Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  “Thanks, Fiona.”

  “Fi.”

  “Fi? Thanks, Fi. I’ll let you know how I get on.”

  “I’ll want a recital.”

  He nods. We’re in silence for a moment, but he knows what I’m about to ask and he’s here to tell me.

  “Fletcher. That place, where he is now.”

  I nod. “Yes?”

  “It’s a white house, or shack, or something. A little tower or something. I only saw a photo once, and I didn’t look for long. But I know it’s white. And beyond Milford Haven. And very close to the beach.”

  “Mooring?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “You had a sailing club T-shirt on the time I came to your house.”

  “Did I? Never been sailing though. I haven’t been there.”

  “Okay.” I believe him.

  “I’ll come with you, if you like. I’m not much use for most things, but I know how to hit people.”

  I laugh out loud at that. I don’t tell him that I’ve practiced stamping his testicles to pulp.

  “I’ll be okay. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. And it’s only one man, isn’t it? One that your old nan could take out.”

  “You hope.”

  I stand up. I chuck my still-full coffee cup into a trash barrel.

  Penry nods farewell. “Good luck, sweetheart. You might be like me, but don’t become me.”

  I grin at him, looking braver than I feel. “I’ll be okay. And good luck yourself.”

  When I leave him, he’s still on the bench, the book open in front of him, his fingers practicing movements on an invisible keyboard.

  The mortuary visit with D.I. Hughes isn’t as fun as the one with D.C.I. Jackson three weeks ago. Hughes and Price do have a boring contest, and Hughes comes out of it much better than I’d expected. Price scores heavily with his sheer torrents of uninteresting detail, but Hughes counters with that depressive hostile thing he does, an adaptable technique and one that really works for him. In the end, I can’t call a winner. There’s no knockout, and the judges will have to make a decision on points.

  By the time they’re done, I’ve filled twenty-one pages of my notebook. I’m rustling like taffeta, just like the first time.

  The room we’re in contains Stacey Edwards on a proper autopsy bench, and the two Mancinis on gurneys. They were only wheeled in here so Price could make one or two points of comparison between the corpses. They’re all going to be burned tomorrow. Released up through a chimney into the sky. The weather tomorrow is forecast to be like today. Windy, dry, hot, overcast. A good day to be burned, I reckon. The wind will give little April her freedom at last. Freedom and light.

  Finally, finally, neither Price nor Hughes can think of anything else that’s worth saying. We cover the bodies and leave the room.

  I look down at my watch.

  “Gosh, is that the time?” There’s a big hospital clock on the wall which says that it is. Six o’clock, near as dammit. “I’m meeting someone for a drink. Thank you so much, Dr. Price.” He gets a handshake; then to Hughes, “If it’s okay, sir, I’ll touch base with you tomorrow. I’ll have my notes typed up first thing.”

  “That’s fine … Fiona.” It took him a moment to remember my name, but he got there soon enough. He’s forgiven. “See you tomorrow.”

  I rush off to the women’s changing area, gown flapping, boots galumphing. Behind me, the two men stroll through to their section, still talking.

  My heart is doing a thousand beats a minute, and it’s welcome to them all. I yank off my gown. My fingers are trembling so hard it’s actually difficult for me to undo it properly and I end up just ripping it off. Kick my boots off, slip my shoes on, and edge back toward the reception area, listening. The men are in their changing area, doing whatever they’re doing.

  “Good night, then!” I yell, getting an answering murmur from the boys.

  There’s a security button by the main exit. I press it, the door clicks, and I open it, then let it slam shut. The sound echoes off bare walls and the polished hospital floor.

  For just a second, my heart switches off and I have a moment of something that passes for clarity. Fiona Griffiths, this is not what you do. Not now. Not ever. Just say no.

  I don’t listen.

  Apart from anything else, there’s a certainty in my bones which says the opposite. It says: Fiona Griffiths, this is your opportunity. Use it. Use it now. Use it well. It’s never coming back.

  Quietly now, I slip off my shoes and walk back to the ladies’ in my stockinged feet. I turn off the light, making sure that the switch doesn’t click. The room is bare and empty. Nothing to see.

  It’s not too late to reverse course. I know that. Free will is offering me escape routes with every second that passes and I don’t take any of them. Heart still beating too fast, but feeling strangely calm, I open the cleaning cupboard door, walk inside, and pull the door gently shut.

  There’s a bucket there, and I sit on it. I’m in the dark. Hidden. Invisible. Forgotten.

  I wait.

  Noises from outside. Mostly hospital ones. The ventilation system. A window cord tapping in a draft. An electronic beeping from some machine somewhere. The little clicks and creaks of any large building.

  And then I hear Hughes and Price walk back out into the reception area. A short pause. Keys. Some muttered conversation, then the click of the front door. The slam of it closing. The turn of a lock. Two pairs of footsteps walking away.

  Now it really is too late. Escape routes well and truly sealed off. I’m incredulous at what I’ve just done, but I’m partly incredulous because I don’t regret it at all. My decision feels entirely right. I am intoxicated by the simplicity of it all.

  For about an hour, I don’t move. Bum on a cleaning bucket in a cupboard outside a silent changing room. I don’t even allow myself to shift my weight around or stretch out my legs.

  Then I do. Hughes and Price aren’t coming back. I very much doubt if hospital security patrols here at night. The dead aren’t known for their rowdiness, and presumably the point of those lockdown security procedures is to make sure that what I’ve just done can’t possibly happen.

  I’m all alone in the mortuary. Alone with the dead.

  I assume that Price has locked the exit and that I’m stuck here for the night. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited—so happily excited—in my life. I let some more time pass, take things slow. No need to rush.

  Then finally, I wander out into the reception area. I poke the rubbery looking plant with my finger to check that it’s real, and it is. There are a few odds and ends on the reception desk, and I shift them around just to feel my own presence here a little more. There are no security cameras in the ceiling, no nothing. There’s a card on the desk addressed to somebody called Gina. I read the card—nothing interesting—and put it back.

  I’m suddenly aware of being a bit cold. I’m wearing a dark skirt, tights, white shirt, and a jacket. For obvious reasons, mortuaries are kept on the cool side, and it’s not going to get any warmer overnight. I put on the low-heeled office shoes that I was wearing earlier, to keep my feet off the floor. There’s something weird about being so formally dressed, given the circumstances.

  I wander about a little more. I try a couple of the internal doors. They all open easily. Why wouldn’t they? The entrance is locked and the place is empty.

  In the women’s toilets, I put the lights back on and stare at myself in the mirror. Short dark hair. Low-key makeup. Dutiful, efficient little face. I can never work out if I look like me or if I look nothing at all like me. I don’t know. I run hot water over my hands, then wet my hair, spiking it up, the punk look. More me or less me? I don’t know but leave it spiked.

  I’m nervous now, really nervous, but I know exactly what happens next.

  I dry my hands, turn off the lights, and walk calmly over to Autopsy Suite 2, where the Stacey Edwards and the two Mancini bodies are ly
ing. The door is closed, but I know it’s not locked from having tested it earlier. I pause for just a moment. Not gathering strength, but … well, pausing. If I were the praying kind, which I’m totally not, then this would be a praying moment. I don’t rush it. I’m about to put my hand to the door when I find myself checking that my shirt is tucked in and not rumpled. That’s right, Griffiths! Got to look smart now.

  I go in. Outside, it’s starting to get dark, and the room is full of shadows. An evening room. I don’t put the light on. I don’t uncover the corpses. Just move slowly around, orienting myself.

  There are two workbenches, a “dry” area for papers and suchlike, and a “wet” area for organs, innards, and other delights. The anglepoise lamp. Some wall charts. Nothing much. The room has its share of hospital noises, but it’s the quietest place I’ve ever been. The most peaceful.

  I say hello to Stacey Edwards first.

  She looks much the same as she did the first time I saw her. No duct tape. No cable ties. But equally dead. I hold her hand for a while and stroke her hair. No reason really. She’s not why I’m here. But it would feel wrong to leave her out, just because I don’t feel a connection to her. This is the last night of her stay on earth. She’ll be joining April and Janet in the winds tomorrow, racing northward to the valleys and the hills. Aunt Gwyn’s farm and the mountains and the plovers.

  “You’ll be all right, love,” I tell her. “I’ll tell Gwyn to give you a wave.”

  She doesn’t react to that. She doesn’t know Gwyn, so I can’t blame her.

  “You were brave. Did you know that? It was because of you that this whole thing came out. You did a good job. You did your bit.”

  She likes that. We still don’t really have a connection, but I stick around a bit longer so she doesn’t think I’m running away.

  Then I shift across the room, to the side of Janet Mancini’s gurney. Not a good word, that. Gurney. Clumpy and undignified, like orthopedic shoes. They’re only on gurneys because they’ve already been sliced and diced. They were moved in here as accessories to the Price-Hughes borefest. No point in moving them back anywhere. Not tonight, their last on earth.

  I decide that for me, for tonight, for Janet and April, those gurneys will be their biers. They can lie in state like a medieval queen and her young princess.

  I unshroud Janet. Top to toe. I fold the cloth up and leave it on the dry workbench, which probably, I think after I’ve done it, breaches hygiene rules.

  The room is dark enough now that most color has gone. Janet’s hair still looks coppery, but so dark that it’s hard to tell anymore. It’s wonderfully soft and long. I’ve never had long hair, or at least not since I was eight or nine, and I envy Janet’s more-than-shoulder-length tresses.

  There’s a circular wound at the back of her head where Aidan Price would have sawn through the skull so he could remove the brain for analysis. He’s a tidy worker is the good Doctor Pedant, and the join is a neat one. Feeling naughty now, I lift away the trapdoor of bone and feel inside. Emptiness. There’s something wonderfully liberating about the feeling. To be so dead that your skull is actually void, now there’s a trick most corpses don’t manage to pull off. I allow my fingers to roam the cavity.

  I don’t cut myself off from myself, the way I normally would. I’ve got all night, so I allow myself time to explore. The skull feels like the largest thing in the universe, containing galaxies. I let my fingers drift among the stars, enjoying the space and the silence. I think of that Llangattock barn. That space, that silence, and all those amber eyes.

  When finally I fit the skull back together again, it closes with a hollow clop.

  Janet’s expression hasn’t changed at all. It’s hard to say what her face is communicating. Release, I suppose. That would be the normal thing to say, but then again I’m aware that my citizenship of Planet Normal is on temporary hold as certain irregularities with my papers are investigated—and in any case, I don’t think release is correct. She doesn’t look like she’s been released from anything. Whatever it is, it’s more than that, purer. It’s as though death has perfected Janet. It’s brought her to the best possible version of herself, untouched by life’s misfortunes and untouchable now, untouchable forever.

  I run my hand right down her body to her feet. All her internal organs will have been removed, weighed, measured, analyzed. Sometimes they’re returned to the body. Other times they’re disposed of and the body is filled out with cheap fillers. They use pipe insulation for bones, for example. But her skin feels wonderful. It’s partly the cold, I suppose. Cold skin always feels smoother, but the truth is that Janet Mancini is a pretty woman with good skin, and she isn’t all that far from being a real beauty.

  I push gently down on her feet, so they’re pointing like a dancer’s, not stuck out at ninety degrees like a policeman’s. I can almost completely close my fingers around her ankle, whereas I’m an inch away from being able to do the same with my own. I wonder what Mancini could have been with a better start in life. A nursery school worker. A secretary. A sales rep. Strange things to think about when she’s lying cold and naked in front of me, and when I know the commercial uses to which that nakedness was once put, but still. She wasn’t a prostitute. Not really. Not properly even in life, and certainly not now.

  “Who killed you, Janet Mancini? Was it Karol Sikorsky?” I ask her softly.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “We’re going to get him. We’re going to get everyone who ever hurt you.”

  She still says nothing.

  “You did your best, I know that. You always did your best.”

  I have an impulse to cover her again, but I realize that the dead don’t care. Their nudity is as neutral to them as pale blue hospital cloth and white gauze. Bier or gurney, they don’t care about that either.

  I unwrap April.

  Her little body ends at the nose. No eyes. No forehead. No empty cavity in the skull. But she has her lovely little smiling mouth, her skinny little kid’s frame, and a hand that happens to lie outstretched toward me. I hold it. I hold it for long enough so that my skin cools down and hers warms up. We’re the same temperature now. I feel like we already know each other. We’re old friends.

  “And who killed you, little April?”

  She doesn’t reply.

  “I was born in April too, you know. Perhaps we have the same birthday.”

  She smiles at me. She likes that.

  “You worried about your mam, didn’t you? It wasn’t easy being you. But you know, she did her best. You did your best. And there’s absolutely nothing in the world to worry about now.”

  Nor is there. Not for them and not for me. I’m not sure how long I stay with the pair of them, but the room is totally dark now, just a little violet light seeping from the lamps in the car parks outside.

  I’ve gotten stiff, so I pace briskly around a bit. I explore the rest of the mortuary. There are three other cadavers that I can find. One old man, a real character, I’ll bet. Good Time Charlie I call him, and he flirts outrageously back at me. Then an obese fifty-something guy. I don’t get on with him at all. I don’t even give him a name, and he’s not sorry to see me go. Last is a lovely silver-haired woman, naked as the moon and grinning upward at the ceiling as we sit and chat. I like her best of all, as it happens—Edith, she is—but it was Janet and April who brought me here, and so it’s back to them I go.

  I pull April’s bier over to Janet’s, so I can sit with the mother and hold the daughter’s hand. I start telling April a bedtime story about Gwyn’s farm and what it’ll look like from above. We enjoy the story to begin with, but then we prefer silence and we just sit, the three of us, not talking but feeling happy together.

  April is Janet’s daughter.

  That’s what April was trying to tell me all the time and I’ve only just twigged. April is Janet’s daughter. Janet herself never really knew her mother, because she was taken into care from an early age. Same thing with Stacey Edwards
. The same thing with so many of these prostitutes.

  But Janet stayed close. She did what she could. She wanted to be April’s mam and did all she could to be the best one she could possibly be. And April appreciated her mother’s efforts. April was Janet’s daughter. Same genes, same blood.

  That’s what April was trying to tell me.

  I would laugh at the simplicity of it all, only this is a night for silence, so my laughter is silent too. One more thing for my to-do list this week.

  I’m as happy now as I’ve ever been. Everything is going to be all right.

  After some time, I feel tired, so I butt the two biers against each other and lie down in the middle to sleep. I sleep holding April’s hand and with my face up against Janet’s enviable copper hair. We sleep the sleep of the dead.

  It’s somewhere after dawn. I’m as stiff as a board and as cold as last night’s tea. Janet and April are doing just fine. They’re probably laughing at me. Yeah, right, sisters. Not one brain between the pair of you.

  I shove the two gurneys back into their proper positions and re-cover the corpses. I give each of them a kiss before I go. Janet on her forehead, April on what there is left of her cheek. Stacey gets a smacker too.

  “Good night, ladies. Good night, sweet ladies. Good night. Good night.”

  I give them a blast from Hamlet, just so they know they’ve spent the night with a girl who knows her Shakespeare, then pull my attention back to escaping the train wreck which threatens to undo not just my career but everything I’ve sought to build over the last few years. If the good Doctor Pedant and gang come back in the morning and find me here, then I’m going to be properly kippered and quite right too.

  This problem has only just occurred to me. It didn’t once enter my thoughts when I pulled my disappearing stunt in the ladies’ last night. It didn’t really occur to me when I was planning this particular escapade.

  I wonder if I have a misplaced degree of confidence in the way this week is going to turn out.