Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  “This was him,” she says. She’s crying as she says it and pointing to the photo of Kapuscinski. “He’s who Sikorsky mostly uses. He said that I’d been buying from someone else, but I hadn’t. I just haven’t been using as much recently. I had flu and wasn’t working, but he didn’t believe me. He just came in and—”

  She continues.

  Jane’s perfect policewoman mode is called for now. Her pencil is flicking across the pages of her notebook, recording names and dates and times and places. Jayney’s admission prompts something similar from Luljeta, and further confessions follow. Accusations, in fact, but they feel and sound like confessions. By the time it’s over, we have material evidence not just on Sikorsky—where we already had it—but on Kapuscinski, a Russian called Yuri, and someone else called Dimi.

  Warrants to obtain. Arrests to make.

  Jane takes about two hours to get through the evidence that comes tumbling out. I don’t participate, or almost not at all. I feel drained and empty. I ought to be taking notes, to supplement Jane’s, but I can’t. I pretend to, but I don’t really manage anything at all. Jayney has her top down again, but I see straight through it. All these girls look naked to me now. Little bodies, covered with bruises. Bruises that exist here and now, in Jayney’s case. Bruises that exist only in the past or in the future—or in the past and in the future—for the other girls here. Bruises that will go on existing, go on multiplying no matter what bunch of arseholes is controlling the drug trade, because whenever young women sell their bodies for sex, there will be leather-jacketed men to make sure that the profits end up in other hands, other fists.

  Twice, as Jane is doing her stuff, I put my hands up to my eyes. I want to see if I can feel any tears. I can’t, but I don’t know whether people can feel themselves crying or whether they have to make a physical check to be sure. Even if there aren’t tears here right now, I’ve got a feeling inside which might be the sort of thing that normally goes with crying. I don’t know, though. I’m not the best person to ask.

  I would like to kill Sikorsky and Kapuscinski and Fletcher and Yuri Someone and Dimi Whoever.

  And then, after I had done all that, I would like to resurrect the drowned and fish-eaten Brendan Rattigan from the waters of Cardiff Bay, so that I could kill him too.

  I let Jane do her stuff and sit next to her in a daze. I’m pleased she’s here.

  When we emerge onto the street, it is 9:00 P.M. Jane has magicked a navy blue cardigan from somewhere and puts it on. I’m wearing trousers and a white top, but I’m not cold, or not cold in that way.

  “Are you okay?” Jane asks.

  “Yes.”

  Jane brandishes her notebook. “I’ll deal with this, if you like. Jackson will want to know.”

  I nod. Yes. Jackson will want to know. He’s finally got what he wanted.

  “If you want to … I mean, if you want to tell Jackson with me, then you should.”

  I’m puzzled by that. I don’t understand. I presumably say or do something to indicate my puzzlement, because Jane explains.

  “I’ll tell him anyway. That it was you who did that in there. I don’t know how you knew to do that, but it worked all right. I’ll make sure Jackson knows that.”

  I shake my head. I didn’t know to do anything. I just did it. “I lost it, Jane. That’s all. I couldn’t stand those girls keeping their mouths shut anymore. I just lost it.”

  “You’ll be okay?”

  “Yes.” Everyone is asking me that at the moment. “I think I’ll go home. Is that okay? Sorry to leave you with all the follow-up.”

  “You go home.”

  The sky above is that mid-blue of late summer evenings, neither light nor dark. The streetlights are blinking on, but they’re not needed, not yet. The house behind us is quiet. The little Edwardian street is mostly quiet too. At the bottom end of the road, the river files past, holding its silence. A river insect, confused by the lamplight, ends up fluttering around in my hair. Jane reaches for it and releases it.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  She smiles at me, tidies my hair back into place where she and the insect ruffled it, then says, “Drive safely.”

  I nod and do just that. Sober and safe and under the speed limit. It’s not what I want, though. Some part of me wants the exact opposite. Some part of me would like a two-hour drive on empty roads and no speed cameras. A curving ride through the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountains. A sunset that never quite dies, just beckons onward into the next valley, up the next slope, round the next bend. No traffic, no direction, no destination.

  I don’t get that, but I do get home in one piece.

  I microwave a meal straight from the freezer. It’s icy in the middle when I eat it, but at least I eat it.

  I think about a smoke and decide against.

  I have a hot bath. I think about putting some music on but can’t think of anything that will alter anything, so I just leave the silence.

  When I get out of the bath, I don’t put on office clothes again. Lev’s coming in a bit, and he’s not an office clothes kind of guy. I wear jeans, gym shoes, and a T-shirt. I’ll add a fleece top if we go out.

  Then Brydon calls. He’s in London but has just heard the news Jane brought in to Cathays Park. Huge excitement, apparently. He wants to talk all about it, but I close him off. We’ve spent enough time talking about work things in our lives, so instead we talk rubbish—nice, affectionate, directionless rubbish—for twenty minutes, then he yawns and I tell him he should go to bed.

  “See you soon, Fi.”

  “Yes, see you soon. I’m missing you.”

  “Likewise. Look after yourself.”

  I have an image of him making love to me on the living room floor. Urgent and intense. Not too many words. Not too gentle or too solicitous. A lovemaking that leaves bite marks. I wonder if that’s how ordinary people have sex. It wasn’t like that with me and Ed Saunders, but that’s not a very big sample to go from.

  We say goodbye.

  I’d snooze if I could, but my adrenaline is up and I don’t know when Lev will be coming. I never do, except that it’ll be far too late. Not a morning person, is our Lev.

  I have the TV on. It’s after Newsnight has closed down. There’s a black-and-white film on BBC 2. It involves violence against women, so I watch it with the sound turned off and even then all I can see is Jayney’s bruises. I shouldn’t even be watching it really. Sometime after midnight, I start to doze. And then I hear a car engine coming to a halt outside the house, and catch a couple of headlights shutting off.

  I get my bag, check the gun, go to the door.

  Lev.

  He looks like he always looks, which is to say like not much. Old jeans, a much-washed sweatshirt, sneakers. Not a big guy, maybe five foot eight, something like that, and not particularly broad. Lean and muscled in his leanness, the way you might expect an ocean sailor or a mountain climber to be. Dark hair, always a bit too long and never very combed. Ambiguous skin that could place him anywhere in the arc that runs from Spain through to Kazakhstan and beyond, though I’m damn sure he’s not Spanish. His age is similarly indeterminate. I used to think he was about my age when I first met him, a bit older perhaps, but not much. Then I realized from one or two snippets he let fall about his past that he could be a fair bit older. He could be anywhere between thirty and almost fifty. I honestly couldn’t narrow it any more than that. The one thing you really notice about Lev—or more accurately, something you don’t notice at all and only find yourself thinking about afterward—is the way he moves. Catlike. That would be the normal term, but I imagine that whoever first developed that queen of clichés never spent much time looking at cats, who are always licking their bits or finding new ways to scratch themselves. That’s not Lev at all. He’s still mostly, but there’s a poise in his stillness, a potential for sudden flowing action, which means that his stillness has more motion in it than anyone else’s movement. More motion and more violence.

  “
Hey, Fi,” he says, light pouring outward to the street from the hall and his eyes already checking the space behind me.

  “Lev. Hi. Come on in.”

  We don’t kiss or shake hands. I don’t know why not. But it’s hard to know what social rules to apply when you’re in his presence. I don’t think he knows.

  I let him stalk around the house for a bit without saying anything. His normal procedure when he visits. Doors, windows, exits. Hiding places. Blind spots. Potential weapons. My kitchen morphs into a kind of conservatory area at the back, which means a large area of glass opening onto the dark garden beyond. Lev fiddles around till he finds the switch for the security light, which bathes the back garden in 150 watts of halogen brightness. He leaves it on.

  Finally he’s happy. He takes a chair and sits down. His inspection is of me now.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing much. Just wanted to see you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you want something? Tea? Coffee? Alcohol?”

  “Are you still growing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I don’t want tea, coffee, or alcohol.”

  I laugh, stand up, and get the keys. I unlock the French doors and we go outside. Lev steps into the garden and instantly starts assessing the air and peering over fences. I fiddle around with the padlock on the shed and get it open.

  There isn’t much inside, because I don’t like gardening. A lawn mower and a hoe, and I’ve never used the hoe. And there’s the bench with the grow lamps and my marijuana plants. The poor dears have been much too hot recently, but they’re doing all right despite it. I brought the seeds home from India when I was there on holiday once as a student, and these plants are their daughters and granddaughters. I check the plants for water, but otherwise leave them be. I’ve more or less given up smoking resin, but I dry the buds out in my oven and then keep bags of them in under lock and key in the shed. I take one good-size bag, then lock up again.

  I roll a joint in my kitchen but decide I want tea as well so get Lev to put the kettle on. He does so, then wanders into the living room, to flick through my CDs, making clucking sounds of disapproval before finding something by Shostakovich, which was a gift from a very temporary ex-lover, I think, and before too long the air fills with dark-toned Russian pessimism, played out on the bassoon and a sea of violins.

  “In 1948, did you know, Shostakovich used to sleep outside his apartment by the lift shaft.”

  “No, Lev. Amazingly enough I didn’t know that.”

  “His work had been denounced. Denounced for the second time. First time was in the nineteen thirties.”

  “Well, I can see why that would drive anyone to sleep by the lift shaft.”

  “He thinks he is going to be arrested, and he doesn’t want the police to disturb his family.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Lev, come and get stoned.”

  The joint is ready. It’ll be my second of the day, but social smoking is excluded from my normal rules, which let me smoke a joint two or three times a week, in my garden usually. Four or five times if I feel my head is under pressure and needs the relief. I never smoke tobacco.

  I make peppermint tea for me and dig out some chocolates. Lev, I don’t even bother with, because I know that he’ll sort himself out, and he does. He makes black tea, noxiously strong, finds a little jug of hot water, and some Bonne Maman raspberry jam from the cupboard. Slightly moldy jam, to judge from the way he scowls and dollops a few blobs down the sink before coming over to the table. Then, I sit there, smoking, drinking tea, and eating chocolate, while Lev smokes, mixes jam, tea, and hot water in his cup, and drinks that.

  “So. What’s up?”

  I shake my head. Not because there isn’t anything to say but because I don’t know what order to say anything in. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I start randomly.

  “I’ve got a gun.”

  “Here? In the house?”

  I get my bag and give him the gun.

  Lev gets all Lev-like with it, as I knew he would. He pulls back the slide to see if there’s a bullet chambered, which there isn’t. He pulls out the magazine, to see if it’s loaded, which it is. Checks the safety. Checks the sights. Checks the feel and heft of it. With the magazine out, and no bullet in the chamber, he takes aim and fires. First statically, still seated and at a fictive, motionless target. Then, moving. Him, the gun, the imaginary target.

  “It’s a good gun. Have you fired it?”

  “Yes. On a shooting range. I learned to keep my shoulders down and soft hands.”

  I show him.

  “Good. The grip is okay? You’ve got small hands.”

  “It’s fine, I think. It’s a small gun, isn’t it?”

  “Tak.”

  Tak I happen to know from my mate Tomasz Kowalczyk, the king of all things papery, is Polish for yes. I’m also fairly sure that Lev isn’t Polish. Then again, I’m not exactly sure what he is, and when he inserts foreign words into his English, I’m pretty certain that they come from at least half a dozen different languages, maybe more.

  “You have done any real shooting?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why you called me?”

  “I suppose. I don’t know.”

  “You are under threat?”

  “No. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “That’s not very logical answer for a Cambridge girl.”

  “No one has threatened me. Not exactly. One guy hit me, but that was a whole different thing.”

  “Hit you? How? What happened?”

  I tell him. Not the edited highlights, the full version. Lev needs us to act it out, so he can visualize where I was standing, where Penry was standing, where I landed, what happened next.

  “You didn’t strike him?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re on the steps, there, in that position?”

  Lev has got me to adopt the exact position that I was in after Penry hit me. Arse on the bottom step. Legs out. Head and torso slumped against the wall. It’s freaky being here. Frightening. Lev isn’t Penry. Not as tall or powerful. But from down here on the floor, any man looks two miles high.

  “Yes. This position. I told you already.”

  “And the guy. What was his name?”

  “Penry. Brian Penry. He’s not such a bad person really. I might even like him.”

  “So Penry. I’m Penry. I’m in the right place?”

  “Yes. No. A bit closer and nearer to the wall. Yes, there. About there.”

  I’m really uneasy now. Penry is dark. Lev is dark. Same place. Same posture. Because the hall light is behind Lev’s head, he could almost be Penry.

  “Okay. I’m Penry. I’ve just hit you. You’re wearing what?”

  “What? A skirt. It was a fucking summer’s day, Lev. I was wearing a skirt, okay?”

  “No. I don’t care about that. Your shoes. What kind of shoes?”

  “Flats.”

  “I don’t know what that is, flats. Did they have a sole, anything heavy?”

  “No, Lev. I don’t live in a war zone. I’m a girl. And it was a summer’s day.”

  “Okay, so no shoes. You can still strike the knee. Do it.”

  “Lev. I’ve got a gun now. Penry hit me once and buggered off. I didn’t need to strike him. He just let himself out of the front door and drove away.”

  “So it was tactical, you are saying? You chose not to strike?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that.”

  “I’m Penry. I hit you once. I’m going to hit you again. Maybe I’m going to kill you. Maybe fuck you, then kill you. Probably that. Fuck you first.”

  He makes the tiniest movement toward me. There’s something menacing in him, the light behind his head, the way his voice tightens, the way he’s holding himself. I’m in terror now. Maybe that’s the marijuana making itself felt, but I don’t think so. I don’t get paranoid on weed. I get calmer. That’s why I started smoking it in the first place. Why I still do. Self-medica
tion. But the drug can’t do anything for the terror I’m feeling now. I feel just like I did back on the step with Penry. A body memory, perhaps, but no less terrifying for that.

  “Fuck you, then kill you.”

  Lev moves fractionally farther toward me.

  And then some instinct takes over in me. A fighting one. A killing one.

  I lash out with my topmost leg, my right one. I aim for Lev’s kneecap, and catch it cleanly. Lev spills over backward, and I follow through with a hard stamp down on his testicles, mashing them twice with my heel, then get poised to start kicking him in the windpipe until I’ve shattered his larynx and his windpipe and the poor fucker will be on his knees choking for breath and pleading for mercy and ready to feel the smash of my kneecap in his face.

  “Good, good. Really good.”

  Lev never lets me really hurt him. He lifted his knee at the last possible second, so I caught him on the upper calf. As for the testicle stamp, he caught my leg with both hands and took the weight off it as it came down, shifting it sideways onto his thigh.

  But I’m not there. I’m not in the world that Lev is in. Unarmed combat practice. Everything a series of moves and countermoves. I’m panting, partly from the exertion, but mostly because of a flood of feelings that I don’t recognize. I don’t even really feel them as feelings at all. I just feel spacey and out of my body and like I want to kick Lev’s windpipe until he’s breathing out through the toe of my shoe.

  I know he’s talking to me, and I have trouble focusing on his words. I do my best. He repeats himself.

  “You were scared? At the time it happened, you were scared?”

  “No. It was beyond that. Terrified. I felt helpless.”

  “But you weren’t helpless. You could have disabled him. Like just now.”

  “I know. But I wasn’t in that headspace then.”