Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  “Through” also means to Dad’s world. Out of Mam’s much ornamented, endlessly hoovered, precision-arranged utopia. Into … Dad’s world. A place of giant plasma-screen TVs. Huge leather furniture. Photos of his clubs. Not just the glitzy bars, the flashily expensive interiors, but the girls too: the pole-dancing, drink-serving, short-skirted or no-skirted bikini babes who bring the punters flocking in. Babes, many of whom will be around Kay’s age or mine—though Dad manages to avoid having that thought, or at least manages to stow it somewhere safe, where it can’t cause any damage. And in any case, the babe photos aren’t a form of soft porn as far as my dad’s concerned. They’re as much and as little to be lusted over as all the other stuff in the room.

  The stuff. Hard even to name it, because it’s an endlessly shifting, endlessly varied collection. Right now, Dad is unable to contain his joy about his latest acquisition. He shows me a giant bundle, wrapped in a green felt bag, standing on the pool table.

  “What do you think that is, love? Bet you can’t guess. It’s for your mam. It’s bloody amazing, it is. Can’t guess? You haven’t tried. But you’ll never guess anyway. Here, look, I’ll show you.”

  He unwraps it. It’s a giant silver trophy. Smaller than rugby’s Heineken Cup, but not much. Dad’s had it engraved WORLD’S BEST MAM, KATHLEEN GRIFFITHS. He’s just waiting for a shelf to arrive. The plan is to install the shelf over the door into the kitchen and put the cup there one day as a surprise. It won’t be a birthday gift or anything like that. It’ll just happen. Mam will like the thought but hate the actual object. It’ll sit there for a few months, until Dad has well and truly forgotten it. Then Mam will find some inconvenience with it. Or she’ll acquire a neat little Victorian hunting print and will wonder out loud where it could go, “maybe over the kitchen door—only no, silly me, my lovely cup’s there and that’s got to stay really, hasn’t it?” Anyway, she’ll figure it out. Before too long, the cup will arrive back in Dad’s lair, the house will have acquired another neat little Victorian hunting print, and Dad’s attention will have moved on to something else entirely.

  And “through” also means to the place where Dad decompresses. Where his huge, booming energy finds its settling place. In his long journey from Cardiff ne’er-do-well to successful entrepreneur, I’d say that this pool house turned studio retreat has played a part almost as central as Mam’s eternally patient hand nudging at his tiller.

  For about half an hour, Dad rattles around being my dad. He doesn’t drink much, but he likes the whole cut-glass, lead-crystal, heavy decanter type thing, so persuades me to have a whiskey, which he knows I won’t drink, and pours himself one too, which he’ll sip from, then forget about. I take another couple of aspirin while he’s not looking, just crunch them up in my mouth and swallow them without water. My headache is still there and my face is still sore, but they’ll mend.

  Meantime, Dad’s conversation slowly calms. He talks about his clubs. Two in Cardiff. One in Swansea. Plans for a big one in Bristol, the biggest yet, but the plans have been pushed back a bit by recession. Strange thing is, he’s become a really good businessman. Both bold and cautious. Meticulous in planning, swift and intuitive in execution. I wonder if he ever met Brendan Rattigan, if they’d have got on. I’m guessing yes.

  I’m also, however, thinking about me. I fled home today because I couldn’t stay there, but my windows will be just as fragile tomorrow. The dark shapes beyond Penry will be just as dark, just as dangerous.

  I sometimes wonder if I’ve got an exaggerated sense of danger. Sometimes, not often, but at least once a month, I wake up in the night utterly terrified. No reason at all that I know of. Just something that happens. Maybe other people have this too and don’t talk about it, but I don’t think so. I think it’s just me.

  Dad is talking about the security issues that his clubs have faced recently. Nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional idiot with a knife. The odd binge drinker who gets violent.

  I don’t premeditate the thought, just blurt out, “I know. I sometimes think I should get myself a gun. You never know what might happen.”

  That’s all I say. A stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. But Dad’s pounces on it straightaway.

  “What do you mean, love? You want to become an armed officer, is that it? Are detectives even allowed to carry guns?”

  I backtrack immediately. No, I don’t want to join some armed response unit. No, I can’t see the South Wales force thinking that D.C. Griffiths would be the right person to wave heavy weaponry. No, it’s probably a stupid idea.

  “You mean have a gun at home? A licensed thing? But you know, these days, you can get a shotgun or whatever for going out hunting. Air rifles, that sort of thing. But they won’t let people carry handguns. Not off a shooting range. And quite right too. The number of crazy people there are. If I could ban the whole damn lot of them, I would.”

  “Yes, me too. I’m not really saying anything. Just, like you say, there are some idiots out there.”

  “You worried about something, Fi girl? If you are, you need to say. Maybe the police isn’t the right job for you. I mean don’t get me wrong, you’re fabulous. CID bloody lucky to have you, never mind what I might have said. But you mustn’t take risks you shouldn’t, you know.”

  He pauses, the shadows of our old arguments crossing our lamplit present.

  His suspicion of anything to do with the police. His fear. My determination to pursue the career of my choice. Two obstinate people, digging in.

  And to be fair to Dad—and I didn’t perhaps understand this as well as I should have done—he was worried about me too. He’s always been protective of me, doubly or trebly so during my illness and afterward. He didn’t want me to go to Cambridge. For the first few weeks of my first term there, he was dropping by every second or third day, pretending he had business in East Anglia—which he most certainly did not—until I ordered him not to come again until the end of term. Then even when my life was all put back together again—no recurrence of the illness, excellent degree, some friends—he felt that a career in the police force was absolutely the wrong one for me. Too much danger. Too much stress. Risks physical and mental. He’d have loved me to stay living at home. To work for him as office manager, or something like that. Not front of house, but a back office fixer. In his imaginings, he saw us as a possible dream team—which, I have to say, we might well have been.

  But it didn’t happen. Helping to run Dad’s pole-dancing clubs was hardly my idea of a career, and after my first year or so in uniform, Dad gradually stopped expecting to me to crack up. That was when he put the deposit down so I could buy my house. He didn’t want me to move out, but he accepted it, even if his version of accepting it meant that for the first few months he was always popping round, because he “was just driving past.”

  Anyway. The present pause compresses that whole debate into a few seconds of silence. It’s Dad’s way of saying that I can always quit the police, come home, take a job with him. My silence is my way of saying, Thanks, Pa, but no way. Our argument unfolds in a few beats of nothing at all.

  Then it finishes. Finishes with a truce.

  “You look after yourself, love. If you need anything, you just say.”

  “I will, Dad. Thanks.”

  It’s bedtime. I feel oceanically tired. Tonight, I know it already, I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.

  Late to work, but I’ve slept well, I’ve got one of Mam’s cooked breakfasts inside me, and Kay has worked something close to magic on my bruises with an array of concealers and foundation. I stick to my dentist story, and she seems to buy it. As she smears stuff on my cheek, she tells me that she’s thinking about training as a beauty therapist. I’ve no idea what that means—she gives you therapy if you’re beautiful?—but she’d get my vote. There’s still puffiness, but at least it’s not orangey purple puffiness. Good enough.

  Ken Hughes, who has taken to noting down the names of officers not present
at the morning briefing, sees me coming two hours late to my desk. He starts to give me a bollocking, but I whip out my dental emergency card and play it before he’s really gotten rolling. He lays off me right away.

  Other people are being unnaturally nice to me too. It’s not my grievous dental injuries which are affecting them so, more that I found my first corpse two days ago, an event which apparently entitles me to special treatment. It seems there’s no quicker route to sympathy from your workmates than stumbling across a dead body. People are so positive and kind to me, you’d think I’d killed her myself.

  Anyway. Catch-up time. The first twenty-four or forty-eight hours of an inquiry tend to move fast, and the Stacey Edwards arm of Lohan is beginning to crank out data, no matter that yesterday was Sunday. Meantime, most of the people whose DNA placed them at the Mancini house have been interviewed, and transcripts and summaries are now available on Groove.

  Rhys Vaughan and Conway Lloyd have both been picked up and interviewed separately. Ken Hughes led the interview with Vaughan. Lloyd had the pleasure of Jackson’s beetle-browed attentions. But neither Vaughan nor Lloyd had much to offer us. They both paid Janet Mancini for sex. Both swore that they weren’t up to anything kinky. Neither of them had seen April Mancini, though there was enough space upstairs that April could have been in one room while Janet was busy in the other. Rhys Vaughan swore that he took no drugs at all. Conway Lloyd admitted to occasional marijuana and cocaine use. Both men were adamant that they’d taken no drugs with Mancini. Vaughan admitted to four visits, Lloyd to two. Both men were in full-time employment. Vaughan had paid between 60 pounds and 80 pounds for his pleasures. Lloyd had paid 120 pounds on both occasions. They’d both found Mancini on the Taff Embankment—not far from where I’d sat with Bryony Williams—and had either walked or driven back to Allison Street from there. Mancini hadn’t been all that talkative. In Vaughan’s sweetly loving words on the transcript, “I mean, you’re not paying to listen to her, are you?”

  According to Brydon, who was in the office yesterday and was present for part of the Hughes-Vaughan interview, the youngster was almost peeing himself with fear. A stupid kid, Rhys Vaughan, paying for sex, not wanting to accept that he was funding an industry which routinely kills or injures its practitioners. Lloyd, from the sound of it, was pretty much the same.

  So much for those two.

  The next person to leave DNA at the house, Tony Leonard, was brought in this morning and is being interviewed now.

  Karol Sikorsky, whose DNA was also found at the house, has not yet been located, but active inquiries are proceeding. I notice that Brydon is on the team hunting Sikorsky.

  “Any leads?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. “We don’t have an address, but we’ve got some idea who he hangs out with. Not a very nice man, we’re guessing.”

  “Our killer, do you think?”

  “Could be. Got to be possible. Organized crime links. He’s possessed weapons. And he was in the house.”

  “How about Stacey Edwards? Do we have anything more on her?”

  “Nothing much. Not that they talked about at the briefing anyway. I think they’ve got you down for digging into her records. Social Services stuff.”

  “Oh, great. Paperwork.” I can predict the whole thing in advance. Alcoholic and abusive father. Mentally ill mother. Foster homes. Behavioral problems. Difficulties at school. An abortion somewhere along the way. Class A drugs. Prostitution. And after a suitable length of time, death. Another car crash of a life, brutally ended. “I don’t know why Jackson always throws the crap at me.”

  “He doesn’t. You’re interviewing with Jane Alexander as well. You’re the only D.C. who’s on the interviews list.”

  If it comes to that, then the hunt for Sikorsky is definitely the most urgent element of Lohan at the moment, and the fact that Brydon’s been roped into it is a pretty strong clue about the way he’s regarded by Jackson and Hughes. If there is a promotion to D.I. around, then Brydon must be in line for it.

  We both pause, then both start to speak, then I do.

  “We should sort out that drink,” I say.

  “Wednesday, maybe? Subject to operational requirements.”

  That last bit said in Brydon’s mock-serious voice, a bit deeper and slower than his normal one. He means that if Lohan jumps up a gear—perhaps because Sikorsky is reeled in—then anything could happen.

  “Wednesday,” I agree. “Assuming you’re not beating the crap out of Sikorsky in a cellar somewhere.”

  “Or breaking his fingers, anyway.”

  “Ha ha. Very funny.”

  “Or sticking a table through his cheek.”

  “Oh, ho ho ho. Don’t you have to bugger off to polish your knuckledusters or something?”

  Brydon smirks at me and lopes off. When I had my little contretemps with the breast fondler, I managed to break three of his fingers, and followed up by kicking out at his kneecap with the toe of my boot, which was how I managed to dislocate it. Unfortunately, he rolled slightly sideways as he fell, gashing his cheek on the corner of the table. The table corner was sharp and went right through the flesh of his cheek, stopping only when it hit teeth. My dear colleagues love any excuse to remind me of all this, though I imagine that the joke will run dry after a few thousand further repetitions. In the meantime, I’ve got the sweet balm of endless work to keep me cheered and comforted.

  Work such as catching up with everything that’s been going on over the last thirty-six hours.

  Work such as digging into Stacey Edwards’s past and getting summaries and reports up on Groove.

  Work such as checking in with Jane Alexander, because she and I are assigned to interview prostitutes. Bev Rowland and a female D.I. from Neath are pairing up to interview others. Another female D.I. is said to be coming over from Swansea as well. I don’t know who she’ll be paired with.

  And work such as checking my phone numbers. I’ve got eleven names and addresses from my flower girl calls. Four of those turn out to be family numbers, one way or another. Three of them I don’t know a whole lot about, but there was a straightforward blokeiness about the men answering, and the names don’t flash up red on our criminal records system. At some stage, I suppose, I’ll need to research them further, but they don’t take priority now.

  That leaves four remaining names. All female, but no vice records on any of them, and at least three of the addresses are in good parts of town, where I wouldn’t particularly expect to find prostitutes living or working. The fourth address was more marginal, but when I phone it again, I get a brisk, no-nonsense voice and the sound of family clamor in the background. I can’t be certain, but it doesn’t look to me as though Penry’s phone buddies have much to do with prostitution, so one of the easiest possible avenues of research seems to be a dud. Room for further thought, however.

  Of the numbers on Penry’s phone, there were eight where I couldn’t get through to a human being. To those eight, I sent a text: MUST MEET ASAP. THIS PHONE CD BE COMPROMISED. TEXT ME ON NEW NUMBER ——. BRIAN. I gave out my phone number, and so far I’ve received five texts back. Of those, four come over as simply baffled. IS THIS A JOKE? says one typical message. SEE YOU DOWN THE PUB. MIKE.

  But the last of the five is my prize specimen. DON’T EVER CONTACT ME AGAIN. JUST FUCK OFF. FUCK RIGHT OFF. FLETCH.

  I love everything about that message. I like the fact that it’s properly spelled and punctuated. I like the repetition of the FUCK OFF. Not elegant, but pithy, and give me pith over elegance any day of the week. Best of all though, I love the FLETCH. A nickname that’s no more than a sawn-off surname. I don’t know who Mr. or Ms. Fletcher may be, or how he or she fits into this puzzle. I don’t even know if this is one puzzle or two puzzles or maybe more, but I do know that right now I’d rather lay my hands on the enigmatic Fletcher than on the darkly menacing Karol Sikorsky.

  Just as I’m marveling over Fletcher’s text, Jane Alexander comes over to me.

  “You
okay?”

  “Yes. Emergency dentist thing this weekend. Feels like someone’s run over the side of my face.”

  “God yes, sorry. That does look sore.”

  “Oh, you meant—”

  “Yes. After Saturday. It was brave of you to go in through the window.”

  I shrug. May as well give myself a reputation for toughness, even if it’s not quite deserved. “I’m glad you were there.”

  “Still. You’re okay to go out again this afternoon?”

  “Prozzer patrol?”

  She gives me a slightly stern “Yes.” “Start after lunch? Two o’clock?”

  I agree. The timing’s good. When Jane goes, I give Bryony Williams a call. She answers, but there’s a din in the background as though about two hundred children are being asked to see how much noise they can make.

  “Are you okay to talk?” I say, once I’ve succeeded in letting her know who I am.

  “Sure, just give me a sec.” A door slams somewhere, and the sound level drops. “Sorry. My day job is teaching art. They’ll be okay for a bit anyway.”

  I ask her if we can meet for lunch. It turns out that she’s working quite close by and we agree to meet in Cathays Park at one. That’s helpful. I want to be as prepped as possible for the interviews I’m doing with Jane.

  I poke around on our records system for interesting-looking Fletchers but don’t find anyone who takes my fancy. I check my Penry case files. I don’t recall any Fletchers there and my memory for such things is normally good, but it seems an obvious place to look. No joy there though.

  Ten fifty. I’ll need to leave in two hours. Two hours to find a Fletcher. A maker of arrows. That’s what a fletcher was. A missile man. A weapons guy.

  I do everything I can to trace him. Our databases. Newspapers. Google. I do everything a good copper should do and come up with nothing that seems to make any sense. Either I’m not seeing a connection or I’m missing something obvious.

  Then my time’s up. It’s one o’clock, near as dammit. I run to the park, and get there just as Bryony Williams arrives.