Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  Mobile phone records have already established that Sikorsky was in the relevant areas for all three incidents under investigation: the Mancinis, Edwards, and Balcescu.

  Officers, including Jim Davis, have been sent back to Ioana Balcescu to see if she’ll be willing to give us a formal statement.

  I feel a bit weird about all this. Our investigation is moving rapidly toward a close. Perhaps Sikorsky is already back in Poland or Russia or wherever he comes from, but if he isn’t, then it’s becoming increasingly likely that we’ll get him and arrest him. Ports and airports have been watched since we got the DNA sample from Allison Street. Interpol has his details.

  In any case, Kapuscinski, Petrov, and Leonard are all now under arrest for provable offenses. Once we have completed all the forensics work on the properties associated with them, it’s highly likely we’ll be able to put together a case for murder too. The mood around the room is jubilant. Good old Jackson. Old Reliable. All we need now is Sikorsky and everyone’s joy would be complete.

  I know why Davis has been sent to reinterview Balcescu. Jane Alexander isn’t available. I’m around but knackered. When inquiries reach this stage, everyone has to be willing to do everything, even if they’re not the ideal person for the job.

  I know all that, but I can’t help thinking of Jim Davis talking to Ioana. “We’re asking you to confirm for us statements you made at your previous interview, with Officers Alexander and Griffiths, on Monday, May 31. We’re asking you recklessly to endanger your own life. We’re asking you to overlook my yellow teeth and D.S. Alexander’s unfeasibly blond hair. Any questions, Ms. Balcescu, hur-hur-hur?”

  I think of Ioana’s battered body. Of Jayney’s bruises. Of Stacey Edwards’s corpse. April’s blind little head. Images I should avoid. I’m not feeling well.

  Trow-ma.

  Jackson ends the briefing with a request for questions or any further points worth communicating.

  I want to stick my hand up. I want to say that, down in Newport, a man went missing leaving behind over two hundred thousand pounds in cash. I want to say that I looked into Charlotte Rattigan’s eyes. That her husband—her late husband?—liked to fuck street girls. I want to say all sorts of things, but I can’t because, although I’ve just garnered a round of applause for being Detective of the Day, no one except me cares about any of these things. If I tried to say anything now, I’d be like the cartoons on the back page of the newspaper. The funnies at the end of the news bulletin. “And in other news …” That’d be me. The pet rabbit who got stuck up a tree. The cat who does a YouTube dance with the dog.

  I stay shtum.

  The briefing breaks up. Everyone feels that success is imminent. About to get the killer. Job done. Beers all round. All round? No, not quite, because the office comedy act here, Miss Fiona Griffiths, doesn’t drink beer. Not a real police officer, see, but we’re proud of our efforts to increase diversity. Look! Watch her drink some fizzy water. See her rip into her whole-grain snack bar. We hire all sorts these days, and we still catch the bad guys.

  Bev Rowland seeks me out, worrying that I’m looking ill. She has a face as round as the moon, only kinder and more talkative. She starts to fuss and cluck me into well-being, but I’m not fussable today. I tell her that I’m going to catch up on a few emails, then take off. I don’t tell her that I’m planning to take off for Newport, and she accepts my answer.

  We agree to rendezvous for tea once we’ve checked our emails, and I wander upstairs.

  A mistake. Hughes catches me at my desk. A trap. A Hughesian trap.

  He says something about time sheets and interview notes. I don’t really listen. It’s not his case anyway. Lohan belongs to Jackson. Penry belongs to Matthews. Fletcher belongs to Axelsen. When I tune in again, Hughes is saying something about the Stacey Edwards autopsy. He’s telling me that, because I did a good job with the last one, I can do this one too. Go along on Monday afternoon, to take notes as Hughes and Dr. Aidan Price seek to bore the pants off each other in what will surely be a world-class boring match. It’ll be a tense affair, but my money’s on Price.

  I’d forgotten that there would be an autopsy for Edwards. There has to be, of course, I just hadn’t thought about it. I say, “Yes, fine. That’s fine,” but I can’t work out what I feel about seeing Edwards again, because I can’t figure out much about anything. I go on saying “yes, sir” whenever there’s a gap, and eventually even Hughes has had enough and he goes away again. I look at my emails for twenty minutes. Can’t remember what I’m doing with them. Text Brydon. Get a call back. Chat for ten minutes, which is all he can spare. Drink some peppermint tea and manage a half-sensible conversation with Bev, before heading back over to Newport.

  The team at Rattigan Transport has shrunk to just two, and neither of them is on the case full-time. We have a house full of money, a missing person, but no actual, honest-to-God crime. There’d be more urgency about this if there were a proper crime. I should have stuck a dead body in Fletcher’s bathroom before calling the uniforms in.

  I get myself to the conference room and the computer that’s been allocated me. The girl who has the expression of a calf gets me some undrinkable tea in a plastic cup that buckles when I try to pick it up.

  Once I’m settled at my desk, fog claims me again.

  I once went on a walk in the Black Mountains with my aunt Gwyn. It started out misty but pleasant, the collies racing ahead of us through the bracken, a little frost, a nice day. Then the mist thickened, as though the light had hardened, or grown more dense. And then—the world was gone. Vanished into the silence and the cold. The collies still came and went. I don’t think they had a problem. But Gwyn and I were suddenly wanderers on the void, a Vladimir and Estragon of the mountains. Gwyn had known these hills all her life, and even so we were forced to descend until a hedge stopped us, and then we skirted the rest of the way, the hedge always on our right, until at last we came across the gate and the lane by which we had entered. Had we somehow missed that gate, I think we could have been wandering there forever.

  It’s like that today, only without the collies, without Gwyn, and without that blessed gate. Axelsen is around more often than he has been. He’s in and out, keeping an eye on things. I listen to him assigning me a task—listing overseas clients visited by Fletcher in the last two years, for example—and I nod my agreement, and two hours later, I have a sheet of doodles and I’m trying to remember what it is I’m supposed to be doing. Axelsen thinks I’m taking the piss. So do the others on the team. I tell them sorry and I’ll do better.

  As soon as I tell them and they get off my case, the fog descends again. I can’t remember what I said five minutes before.

  Cod, whiting, herring, turbot.

  What about halibut? What’s a halibut? Some kind of flatfish, I think. Google tells me that you can catch halibut in the North Atlantic. It tells me that, for six months, the halibut has eyes on both sides of its body and swims in the normal fishy way. Then after six months, one eye migrates to the opposite side, the fish rotates ninety degrees in the water, and it spends the rest of its life with both eyes staring up at the roof of the sea, and no way at all of looking down. A fish with vertigo.

  I can’t see Rattigan wanting to catch halibut.

  Every time Fletcher went off on a “fishing trip,” there was a Rattigan ship coming in from the Baltic. Usually Kaliningrad, sometimes Petersburg. That would be a more impressive fact if Rattigan didn’t operate a fleet of such ships.

  Kaliningrad. Major exports: Russian gangsterism, Afghan heroin, criminality that combines capitalist organization with Soviet murderousness. Best of both worlds.

  I forget what Axelsen has told me to do, so instead I call all the fishing vessels available for charter on the South Wales coast. I ask them if it would be possible to inspect their logs to see who chartered them, when, for how long, and going to where. Most of them say yes, if I want. A couple say that should be fine but they’ll need to refer it elsewhere in
their, no doubt colossal, corporate structures. One skipper from West Wales hangs up when I tell him who I am. A little further truffling informs me that the hanger-upper is Martyn Roberts, based out of Milford Haven, and he has a criminal conviction for armed robbery and another for grievous bodily harm.

  I tell all this to Axelsen the next time he visits.

  “Do you think Rattigan went fishing with Fletcher?”

  “No.”

  “So why would either of them want to charter a fishing boat?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re remembering that Rattigan owns an entire fleet of ships? That if he wanted a boat, he could buy one. That Fletcher’s day job was arranging charters for Rattigan’s fleet?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that Rattigan has been dead for almost a year?”

  “Yes.”

  “So do you think maybe this all is a red herring?”

  “A red halibut maybe.”

  I laugh. I think it’s funny, so I laugh quite a lot. Axelsen doesn’t think it’s at all funny, so I shut up.

  “Have you got that list I asked for?” he says.

  I scrunch my eyes up and start to give that question some serious thought, but then the fog creeps in again and no answers seem to arrive. I can’t remember what list he wanted.

  I wonder if he’d be interested in hearing about halibut instead, but there’s a look on his face which suggests not, so I say nothing, which is a pity, because they’re interesting fish. Halibut have white bellies, so from below they look like the sky, and dark upper bodies, so that from above they look like the ocean floor. A light side and a dark side. And the light side travels blind.

  “Are you feeling okay? You don’t look well.”

  “I don’t feel well.”

  “You weren’t in an accident or something?”

  I shake my head. I don’t remember the day terribly well, but I’d have remembered that, surely.

  “You look like someone in shock. Why don’t you go home, get some rest, take it easy over the weekend. You’re no bloody use to me at all the way you are now.”

  I nod. I try to look wise, as though we’re making a tough judgment call together, and after due consideration I’ve come down in favor of his assessment.

  “I’ll go home. Yes. Good idea. Sorry.” I’m not sure why I’m saying “sorry,” except that “no bloody use” is a phrase I’ve heard before, and not in a good way. I say “sorry” again and sit at my desk to clear my things. Axelsen goes off to catch criminals and make the world a better place.

  Before I go, though, I type “shock” into Google and get up a Wikipedia page. It offers me three alternatives:

  • Shock (circulatory), circulatory medical emergency

  • Acute stress reaction, often termed “shock” by laypersons, a psychological condition in response to terrifying events

  • Post-traumatic stress disorder, a long-term complication of acute stress reaction

  It takes me some time to understand this. It took me some time to discover all those interesting things about halibut too. But I don’t have circulatory shock. That’s something you get in hospitals and has nothing to do with me.

  PTSD. That’s what Lev told me I had, but that’s a long-term thing. A continuing response to something that happened way back.

  Acute stress reaction is more interesting though. Often termed “shock” by laypersons. It’s a bit harsh to call D.I. Axelsen a layperson. He’s a detective inspector with the Gwent Police, for heaven’s sake, but layperson or not, maybe he was onto something. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

  Acute stress reaction (also called acute stress disorder, psychological shock, mental shock, or simply shock) is a psychological condition arising in response to a terrifying or traumatic event.

  A bit further on, I learn what my symptoms are meant to be:

  Common symptoms that sufferers of acute stress disorder experience are: numbing; detachment; derealization; depersonalization or dissociative amnesia; continued re-experiencing of the event by such ways as thoughts, dreams, and flashbacks

  Numbing—tick. Yes, got that. Detachment—yep, that too. Derealization—not too sure what that is, but if it’s what it sounds like, then I’ve got it. Depersonalization or dissociative amnesia—yes, got that big-time and, back in the day, had it mega-big-time. World-class depersonalizer, I was. Never beaten, seldom matched.

  But then there’s that last bit. Continued re-experiencing of the event by such ways as thoughts, dreams, and flashbacks. No. What event? I try to find something on Wikipedia which will tell me what event I’m meant to be experiencing but can’t find anything. But what about my nighttime terrors? The gaping horror at midnight? The skull grinning in the dark? Do those things count as dreams or flashbacks?

  If they do, then I tick every box. Tick ’em big. Tick ’em good.

  But what’s the event? There isn’t any event. Lev thinks there is, and Layperson Axelsen thinks there is, but there isn’t. There’s no event.

  It’s odd, this. Even in my dazed state, I know it’s odd. When I first got ill, there was this big investigation into why. What made it happen? My condition was something that safely brought-up teenagers weren’t meant to get. It made no sense. Psychiatrists pushed and prodded, and Social Services tried to foist their crappy little theories onto my poor old mam and dad. No one got anywhere. There was no explanation that made sense, so the whole question—certainly in my mind, and I think in everyone else’s too—got shoved aside. My illness was just one of those things. No more logic than an earthquake. Wrong place, wrong time, tough luck.

  And now, when I least expect it, Lev and Axelsen are telling me to think again. Continued re-experiencing of the event. There isn’t an event, but Lev and Axelsen and Wikipedia all beg to differ.

  Next to me, the phone rings. One of my teammates picks it up. There’s a muttered conversation which I don’t follow, because I’m hot on the pursuit of knowledge and can’t concern myself with trifles. The phone conversation ends. The teammate approaches.

  “That was Axelsen calling to check you’d gone.”

  “Ah, yes.” I remember that now.

  “I’ll take you to your car, shall I? You’ll be all right driving?”

  I nod. Very meek. Very submissive. I’m led out to the car park and drive home so carefully that I’m honked at on the M4 for doing forty in the slow lane.

  I reach the house vaguely expectant, but there’s nothing there. Lev’s gone, as expected. No messages on the machine, no texts.

  The kitchen is all tidied up. Not my doing. Lev’s. He’s left a note for me on the counter, though. “FF, TR.” Fuck feelings, trust reason. A very good slogan indeed, though I say so myself.

  I start to apply it. Think, Griffiths, think.

  First, this whole issue about shock. Clearly, I tick most of the boxes for PTSD. Pretty clearly, I am looking and acting like someone in the grip of major-league shock right now, this minute.

  At the same time, however, I’m missing the single most crucial ingredient in the formula, a “terrifying or traumatic event.” That’s a puzzle, but not one that needs to be solved right now. I decide to leave it.

  Next, I need to find some way to lessen these symptoms. I’m not managing them well at the moment, and I know how dark they can get. I make a list of my standard techniques for dealing with head craziness. My list runs (1) smoke a joint, (2) bury myself in work, (3) go to stay with Mam and Dad, (4) breathing exercises, et cetera.

  I immediately cross out item one. I smoked too much yesterday, and dope goes only so far. It’s excellent self-medication, but it helps only when my problems are mild to moderate. Right now, they’re moderate to bad, with the course set for hard to severe.

  Item two is likewise forced to bite the dust. I’ve just been fired by the Gwent police force. Everyone on Lohan is looking at me strangely and telling me to go home. I’ve got no work to bury myself in. And the work wasn’t helping.

&nb
sp; Item three is more interesting. It would probably work. Not straightaway, but give it a few days and I’d be right as rain. But it feels like a backward step. A palliative, not a cure. I decide to set that one aside and come back to it if there’s an emergency.

  Number four is like a pair of sensible shoes or a high-fiber cereal. Good for you, but sinfully dull. All the same, four is a good ’un. I’ll come back to it shortly.

  Floating around, though, is a possible number five. Making love. I’ve never had many lovers. A few women early on. Then two or three spottily awkward male students at Cambridge, ickily overeager to get into bed with anything in a skirt—and I was ickily overwilling to let them. Then one sort of but not quite boyfriend after Cambridge. A nice chap. Runs a bookshop now. And Ed Saunders. Ed was the only one I felt right around. In bed and out of it. With Ed, I think I used to use sex as a way of coming into being. A trick akin to smoking dope or running home to Mam and Dad.

  And now Brydon. Part of me wants to go rushing off to Brydon. Get him into bed. Make love urgently enough that I could use it as a way to feel myself again. Use him.

  I only have to understand that to decide against it. With Brydon, I want to do things right. I want to learn the art of being a girlfriend. A proper one. A permanent, stable one, for whom lovemaking is about nothing more than making love. Not a fucked-up sort of self-medication.

  I make a cup of tea and spend forty minutes doing exercises. Breathing first. In-two-three-four-five. Out-two-three-four-five. When I’ve done fifteen minutes of that, I start my bodywork. Move my arms. Move my legs. Feel them as I move them. Stamp on the floor to see if I can feel down to my feet. Ed Saunders would be proud of me, though he might be a bit concerned to learn my thoughts on the topic of lovemaking. Or perhaps he already knew.