Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  Penry gets out of the Yaris and leans up against it waiting for me.

  “Well, well, Detective Constable.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Penry.”

  “The home of the mysterious Mr. Fletcher.”

  “The mysterious and missing Mr. Fletcher.”

  Penry checks the road. No other cars. No other coppers. “No search warrant.”

  “Correct. We’re making preliminary inquiries about a reported missing person. If you have any information that might be related to the matter, I’d ask that you disclose it in full.”

  “No. No information, Detective Constable.” But he gets a key out of his pocket. A brass Yale key, which he holds up twinkling in the sunlight. “I want you to know that I have nothing to do with any of this. I made some money that I should not have made. I did not report some of the things that I should have reported. I fucked up. But I didn’t fuck up the way he fucked up.” He equals a jab of the index finger equals Huw Fletcher. “I’m not that sort of idiot. And I’m not that sort of bastard.”

  I reach for the key.

  He holds it away from me, polishes it in a handkerchief to remove prints and sweat, then holds it out to me. I take it.

  “Time to find out what kind of idiot you aren’t,” I say.

  Penry nods. I’m expecting him to move, but he doesn’t. He just keeps leaning up against the Yaris and half-smiling down at me.

  “You’re going in there alone?”

  “To begin with. Yes. Since I am alone.”

  “You know, when I was a young officer, a wet-behind-the-ears D.C., that’s what I’d have done too.”

  “Junior officers are required to use their initiative in confronting unforeseen situations,” I agree. I don’t know why I start speaking like a textbook to Penry, of all people. Maybe because it feels strange to be speaking to him like this. Last time I saw him, he practically knocked my head off, a thought that makes me step back a little.

  “You’re like me,” Penry says. “You know that? You’re like me and you’ll end up like me.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not maybe. Definitely.”

  “Can you even play the piano?”

  “No. Not a single bloody note. Always thought I’d like to, but I get a brand-new piano in the house and I never touch it.”

  “That is like me.” I nod. “That would be just like me.”

  His half smile extends into a three-quarters one, held for about three-quarters of a second, then vanishes. He gives me a half salute, slides back into the Yaris, and drives off, slowly because of the speed bumps.

  The street is empty and silent. The sunlight occupies the empty space like an invading army. There’s just me, a house, and a key. My gun is in the car, but it can stay right where it is. Whatever’s in the house isn’t about to start a fight, or at least I hope it isn’t.

  I approach the door, insert the key, turn the lock.

  I feel a kind of amazement when the lock turns. It’s like turning the page in a fairy story and finding that the story still continues exactly as before. At some point, this particular tale has to come to an end.

  The house is … just a house. There are probably twenty other houses on the same street that are exactly like it. No corpses. No emaciated figures of runaway shipping managers chained to radiators. No weapons. No stashes of drugs. No heroin-injecting prostitutes or little girls with only half a head.

  I tiptoe round, shrinking from the accumulated silence. I’ve taken my jacket off and wrap my hand in it whenever I touch handles or shift objects.

  I don’t like being here. I think Brian Penry is right. I’ve got more of him in me than of, say, David Brydon. I wish that weren’t true, but it is.

  In the bedroom, there is a big double bed, neatly made with white sheets and a mauve duvet cover.

  In the bathroom, just one toothbrush. All the toiletries are male.

  In the living room, three fat flies are buzzing against the window-pane. A dozen of their comrades lie dead beneath them.

  In the kitchen, I open cupboards and drawers, and in the place where tea towels and place mats are kept, there is also cash. Fifty-pound notes. Thick wodges of them. Held together with rubber bands. The drawer below holds garbage bags and kitchen foil, and even more bundles of notes. These notes are stacked up against the back of the drawer, making multiple rows. A little paper wall of cash. With one finger, and still through my jacket, I riffle one of the bundles. Fifties all the way down.

  I don’t like being here at all now. I don’t like being Brian Penry. I want to go back to plan A, which was to practice getting ready to be Dave Brydon’s new girlfriend. To experiment with my putative new citizenship of Planet Normal.

  I close the drawer and leave the house. The lock clicks shut behind me. I find an old terra-cotta flowerpot in the garden and stow Penry’s key underneath it.

  In my car, I find that I’m sweating and cold at the same time. I try to go back to that feeling I had on the print room stairs. That feeling of being somewhere close to love and happiness. Living next door to the sunshine twins. I can’t find them anywhere now. I stamp my legs, but I can hardly feel my feet when they hit the floor.

  I call the Newport police station. It’s all I can do, and I feel relieved when the silence is ended.

  The day goes crazy, and the craziness keeps me sane.

  Newport isn’t our patch, it belongs to Gwent Police. As far as anyone else is concerned, there’s no real connection between Huw Fletcher and Operation Lohan, so I shouldn’t even be here. But since I am here, I stick around.

  The first thing that happens—impressively fast, I have to say—is that a squad car turns up. Two officers, in uniform.

  I identify myself and tell them that I was following up a minor lead from a CID case being run out of Cardiff. I report the essence of my conversation with Fletcher’s workmates and show the officers the key that I’ve “found” under the flowerpot.

  “Have you checked with the neighbors?”

  “Yes,” I tell them, having managed to remember to do that just a few minutes ago. “Most people are out. The one couple I could find haven’t seen the individual for several weeks.”

  The officer I’m speaking to—an intelligent-looking sergeant, who looks like he enjoys his pie and mash—radios the office. He needs approval to enter the property, and soon secures it.

  He takes the key and goes to the door, rings the doorbell, and then knocks. A crashingly loud knock, from the lion’s head knocker that was probably Huw Fletcher’s pride and joy.

  For a moment, I’ve got this insane feeling that Fletcher will just come to the door. I realize I don’t even know what he looks like. I imagine a slightly podgy forty-something with receding hair and badly cut jeans. I imagine him opening the door, bewildered by the police car in his driveway, the uniforms at his door. I imagine everyone turning slowly to look at me, the girl with a gun in her glove box and a head full of make-believe.

  A long-drawn-out comedy moment. The end of my career.

  But it doesn’t happen. Nothing does. No one comes to the door. The sergeant and his colleague use the key to enter the house. I follow them because it seems silly not to. We peer into the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the spare room. Opening cupboards, looking under beds. No Huw Fletcher. No nothing.

  The sergeant says, “Let’s check the fridge. See if there’s milk there.”

  God bless you, Sarge. You’re an honor and ornament to your force. We troop into the kitchen. The sergeant opens the fridge, because fresh milk there would imply that the house has been recently used. His buddy opens a couple of cupboards. Because there’s nothing else to do, I swing open the drawers.

  The sergeant doesn’t find any fresh milk. His buddy doesn’t find anything he doesn’t expect to find. But I come across all the cash, just where I last saw it.

  “Bloody hell,” I say, stepping rapidly backward. “Look at that.”

  The sergeant looks, and he says “bloody hell
” too. The junior sidekick is more to the point, and says “fuck.”

  The sergeant bends down, pulls stuff out of the drawers, takes a proper look at the cash. I’d guess that each bundle contains fifty notes. Fifty fifties, making 2,500 pounds in each. And dozens of bundles, dozens of them. There’s upwards of 100,000 pounds here lying around with the plastic wrap and the spare tea towels.

  We pull rapidly out. The house isn’t a crime scene exactly, but it’s pretty clear that the forensics boys will want to have a look over it. The sergeant is on the radio back to base nonstop. A D.I. comes racing up from Newport.

  And my role suddenly becomes rather more delicate. Everyone’s staring at me. The Newport D.I.—a guy called Luke Axelsen—gets me into his car, offers me a cigarette, and says, “Okay. Spill it. What do you know?”

  “Not much. Really not much.”

  “Good start.”

  But I tell him. About Bryony Williams and the stuff she was meant to have told me.

  “That was yesterday? That doesn’t seem like very urgent follow-up.”

  “No. It wasn’t. Williams didn’t really believe the rumors. She only mentioned them because I asked. It was a low-priority lead. When I called Rattigan Transport this morning and confirmed that the guy had gone missing, it became a little higher priority.”

  “Yes. I can see why.”

  He bites his lower lip. Thinking. He’s thinking that he doesn’t want to hand this case over to Cardiff and the South Wales Police. He wants to keep this as his case in Gwent.

  “For what it’s worth,” I say helpfully, “I don’t think that we’ve got enough to connect this case to Lohan. It’s still only hearsay.”

  He’s happy to hear that, and then the craziness really gets going. Axelsen assembles a team to investigate Fletcher’s disappearance. He briefs the team, then gets me to brief them on my angle. I keep it short and sweet, which is pretty much all I have to offer anyway. I’m asked where I think the money came from, and I tell them that I don’t know. Drugs. Prostitutes. Drugs and prostitutes. Embezzlement. God only knows. “Just keep us in the loop on anything at all you come across,” I say. “We’ll do the same from our end.”

  All this eats a couple of hours and more. I’m hungry again, but can’t find anything that looks edible. I text Brydon. I don’t know what to say, so I just write HOPE ALL’S GOING WELL. SEE YOU SOON. FI XX. I like those xs. I like that, for once, they mean something.

  I call Jackson, because I reckon I ought to let him know what’s going on, but I go straight through to his voice mail and leave a raggedy kind of message for him. I’m not good with voice mails. They squeeze out all my natural charm and wit.

  Then I don’t know what to do. I want to get seconded to the Fletcher inquiry, but it’ll take Jackson to sort that out, not me. Plus I’m supposed to be in Cathays Park right now, on prozzer patrol with Jane Alexander.

  Because I don’t know what else to do, I start driving back into Cardiff. I’ve got as far as the M4, keeping my eyes left, as I always do, to see the sea as it appears and disappears between the trees and embankments. It bothers me somehow that something so large, so deep-bellied and dark, should be so good at hiding from view. The Atlantic Ocean, the world’s biggest graveyard.

  I think about Penry. Not so much how he intercepted those Fletcher messages, more why he showed up at all. Why help me out? Why give me a key? I think because the honorable Brian Penry wanted to do something to redeem the screwup Brian Penry. I want to dislike the man but can’t quite bring myself to do it. Too much of me in him.

  I’m thinking all this, driving in the slow lane with Radio 2 shoving a Britpop retrospective at me, when I get a call on my mobile. I make a mess of the hands-free system, and then I get it right, and when I do, Dennis Jackson’s voice comes crashing out of the Peugeot’s very capable sound system.

  “Fiona, what the fuck is going on?”

  Because of the almost surround-sound speakers, it sounds like the universe is asking me that question. God coming through in quadraphonic, bass booster set to full.

  “I’ve no idea, sir,” I say with a fair degree of truth, but I give him the bits and pieces I have. A conversation with Bryony Williams. A phone call this morning. “It all developed from there.”

  “Is this another solo effort by D.C. Griffiths?”

  “Sort of, I suppose. It wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Because I don’t like officers flying solo on my inquiries. I especially don’t like it—in fact I bloody hate it—when I’ve given specific bloody instructions earlier in the day to get moving with the main line of inquiry into a murder investigation.”

  “Yes, sir.” I tell Jackson what I’ve done on that front so far. The calls to the lab. To Jane Alexander. The chat with Mervyn Rogers. To Bryony. To Gill Parker. My first efforts to arrange further interviews with prostitutes.

  I’ve managed quite a lot, in fact, and Jackson sounds somewhat mollified. “And Rogers is on the case, is he?”

  “I think he’s beating the shit out of Tony Leonard right now, sir,” I say, wondering if I’m being impertinent or simply in tune with the boss’s mood.

  “Yes, I hope he bloody is.” The sound system goes quiet for a moment, which means either that God is thinking or that I’ve lost reception. But it’s the former, because God comes back again. “Do you know how much money they’ve found in that house? So far, I mean. They’re still pulling up floorboards.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Two hundred and twenty grand so far. One fifty in the kitchen. More in the bedroom. More in the bathroom. Axelsen just told me.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.

  Jackson doesn’t know what to say either, so he’s silent a moment or two longer before saying, “Right. In the meantime, I want you doing what I asked you to do. That means chasing the frigging lab to make sure they don’t forget about our bloody heroin matches. It means working with D.S. Alexander to get statements from sex workers in Cardiff. It means finding a way to get ourselves some search warrants for premises which may well have links to the Lohan killings.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I don’t say it out loud, because I don’t think I need to, but I have just obtained police access to premises which contained evidence strongly suggestive of serious crime. Jackson’s thoughts are running along the same lines, because the next thing that booms out of the car loudspeakers is “You think it’s a drugs connection? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Fletcher worked in shipping. Arranging cargoes out of the Baltic. Mostly Russia. He went away on numerous long trips. Plus the cash. Sikorsky has a pile of heroin in London. Fletcher has a pile of cash in Newport. If there are drugs around, there has to be money as well, and maybe we’ve just found it. Plus most heroin comes from Afghanistan, which means that the Russian transport route could make sense. It’s all circumstantial, but the connections are there.”

  “And you managed to uncover the connection thanks to some community worker passing on some hearsay conspiracy bollocks from a prostitute, who’s probably high as a fucking kite when she says it.”

  “Well, there was a missing person. And one who does connect, even if only remotely, to the Mancini house.”

  “Very bloody remotely.” Another long pause. “Listen, are you driving?”

  “Yes, sir. M4 back to Cathays Park.”

  “Okay, pull off when you can and give me a call back.”

  God hangs up without waiting for an acknowledgment.

  I’m almost in Pentwyn before I can make a legal stop, but I park as soon as I can and call back.

  When I do, Jackson is short and to the point. “Okay. Look. I told you not to fuck around with me. I told you to do what you were told to do, when you were told to do it, and with no bollocksing around. And you can’t do that, can you? You just can’t bloody do it.”

  Part of me wants to pick a fight. Actually, sir, I did do everything you told me to do and I did it fast and I d
id it fine. I just did some other stuff as well. Oh yes, and by the way, I obtained access to premises with two hundred and twenty grand of almost certainly illegally procured cash and have launched a MisPer inquiry into the likeliest target.

  But I don’t say that. I just sit mute as Jackson lobs rockets at me.

  “Fiona, what made you chase after Fletcher? Don’t tell me it was conspiracy hearsay crap, because I won’t believe you.”

  “It was a bit to do with that, sir, but there is another part that I can’t tell you about. Sorry.”

  “It’s not your father, is it?”

  “No, nothing to do with him. I made a promise to someone and I have to keep it.”

  There’s a pause. Crackle on the line. Microwave radiation from the formation of the universe.

  “I would love to give you a formal warning. I really would. The police force is a structured organization. There are reasons for the structures, and we work better because they exist.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s not like—it’s not like the way your dad works. It’s not like the way, I don’t know, some Cambridge philosophy department works.”

  “No.”

  “And it pains me to say it, really pains me, but much as I would like to give you a bollocking for this, I can’t quite do it. I’ve checked with Alexander and Rogers and the lab, and they tell me you’ve been on the case. And you did find two hundred grand in drug money.”

  “Thank you.” Yes: Thank you. You noticed. Hallelujah.

  “But you’re not off the hook. I am not sure if you are the kind of detective we can use in South Wales. You’re either very good, or absolutely terrible, or a bit of both. And I can’t use terrible. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve spoken to Gethin Matthews and Cerys Howells, and they agree with my assessment. You’re not going to be able to play them off against me, or the other way round. We’re in the same place on this.”

  “I understand.”

  “Okay. Now, if I asked you what you wanted to do next—interview with Jane Alexander in Cardiff or attach yourself to this Gwent inquiry—what would you tell me?”