Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  Here, without anyone to bother them, they look like mother and daughter. I can’t tell anything about the eyes, of course—April doesn’t have any—but her mouth is a miniature version of her mam’s. Her little, dimpled chin too. I stroke April’s cheek, then Janet’s as well. Each is as dead as the other. No reason to make distinctions now.

  I stare at them.

  Janet stares back at me. She’s not saying anything just yet. Still getting used to being dead. April can’t look, but she does smile at me. I don’t think being dead is going to be too hard for her. Life was tough. Death should be a cinch in comparison.

  We smile at each other for a while, just enjoying each other’s company. I bend down to Janet’s hair. Smell it, touch it, comb it through with my fingers. The combing releases both a smell of antiseptic and a smell of shampoo. Apple, or something like it.

  I stand with my fingers in Janet’s hair, trying to trace the root of the impulse that brought me here. Janet’s scalp feels surprisingly delicate under my fingertips. I can feel little April smiling beside me.

  Something in our interaction seems incomplete, but I don’t know what’s needed to complete it.

  “Good night, little April,” I say. “Good night, Janet.”

  It’s the right thing to say, but the incompleteness is still there. I pause a few seconds more, but to no avail. The thing that was left hanging a few moments before is still hanging now, and I don’t think I’m going to find it by waiting.

  I don’t want Jackson and Price to think I’m a freak, so I “find” my pen, cover the girls, and go rustling out of the suite, brandishing the pen with a dumb look of triumph. The guys don’t care. They’re moving through to their changing area anyway.

  I get changed slowly. Rubber boots in one bin. Oversize gown in another. The door to the cleaning cupboard stands next to the entrance of the women’s changing room. Nice touch that. Don’t frighten the men by letting them see mops and buckets. I swing open the door and stare inside. It’s a big, roomy cupboard—a small room, really—with cleaning equipment. I don’t know why I’m staring, so go out into the lobby beyond.

  The men still aren’t done. I don’t see why I should wait for them, so I yell, “Thank you, Dr. Price. See you tomorrow, sir.” I push the door to leave and can’t budge it. It doesn’t pull open either. I’m trying to work out if these are unusually heavy doors and I’m just being wimpish when Price comes out to help.

  “I’ve got to buzz you out,” he explains. “It’s a secure area.”

  “Oh.”

  Everything’s a secure area these days. What do they think? That the corpses will escape? We say good night—him automatically, me woodenly—and he buzzes me out.

  Because I’m feeling a bit odd, I manage to get lost and end up tramping up and down some of those endless hospital corridors, looking for the way out. Pale yellow vinyl tiles that squeak underfoot and reflect too much fluorescent light. My head is full of hospital words. Pediatrics. Orthopedics. Radiotherapy. Phlebotomy. I don’t do well with the light or the words, and I end up walking around at random. Taking lifts, up or down according to which way they were going at the time. Getting on and off when anyone else does.

  Hematology. Diagnostic imaging. Gastroenterology.

  At one point a nurse stops me and asks me if I’m all right. I say, “Yes. Quite all right,” but I say it too loudly, and I go squeaking off down the yellow vinyl to show how all right I am.

  Eventually, I realize it is the hospital itself which is making me feel weird. I need to get out. I find myself at a T-junction in the corridor, wondering how to find the exit, then realize I’m staring directly at a large black-on-metal sign which says WAY OUT →. I treat this as a clue and pursue it all the way to the main exit, where I find fresh air and a swell of wind. Cardiff air smells of grass or salt, depending on which way the wind blows. Or so they say. Mostly it smells of car fumes, the same as anywhere.

  I stand in the entrance for a while, letting people push past me, feeling myself return.

  I’m trying to remember where I parked my car when my phone chirps the arrival of a text. Brydon nudging me about the drink. The drink I’d forgotten. I should go. I’m already late.

  On my way to the car, I salute the mortuary.

  “Good night, April. Good night, Janet.”

  I don’t get an answer, but I bet April is still smiling.

  Sharp means sharp, and today no one is sharper, smarter, or more bushy-tailed than me.

  Not long into Jackson’s morning briefing, I get my moment of glory.

  He summarizes the result of the meeting at the mortuary yesterday, then adds, “Fiona Griffiths will be getting her notes onto Groove as soon as she can. Right, Fiona?”

  “Already done, sir,” I say.

  “You’ve done it?” He doesn’t believe me.

  “All done. I didn’t want to waste time.”

  He raises his eyebrows—which have turned shaggy before their time, so the gesture is a bit of a signature look for him. Either he’s impressed or (more likely) he doesn’t believe that I’ve done a decent job. But I have. I came in early and whizzed through it. I learned to type at Cambridge, and I’m blitzkrieg fast.

  “Okay. Good. That means you lot can read all about it.”

  Jackson delivers a few other nuggets—the most important of which is that we’ve now got the full case files from Social Services up on the system—then hands over to Ken Hughes. Hughes summarizes the first batch of findings from the door-to-door work. Eighty-six Allison Street had accrued a good bit of hostility from its neighbors, being variously described as a drug den, a squat, a place taken over by the homeless, and much more.

  “Putting aside more fanciful ideas,” says Hughes in his depressive, and ever-so-slightly hostile, monotone, “the general picture seems to be this.”

  He tells us that the house had been rented for some years, then fell vacant around two years ago. Landlord not yet traced. For some time, it just stood there, getting quietly damper and older. Then the back door was forced, possibly by kids out to cause trouble, possibly by a drug dealer wanting a place to operate from, possibly by a homeless person wanting a roof for the night. In any case, once the back door was gone, the house began to attract trouble.

  From the visual evidence, the house had certainly been used as a squat for a period longer than the Mancinis’ few weeks of residence. It was highly likely that drugs had been taken in the house for some considerable period. If drugs were used there, they were probably dealt there too. If drugs had been bought and sold there, then it was likely enough that there were women selling themselves for drugs, although the place wasn’t remotely nice enough to have prospered as even the most basic of brothels. (At this point, there’s a muttered comment from one of the lads nearest Hughes, and there’s a burst of hard male laughter. Hughes catches the comment and glowers at the culprit, but we girls, standing at the back and edge of the room, are excluded from what would most certainly have been an extremely hilarious observation. Ah well.)

  So much for the background. Specifics. Janet Mancini had definitely been seen around the place for the past several weeks. Farideh, the girl I’d talked to at the convenience shop, had reported seeing Janet several times. She remembered her hair—which meant nothing, because Janet’s hair color had been widely mentioned in the press—but she also correctly described some clothing and an item of jewelry that had been found at the house. She also—and this was a clincher—remembered selling Janet a frozen Hawaiian pizza whose wrapper featured in the long inventory of the rubbish that had been found at the house.

  “Hawaiian, sir?”

  This question from Mervyn Rogers, who has been taking notes. His pen is poised and his face is serious.

  Hughes is suspicious, because he thinks Rogers is taking the piss (which he is), but he’s not sure enough to make a thing out of it, so he just confirms the pizza identification and moves on. A little ripple of amusement runs round the room and includes us gi
rls this time. We’re thrilled, I can tell you.

  “Yes, Hawaiian. Mancini clearly had April with her in the house, because the same source confirms purchases of such typically childish foods as Coco Pops and Nesquik banana milk.”

  He knows he sounds idiotic, so he glares angrily at us as he says it. He can’t tear himself away from his written notes, though, and on he plows.

  “Sources whom we take to be reliable and who have confirmed Janet Mancini’s presence in the neighborhood all agree that they did not see April Mancini with her at the time. We are for the moment presuming that April was present in the house but not inclined or not permitted to go out.”

  He’s got another few pages of notes to get through, but none of us can bear much more of it and Jackson steps in to rescue things.

  “Anything else is up on Groove. Familiarize yourself with it all. Short summary: We have no reports of anyone other than the two Mancinis at the house. No reports of April Mancini being seen outside at any time. No reliable reports of any regular visitors, or irregular ones for that matter. Curtains always closed, lights off—no electricity, remember. No music. The place was quiet.

  “So, we have to shift resources to other lines of inquiry. CCTV. The nearest cameras—the nearest working cameras—were five hundred and seven hundred yards away. It’s fairly likely that one of these picked up Janet Mancini at some point over the last few weeks. We need to see if she was with anyone at the time. Jon Breakell—where are you, Jon? There—you’ll take the lead on that.”

  Because I feel on the fringe of the inquiry and want to make myself more central, I lift my hand. Jackson doesn’t notice me, so I butt in.

  “There’s CCTV at the convenience shop too, sir. Maybe they’ll have footage.”

  There’s a short exchange of conversation up at the front. Apparently someone’s already noticed the shop’s CCTV, and getting access to their footage is already on an action list somewhere.

  “Okay. Meanwhile, Janet. We need to dig into her past. There’s a good chance she knew her killer, so we need to locate the people she knew and how she knew them. If she was working as a prostitute and was killed by one of her punters, then it’s a fair bet that this wasn’t the first time they’d had sex together.

  “And let’s not forget our anonymous female caller, the one who tipped us off about the house. That caller is still out there. There’s been plenty of media, she knows we want to talk to her, but she hasn’t come in yet. Anything that can lead us to her is also valuable.

  “So. Tasks for today …”

  Jackson starts listing tasks and responsibilities, and the Incident Room begins to break up. No breakthroughs yet, no easy victory. No one’s concerned yet, and there’s a general assumption that the killer will be found and jailed. All the same, it’s hard not to notice that we remain completely in the dark about who might have killed the Mancinis. Sooner or later, this optimism will demand fuel to keep it burning.

  I head downstairs for the print room but am interrupted by a knot of officers round the coffee machine, where Merv Rogers is being honored for his wit.

  “Pineapple,” he is saying. “Adding fruit to a dish which is basically savory. That’s not right, is it?”

  I squeeze round them. They don’t make way for me or seek to include me in their banter. That’s partly because I’m physically small. Partly because I’m junior. Partly because I’m a girl. And partly because people think I’m odd.

  I go down to the print room, where the ever-so-slightly-Polish print manager, Tomasz Kowalczyk, is bustling around in charge of his papery domain.

  “Dzień dobry, Tomasz,” I tell him.

  “Dzień dobry, Fiona. How can I help you today?”

  “You shouldn’t say that. It makes you sound like you’re about to offer me fries.”

  At least Tomasz likes me. I’m here for some photos, and I show him the ones I want from the system, which now boasts not only the crime scene images but also some of those found among the Mancinis’ possessions. Not so many of Janet, because I suppose she never had a regular person to take photos of her, but plenty of April. April in party dresses, April on a beach. April holding a huge toffee apple and laughing. She had wide blue eyes, like her mam, and when she laughed, everything in her face was laughing too. April Mancini, the toffee apple kid.

  I pick out about a dozen pictures in total. Some of Janet. Some of April. Obviously we’ve got printers upstairs, but only regular black-and-white ones. Tomasz’s empire is responsible for all bulk runs, all color printing, all fancy print jobs—and I’m after photo-quality reproduction. Tomasz makes me fill out some forms, which annoys me because I don’t like forms, which means I make a mess of them, which means that Tomasz ends up doing them for me. I polish up one of my nicest smiles and give it to him when he’s ready. He tells me to come back in forty-five minutes.

  Back at my desk. Aside from my work on the Penry case, I’ve been tasked with two jobs for today. One is to answer any Lohan-related phone calls from the general public that come in as a result of our media appeals for information. The other is to get stuck into Janet’s Social Services records and see if there’s anything useful there. A grandly named executive summary is what Jackson is after. I take three calls—one nuts, two sane but probably useless—and start on the paperwork. I’m good at this kind of thing. That’s what a Cambridge training does for you: reading mounds of stuff fast and extracting the useful part quickly and clearly. All the same, I’d prefer to be on the inquiry proper, so I work fast, accumulating brownie points.

  I’m hard at work when my phone rings. It’s Jackson, using the speakerphone on his desk, to tell me to come over. No reason offered.

  I enter his office but hover by the door. Jackson does door-open meetings and door-closed ones. The former sort are usually better, but I’ve had more than my share of the latter. I wait for a signal as to what kind of meeting this is and, from the way he looks at me, guess it’s a door-shut one. I close it.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Good work on the autopsy. Fast, accurate. Good stuff.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re doing the same on the Social Services stuff, I expect?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  I sit down. Jackson is being nice to me, which is a bad sign. I wonder what I’ve done wrong.

  “A sudden burst of hyperactivity on the Fiona Griffiths front usually means you want something. So, why don’t you tell me what that is?”

  This throws me a bit, because I didn’t know I was so obvious.

  “If possible, sir, I’d love to be full-time on Lohan. I think I could contribute.”

  “Of course you could. Every officer in the department could contribute.”

  “Yes. But at the moment, I think there are only two women on the team. D.C. Rowland and D.S. Alexander. Obviously they’re both brilliant officers, but I just thought that they might be stretched a bit thin. I mean, I know you can get men to do the some of the interviews, but it’s not quite the same, is it? I mean, if prostitution is involved.”

  I’ve hardly explained myself brilliantly, but Jackson knows what I mean. It’s all very well getting men to interview prostitutes, but there’s a certain kind of interviewing they just can’t do. There’s always a shortage of women for those interviews, and uniformed officers are often brought in to try to address the shortfall. Which is fine, except that having a female officer in full uniform—baton, handcuffs, radio, protective jacket, and boots—doesn’t exactly get the girlie juices flowing. Jackson is a grizzled old sod, which means that he remembers the old days, when prostitutes were just bundled off down to the interview rooms to be shouted at by a whole bunch of blokey officers who exuded dislike, lust, and distaste from every masculine pore. But he’s also an intelligent officer, who recognizes that the old days weren’t exactly bathed in an eternal glow of success, and that other approaches have their merits too. Merits like actually working, for example.

  “No,” he says, “it�
�s not the same.”

  I’m not sure if he’s saying that I’m on the team or not, so I stay in my chair, trying to read the runes.

  “What else are you on? You’re getting Penry ready for court, aren’t you?”

  I tell him that I should be done with that by the end of the week, which seems implausibly early, even to me.

  “And our friends and colleagues at the CPS think so too? Gethin Matthews thinks so?”

  CPS: Crown Prosecution Service. And no, they don’t think so, nor does D.C.I. Matthews, but I tell Jackson that they will think so by the end of the week.

  Jackson does the shaggy-eyebrowed thing at me. “And if you join Lohan full-time, which D.C. Griffiths am I going to be getting?”

  I open and close my mouth. I don’t know what to say.

  “Look, Fiona. Lohan would benefit from additional female staff. Of course, it would. Gethin asked me if I wanted you transferred over when the case broke. And I thought about it. I wanted to say yes.”

  I mouth the words “thank you” again, but the thank-you isn’t the point just now. It’s the thing that’s hovering over the horizon, about to sock me between the eyes.

  “The good D.C. Griffiths I’d have like a shot. But the other one …? The one I ask to do something, and that something never seems to get done. Or if it gets done, it’s done wrong. Or done slowly. Or done after fifteen reminders. Or done in a way that breaks the rules, causes complaints, or pisses off your fellow officers. The Griffiths who decides that if something is boring her, she’s going to make a mess of it until she’s moved to something else.”

  I make a face. I can’t say I don’t know what he’s talking about. I do.

  “Am I, for example, going to get the officer who makes Brendan Rattigan’s widow break down over some bit of total speculation about her dead husband’s sex life?”

  I bite my lip.