Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  Jackson nods.

  “I got a call from Cefn Mawr this morning. I handled it. No official complaint. Nothing that’s going any further. But I didn’t want to have to take that call. I don’t want to have to wonder all the time if you’re going to use your mature, intelligent judgment or if you’re going to say and do the very first thing that comes into your head.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Jackson doesn’t mention it—he doesn’t have to—but he and I are both well aware of another incident last year. I was still in my first year in CID, meaning that I was still a training detective constable, effectively on probation. There was a missing persons case, and we were going through the long process of interviewing friends and family. I’d been paired up for most of the interviews, so I could learn from my elders and betters. Then I was given my first solo gig out in Trecenydd—basically a person we were sure had nothing to tell us, just so I could practice my skills and develop my confidence. Unfortunately, the interviewee thought it would be a clever idea to put his hand on my breast. I didn’t react with dignity and maturity, and a few minutes later I was calling an ambulance, so that my interviewee could receive treatment for a dislocated kneecap.

  The whole incident was a bit hard to get into any kind of perspective. On the one hand, no one doubted that he had sexually harassed me and that I had a right to defend myself. On the other hand, there were questions raised about the appropriate and proportionate use of force. A disciplinary inquiry cleared me of wrongdoing, but these things do leave a smell.

  Jackson was in charge of that case too. He handled it well, I guess. He yelled at me the regulation amount, then did a help-us-to-help-you bit, which I think he meant. We had a long discussion, in which he said all the right things and I said all the right things—or most of them, at any rate—and the right forms were filed and the right procedures followed. Five weeks later, I found myself on a course in Hendon with officers from all over the country on Managing Dangerous and Ambiguous Situations, the general gist of which was that you are supposed to talk firmly to people before dislocating their kneecaps. There were eighteen officers present on the course. I was one of just three women and the only one who didn’t look like a lesbian. The lessons must have worked, since I’ve never disabled anyone since.

  “It’s not really about sorry, is it now, Fiona?”

  “No, sir.”

  There’s a long pause. I’m normally okay with pauses. I can pause with the best of them, but this one is weirding me out because I don’t know what Jackson is doing with it.

  “If I may,” I say. “I think it’s significant, the reports we’ve had about April Mancini at Allison Street.”

  “We haven’t had any reports of her there. Not a dicky bird.”

  “Exactly. There’s this window seat in the front window there. One of the SOCOs told me that they found piles of April’s pictures dropped down behind the back. She must have sat there for hours, drawing. Hours and hours. In the front window.”

  “Yes, but there are curtains across those windows. Doesn’t look like they were ever opened.”

  “That’s what I mean. What kid wouldn’t open those curtains up when Mam went out? You get a good view from the front of the house. I mean, good for Butetown. You see everything that’s going on. Most kids, even if they weren’t allowed out, would be sitting in that window staring out. April didn’t. I think she was terrified, and I think she was because her mother was. It was fear that took them to that house, and whatever it was they were frightened of caught up with them and killed them. I mean, I know we can’t be positive, but it seems like a theory for now.”

  Jackson nodded. “Yes. Yes, it does.”

  We seem to have tumbled into another pause, but I decide that it’s Jackson’s turn to get us out of this one, so I just stay sitting with my mouth shut, trying to look like a good, professional detective constable, a little half smile on my face by way of defense.

  “Fiona. I don’t want you on Lohan. Not properly. Not while I’m in charge. If you want to continue working on Lohan in a support capacity, then that’s fine with me, as long as I don’t get any more calls like the one I had this morning—”

  “No, sir—”

  “And as long as you don’t injure anyone, piss off D.C.I. Matthews, make a mess of any work you don’t enjoy doing, get on well with your colleagues, and in general act like a good, capable, and professional detective constable.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any fucking around and you’re off the case altogether. You’re this far from being a phenomenal officer.” He opens the finger and thumb of his right hand a couple of inches. “And you’re this far from being a right pain in the arse.” He holds up his left hand, and his finger’s resting on his thumb and not going anywhere.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Another pause kicks off, but I’m all out of exciting pause strategies and I just sit there waiting for it to end.

  “I think you could be right about April. Why nobody saw her. Poor little bleeder.”

  Yes, poor little bleeder.

  Little April, drawing flower pictures in a stinking room. Little April, told never, ever to open those curtains. Little April, whom Farideh never saw. Little April, invisible to everyone except her killer.

  Jackson nods to say I can leave, so I go downstairs and pick up my photos from Tomasz.

  Back at my desk, I run into Brydon. Our drink together last night confused me. When I’d got his text yesterday, I’d assumed that the drink was a coppers’ night out sort of affair. The kind of thing that happens at least once a week, a bunch of people ending up in Adamsdown, drinking in the kind of bar that will be making work for our uniformed colleagues a little later in the evening. I’m not always invited to those things, but I’ve been to a few. Me and my orange juice. Only later did I realize that Brydon had maybe meant his invitation as a date. Not a big flowers ’n’ candles date maybe, but as a sort of toe in the water, a deniable date, a drink ready to morph either into a flowers ’n’ candles jobbie or a simple drink between work buddies. I’m rubbish at decoding these things. I don’t even realize that there are codes involved until it’s all too late.

  Last night was a case in point. Because I hadn’t given the drink any great weight, I turned up late and without letting Brydon know that I was on my way. Result: When I finally arrived Brydon had indeed joined up with a couple of office colleagues, and we all had a faintly tedious but good-hearted coppers’ night out. With hindsight, I think maybe that’s not what he’d originally intended—and now maybe I’ve sent him a signal indicating that I’m not interested in a flowers ’n’ candles evening with him. I never meant to send any kind of signal, and I’m not sure that I’d have sent that one, if I had meant to.

  “Hey, Fi,” he says.

  “Hey.” I grimace at him. An attempted smile really, except I’ve got my head full of Jackson’s bollocking and my hands full of photos of dead people.

  “All right?”

  “Yes. You? Sorry about yesterday.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I was in a muddle last night. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t trying to—”

  “That’s okay, don’t worry.”

  “Maybe we could do it again sometime. A drink. I’ll try my honest best not to make a complete pig’s ear of it.”

  He grins. “Good. Half a pig’s ear would do fine. Definitely. Sometime soon.”

  “Okay. Good. Thanks.”

  I don’t want Brydon poking around my pile of photos, so I put them facedown on the desk and sit on them.

  “You’re okay? You’re not looking your normal relaxed and untroubled self.”

  “Jackson just gave me a bollocking. About, um, seven out of ten. No. Six out of ten.” I try to calibrate the bollocking, benchmarking myself on the assumption that the whole kneecap thing was worth a ten.

  “Oh, who’s in hospital this time?”

  “Very funny. No, listen, could you do me a favor?” I shove some pape
rs at him, the ones I’ve been working on for Penry. “If I get some teas, will you add up this list of figures and tell me what you get?”

  I set him to work with a pencil and calculator, shove the photos in a drawer, and go to get tea. When I come back, Brydon has an answer, the same as the one I had, and about forty thousand pounds higher than it ought to be.

  “Problem?” he asks.

  “No. Not really. Just too much of a good thing.”

  “You know, if you get stuck with this, you should get the accountants in. No reason for you to do all the number crunching.”

  I nod, too lost in my own world to tell him that we’ve already got some accountants involved, and they’re coming in for a meeting tomorrow morning. A shortage of accountants is not my problem.

  “Who the fuck steals from their employer to buy one-sixth of a racehorse?” I say out loud. Brydon probably answers me, but if he does, I don’t hear him. I’m already reaching for the phone.

  I work like a bluebottle all that day. At half past twelve, Bev Rowland passes my desk on her way down to lunch and invites me to join her. I’d like to, but I’ve got a mountain of work to climb if I’m to have half a chance with Jackson, so I tell her that I’m going to eat a sandwich at my desk, and I do. Feta cheese and grilled vegetable. Bottled water. Consumed in a nice little hum of busyness. I don’t even let any chargrilled aubergine slip from the sandwich down into the keyboard, a faultless exhibition of desk-lunching technique.

  I find out lots of things I never knew. Things about Thoroughbred registers. How racing syndicates work. Where the money gets paid.

  I find out things I didn’t want to know. Things that disturb me when I find them. Things that I wouldn’t have bothered to look for if Jackson hadn’t given me a kicking. By the end of the day, I’ve done nothing at all on Mancini’s damn Social Services reports and my desk is awash with printouts from Companies House and Weatherbys Thoroughbred breed register.

  The phone rings, and I answer it, absently.

  It’s a Lohan caller, one of only five that day. The case has had plenty of publicity, but it’s a sad fact that, despite April’s death, the public aren’t much moved by the killings. The death of a mother and child would normally generate upwards of a hundred calls in a day. Because of Janet’s murky past, however, this case has generated almost nothing.

  The caller introduces herself: Amanda; knew Janet slightly; only calling up because her daughter had been friends with April—same age, same school.

  “I didn’t know whether to phone or not, then thought I might as well. Hope that’s all right.”

  “It is. Any information can make the difference.” I run through the questions I’m meant to ask. Known associates, stuff like that. Amanda’s as helpful as she can be, but she doesn’t know much. The only “known associates” she knows are other school mams, none of whom sound like obvious sink droppers.

  “Did she have a reputation?” I ask. “You know—did other mothers talk about her as being a bad sort, or a bit wild?”

  Amanda pauses. That’s usually a good sign, and it is now. Her answer is reflective and considered.

  “No, I wouldn’t say so. I mean, the school was quite mixed. I don’t mean race-wise, though that too. I mean, there were the yummy mummies, the dolled-up chavs, the ordinary mums, everyone. Janet—well, she wasn’t well off, was she? She was never going to get invited along to the next yummy-mummy coffee morning, or whatever. But she was okay. She used to worry over things. Like she asked me how Tilly—that’s my six-year-old—got on with her reading. I think she felt she should be doing more to help April, but didn’t quite know how. But a couple of times Tilly went over to April’s after school, and there’s no way I’d have let her go if I’d had any worries.”

  “Amanda, do you know how they died?”

  “Pardon?”

  “How and where. They were in a squat. It was filthy. There was just one mattress upstairs, which they must have shared. No sheet. One not very clean duvet.”

  Another long pause. I worry that I’ve cocked up again. Said too much. Been untactful. Upset someone who’s now going to go and call Jackson. I think maybe Amanda is crying on the other end of the line. I try to put things right.

  “Sorry, Amanda, I didn’t want to—”

  “No, it’s okay. I mean, what happened, happened.”

  “I was only telling you because—”

  “I know why. You wanted to see if I said, Well, that just proves that Janet Mancini was a loser after all.”

  “And?”

  “And she wasn’t. She wasn’t. You know, I didn’t like her particularly. I’m not saying I disliked her, we just didn’t have much in common. But she lived for April. I know she did. If she took April to a place like that—well, she must have been terrified of something. That, or her whole life just fell apart for some reason. Even so, I’d have looked after April. Course I would. I can’t believe it. Sorry.”

  By the end of this, Amanda is crying outright, apologizing, then crying some more. I listen to her sob and say the things that I’m meant to say. I might even have said the words “All right, all right” at some point, which sounds stupid to me, but Amanda seems okay with anything.

  I’ve never cried once during my time on the force. Indeed, that hardly says it. I haven’t cried since I was six or seven, ages ago anyway, and hardly ever even then. Last year, I attended a car accident, a nasty smash on Eastern Avenue, where the only serious casualty was a little boy who lost both his legs and suffered significant facial injuries. All the time we were getting him out of the car and into the ambulance, he was crying and holding his little tiger toy against his neck. Not only did I not cry but it wasn’t until a few days afterward that I realized I was meant to have cried, or at least felt something.

  I reflect on all this as Amanda cries and I say “It’s all right” like a mechanical toy, wishing one day to find some tears of my own.

  Eventually she’s done.

  “Amanda, would you like to come to the funeral? We don’t yet know when it’ll be, but I could let you know.”

  That sets off another round of crying, but Amanda manages a “Yes, yes, please. Someone ought to be there.”

  “I’ll be there,” I say. “I’m going to be there.”

  The call ends, leaving me faintly dazed. I’m going to the funeral, am I? That’s the first I knew of it, but I realize that I do really want to go. I’ve also got D.C.I. Jackson’s comments from earlier buzzing in my ears. Was that the good D.C. Griffiths, the one with the great interview technique? Or was that an example of the bad one, a fingernail’s breadth away from triggering another complaining phone call to the boss? I don’t know, and right now I don’t care.

  I’ve got too many things in my head and don’t know where to put them all. The racehorse that Penry co-owned had five other owners. Four of those five were individuals. One was an offshore, privately held company, with no publicly available information about its ultimate ownership. But it had two directors and a company secretary—D. G. Mindell, T. B. Ferrers, and a Mrs. Elizabeth Wilkins, respectively—who were also directors and company secretary at one of Brendan Rattigan’s shipping companies. One of the individual co-owners of the racehorse was also a senior executive at Rattigan’s steel company. A second man was godfather to one of Rattigan’s children, something I learned from a Google search that took me to various gossip magazines. I couldn’t trace any links between the other two owners and Rattigan, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

  And besides, even the links I knew about seemed to imply something. A company, almost certainly belonging to Rattigan, owned a chunk of a racehorse, as did one of his company executives and one of his oldest friends.

  As did Brian Penry.

  Maybe that was just coincidence. Maybe he had nothing to do with Rattigan and he was just there to make up the numbers.

  Or maybe not. Penry had spent about forty grand more on his bullshit purchases than he had stolen from the schoo
l or than could be accounted for from his salary. It was, I reckoned, just about possible that Penry had found some way to cash in his police pension in order to fund his purchases, but who on earth would do that? And why?

  Why, why, why?

  Wasn’t it more likely that Penry had another source of cash and, if he did, then wasn’t it also possible that Rattigan was in some way the origin of that cash? And if so, and if Rattigan did have some connection to Mancini, then didn’t that imply that Penry was in some way involved with the Mancini murders?

  If, if, if.

  It’s five o’clock.

  Because I haven’t made any progress on the Mancinis’ Social Services records, I decide to take them home. Little Miss Perfect has a minor issue of conscience there. The records are confidential, and we’re not meant to take confidential data out of the office on a laptop, but that’s the kind of rule which is broken all the time and I feel the need to get home reasonably early. Tonight is meant to be a gym and ironing and tidying up sort of night, but I have a feeling that it’s going to be nothing of the kind.

  Before I leave, though, I decide I need a bit of human contact. I go on the prowl and come across Jane Alexander, who’s just back from house-to-housing. I find Jane a bit scary, if truth be told. The sort of person who always manages to find outfits that are seasonal and fashionable, but also affordable and sensible, simultaneously professional and CID-ish, yet at the same time gently calling attention to her gym-bunny physique. Plus her hair is always perfectly blow-dried. Plus she never gets food stains on things. Plus she doesn’t make perfectly helpful witnesses cry for no reason, and I bet she can go years at a time without kneecapping perverts. She doesn’t disapprove of me exactly, but I can’t believe that she approves of me, and I’m always 5 percent scared when I’m with her.

  On the other hand, right now Jane seems genuinely pleased to see me. She complains about the day she’s had and how she still has to get her interview notes up on Groove. I’m a much faster typist, so I offer to help in exchange for some tea. It’s a done deal. She gets us tea. I type. She sits on the desk and interprets her writing whenever it’s hard to read, and in the gaps we gossip and fall silent or drop our voices whenever a male colleague strolls by. It’s a nice way to spend time.