’t worry me so much, but they do. There shouldn’t be such a thing as poverty and starvation, but there is. I wait till I think it’s okay, then give it another twenty seconds.

  Out of the car. I slam the door closed but don’t blip it locked. On the front steps of the house, there’s a woman—Miss Titanium, I presume—watching me. She doesn’t look like she likes me.

  “D.C. Griffiths?”

  It’s D.C. now, I notice. Miss Titanium doesn’t strike me as altogether au fait with CID ranks, so I suspect her of doing some quick research on the Internet. In which case she knows how junior I am.

  “Sorry I’m late. Traffic.” I don’t know if she witnessed my rally-driving arrival, so I don’t apologize for it and she doesn’t mention it.

  The house is a modest affair. Ten or twelve bedrooms. Immaculate grounds. A leylandii hedge screening what I presume is a tennis court. Farther away a couple of cottages and what I guess is a stable or gym complex. The river Usk flows picturesquely over rocks at the end of a long sweep of lawn.
We’re only a few miles away from Cwmbran and the old coal mines which injure the hillsides above. Crumlin, Abercarn, Cwmcarn, Pontywaun. Standing here, with the river Usk parading its party tricks in the sunlight, you’d think you were a million miles away from all that. That’s the point, I suppose. What the money is for.

  Titanium takes me on through the front door. Inside everything is as you’d expect. Interior designed so completely that any trace of human personality vanished along with the Victorian subfloors. Our heels click across limestone in the hall, past vases of fresh flowers and photos of racehorses, through into the kitchen. A huge room, an add-on to the main body of the house. Handmade kitchen furniture in ivory. A range cooker in Wedgwood blue. More flowers. Venetian blinds, sofas, and sunlight.

  “Mrs. Rattigan has been called away on something else, just temporarily. We were expecting you at eleven thirty.”

  “Sorry, my fault. I’m happy to wait.”

  I say this sincerely. Genuinely sorry. Genuinely happy to wait. Mature of me. Nice person. Trouble is that I’m being nice only because I scared myself a few moments back and can’t take any hassle now. For the time being, just sitting in this kitchen listening to my heart beat is enough for me.

  Titanium—who gave me her name, along with a limp but elegant hand, at the front of the house—is doing things with the kettle. I try to remember her name, and nothing comes to me. I sit at the table and get out my notebook. For a moment I can’t even remember why I’m here. Titanium puts coffee down in front of me, as though it’s some art object the family has just invested in.

  I can’t think of anything to say, so say nothing. I blink instead.

  “I’ll go and see if Mrs. Rattigan is ready for you.”

  I nod. She goes. Clicks out of the kitchen, through the hall, to somewhere else. I’m calming down now. I can hear a clock ticking somewhere. The range cooker emits a kind of gentle rushing sound from its flue, like a stream heard a long way away. A few minutes go by, lovely empty minutes, then a woman comes into the kitchen, Titanium in position on her wing.