Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  I can imagine Lev praising that kick.

  Sikorsky jerks spasmodically, then lies still. Not dead, because he’s still breathing, but there are blood bubbles at the corner of his mouth.

  I’m not sure what to do now. I don’t have my handcuffs with me. My phone is back at the lighthouse. The guy is hurt, but he’ll recover. I can’t afford to let him get to the boat.

  I peer over the edge of the cliff. I’m not brilliant with heights, but I’m not awful, and in any case these are special circumstances. The cliff’s not all that high, maybe fifty feet, and it rolls down at seventy degrees or so to the vertical.

  Good enough.

  I give Sikorsky another good kick in the head. No point in taking chances. Then I bundle him over the edge. All a bit improvised, but improvisation is my strong suit. He rolls down like a sack of potatoes wrapped in a carpet. He bounces lifelessly, like a punctured football. I can’t see the base of the cliff, so I don’t know what happens at the bottom. I can’t even hear anything. Half deaf from the gunfire earlier, I can’t even hear the waves.

  I’m tired now. Unbelievably thirsty.

  I trudge into the field behind me and find the gun. There’s a slide on the barrel. You pull the slide back to chamber a bullet. See. I knew it wouldn’t take long to figure out.

  The return journey to the lighthouse seems like a hundred miles, and I feel every inch of it. Despite my T-shirt, I feel completely naked.

  I don’t like violence. I know I’ve learned it. Studied its dark and unpredictable arts. But I don’t like it. What I’ve just done revolts me. What has happened here is revolting.

  When I get back to the lighthouse, I can’t go in straightaway. To the house of horror. To Fletcher’s mute, repulsive eyes.

  For a minute, maybe two, I sit on the stone steps and just let myself be. I’m not consciously practicing my breathing, but these things have become part of me now, and I do it without noticing sometimes. In-two-three-four-five. Out-two-three-four-five. My pulse rate slows. I feel calmer. I notice what an extraordinarily beautiful day it is. What an extraordinarily beautiful place. Cropped grass, lichened limestone, and the endless cerulean sea.

  Since I parked my car on the shoulder above the lighthouse, there has been no barrier between me and my feelings. None at all. I’ve never been myself as much as this for as long as this.

  In-two-three-four-five. Out-two-three-four-five.

  Then I drag myself inside. That dark interior, home to so much cruelty.

  Fletcher is alive, but unconscious. The bleeding seems to have stopped, so I decide not to move him. I don’t trust myself to make good decisions now. Let the professionals look after things.

  I go downstairs, picking my way over the two semiconscious men and avoiding the one very dead one.

  The women stare at me. They don’t know they’ve been saved. Maybe they don’t know they were about to be killed. In any case, given what they’ve been through, their salvation lies a long way off. They may never find it. Janet Mancini never did. Stacey Edwards never did. It’s no good living in a world at peace if your own head is at war with itself.

  I can’t find the keys to unlock the women, and in any case that’s not a priority. I check the two handcuffed men. They’re not in good shape, but they’re alive and I don’t feel like giving them first aid. I find my clothes and my phone. There’s no signal in the cellar, so I walk back outside to the steps. I call Jackson.

  He starts to give me a bollocking for going AWOL, and I interrupt. I tell him where I am and what I’ve found.

  I tell him that there’s one man dead, and four others, who might or might not be dead by the time help arrives.

  I tell him about the boat.

  “There’s at least one woman on it. I’d guess more. Maybe as many as six. I’m pretty certain they were going to be taken out into the Irish Sea and then thrown overboard. You need coast guard vessels to approach from the sea. Ideally a helicopter from above, and divers ready for an instantaneous rescue job if whoever is onboard tries to dump the evidence. And if you can find some snipers from anywhere, you might want to get them.”

  Jackson, bless the man, takes me at face value. He tells me to stay on the line—I called his mobile—then I can hear him yelling orders, using his landline, getting the cleanup operation mobilized. Every now and then he checks in with me. Precise location of the vessel. Identifying marks. Number of men guessed to be onboard—not that I have an answer to that one, but it can’t be many. Probably just Martyn Roberts.

  It’s easy for me now. Someone else is making the decisions, getting the job done. I unzip my boots and take them off. These little stone steps make something of a sun trap. A nice place to lie around. But I get dressed properly. Trousers. Top. Boots. I remember about the ammo in my jacket pocket and take it out. I pop back inside and leave it on the table in the upstairs room. I give it a quick polish in the lining of my jacket to remove some of my prints from it, but if there are some left, then so be it.

  I leave the Russian’s gun next to the ammo.

  I’m gunless now. Fully clothed, I feel naked.

  Too naked. Bracing myself one last time against the horror, I go back inside and retrieve the gun. I smell it. It hasn’t been fired today. Chances are it hasn’t been fired in any place that would give our ballistics people the opportunity to get the measure of it. These days, guns are one-use-only affairs. Used once, then ditched. We’re a throwaway society.

  The Russian gun is bigger than mine, but not too big. Not unusably big. I quite like the heft of it, the greater weight, the absence of compromise. A gun for grown-ups.

  I wonder what to do with it.

  Hand it over to the good folk who are about to arrive. That’s the answer that every good copper would come to without much need for thought.

  Keep it for myself. The answer my instinct prefers. I liked having a gun. I slept better for it. I felt more complete owning a weapon and knowing how to shoot it.

  But it’s been a big day, and these questions feel bigger than I want to address right now, so I don’t try. In the field above the lighthouse, there’s a little stone sheepfold. An old one, set down and into the hill. I go to the shed with the woodpile, root around for a moment or two, and find an old fertilizer sack. I wrap the gun in it, then jog up the hill to the sheepfold and stow the gun in its fertilizer sack somewhere down in the rocks at the back. You can almost see where I’ve hidden it, but it just looks like an old bit of dirty plastic. A good place for a gun to be.

  I’m just walking down the hill from the sheepfold when I hear a helicopter coming over the hill and spy two boats skimming fast across the waves from Saint Ishmael’s. The helicopter has its side door open and two rifle-toting snipers looking out.

  Good work, Jackson. Fast work too. I remember that there’s an RAF base a little way up the coast. No doubt this is their chopper and their gunmen. Jackson’s call probably made their year.

  Behind me, I hear sirens. Police cars. Ambulances. Big men who know how to deal with the mess I’ve helped create. I welcome their arrival.

  By the time they come, I’m sitting on my stone steps, shaking and shaking and shaking.

  One of the very best things about Wales, the whole of Britain really, is the quality of its coppers. You get the odd rogue, of course, and more than a few idiots, but for solid-gold good sense, good hearts, and incorruptibility, you can give me a British copper any day of the week.

  Dennis Jackson is making me drink milky, sweet hot chocolate at a café in Haverfordwest. He’s ordered me beans on toast because he thinks I need to eat. I do my best.

  “Four women onboard,” he tells me, then pauses. “I don’t know if you want to hear this now, but given what you’ve already seen today, I suppose you may as well know.”

  I nod.

  “Four women. None of them speak English. Duct tape over their mouths. Hands cable-tied behind them and cement blocks chained to their ankles. They were just going to take them out to sea …�
��

  “I know.”

  “Take them out to sea and …”

  “I know.”

  “Can you imagine it?”

  Detective Chief Inspector Jackson, he of the bushy eyebrows and the growly demeanor, can’t complete his sentence. He doesn’t need to. I know what he was going to say, and I know how he feels.

  I think I feel the same. Almost. I don’t have tears at my disposal, of course, and I don’t have that easy familiarity with my own feelings that Jackson has. But still. The glass wall between me and my feelings has gotten thinner these last few weeks. At times it hasn’t been there at all. I haven’t been normal, but I’ve been closer to normal than I’ve been since before I got ill. I can tell how D.C.I. Jackson feels, and I think I feel something almost similar. The feeling is a sad one, but nothing is as bad as not feeling anything at all.

  I feel so proud of myself for being here, sharing the same emotional space as Dennis Jackson, that part of me wants to laugh for happiness. I make sure I don’t, though. It’d be a mood spoiler.

  “It wouldn’t have been the first time,” I say. “I think Martyn Roberts was doing the same old work for new customers.”

  “Yes. I agree. I’m sure you’re right.”

  I make a face and try to eat some beans. They seem like heavy going, so I drink some hot chocolate instead. Jackson asks the waitress to bring another. I would object, except that I know he’ll override me.

  I stopped shaking only about ten minutes ago.

  “I expect one day you’ll want to tell me how you knew to go looking in a remote Pembrokeshire lighthouse. You’ll probably also want to tell me how come you decided it would be a great idea to storm in there yourself, instead of asking me to supply the required resources.”

  “First question: I had a tip-off,” I say. “Conspiracy hearsay bollocks from a prostitute. As for why I didn’t tell you—well, you’d have told me it was conspiracy hearsay bollocks. Unwarranted speculation. And I don’t blame you. Would you even have got a search warrant?”

  “Fiona. You’re one of my officers. I won’t say you’re the easiest person I’ve ever managed, but you’re still one of my officers. You could have got yourself killed today, and it’s my responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  There’s a pause there, and I leave it be. Maybe I drop a little shrug in there, but mostly I just leave it. Anyway, Jackson is on a different train of thought now.

  “Though, bloody hell, Fiona, you seem to have looked after yourself all right.”

  He shakes his head instead of continuing, but I get the gist. How come a little will-o’-the-wisp thing like me ends up wreaking so much destruction? When the cavalry did come charging over the hill to rescue me, I was so grateful for their arrival, and in such a state of shock, that it took me about forty minutes to remember I’d found Sikorsky, the guy that everyone had been looking for. When I remembered, and started trying to tell people about it, and how I’d tipped him over a cliff, they assumed that I was blathering nonsense, and kept telling me that everything was fine now, everything was being taken care of. Eventually, I had to grab a couple of people and lead them down the cliff path to the spot. Since there was an ax sticking out of the gorse just where I told them it would be, and a spray of blood on the path where I’d kicked the guy’s head in, they had to take me seriously. It took them fifty minutes to get down to the base of the cliff, because they had to get the RAF chopper to fly out some ropes and tackle, and when they did, they found Sikorsky, battered but alive on the rocks at the bottom.

  “I guess I must have learned something at Hendon after all,” I suggest to Jackson.

  “You know there’s going to be an investigation, right? A massive one. Blow-by-blow forensics, the whole works. Don’t get me wrong. I think you did a good job today. If you’d killed all of those fuckers, it wouldn’t bother me personally. But when a police officer discharges a firearm—”

  “I know.”

  “There has to be an investigation. And when there’s a dead man and three others seriously injured …”

  “I know.”

  “Sikorsky is in intensive care. Injuries to the skull as well as half the bones in his body. I don’t know if—”

  If he’ll live or die. I shrug, and Jackson echoes me. We don’t care.

  “You fired in self-defense.”

  Half statement, half question, but not one I disagree with. “Yes, sir.”

  “That first shot, the man you killed, was fired from a distance. There are no powder marks, and the entry wound was very clean. There’s no sign that any of those coming at you discharged a firearm.”

  “They’d have killed me, sir. They’d have killed me just the same way as they were about to kill all those women.”

  “Fiona, this isn’t a bollocking. You won’t get one from me about this. For a change. But you’re going to be asked a lot of questions. You’re going to need to have some answers.”

  “To be honest, sir, I’ve no idea what happened. I’m more of a logic type than an action type. The whole thing’s one big blur really.”

  The waitress comes with another hot chocolate and gives it to me. There’s something maternal in the way she hands it over. Or rather, it’s as though I’m special needs, and she’s looking at Jackson to check that she’s doing the right thing.

  He nods her brusquely away. He’s not done with me yet.

  “One big blur. That’s cute, but—”

  “I think there must have been a gun on the table when I came in. I picked it up. I knew I was in a dangerous situation.”

  “Okay. And you wanted to deny firearms to the suspects you were there to apprehend. Good. Then you went downstairs to pursue your investigations further.”

  I stare at Jackson. My brain isn’t working too well, and it has to turn over a couple of times, like a car starting in the cold, before I get what he’s doing. He’s giving me my lines. Rehearsing me.

  “Yes, sir. I went downstairs to”—there’s a blurry moment where no words come to me; then it passes and I continue—“to pursue my investigations further. I sought to liberate the women I found, but they were secured with chains.”

  Jackson nods. I’m doing well. “And you weren’t able to call for help, because …”

  “Because of the women on the boat. If Sikorsky’s men had heard police sirens, those women could have been tossed overboard immediately. I had to let those men come to me, so I could … um …”

  Shoot the fuckers.

  “Arrest them,” says Jackson.

  “Exactly. So I could arrest them.”

  “When they entered the cellar, I expect you identified yourself and gave them an opportunity to surrender their weapons.”

  I stare at him. He really means this? Hello, you must be Russian Gangsters. I’m Detective Constable Griffiths, just about the most junior member of the South Wales CID. Following budgetary cutbacks, I’m all that’s left of our Armed Response Unit and, in the spirit of community togetherness, I’d very much appreciate it if you could lay down your weapons and turn yourselves in. And maybe we could all tidy this place up a bit afterward.

  Jackson holds my gaze without a flicker.

  “I expect you shouted ‘Police’ or ‘Drop your weapons,’ or something like that.”

  “ ‘Police.’ I probably shouted ‘Police.’ ”

  “Good. You shouted ‘Police,’ ” says Jackson, neatly excising my “probably.” “They raised their weapons, clearly intending to fire.”

  “Yes.” That bit is true.

  “And in the subsequent firefight, you—Fuck it, Fiona. You killed one, disabled two, and all without any of them getting a shot away.”

  “That’s the blurry bit.”

  “Then you beat Sikorsky to a pulp and throw him off a cliff?”

  “Not throw. It was more of a roly-poly thing.”

  “Okay. You rolled him off a cliff, because of a continuing desire to protect the women on the boat. Correct?”

&
nbsp; “Correct.”

  “As soon as the threats were secured, you made contact with me, and we came in to apprehend Roberts and secure the vessel.”

  I nod.

  “At least you left something for us to do.” Jackson laughs into his coffee. “And by the way, I think you’re right. I think if you’d come to me with hearsay and speculation and no grounds for a search warrant, I’d have told you to go away.”

  “I thought I’d find Fletcher. Maybe some women. I had no idea the Russians would be there. If I had, I wouldn’t have gone. And I was confident that I’d be able to handle Fletcher on my own.”

  “I’ll say so. Bloody carnage it was in there. Carnage.” He chuckles for a while, then changes the subject. “Janet Mancini. Do you reckon she was taken there and got away? Or did she find out some other way?”

  “I’m totally guessing now,” I say, “but I’m pretty sure the lighthouse was only used for imported goods. I think Rattigan must have had sex with Mancini at some point—perhaps several points—but in Cardiff, in whatever place she normally serviced clients. He’d have been high. Talked too much. Maybe he even liked her. The honest truth is, I think he liked her. He wouldn’t have told her otherwise. He must have dropped that debit card in her flat and she kept it as a souvenir. Her client, the millionaire.”

  “Or kept it for its blackmail potential.”

  “Or thought about buying stuff on it, before losing her nerve. Could have been anything.”

  “Pity Rattigan’s not alive,” says Jackson. “It would be nice to send him to jail, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes. Yes, it really would.”

  I try another forkful of beans, but they’re not going anywhere and Jackson moves my plate so I stop annoying him by pretending to eat things that are never going to end up eaten.

  “Fiona, if anything like this happens again, tell me first. If you’ve got some conspiracy hearsay bollocks that you believe in, tell me and I’ll believe it too. No more solo flights on my watch, ever, for any reason, ever. Do you understand?”