Talking to the Dead

by Harry Bingham

  “I’d like to do both. As much as I can. I think Jane and I are working well with our prostitutes, but I don’t think we should lose sight of the Fletcher angle.”

  “You’ll manage to do both, will you?”

  “I’m not sure. Working with prostitutes is an afternoon or evening thing anyway. Maybe I could work in Newport in the morning, then come over to Cardiff for the afternoon.”

  “Okay. Don’t kill yourself, but a little bit of self-harm where you’re concerned—that would do me fine. I’ll call Axelsen and let him know to expect you. Don’t get yourself into any trouble with him, because if you do, I will murder you. Literally murder you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And no flying solo again with me, ever, under any circumstances. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay.”

  Jackson hangs up. I’m in Pentwyn and I haven’t been fired.

  Six days slide by almost unnoticed. Dark fish in an urban canal. Sleep and I aren’t best of friends at the moment. I’m averaging four or five hours a night, and that only with the futon and gun arrangement. It’s not the regular way to get some kip, I know that, but I’ve given up on being Little Miss Regular a long time back. I’m tired all the time and I’m not eating properly, but I’m surviving. I’m getting by. When I wake up at dawn, I go downstairs for a smoke, then come up again and read in bed, drinking tea and listening to music. It’s not sleep, but it’s not a bad substitute. It’s all I’ve got, anyway.

  My mornings are spent down at Newport. Gwent Police has taken over a chunk of the Rattigan Transport building, and our little team works out of a conference room there. It smells of warm laptops, copier paper, and male sweat. Mine too, for all I know. The aircon is another area where Rattigan seems to have saved his pennies.

  And the stuff I learn. Stuff I never even knew existed. Like, for example, deep-sea fishing off British coastal waters. That image you have of it—all Hemingway, and bulging forearms, and Floridian sunshine, and ninety-pound marlins dangling from the scales—all that is bollocks. Maybe it’s not bollocks in the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s proper oceangoing bollocks if it’s the Severn Estuary and the Irish Sea you’re talking about.

  In British waters, the sort that Brendan Rattigan and his best buddy, Huw Fletcher, used to fish in, you don’t get marlin. You don’t get tuna. You don’t get fish that you want to hang from scales and show your buddies in the pub.

  You get cod. You get whiting. You get herring, for God’s sake. Turbot. Small, cold fish swimming around in small, cold seas. Gray waves and rain. It’s a sport for blokes who bring tea with them in thermoses and boast about how bad the weather was.

  That first morning, I call Cefn Mawr and get Miss Titanium again. I tell her who I am. She’s icy with me. Hostile. She doesn’t say anything she shouldn’t, but that’s what you get from paying top dollar for your support staff. Even their hostility is classy.

  “Look,” I say, “I’m very sorry to have caused an upset last time. The investigation was important, and the questions did need addressing.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I don’t need to bother Mrs. Rattigan this time, but perhaps I can ask you a number of simple questions. Just three. Literally.”

  “Very well.”

  “First, have you ever heard of a man called Huw Fletcher? A colleague or friend of Mr. Rattigan’s, perhaps?”

  “No, never.”

  “Have you ever heard of a man called Brian Penry?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Last question. A certain person currently under investigation claims to have been deep-sea fishing with Mr. Rattigan. Not just once, but many times. Days on end, sometimes. In the U.K., probably. Or starting from here. So the Irish Sea, the North Atlantic. Perhaps the North Sea or the Baltic—”

  I haven’t even finished before Titanium interrupts. “No. Your information is incorrect. I’ve never heard of the late Mr. Rattigan showing any interest in fishing at all. He didn’t even fish on the river outside the house here. I can’t imagine anything he would have liked to do less. Will that be all?”

  She’s got a nasty edge of triumph in her voice. She wants me to believe that I’ve fucked up, that I’ve got it wrong, that we police are idiots. So I say, very warmly, “That’s exceptionally helpful. No interest in fishing at all? Excellent. Thank you very much.” I say that to offend and annoy her, and hang up satisfied at a job well done.

  But that was a highlight. For the rest of the time, me and three junior officers from the Gwent force are simply sifting through heaps of tedious data. Vessels and routes handled by Rattigan Transport. Logistics issues. Client contacts. Bills of lading. Customs dues. Bonded warehouses. Emails. Phone logs. Bank statements.

  No one knows what we’re looking for. We all assume we’ll know it when we see it, except that I don’t think we will. Either it’s under our noses already, or it isn’t here at all. We get Jim Jones and all his colleagues together and press them to supply any photos they have of nights out with clients or any other images they may have of Huw Fletcher’s contacts. Most of them have nothing at all, but Andy Watson turns out to have a fair few on his phone, and we start collecting names and images. We can check the names against the criminal records system. The images we can start to show to prostitutes and the people from StreetSafe. It all feels like fishing in the dark. The cold, rainy dark.

  Those are my mornings.

  The afternoons are more or less the polar opposite of all that. Or not afternoons exactly, but early evenings. My routine is now this. By about two in the afternoon, I’m back at Cathays Park. I catch up on paperwork for an hour or so, then at three have a briefing with Jane Alexander. Not on Sunday, of course. I more or less take that day off, and the Saturday is a half day too, though I’m too shattered to relax. But apart from those breaks that don’t feel like breaks, we push on, talking to as many prostitutes as we can, trying to gain their trust, trying to find Jackson an angle that will break the case open.

  To begin with, our technique was simple. We brought as many prostitutes as we could together in one place—their own homes or flats, of course; we avoided Cathays Park completely—and bribed them with cakes and chocolates, if need be. Then we showed them photos. Loads of them. Photos of the victims: Janet and April Mancini, Stacey Edwards, Ioana Balcescu. Photos of anyone associated with the crime scene or the primary suspect: Sikorsky, Kapuscinski, Leonard, Vaughan, Lloyd, and anyone else we can connect to those names, Sikorsky’s in particular. Any CCTV images we have that seem relevant for some reason. Photos from the Fletcher inquiry down in Newport: Russian shipping clients that just might have a drug connection somewhere along the line. Piles and piles of photos.

  It didn’t work. We got exactly nowhere. Kyra, who had been so stupidly free on the phone with me, clammed up completely when she understood what we wanted. The other girls were sullen. As soon as we showed them photos that were really meaningful—Sikorsky, Kapuscinski, Stacey Edwards—they just stopped talking. They ate our cake, chain-smoked, and squirmed under our questions like teenagers at a family gathering. Jane got tart and police officerish with them, and the mood deteriorated completely.

  After two days of that, at my suggestion, we tried another tack. We got Tomasz to print off bundles of celebrity photos from the Internet. Film stars, TV actors, singers. Cleverly, he added in photos of people who were celebrities only in Poland or the Balkans, photos that would get the East European girls chattering.

  And chatter they did. The conversation flowed. We mixed up all the photos so there was no particular order to them, and the girls were vastly more talkative. When we showed them the Tony Leonard photo, two of the girls reported that he had dealt them drugs in the recent past. The pictures of Sikorsky and Kapuscinski made them clam up, but even then their clamming up was significant—a sign that they knew things they didn’t want to say, not just a general protest against having police officers in their living room.

  As we got ou
t of the house that evening—a two-up, two-down a couple of hundred yards from the Taff Embankment—Jane was vertiginous with pleasure, doing a little dance of triumph down the pavement, a slim, blond Ginger Rogers waltzing to the river.

  “That was brilliant,” she said to me. “That was probably the best thing that’s happened to me since being in the CID.”

  She phoned Jackson on his mobile, getting him at home. She told him that we had reasonable suspicion to arrest Tony Leonard on drug charges and enough grounds to apply for a warrant to search his house.

  She listened a bit to whatever Jackson had to say. “Yes,” she said. “Yes … Yes.” With each new yes, she tried to curl her hair back behind her listening ear, only to lean forward again, causing the hair to fall forward. When she got off the phone, she did another side-shuffle, fist-pumpy thing of pleasure.

  “Jackson’s going to arrange a dawn raid. Apparently the London lab has just confirmed that the London heroin matches the samples found at Allison Street. This could be it. It could be the thing that breaks the case open.”

  Because Jane was obviously so pleased, I allowed myself to do a high five with her. I felt an idiot doing it—and didn’t think that raiding Tony Leonard’s house would give us what we needed—but I liked Jane in Ginger Rogers mode, and I didn’t want to be the party pooper.

  Sure enough, Jackson does organize a raid and starts to rip Leonard’s house to shreds. Because I’m over in Newport a lot, I don’t hear all the details, but I bet the lads involved love it. Mervyn Rogers is assigned to do the interviewing, and he’ll love it. He does a good tough interview and Leonard will be a soft target. There’s a decent chance that Leonard says something to implicate Sikorsky.

  Meantime, Jane and I keep our noses to the grindstone. A grindstone that turns and brings us nothing further, beyond bloody faces.

  Sikorsky is still out there. So is Fletcher. So is Kapuscinski. And so is Brian Penry, who probably knows how the whole thing stitches together. Keeping his mouth shut as people die.

  I’ve stopped knowing who I am.

  By Thursday, I’m feeling ragged.

  I’ve had my worst night yet. Three scant hours of sleep. Smoking in my dressing gown in the garden for the two hours from dawn onward. Then back to bed for mint tea, energy bars, and Amy Winehouse singing to me from downstairs.

  I think about Brydon. On my weekend off—the one that didn’t feel like a weekend and during which I never felt off duty—we tried to have a second date together. We met in the same wine bar as before. Cathedral Road. All very middle-class. I dressed nicely and washed my hair just for him. I remembered about smiling and asking Brydon questions about himself. I remembered all about how I was meant to be girlish and supple and appreciative and not tough. But the date was still a disaster. After I had asked Brydon the exact same question for the third time—“So, what do you like doing when it’s hot? I can’t see you as the sunbathing type”—he took control.

  “Fi, are you sleeping properly?”

  “No.”

  “Do you get bad dreams at all?”

  “No.”

  “But it’s this case, isn’t it? It’s getting to you.”

  “I suppose. Everyone’s telling me that.”

  “But no bad dreams?”

  I shook my head. None that I’d count.

  Brydon nodded. This man was a soldier once and probably knows something about bad dreams. After our drink, Brydon took me next door to a pizza place. I asked for a salad, and he countermanded me, adding a pizza and doughballs and large orange juice to my order. He made sure I ate and drank it too, bossing me into eating the bits I wanted to leave.

  In the end, I just let him boss me. I probably forgot to smile lots and ask questions, but I’m fairly sure I didn’t say anything offensive either. When I’d eaten as much as I could, Brydon asked for the bill and drove me home.

  “Don’t worry, Fi. Whatever this is will soon be over. And there’s no rush. With us, I mean. We’ll just take it slow. Okay? Get some sleep. Take each day as it comes. And we’ll be okay.”

  I nodded. I believed him. We kissed. I couldn’t really feel the kiss, but these days I’m not feeling anything much. Right now, I’m in bed with mint tea on the bedside table and my gun lying flat on my stomach. The gun is the only thing I can feel, and I don’t let go of it all the time I’m here.

  At eight thirty, Amy Winehouse has fallen silent. Gone back to black. I call Axelsen over in Newport and tell him that I’m not feeling well and won’t be coming this morning. He’s fine with that. I don’t think he wants me on his team anyway.

  Sikorsky still hasn’t been found.

  Under questioning from Rogers and gang, Tony Leonard has admitted to dealing drugs. Drugs that he’s bought from Sikorsky. He knows Kapuscinski by sight, but nothing more.

  I feel increasingly detached from myself, from the investigation, from Brydon, from everything. Because I know that I need human contact when I’m in this state, I play everything according to the book. Call my mum, chat with her. Call Bev, chat with her. Call Brydon, get his voice mail, don’t leave a message but send a text instead.

  I call Jane, who’s in the office. I tell her I’m taking the morning off. She tells me not to worry. “You really need it, Fiona.” She tells me that she’s got more prostitute interviews set up for tonight, but “only come in if you feel you can. You need some rest.”

  She and I never know what to call the prostitutes. They call themselves “girls,” which seems patronizing. We mostly call them “prostitutes,” which seems derogatory. Gill Parker always refers to them as the “sex worker community,” which makes them sound like a cross between an important export industry and a bunch of special-needs schoolkids. Which, come to think of it, at least has the virtue of accuracy.

  At midday, I realize I haven’t really eaten anything. I take the gun off my belly, put some clothes on, and skedaddle out in search of something like food. I go to a sandwich shop up by the Aldi at the top end of the Glyn Coed Road. It’s a rubbish shop, but at least I know my way there, and I get the dozy shop assistant to put some gloopy tuna–sweet corn mix into an aging baguette. She completes the concoction with a lettuce leaf that’s brown along the edges. But it’s food.

  I sit outside in the sunshine to eat it.

  On a bit of grass opposite the Aldi, I check my phone. A message from Brydon. I’d forgotten that he was back up in London, and his text says, PROBABLY STILL BE HERE TOMORROW. SEE YOU AS SOON AS I CAN. DAVEX. These days, he texts me with a kiss at the end. He’s found a macho way to do it though, converting Dave into Davex. Or maybe he’s just lazy about putting in the space. Or maybe I’m overanalyzing. I think about texting back, but the worse my head is the more tightly I cling to my Standard Operating Procedures. And the Standard Date Girl Operating Procedure is to play it cool, so I do. I won’t call or text again until this evening.

  I can’t quite put the phone away, though. I go on chewing my baguette, which isn’t too bad in the mouth but then turns to something like decorator’s caulk in the belly. I was right to take the morning off, but I’m feeling a little lost. I like the banter of colleagues. I’d even like it if Jim Davis were on the case with me, sucking his yellow teeth and laughing his cynical hur, hur, hur.

  I make further progress with the baguette, but the blunt, pointy end has an armor plating that I can’t penetrate. I scoop out the last bit of tuna with my fingers, swallow that, and chuck everything else away.

  Then I hesitate no longer. I lick the tuna gloop off my fingers and send a text. To Lev. My contact, not Dad’s contact. My own personal helper of last resort. A wanderer on the dark side.

  My text says, IF YOU’RE AROUND, I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU. FI. Before I even get home, I get one back. TONIGHT.

  I feel relief. Lev’s coming. Everything’s going to be okay.

  That evening with Jane, we’re sitting with five prostitutes in a bedsit near Llanbradach Street. Photos. Chocolate cake. Cigarettes. Net curtains in the
windows and carpet worn down to the warp. The battery pulled out of the smoke alarm, because it goes off otherwise. A pink lace top hung over the bedside lamp, because the whole place risked looking too classy without it.

  Silly girls swapping clothes and comparing underwear and giggling at the photo of George Clooney and not telling us anything that would allow us to save them from whichever bastard is going around murdering their friends.

  I lose it. Jane has shoved the photo of Wojciech Kapuscinski at them, and they’re wanting to turn quickly on to another image. And I lose it.

  I shout. I really shout. These things aren’t just a question of volume—though I give it all I’ve got—they’re a question of energy too. Of really meaning it. And I really mean it.

  “Don’t touch that!” I shout at the girl, Luljeta, who’s about to toss the Kapuscinski photo to one side. “Don’t you dare fucking touch that! You know this man, don’t you? Look at me. Look at me! You know this man, don’t you? Yes or no? Give me a fucking yes or no. Don’t lie.”

  Luljeta is terrified. The room—including Jane in her powder blue linen dress next to me on the sofa—is utterly silent. And Luljeta nods.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name? Give me his name.”

  She pauses, trying to be tactical, but I’m too angry for tactics. I open my mouth ready to yell again, but Luljeta preempts me. Her voice is tiny, but truthful.

  “Wojtek. Polish guy.”

  “Surname?”

  Luljeta shrugs, but that’s probably real. She probably doesn’t know.

  “Kapuscinski, yes? Wojciech Kapuscinski. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, I think.”

  “And what do you know about him? I need to know everything. Not just you, Luljeta. All of you.”

  It takes time, and I have to yell twice more, but we get it. Kapuscinski is one of Sikorsky’s thugs. Sikorsky is reputed to have organized and maybe committed the Mancini and Edwards killings. All that much is hearsay. No search warrants for hearsay. But then Jayney, one of the Welsh girls, pulls up her top. She’s bruised and cut everywhere from her knicker line up to her shoulders. Old bruises now, yellow and purple, but still horrendous. Not just fists either. It looks like boots to me, and maybe a stick or iron bar or something as well.