Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  “Now I’m going to take a wild guess and say I know the answer to that. I think the money came from Brendan Rattigan. But that brings us to question number two: What services were rendered in exchange for that money? As far as I know, multimillionaires aren’t in the habit of giving something for nothing.

  “And number three, just how much precisely do you know about this?”

  From my case, I extract the evidence bag with Rattigan’s platinum card inside it. Penry reaches for it, stares at it, then hands it back. He’s not even pretending to be uninterested now. His brown eyes have a complexity in them that was missing before.

  “You might also like to know where we found it. We found it at Number 86 Allison Street. An address where we found a woman dead and her daughter murdered. The mother may have been murdered too. We can’t yet say for definite.

  “So you see why I’m curious. If it were only the debit card and only the fact that you happened to share an interest in racing with its owner, then I’d say it was all a coincidence. Something worth investigating maybe, but not the sort of thing that Gethin Matthews would start throwing resources at. As it is, though, your silence kind of connects you to that house, doesn’t it? Any reasonable ex-policeman in your position would be cooperating with us to bring his sentence down. And you haven’t cooperated at all. And the more you don’t tell us, the more you’re telling us that we have to investigate as closely as we possibly can. Which turns an ordinary little bit of embezzlement into something altogether more interesting. Something that’s maybe just a step or two away from murder.”

  I finish.

  I say nothing. Penry says nothing. As a way of gathering information, this trip has not precisely yielded a rich harvest, but not all harvests look the same or ripen quickly.

  I stand up. From my case, I dig out the information-wanted poster that was up in Farideh’s shop window and elsewhere in Butetown. I drop it onto the coffee table, but it slithers on from there to the floor. Neither Penry nor I stir to pick it up.

  “That’s the murdered woman. That’s her murdered child. That’s the number you’d need to call with information.”

  I snap my case shut and go to the front door to let myself out. Penry doesn’t move. “By the way, this house is a shithole,” I call through to the living room. “And you should see someone about that asthma.”

  Outside on the too-bright street, I take stock. Penry is probably watching from the living room, but if he is I don’t care.

  His Yaris is dark blue. There’s a rust spot above the passenger-side wheel arch, and the whole car could use a wash. Who owns shares in a clutch of expensive racehorses and drives a car which, if not quite rubbish, is not exactly a thing of beauty? The only CDs I could see in Penry’s house were modern rock music and a couple of Classic FM brand compilations. Those musical tastes might impel you to buy a piano, or then again they might not. But Penry bought one. An upright piano, a Georgian conservatory, and a sink full of orange scum.

  I look back into the living room. Penry is at the window scrutinizing me. I smile, give him a twinkling wave, and return to my car.

  On my way back into the office, my mobile bleeps the arrival of a text.

  Because I’m an extremely skilled, police-trained driver, I have the resources to check my texts while driving, without compromising the safety and security of other road users. Either that, or I’m a selfish idiot. And this text is an interesting one. It reads: JANS NOT DEAD YOU LIARS IF SHE IS SHES LUCKYER THAN SOME. My first thought is that this is a windup from a colleague, my second that this is an answer to the ad I’d put in the shop window.

  I pull over and jam the car into an available space on the Cowbridge Road. I text back WHAT HAPPENED TO HER THEN?

  And wait. I’m parked up by a chip shop. A young mum, overweight, leads two overweight kids outside. One of the two, a boy with a taut red face, starts eating from a bag of chips, holding them away from his brother, jamming them successively into his mouth with a savage intensity.

  Obesity. Violence. Drugs. Prostitution. A million different ways to screw your life up. Brian Penry chose embezzlement, his own sweet route to self-destruction. What made him take that turning? What accounts for the beat-up Yaris and the expensive, empty conservatory?

  Then, just as I think I’m not going to hear back, a text comes in. It reads RICH PEPLE DONT HAVE POLICE SHIT ITS PEPLE LIKE JAN THAT GET IT.

  There are two ways to read these texts. The obvious one is the way my colleagues will read them. They’re deranged. They have zero evidential value. Maybe even subzero, given that the accusation made in the first text is obviously false. My colleagues might also gently note that there is a reason why requests for information are channeled through official 800 numbers, not to officers’ personal mobiles.

  But that’s not the only way to read these messages. For one thing, anyone who knows what happened to Janet Mancini is quite likely a poorly educated, drug-addicted prostitute, so bad spellings and nonexistent grammar may actually be signs that the texter is in a position to know something. And that second text is odd. It’s making a connection—albeit a kind of crazy one—between Janet’s death and “rich peple.” That would mean nothing, except that Brendan Rattigan’s card was found in Janet’s squat. And that in itself would mean nothing, except that Charlotte Rattigan implied that her husband liked it rough and nasty. And all of that might still mean nothing, except that the frozen silence I experienced with Brian Penry told me there were big things hovering close by, unsaid.

  No other text comes through, so I send one back. I say I won’t make any further attempt to be in contact, but that whoever it is should feel free to call or text me at any time. I WANT TO HELP JAN AS MUCH AS YOU DO, I write, then press Send.

  Nothing makes sense.

  It’s why I became a policewoman, this ambition to make sense of things. As though the various mysteries and challenges of my life could be made better through the repetitive solution of other people’s puzzles. I’m on a dead end to nowhere, you might say, but even that phrase intrigues me. Death in one half. Nothing at all in the other. The phrase itself is a mystery wanting solution.

  My brain is too busy. I figure that there’s one way to lower the pressure and that’s to make sure Rattigan is well and truly dead. I root around in the back of the car for the AAIB report. I find a number and dial it.

  With an extraordinary lack of bureaucracy, I am put through swiftly to the person I need to speak to.

  “Robin Keighley.” English voice. The sort of voice that Americans love to mock. The sort they associate with effete, end-of-empire aristocracy. But it’s friendly and competent. Good enough for me.

  I introduce myself and tell Keighley why I’m calling. I ask him about the plane crash. He’s open and easy with his answers, which roughly speaking follow the gist of the report. The plane had taken off from Birmingham and was heading for Rattigan’s holiday home in southern Spain. They ran into bad weather, and the pilot reported an unidentified problem with the right-hand engine. He asked Bristol Airport for permission to make an emergency landing. Permission was given. His course duly altered, then silence, then a short radio burst, which basically consisted of two brief expletives from the pilot, then nothing.

  I speak to Keighley for about twenty minutes. The plane was a Lear-jet, a good plane properly maintained. Until the very end of the flight, proper procedures had been followed. I notice, though, a slight hesitation in Keighley’s voice when he mentions the pilot. When I ask, he says, “Well, nothing really. The pilot was experienced enough, but had no background in either the RAF or one of the big commercial airlines.”

  “Any significance in that?”

  “Not really. RAF pilots are obviously trained to operate in extreme conditions. Equally any pilot for a big commercial airline like BA will be put into a flight simulator every six months and have every kind of disaster thrown at him. Those guys have to take it all and pass their tests, or they’re grounded till they do.”

/>   “So maybe a pilot a bit less experienced than you’d like?”

  “Less experienced than I’d like, yes. But then flight safety is my business. Rattigan’s pilot was fully qualified to be flying the plane he was flying.”

  “Any evidence of foul play in the wreckage? Anything at all? Even a whisper of a hint that you couldn’t put in your report because there wasn’t enough to go on?”

  “No, nothing, but most of the plane is at the bottom of the sea. I couldn’t rule out foul play, but I have no reason to suspect it.”

  “Was this an aircraft type known to have problems? Does the accident fit any kind of known pattern?”

  “Yes and no, I suppose you’d say. No in the sense that this was a perfectly decent plane and all the rest of it …”

  “But?”

  “But then again, if you do get human or maintenance error, you’re most likely to get it with smaller aircraft owned by outfits that don’t have the depth of technical and safety culture you’re going to find at a BA, say, or any one of its peers. That’s why most accidents are and have always been in the general aviation sector.”

  “So putting aside any official report, your gut feel would be that someone cocked up. If the plane weren’t sitting somewhere out in Cardiff Bay, you might have a chance of identifying the culprit. As it is, you’re obliged to shrug your shoulders and chalk it up as one of those things.”

  “Putting any official report a long way to one side, then yes.”

  “Can I ask one last question? Off the record, nonofficial, wild speculation.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Okay. Do you attach any significance to the fact that Rattigan’s body was never found?”

  I can hear an intake of breath down the line. Keighley is surprised by the sudden turn in the conversation, and he answers cautiously. “Significance, such as what for example?”

  “Let’s just suppose there were a theory that Rattigan in some way arranged the plane crash. That he escaped, his pilot died. Or perhaps the accident was perfectly genuine, but Rattigan seized the opportunity to disappear because he happened to want to for some reason. Is there anything at all in the circumstances of the crash which would make better sense in the light of such a theory?”

  Keighley is silent for a long ten seconds. Then he says, “Sorry, got to think about that,” and is silent for another fifteen.

  “Okay, then I’ve got to say probably no. Nothing comes to mind, except maybe … well, Rattigan’s body was never recovered. The pilot wore a life jacket and was quickly identified, and his body retrieved. If Rattigan had been wearing a life jacket, then his body should certainly have been recovered too. And there was no sign of it at all. That is odd. Contrary to the rule book, if you like. Yet even for that, there are a million innocent explanations, all of which might be more likely than your theory. If, for example, he panicked and simply failed to release his seat belt, then he’d have been dragged under by the wreckage. Or if he refused to put his life jacket on, even if the pilot told him to, then that would account for it too. Stranger things have happened.”

  We talk on, and Keighley remains helpful, but I get nothing definite. I’m further ahead than I was. Further ahead into nowhere.

  I hang up.

  The prickle of energy that woke me this morning is still here, and it occurs to me seriously for the first time that it might be fear. I try the word against the feeling. This is fear. This is fear. But I’m not sure. There’s not that clicking-into-place sense, when the word really matches the feeling. I’m not sure what it is. I don’t yet have enough clues.

  I drive slowly back to the office, breathing properly as I go.

  At four that afternoon there’s a briefing. All hands on deck. The DNA results are back from the labs, and word is that some of the DNA comes with names.

  You wouldn’t quite say there is a hubbub, but there’s a stirring in the waters, a frisson, a raised energy level which comes from people assuming that the investigation is about to start yielding real results. It’ll be the first time we can actually place named individuals in the house of death. All the report filing, statement taking, pavement pounding, and phone call answering that we’ve done so far hasn’t, in truth, yielded a single clue of solid, undeniable weight.

  At ten to four, the Incident Room is already busy. I’ve come down armed with my peppermint tea and one of those whole-grain energy bars. Jim Davis is at the coffee machine, driven as a piglet at a teat.

  “Hey, Jim,” I say, a little warily. Davis is not my greatest fan, but then the Fiona Griffiths Fan Club is a fairly select body in the CID. I got on better when I was in uniform, probably because I had less opportunity to express myself.

  Davis acknowledges me with a nod, but he’s in the midst of a moan-in with some of his buddies. The scuttlebutt is that recessionary budgets mean no promotions. Not from D.S. to D.I. Not from D.C. to D.S.

  “More work, less pay. Always the bloody way, isn’t it?”

  That’s Jim Davis’s verdict. Personally, I can’t see that a lack of D.I. slots is going to affect Davis’s life chances all that much, but I don’t say so. He has his coffee now and is about to plunge his yellow teeth in for another caffeine bath. I don’t want to watch that, so I squeeze by him. One of his buddies whispers something—possibly about me—and I do catch Davis’s response: a cynical laugh, hur-hur hur-hur, accompanied by lots of savage head nodding.

  My lovely colleagues.

  By this point the room is full. Hughes and Jackson do their processional thing to the front, and everyone falls silent.

  Jackson runs through the DNA findings. The lab has examined over a hundred samples taken from the house. Of those, DNA was successfully extracted from a total of thirty-two samples, yielding seven different profiles in total. Of those seven, two were Janet and April.

  Jackson pauses, enjoying the moment of suspense, then releases his news.

  “Of the five remaining profiles, we’ve got names on the database for four. That means we can place those four people at the house. We don’t know when they were there. We don’t know why they were there. But at least we’re in a position to go and ask.”

  The briefing continues. The four names are

  Tony Leonard. Thirty-eight. Drug user. Small-time drug dealer—that’s how he got his record. No known involvement in prostitution. The DNA sample in question came from a single hair, found on the dirty velour sofa in the living room.

  Karol Sikorsky. Forty-four. Prosecuted three years ago for a firearms offense, but the prosecution failed because of a screwup in our chain of evidence-handling procedures. He was prosecuted and convicted instead for a minor charge of assault. Born Russian but possesses a Polish passport, otherwise he’d have been deported. Sikorsky is suspected by the Vice Unit of having involvement in drugs, prostitution, and perhaps extortion too. A poor-quality saliva sample was found on a glass in the kitchen. A much better sample—courtroom-quality, no less—was found on the tip of a nail which projected from the living room doorframe. Sikorsky must have pricked himself on it as he leaned against the door, and enough tissue remained to leave a high-quality trace of his presence. “A brilliant bit of forensic investigation that,” comments Jackson. “To notice the nail, to investigate it, to successfully extract a sample. Brilliant.” We all give the absent SOCO a round of applause.

  Conway Lloyd. Thirty-one. Arrested for a public order offense in his early twenties. Never prosecuted, but his DNA has stayed on our database ever since. Thank you, Big Brother. Who needs civil liberties anyway? Big splatter of semen on the mattress upstairs. And hairs found. And saliva. And further semen stains found on the carpet downstairs. Not a tidy boy was our Conway. Bet his mam loves him, though.

  Rhys Vaughan, twenty-nine, might have been Lloyd’s twin. Semen found in four different locations, including—get this—a knotted condom which sat in a little china ashtray by the upstairs mattress. Nice touch that. Also saliva. Also hair.

  “And,” says Jackson, holdi
ng up his hand to shush us, “we’ve got one extra name from fingerprints too. We had preliminary results there last night, but I wanted to wait until we had the DNAs in as well, so we could plan our strategy better.”

  The extra name is Stacey Edwards. Thirty-three. Convicted of a couple of soliciting offenses in her twenties. Five contacts with our vice officers in total over the years. Assumed to be still on the game now. Her fingerprints were scattered all over the downstairs of the house, “including,” says Jackson, “the one place we didn’t expect to find anything.” Dramatic pause for effect. “The washing-up brush.” Laughter and a spatter of sycophantic applause.

  “Now,” he goes on. “Strategy.”

  Jackson is a smart cookie. The bullheaded approach would be to go in all hot and heavy on the names identified. Try to force a confession. Trouble is, there’s a good likelihood that anyone who came to the house to commit murder would have taken basic precautions. Even if the murder wasn’t premeditated—and the choice of a sink as a murder weapon suggests that the level of planning was rather minimal, to put it mildly—any vaguely competent killer these days attempts to defend himself against crime scene investigation. Indeed, our killer took at least basic precautions, since there were no prints at all found on the sink, which would have collected them perfectly.

  Vaughan and Lloyd, on the other hand, took no precautions at all. Ditto Stacey Edwards. Maybe Leonard might have tried to clean up after himself, but I’d guess that Jackson doesn’t believe he is likely to be our killer. Of all the names, Sikorsky is the only one who feels like either a possible killer or a man with connections to the killer. The prime suspect.

  Jackson’s conclusion—which is the same as mine would be—is that we need to treat at least four of the five names with a little delicacy. Treat them not as killers but as witnesses. People who can provide information. That may involve a little bullying, but not the kind of thing that Brian Penry was probably best at in his prime. Jackson starts to hand out assignments as Hughes writes a new list of actions up on the whiteboard.