Talking to the Dead

by Harry Bingham

  The briefing breaks up. I charge across the room to grab Jackson. I’m not the first there, but I’m persistent. As he plows his way back to his office, I tag alongside and enter right on his heels.

  I have a banter-rich intro all lined up, but the boss’s face is tired, and the way he says “Yes?” isn’t exactly designed to encourage. I decide to alter my approach.

  “Stacey Edwards, sir. If I can be of help there—”

  “Fiona. We’ve got Jane Alexander on that. She’s working with”—he checks his notes—“Davis. Between them, those two have a million years doing this kind of thing. And Jane Alexander is a woman, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, so we’ve got all the feminine tact we need on this.”

  I don’t have a counterargument. I just have an urgency of desire that I don’t wholly understand. I use what I’ve got. “Sir, if you were a prostitute. Maybe a friend of Mancini’s. Probably scared of the police. Maybe in possession of crucial evidence. Would you rather talk to Jane and me, or Jane and Jim Davis? These girls are—”

  “Women. They’re not girls.”

  “I don’t know why, sir, but this case really matters to me. I think I can contribute. I really want to contribute.”

  “You are contributing. You contribute by doing what you’re told to do. That’s your job.”

  “I know. I—”

  I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything. Just stand there.

  That seems to have the desired effect, though. “Where have you got to on the Penry thing?”

  I brief him quickly. He half-listens to me, and uses the rest of his attention to check out my notes on Groove. I’ve got much further with the Social Services stuff than he has any right to expect, and I can see he’s impressed. I don’t say anything about Penry’s extra horses, those strange texts, or about my conversation with Keighley. I just keep it clean and simple. The way the good D.C. Griffiths would do it; or the way I imagine she would.

  He pulls his attention away from the computer and shoves the keyboard from him with an annoyed flip of his fingers. Going to the door, he yells for Davis and Alexander. They’re not there, but minions scurry to do his bidding.

  Returning to his seat, he tells me, “You fuck up, Fiona, you fuck up at all, and you’re never working on a delicate assignment for me again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to ask Jane Alexander to give me detailed feedback on how you comport yourself in your dealings with Stacey Edwards. Alexander takes the lead. You take the notes. She makes the decisions. You make the tea.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He gives me a few seconds of shaggy-eyebrowed scrutiny.

  “You must have worked late to do this.” He gestures at the computer.

  I nod. The repeated “yes, sirs” are beginning to strain my subordination muscles, and I let them pause for rest.

  Our conversation is brought to a close by Davis and Alexander appearing at the door.

  “Come in. Jim, I’ve decided we need an all-female team interviewing Edwards. Jane, I want you to lead. You’ll have Fiona for support. Jim, go to Ken Hughes, get an alternative assignment off him. Is that all clear? Okay, then get on with it. Out of here.”

  As we leave, Davis throws me the blackest look I’ve almost ever witnessed. He’s saying something under his breath of which the only distinguishable word is fucking. No question this time. He’s talking about me. I wonder if Jackson deliberately put me in a position where Davis would see that I’d successfully bumped him from one of the crucial assignments.

  Jane looks at Davis’s retreating back. It’s pretty clear that she’s surprised by the strength of his reaction. As she turns to me, she adjusts her face until it shows nothing but friendly competence. The perfect CID superior. But in between looking shocked at Davis’s hostility and re-framing itself for me, her face betrayed something else. A microexpression that didn’t last long enough for me to capture and understand it. But if I had to guess, I’d say she’s less than thrilled by having me as her interview buddy. Which is great. Just the effect I aim for.

  “Let’s go and …”

  She indicates that we should go and have a powwow at her desk. No offices for the likes of us.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I try to make the ma’am light and jokey, but also respectful and genuine. I don’t know how well I succeed. She doesn’t award points.

  When we’re at her desk—her in her regular chair, me in a seat pulled up opposite—I say, “I suppose you’ll want me to prepare an interview briefing? See what we can rustle up on Edwards before we go to see her.”

  That’s clearly a new thought for her. It wasn’t the way Jim Davis had been going to go at things.

  “Briefing? You think there’s enough material for that?”

  “She’s had five contacts with our Vice Unit over the years. We’ve almost certainly got people who have a reasonable idea of what she’s like. She’s probably had contact with the StreetSafe people—you know, the prostitution outreach charity. I’m sure they’d be willing to chat with us, as long as we made it clear that Edwards isn’t a suspect.”

  “Okay, but—Look, it’s Friday afternoon now. We need to get on with it. Jackson is going to—”

  “I’ll get straight onto our vice records now. Then go and talk to the StreetSafe people this evening—they work nights, obviously. I can get some notes typed up overnight, then I’ll run those past whichever one of the vice boys I can lay my hands on tomorrow morning. We should be prepped to see Edwards by midday. It doesn’t make any sense to call on her before that anyway.”

  Alexander raises her eyebrows at me in a Why?

  “Because she’s a prozzie. She works nights. Midday might even be a bit early.”

  Alexander listens to all this with a combination of surprise and amusement. “Are you always like this?” she says.

  “Like what?” I wonder if I’ve fucked up already. If so, that’s just about my fastest ever fuckup. I have my humble, anxious face on, and mean it.

  “Like a one-woman work monster. If you think you can do all that, brilliant. But if not—you know, it would be okay just to go and talk to her.”

  She’s being kind, not something I’m used to, so I blurt it out. “I’m not usually like this. It’s just this case has really got to me.”

  “Is this your first child murder?”

  “I suppose. I don’t think it’s that, though. Maybe it is.”

  “It is.” Jane gives me a supportive grin. She’s still blond and blow-dried and perfect, but I think I’ve just located Jane Alexander the human being. “Why don’t you give yourself a break? Jim and I were just going to go and call on Edwards. Play it by ear. That’s what everyone else will be doing.”

  “Will it bother you if I do what I suggested? I honestly think I’d prefer to do it that way.”

  “Okay. But careful, Fi. If you get overinvolved, there’ll be a crash. There always is.”

  I want to ask her if she’s speaking from personal experience, but I’m not brave enough, so I just nod.

  “Yes, Sarge.”

  “Okay, Fiona. Take care.”

  Back at my desk, there’s a voice mail from Robin Keighley. An addendum to our earlier conversation. On reflection, there was something odd about the crash. The double expletive from the pilot, then silence. “Even in a serious crash, that kind of pattern is highly unusual. We’d normally expect continuing radio contact, even in cases where the pilot isn’t sure himself what’s going on. I wouldn’t make too much of it. There could be a dozen different explanations. But there you go. You asked if there was anything untoward, and on that basis I have to say yes. Not much. But something.”

  I listen to the message three times over, then log in to the Financial Times website and search for Rattigan Industrial & Transport Ltd. You can never read too much or too widely, I reckon. I research solidly for three-quarters of an hour.

  Bryony Williams wears a padded canvas jacket over a sweat top and jeans. Shorti
sh hair with a bit of curl. She’s tough, but in the right way. The kind of tough that doesn’t rule out tender. She’s rolling herself a ciggy and sitting on a low wall that marks the front garden of a boarded-up house.

  “Want one?” She offers me her roll-up.

  “No thanks. I don’t smoke.”

  I sit next to her on the wall. “Busy evening?” I ask.

  “Not yet.”

  She lights up and tosses the match away on the street. The Taff Embankment. About nine in the evening. Twilight. The orange sodium lamps are producing more light than the embers of sunset over the Irish Sea, invisible behind us. Blaenclydach Place comes down to meet the river here. Behind us, a row of Edwardian houses. In front, a strip of grass. Then the river. The grass has been recently mown, and the air smells of cut grass and river mud.

  A nice scene. Quiet. Pleasant. Except that we’re in the heart of Cardiff’s red-light district and, like the stars in the sky above us, the first prostitutes are beginning to appear. I see one—leather jacket, pierced nose, short skirt, three-inch heels—strolling up and down the strip of grass opposite us. It was only on her third pass that I realized what she was. A couple of lads emerge from the Red Lion pub up the road from us, walk past the girl, then turn round and whistle at her. She flicks a V-sign at them, and they walk on.

  “You know why I’m here, right?”

  “Yeah. Gill said you’d be coming.”

  Gill Parker: StreetSafe’s project coordinator. Been running the show since 2004. Saint, hero, angel, nutcase. Take your pick. Bryony’s hewn from the same stock.

  “Stacey Edwards. Gill tells me you know her.”

  “Yep. We know Stace very well. Unfortunately.”

  “And you know why we want to talk to her?”

  “Not really.”

  Williams’s tone isn’t precisely hostile, but it’s not welcoming either. StreetSafe is a charity that hands out soup, condoms, and health advice to prostitutes. When they can, they help prozzies off the game, off drugs, off the whole self-destructive merry-go-round. They’ve got good relations with the police, but what we do and what they do aim in different directions. Enforcing the law is one kind of challenge. Handing out friendship and sympathy is quite another.

  I tell her. “Janet Mancini, drug user and part-time prostitute, died, probably killed. Her six-year-old daughter was killed too. There’s evidence that the Mancinis were afraid, possibly in hiding, before their death. Stacey Edwards wasn’t the killer.” I tell her about the state of the house and Edwards’s prints on the washing-up brush. “It looks likely that Edwards was a friend, trying to help.”

  “Probably. The women usually stick together.”

  Williams doesn’t seem keen to help much, so I apply a little force. “Bryony, you need to respect confidences, I know that. But my colleagues want to go in, kick down her door, and give her a where-were-you-at-the-time-of-her-death-type interview. That kind of thing isn’t going to help Stacey. It probably isn’t going to help us either, or the two dead Mancinis.”

  “So what do you want?”

  There’s another prozzie working the beat opposite us now. The two girls spend a few moments saying hi, then break the street into halves, each one working her patch. Their heels don’t make walking easy, so they mostly lean up against a lamppost, looking out at their potential punters with vacant eyes. I realize that they’re here because Williams is. She makes their worlds safer.

  “I want to know—everything. About Janet Mancini. About Stacey Edwards. About who Mancini might have worked with. About who controls these girls. Who makes money off them. Who might have a reason to kill Mancini.”

  Williams looks sideways at me, with half a grin. “That sounds like a two-ciggy question to me.”

  “I’d budget three, if I were you.”

  Williams’s grin widens into a proper laugh. “Okeydoke.” She starts to make herself another cigarette and begins opening up.

  The who-makes-money question turns out to be the easiest one. In the end, everything comes down to drugs. Ninety-eight percent of all Cardiff’s prostitutes are on class A drugs. Any money they make from punters goes straight to their dealers.

  “What about their pimps? They take a cut, presumably.”

  “Kind of. Most of the pimps are basically drug dealers. That’s how they get the girls to stay on the game. It’s a toss-up whether you want to call them pimps or pushers.”

  “And these people—pimps cum pushers—are local, or they’re …?”

  “Mixture. Used to be mostly local girls and local pimps. Then there are more and more from Eastern Europe. South Eastern. Romania, Bulgaria, Albania. I’d say probably the majority of girls are foreigners now.”

  “Trafficked?”

  “Don’t know. What’s trafficking? If you get some Albanian girl hooked on heroin, and tell her she can earn better money in Cardiff, she’ll probably choose to come. No one’s putting a gun to her head. Is she trafficked or not? You tell me.”

  All the time she’s talking to me, she’s got her eyes on the street. Without a word, she suddenly gets up and walks a hundred yards, up along the angle of the river. She talks to a third girl, one I hadn’t even seen. She’s away for five or ten minutes before returning. While she’s away, a couple of blokes walk past me, on their way back from the pub.

  They stare at me as they pass. Their stare probably means nothing, but I feel like I’m being priced up. I also realize that the street is much worse lit than I’d first thought. Scary. I nod at the lads as they pass, and they nod back. Probably not punters. Not everyone is.

  Williams returns.

  “The girls wanted to know who you were. I said you were police liaison.”

  “Near enough.”

  “Yep. You’ll need to bugger off in a bit, though. You’re making the girls nervous.”

  “I am!”

  “Yeah, I know, I know. There used to be benches here, then the council took them away because they thought they encouraged prostitution. Like, what kind of analysis is that? Excessive street furniture. Yeah, that’s the problem all right.”

  “Janet Mancini?” I prompt.

  “Never met her. Never heard of her—I mean, until reading it in the papers. She wasn’t a full-timer. If she had been, we’d have come across her. Not me necessarily, but Gill or one of the others.”

  “A kind of amateur prostitute?”

  “Yeah, if you like. She was on drugs, I assume?”

  “Yes, but she was a battler. It was up and down.”

  “She should have come to us.”

  “She had Social Services. They thought she was a tryer. That’s what makes it worse.”

  Williams nods. “Domestic abuse?”

  “She was single.”

  “There’ll be abuse in the background somewhere. There always is.”

  I hesitate for a second. Jackson’s don’t-fuck-up message is playing loudly in my head, but I don’t think I’m about to say anything wrong.

  “Bryony, we’ve got a hunch—nothing more than that—that Mancini might have specialized in what you could call rough sex. Filthy squat. Maybe a bit of slapping around, that kind of thing.”

  “Slapping around? You’re talking about violence against women.”

  “I know, I know. I’m on your side here, Bryony.”

  “Yeah. Could be. Kinky stuff pays more. Dangerous pays even more. If she had a child, then in a weird way maybe she thought she was protecting her by working with fewer clients for more pay.”

  “Would you know which punters enjoy that kind of thing?”

  Bryony laughs at that. “Fuck no. Most of them, I should think.”

  “Do you recognize either of these men?”

  I show her photos of Brendan Rattigan and Brian Penry. The longest of long shots.

  Williams studies them before handing them back. “Nope. He looks like a piece of work though”—meaning Penry.

  “He is, yes.”

  “Don’t recognize them. But it�
��s the women we work with, not the men. Why? Who are they?”

  I give her the names. Brian Penry, a former police officer. Brendan Rattigan, former rich guy.

  She shakes her head. “Sorry.”

  “Nothing at all? Even hearsay is useful at this stage.”

  “Not necessarily—oh, sod it, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Fiona. Friends call me Fi.”

  “Fi. Fi, fi, fi. I’m crap with names. Sorry. But look, rumors are everywhere in this game. Girls who disappear from view have never just moved on. Something dark has always happened to them. There was one woman, I won’t say her name, everyone said she’d been killed by a couple of your colleagues in the Vice Unit, then her body burned in a warehouse fire.”

  “Huh?”

  “She’d moved to Birmingham to live with her sister. I got a Christmas card from her.”

  I laugh at that, but there’s not much mirth in my laughter. What must it be like to work in a profession like that? Where violence does happen and fear of violence haunts everything you do or say or know? Janet Mancini may have lived with all that, but she’d wanted better for April.

  Williams’s eyes are back on the street. Up the river, one of the girls is talking to a guy. Then the two of them walk off, away from us. In the dying light, all I can see is her long white legs walking away upriver.

  “I’m going to make a move soon. Check on my flock. What’s next?”

  “Stacey Edwards. I’m seeing her tomorrow. Anything at all you can tell me about her?”

  “Stacey. She’s all right, actually. Heroin issue, of course. She’s been working with us and really wants to get off the game. She’s been helpful. Spreading the word for us. Her problem is getting over her addiction. It’s not just a chemical thing for these women, it’s an everything thing. Childhood abuse. Domestic violence by partners and drug pushers. Slapping around by punters. A hostile approach from the police, often as not.”

  “But she was an evangelist for you. You reckon she’d have been there trying to help Mancini escape?”