Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t know how many rules you broke today, and I hope to God I never find out, but you saved some lives. You won’t get any crap from me about that. Well done.”

  I ought to say something in response, but I can’t think of anything. Then Jackson’s mobile chirps and he answers it. He’s giving someone directions to the café. I tune out. I’m not feeling quite myself. I think I need to go home and lie down. I probably shouldn’t drive too fast on the way back. I’m feeling a bit too sleepy to go fast.

  A moment later, Jackson straightens. “Well, well. Look who it is. Your ride home.”

  I look. It’s Dave Brydon, bouncing into the café with that step of his, heavy and light, always heavy and light. He is looking for me, and his face is full of emotion. Jackson takes my car keys off me, promises to get my car back to the house, and slots me into Brydon’s car for the trip home.

  “Are you okay, love?” asks Brydon as he buckles me in.

  “Did you just call me ‘love’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m okay. I’m really fine.”

  The rain that the weatherman promised us has ridden in from the west. It’s one of those rainstorms where huge raindrops whack down on the windscreen, where the road is sheeted in water, and where even with the wipers on full it’s hard to see more than a dozen yards ahead. But I don’t care. I’m half asleep. Safe and sound. And David Brydon called me “love.”

  It’s two days later. I’m on leave, as much leave as I want. My only jobs are to eat and sleep and get myself in shape again. Jackson’s orders.

  Every now and then someone from the investigation team comes along and wants to ask me something about something, and I answer as best I can. There are things I can tell them and things that I can’t or don’t want to, so I tell them the first set of things and withhold the second. Strictly speaking, in fact, there are two investigations. One is the culmination of Lohan, the second is the IPCC—Independent Police Complaints Commission—inquiry, which has to take place whenever a police officer discharges a firearm so as to cause death or serious injury. I’m not in trouble, exactly, but Jackson did well to rehearse me. These things are taken very seriously.

  I stumble my way through without making a hash of anything. Shock is my excuse and, anyway, it’s more than an excuse. I’ve got it. Proper shock. “Terrifying or traumatic event” and all. It’s nice to have a textbook case of the syndrome for a change. I recognize that Lev was right and Axelsen was right and Wikipedia was right. I have lived with something like shock for as long as I can remember. I can’t remember ever having lived without it. So to have it now, in a proper setting and with as much support as I could ask for, is something of a relief. It feels like another part of my descent to Planet Normal. At least this time I have a reason for feeling weird.

  At five o’clock Dave Brydon comes round. The two weeks of warm weather that we’ve had seem to have been dispelled by that Pembrokeshire rainstorm. The weather outside is cold and windy. I haven’t glimpsed sun since that day at the lighthouse, and I’ve got the central heating running all the time, thermostat set to seventy-five degrees.

  Brydon has a couple of grocery bags—chocolate for me, beer for him, frozen meals for us both—and bounces over. I’m on the sofa, under a duvet, watching kids’ TV and enjoying it. There’s a story on about a podgy hedgehog who’s too fat to curl up into a ball, and I find I genuinely want to know what happens.

  But I’m a grown-up, and I’ve been doing almost nothing all day. I switch off and we kiss.

  His range of kisses goes on impressing me. Right now, he’s scoring high in the tender kiss department: 5.8s and 5.9s every one of them.

  We chat awhile. He tells me how Lohan is going. Not really an investigation now. More like a massive cleanup operation. Given what we came across, no magistrate is going to refuse Jackson warrants to search whatever the heck he wants to. There’s a huge forensics operation at the lighthouse. The emphasis is on identifying any punters who may have used it and left a genetic trace of themselves there. Rattigan’s house, Cefn Mawr, is being turned over too. There’s almost certainly nothing there, but it amuses me to think how little Miss Titanium is going to like it. I hope she knows I’m responsible. Charlotte Rattigan I feel sorry for, though. She’s not my sort of woman, but she’s just another injured party. Another on a long list.

  As for the women from the lighthouse, they’re being given one-to-one rehab care. Bryony Williams is one of those involved. The women are shown photos and asked to identify any men who may have raped them. It’s going to be a long process. Lots of photos, lots of questions.

  I’ve told the team that I know for a fact that Piers Ivor Harris, M.P., was one of the men involved. That’s a lie. I believe Penry when he says that Harris would have known about Rattigan’s little hobby. Knew about it, and kept silent. But neither Penry nor I have any way to know whether Harris was more personally involved, and I hand over Harris’s name only because I want to frighten him and mess his life up as much as possible. If they can find a connection between Harris and the lighthouse, then so much the better. Ditto any connection between any of Rattigan’s other pals and the lighthouse. Everyone who ever set foot in that place without reporting it to the police should do time in jail for the rest of their lives.

  Nor do I absolve Penry. His silence was as lethal as everyone else’s. Sins of omission look prettier, but they still meant duct tape and cement blocks out in the Irish Sea. Only two things make Penry any better than the rest. First was, he swears to me that he knew nothing about the murders. He knew about the sex trafficking. The violent sex. The slapping around and worse. He says he didn’t know the rest. I believe him. And second, at least he nudged me, in his own Penryish way, to the right answers. Of all those involved, he was the only one who tried to do something.

  If the current investigation uncovers Penry’s role and jails him for it—jails him over and above what he gets for the embezzlement, I mean—then I’ll be pleased. That would be the right outcome. Deserved.

  But I won’t work to make it happen. Penry helped me, and I won’t repay that help by grassing on him. He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone. We’re both sinners, him and me.

  Brydon and I chat and sometimes just fall silent. We haven’t yet made love, though we’re getting closer. I don’t want to make love from a state of shock. We don’t. Me and Brydon. My boyfriend.

  So we kiss and we cuddle and we chat, but as time goes on I notice that he’s starting to get a little quiet. Like he was after the funeral.

  I ask him what’s bothering him. He says nothing, and I say I can tell there is something. Whatever it is, it’s better to get it off his chest.

  Deep breath. Sigh. He gets up and paces around.

  He’s a restless sort, is Mr. Brydon. A Labrador retriever. If he hasn’t been exercised properly, he just can’t sit still. Maybe I need to get him a rubber bone to play with. And something to keep his nose glossy.

  We both start speaking at the same time.

  “Look, Fi, I didn’t want to—”

  “Did you have any dogs when you were a kid?”

  I’m the girl, so my question trumps his.

  “We always had Labs. Black Labs.”

  “Did you have a favorite?”

  “Oh, God, now you’re asking. Loved them all really, but I suppose Buzz, he was the one we had when I was eight or nine, he was my best buddy back then.”

  “Buzz? Buzz.” I try it out. It fits. “I’m going to call you Buzz. I don’t like Dave, sorry.”

  “Buzz? All right. He was a cracker, he was.”

  “So, Buzz, you have something to ask me.”

  “Look, it’s a stupid thing, but it’s been bothering me. That night, Monday, before the funeral. We were going to see each other, but you said you couldn’t because you had family over. I thought I’d give you a ring, see if you felt like me popping round afterward. Just for a quick drink or
whatever. No answer from your landline. I was in the area, because I was having a drink with a mate round the corner in Pentwyn Drive. I probably shouldn’t have, but I came past your house. Lights off, no car. No people. No nothing.

  “So I was worried. I don’t know why. I’m not—Damn it, Fi, I’m not normally the jealous type. Not paranoid. But I felt worried. I knew you’d been at the mortuary with Hughes, and I just went over there. I don’t know why really. Like I say, it’s not like me. But there was your car. In the middle of the bloody car park. A long way away from any damn family party. And a long time after you’d finished with Ken Hughes.”

  He shuts up. He’s embarrassed at having pried, but he also needs an answer. Deserves one.

  My first instinct is to fob him off. Create a story. Make something up. I’m supple and inventive. I could do that easily. But Brydon—Buzz—is now my boyfriend, and boyfriends deserve better. It’s time for explanations.

  I don’t know where to start.

  I am scared of saying anything at all.

  I find myself alone with the truth and unsure what to do with it. I could just try speaking it, the naked truth, and trusting that Buzz, my new boyfriend, will not be freaked. I could do that. I could do it now.

  Unsure of myself, I start out gently.

  “As a teenager, I was ill. You know that?”

  He nods. He does. Everyone does.

  “Do you know …? I don’t know if anyone knows what I was ill with. I don’t know what the office gossip is.”

  “There’s no gossip, Fi. I’ve always assumed it was some kind of breakdown. It’s not my business, and it’s in the past now anyway.”

  I smile at that. “In the past.” That’s what healthy people say about things, and there’s no one in the world healthier than D.S. David “Buzz” Brydon.

  “Do you want to sit?” I say. “It’s hard to talk to someone marching around like this.”

  He sits down opposite me. Old face, serious face.

  “Thanks. Yes. Some kind of breakdown, that’s correct. The breakdown was a special sort of breakdown. Special enough that it gets its own name. Cotard’s. Dr. Jules Cotard. Le délire de négation. Cotard’s syndrome.”

  Brydon stares at me, somber and without judgment. I know that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m getting there. This is very hard.

  “It’s a syndrome that sounds funny to outsiders, not funny at all to those who have it. It’s a delusional state. It’s much more than a breakdown. I was properly—properly delusional. Crazy.”

  Brydon nods. Not scared. Not judgmental. I know that if I nudge him, he’ll repeat that thing about it all being in the past, but I want to keep talking before I lose my nerve.

  “And the reason why Dr. Jules Cotard got to put his name to this particular syndrome was its oddity. In a mild form, patients suffer from despair and self-loathing, but my form wasn’t mild. Not mild at all. I had the full monty. In a severe state, patients have the delusional belief that they don’t exist, that their bodies are empty or putrefying.”

  I want to stop there, but when I check Brydon’s face I can tell he hasn’t gotten it. No normal person would get it from what I’ve just said.

  Deep breath.

  Say it, Griffiths, say it out loud. Say it to the good man sitting opposite you. Tell him everything and trust that things will be all right.

  And I do.

  “Buzz, for two years, I thought I was dead.”

  A pause.

  A long, long pause.

  Time enough for me to worry that I now have an ex-boyfriend. That I’m being marched to the nearest rocket station on Planet Normal and am about to be blasted back into the orbit from whence I came. It feels like neither he nor I have blinked for an eternity.

  “And that’s what you’re telling me? That that’s where you were that night? In the mortuary.”

  I nod. “With Janet and April, mostly. The Mancinis. And Stacey Edwards. In the autopsy suite.”

  He reaches over to me. We’re both on the sofa now, me leaning against one arm, him leaning against the other, feet and legs intermingled in the middle. He takes hold of my hand and starts talking to me in the voice that people reserve for the genuinely nuts. It’s okay. There are people who can help. It won’t be the same as it was before.

  I interrupt him. His mistake is inevitable, of course. Anyone would make it, but the wrongness of it makes me laugh.

  “No, no. I’m not feeling crazy. I know what craziness is like, and this wasn’t like it at all. I’ve seldom felt so alive.”

  That’s my logic. To me it makes sense, but my skills at regular human logic are never that brilliant, and this evening my compass is all askew.

  “You spent the night with three corpses, all murdered, and—”

  I put up a hand. Time to stop this. “Buzz, I’m going to need to ask you for some understanding. Sorry, but please hear me out. Ever since I made my recovery—Well, it’s not even like that. Cotard’s is something that recedes, it never really goes away. Not that I’d admit that to my shrink, mind you. But it’s there. I always know that I could one day go into it again. I’ve been afraid of it every hour of every day since getting better.”

  “Your shrink. You still …?”

  “Not really. With a case like mine, there’s a doctor assigned to me, in case stuff happens. I’m supposed to go in for a chat every now and then, but I don’t. Haven’t been for years.”

  “And that night. In the morgue …?”

  “That night wasn’t really a thought-out thing, it was more of an impulse thing. I just felt I needed to be with some dead people. It wasn’t just the Mancinis, it was—” I’m about to talk about Stacey and Edith and Good Time Charlie when I realize that’s probably going too far, so I stop myself. “It was the others there as well. You know, to you they’re dead. They’re alien. It actually bothers you that their hearts aren’t beating and that their organs are mostly missing.

  “To me—they’re just people. They’re dead people, but I’ve been dead myself. I find them pleasant company. Easy, contented, pleasant. If I’m being honest, I find them easier to get on with than the living. I know that sounds strange to you, but you’re not like me. No one is.”

  “There’s nothing …? Jesus, Fi, whether it’s true or not, please tell me that there’s nothing funny in all this, is there?”

  I gawp at him. I don’t know what he means, so I try to guess what an ordinary decent human would ask in a moment like this. Then I get it. “Anything sexual? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  He nods, pleased that I didn’t make him come out with the words.

  “Nothing even a tiny weeny remotest bit like sexual. Dead people aren’t interested in sex. That’s not a joke. We’re not. I mean, I wasn’t when I was ill as a teenager and they’re not now. They’re just … they’re just dead.”

  “Okay. Let me get this straight. Stop me if I get it wrong.”

  I agree. The mood is growing lighter now. I’m not thinking very clearly, but I know I’ve just said the worst thing—the big thing, the Cotard’s thing—and Brydon hasn’t leaped up off the sofa. He’s still here. He hasn’t given up. That doesn’t mean I’m in the clear, I know that, but the worst thing that could have happened hasn’t happened yet.

  I listen to his attempt to summarize my summary.

  “Once upon a time, there was a doctor. Dr. Cotard,” he begins.

  “Correct.”

  “He gave his name to Cotard’s syndrome.”

  “Bang on.”

  “For two years, you were unfortunate enough to suffer from the aforementioned syndrome.”

  “Twoish. Dead people aren’t all that concerned about time.”

  “Okay, so about two. Then you got better. Or betterish.”

  “I did.”

  “A few—I don’t know what, panic attacks maybe?—but nothing you couldn’t handle.”

  “Correct.” Not quite correct, actually. The first three years or s
o after “recovery” were awful. Those years at Cambridge were the worst, with the ghost of my own death peering at me through every gloomy window. I don’t even like thinking about them. They feel worse, in a weird way, than the two years of Cotard’s itself.

  “Then you find yourself on police business in a mortuary.”

  “With D.I. Kenneth Hughes engaged on Operation Lohan.”

  “Quite so. And … Help me out on this bit. You needed to be with some dead people, why?”

  “I don’t know. If I knew, I’d tell you. I think it’s because I felt safe enough. I felt sufficiently alive that I could dare to be with the dead. Does that make sense? I was alive, they were dead, we spent some time together. And I felt fine. For the first time since I was fourteen or fifteen, my Cotard’s wasn’t anywhere to be seen. It was gone.”

  I suddenly notice that Brydon’s face is full of emotion. There’s more emotion there than I’m feeling myself.

  “That’s amazing, Fi. If that’s true, that’s bloody brilliant.”

  “I don’t know if it’s true. Like I say, it hasn’t gone-gone. I don’t think it ever will.”

  “Well, don’t bloody spoil it now. You had me going there.”

  “It was a good night. It really was.”

  He nods. How many people could hear all this and be as accepting of it? Outside my family and mental health workers, Brydon is the first person I’ve ever talked to about my illness.

  “What was it like, Fi? How can anyone think they’re dead?”

  “I can’t really tell you. I suppose I had thoughts. My brain was still able to function. But I don’t think I had any feelings. No emotions. I couldn’t really feel pain. Human touch was a bit funny for me. I was numb, or something. It never really felt like anything. So what was I supposed to think? In a weird way, believing myself to be dead wasn’t so far wrong. I mean, I wasn’t alive. Not really. Not the way you are now.”

  Brydon takes all this in.

  “Well, bugger me,” he says at last.

  I take his forearm and bite it, hard enough to leave a mark. “Dying is when you can’t feel that.”

  “Uh-huh. And how dead are you feeling today?” He bites my arm, but gently.