Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  I stand up.

  “Mrs. Rattigan. I’m sorry to have been late.”

  “Oh, don’t worry …”

  The Internet has already told me that Mrs. Charlotte Frances Rattigan is forty-four. She has two kids, both teenagers. She is a former model. Only the last part of that is obvious from her appearance. A pale gray shirt worn above pale linen trousers and sandals. Shoulder-length blond hair. Nice skin, not much makeup. Tall, maybe five foot ten, and then an inch or so more from her heels.

  She is pretty, of course, but it’s not the prettiness that strikes me. There’s something ethereal about her. As though it’s not just the house missing its Victorian subfloors. I’m immediately interested. I ask Titanium if she would mind giving us a few moments of privacy and, on a look from the boss, she leaves us.

  I fix Mrs. Rattigan with my firm, D.C.-ish, professional-quality smile.

  “Thank you so much for agreeing to see me, madam. I’ve just got a few questions. A routine matter, but an important one.”

  “That’s all right. I understand.”

  “I’m afraid that I shall have to ask you some questions about your late husband. I do apologize in advance for any distress which that may cause. It’s all perfectly routine and—”

  She interrupts. “That’s all right. I understand.”

  Her voice is soft, a peach without a stone. I hesitate. Nothing at all in this situation calls for me to come over all hard-edged, but I can’t quite resist and I can feel my voice harden.

  “Did your husband know a woman called Janet Mancini?”

  “My husband …?” She tapers off and shrugs.

  “Is that a no, or an I don’t know?”

  Another shrug. “I mean, not that I know of. Mancini? Janet Mancini?”

  “Do either of these addresses mean anything to you?”

  I show her my notebook. The first address is where Mancini was found. The second is where she had been living previously.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “This second address here is in Butetown. Were you ever aware of your husband having any business in that area? Visiting anyone there?”

  A headshake.

  Quantum physics tells you that the act of observation alters reality. The same is true of police interviews. Mrs. Rattigan knows that I’m a detective constable assigned to a murder inquiry. There’s some absence in her answers that teases me but that could be just the effect of my job function and my assignment. Titanium’s cafetière of coffee is steaming beside us. Mrs. Rattigan hasn’t offered it, so I do.

  “Would you like coffee? Shall I pour?”

  “Oh, yes please. Sorry.”

  I pour out one coffee, not two.

  “Won’t you have any?” The question is the first positive action of any sort she’s taken since I’ve seen her, and it hardly rates high on the positivity scale.

  “I don’t drink caffeine.”

  She pulls her cup toward her but doesn’t drink from it. “Good for you. I know I shouldn’t.”

  “I have a few further questions to ask, madam. Please understand that we want the truth. If your husband did things in the past that he might not want us to have known about—well, that’s all in the past now. It’s not our concern now.”

  She nods. Light hazel eyes. Blond eyebrows. I realize that I was wrong about the house. I’m sure it has been interior-designed to within an inch of its life, but the designers caught something real about the person commissioning the work. Pale linen, light hazel, a stoneless peach. That was this house and its owner.

  “Did your husband ever take drugs?”

  The question jolts her. She shakes her head, looking down and to the left. Her coffee cup is in her right hand. If she’s right-handed, then the down-and-to-the-left look suggests some element of evasion in her answer.

  “Cocaine, maybe? A few lines with business associates?”

  She looks at me with relief. “You know, sometimes. I didn’t … What he got up to when he was away …”

  I reassure her. “No, no, I’m sure you didn’t. But loads of business types do, of course. You didn’t want it in the house, though, I can see that.”

  “You know, there are the children.”

  That sounds to me like the comment she made to him when he was still around. Oh, don’t do that. It’s not me. It’s the children. I’m only thinking of you.

  I get out the debit card and show it to her.

  “This is your husband’s, I presume?”

  She looks at it, then at me. She doesn’t get quite as decisive as a nod, but she gets halfway there.

  “The card was reported lost. Do you recall when or where your husband lost it?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Did he ever mention losing it?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean …” She shrugs. When millionaires lose cards, they have people who sort it out. That’s what the shrug means, or what it means to me, anyway.

  “The card was found at a crime scene in Butetown. Does that make sense to you?”

  “No. No, I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not aware how this card could have come into the possession of Janet Mancini?”

  “Sorry. I’m really not.”

  “Does the name April Mancini mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “You are aware that Butetown is a poor part of town? Quite rundown. Rough. Can you think of any reason why your husband might have had business there?”

  “No.”

  I’ve come to the end of all the questions I could possibly ask, all the ones I’d have got through on a phone call. I’m repeating myself, even. Yet there’s that absence in the air, teasing me with its scent. It’s not that Mrs. Rattigan is lying to me. I know she isn’t. But there’s something there.

  I go for it.

  “Just a few more questions,” I say.

  “Certainly.”

  “Your sex life with your husband. Was it completely normal?”

  The traffic is slow as I come back past Cwmbran. I fiddle with the radio to try to find a channel I want to listen to, but end up settling for silence. To the left of me, green hills and lambs. To the right, the intricate folds of the old mine works. Long black tunnels leading down into the dark. I prefer the lambs.

  Into Cardiff, I can’t quite face going back to the office immediately, so I don’t. Instead of keeping straight ahead on the Newport Road, I pull off left.

  Fitzalan Place. Adam Street. Bute Terrace.

  People say they like the new Cardiff. The redeveloped center. The Assembly Building. Fancy hotels, regional offices, coffees at 2.50 pounds a cup. This is the new Wales. A Wales taking charge of its future. Proud, confident, independent.

  Me, I can’t get my head round any of that. It feels like a con trick with me as the patsy. Everything about it is wrong. The look. The style. The prices.

  The names too. The city center has a Churchill Way, a Queen Street, a Windsor Place. Where’s the sodding independence there? If it were up to me, I’d name every damn street after one of those thirteenth-century Welsh princes that spent their lives fighting the English and getting massacred in the process. Llewelyn ap Gruffydd—Llewelyn the Last. He’d get the biggest street named after him. The last king of Wales. A heroic, ambitious, quarrelsome failure. Tricked, attacked, murdered. His head ended up on a spike over the Tower of London. I’d name every major landmark in Cardiff after him. If the English didn’t like it, they could give us his head back. The queen’s probably got it in a boot room somewhere. I expect Wills and Harry use it to practice their keepie-uppie.

  I relax only as I get away from the center—the part where I work—and out into Butetown. In Butetown, people drink tea more than coffee, and neither ever at 2.50 pounds a cup. In Butetown, it’s true that the occasional drug addict gets murdered, and every now and then you find a little girl whose head has been splattered under a large piece of upscale kitchenware, but I prefer it that way. Crimes you can see. Victims you can touch.
r />   My car pulls to a halt just up the road from 86 Allison Street.

  I get that creepy feeling I get when I’m close to the dead. Tingly.

  I step out. Allison Street isn’t much of a place. Cheap 1960s council houses that look like they’ve been made of cardboard boxes. Same color. Same blocky construction. Same thin walls. Same resistance to damp. There’s no one around except a kid repetitively slamming a red ball against a windowless wall. He looks at me briefly, then continues.

  Number 86 still has a few ribbons of yellow and black crime scene tape around it, but the forensics boys will be mostly done by now. I pick my way through the tape and ring the doorbell.

  First silence, then footsteps. I’m in luck. A solid-looking scene of the crime officer, with short gingery hair and pink ears, comes to the door.

  I show him my ID. “I was just passing,” I explain. “I thought I’d look in.”

  The SOCO shrugs. “Five minutes, love. I’m just resampling fibers, then I’m done.”

  He goes upstairs, leaving me alone downstairs. I go into the living room, where April and Janet died. Red curtains hang over the front window—just as they were hanging on the day of the killing—but yellow halogen lamps of the type that builders use have been strung up here and in the kitchen. Their glare is too strong to be real. I feel like I’m in a film set, not a house.

  Some of the stuff that was here in the house has been removed as evidence. Other items have been sifted, inventoried, then destroyed. Still other items have been left in place, tagged as appropriate. I don’t know enough about these big forensic investigations to recognize the logic behind what has or has not been done.

  I walk around, not doing anything, just trying to see if I feel anything being here. I don’t. Or rather: I feel a dislike for the place, its red swirly carpet, its ugly sofa, the dirt marks on the wall, its smell of discount store and blocked drains. I feel strange and disconnected.

  From the crime scene photos on Groove, I recognize where the two corpses were lying when they were found. Where April was lying, a pool of dried blood has caked into the carpet. It doesn’t look like blood though. A curry stain, more like.

  I bend down and feel the floor where April breathed her last, then move round till I’m in the spot where Janet died.

  You want to feel things at times like this. Some sense of the dead. A lingering presence. But I don’t get anything. Just nylon carpet and a lingering smell. The halogen lamps make everything unreal. Under the front window, there’s a wooden storage unit that has been given a back and arms, so that it can double up as a window seat.

  The SOCO from upstairs comes down, two steps at a time, crashing his way through into the living room.

  “All right?” he says.

  I indicate the window seat. “That thing. Did it have seat cushions?”

  The SOCO points to a place, four feet away, where a dirty black-checked cushion leans up against the wall. The cushion clearly fits the seat.

  “And were there drawings on the property? Kids’ drawings, the sort of thing that April would have done.”

  “Big stash of them there.” The SOCO points down the back of the window seat. “Flowers mostly.”

  “Yes.”

  I lift the red curtain and stare out onto the street. You get a good view from this window. Half of Allison Street and a parking area beyond. I sit on the window seat, imagining that I’m April.

  The SOCO stands close, breathing audibly through his nose. He wants me gone and I have no reason to be here, so I oblige him by going.

  I step from the too-bright living room, out into the too-dark hall, then out onto the hot, sunshiny street. Everything feels odder now. The boy has taken his red ball somewhere else. The house and street look as normal as anything, but inside Number 86, April Mancini was definitely murdered and her mother quite likely was. All the difference in the world. I’ve had my mobile phone off, ever since Cefn Mawr. I turn it back on now, and there’s a short blizzard of incoming texts, half of which are from my superior officers asking where the hell I am.

  I think about going back in, but I haven’t yet had lunch and, besides, my visit to Allison Street has left me feeling unsatisfied. Itchy.

  I wander around hunting for a corner shop. I was sure I saw one on my way over here but, typically, I make a hash out of tracking it down. I’m not always good at locating large, static, well-advertised objects in brightly lit locations. Still, I find it at last and go inside.

  Newspapers. Chocolates. A chiller cabinet with milk and yogurt and the sorts of cooked meats that will block your arteries in about the same time as it’ll take an intensively farmed piglet to bulk up, squeal, and die. Some tinned foods, sliced bread, biscuits. Some sad-looking fruit.

  I help myself to orange juice and a cheese and tomato sandwich. The girl on the till is called Farideh. She has a plastic badge that says so, anyway.

  “Hi.” My opening gambit.

  She ducks that one and reaches for my goods to put them through the till. A CCTV monitor above her head flicks between pictures of different viewpoints in the store. It’s scrutinizing an old-age pensioner bending over the chiller cabinet right now.

  “I’m on the police inquiry,” I say. “You know, the mother and daughter who were murdered up the road.”

  Farideh nods and says something bland and pacifying, the sort of thing that people say when they’re trying to indicate a general willingness to be helpful but without the crucial ingredient of such an attitude—namely, actually being helpful.

  “You must have known them, I suppose?”

  “She came in here, I think. The mother.”

  “The redhead? Janet?”

  Farideh nodded. “You people were here already. I already told them.”

  I didn’t quite catch whether she said “you people” or “your people.” You people sounds a bit edgy, a bit Them and Us. Your people sounds rather flattering, like everyone in the police is part of my tribe, worker bees buzzing around their queen. Then again, Farideh’s English is heavily accented, so maybe I’m reading too much into her word choice.

  She rings up my purchases and puts on her pay-and-get-out-of-here face.

  “You never saw the girl? Not even to buy, I don’t know, choc ices?”

  “No.”

  “Girls don’t really buy choc ices, do they? What do they like?” I think out loud, not feigning my uncertainty. I know I used to be a six-year-old girl once, equipped with pocket money enough to buy sweeties at the corner shop, but those days seem unbelievably distant. I’m always bewildered at other people’s memories of their own pasts. But still, I thrash around trying to guess at April’s confectionary habits. “Rolos? Kit Kats? Gummi bears? Smarties?”

  I don’t know if I’m even vaguely close, but Farideh is insistent. She hasn’t seen the girl. The pensioner who came in behind me has finished foraging in the chiller cabinet and is waiting to pay. I find some money and hand it over.

  The front of the shop is adorned with handwritten adverts. People selling off their mountain bikes, or offering garden clearance and handyman services. “No job too small.” There’s a police notice already up in the window too. Smartly laid out by one of the people on our communications team. Printed on glossy card in four-color reprographics, with a toll-free number in red at the bottom. And it’s useless. An alien intruder. The sort of poster that people around here will simply blank from view. The same kind of disappearing act that is performed on utility bills, planning notices, Social Services forms, tax requests.

  I let the pensioner pay, then ask Farideh if I can put a notice up.

  “Paper or card?” she asks.

  “Card,” I say. I like card.

  She gives me a card, and I write on it in ballpoint pen:

  JANET AND APRIL MANCINI. LIVED AT 86 ALLISON STREET. KILLED ON 21 MAY. INFORMATION WANTED. PLEASE CONTACT D.C. FIONA GRIFFITHS.”

  I add not the toll-free number but my own mobile one. I don’t know why, but it looks right
once I’ve done it, so I don’t go back and change it.

  “One week, two weeks, or four weeks?” asks Farideh. It’s 50p a week, or 1.50 pounds for four weeks. I go for four weeks.

  Farideh sticks the card up in the window as I leave.

  Sunshine, secrets, and silence.

  Outside, I sit on a bollard in the sun, eat my sandwich, and call Bev Rowland on her mobile. She’s in the middle of something, but we chat for a minute or so anyway. Then a text comes in from David Brydon inviting me for a drink that evening. I stare at the screen and don’t know what to do. I do nothing, just finish the sandwich.

  Back in the office, I don’t get the Where-the-hell-have-you-been question I was more or less expecting. I don’t think anyone’s even noticed that I’ve been on walkabout. I email Dennis Jackson with a quick report on Cefn Mawr. Then type up my notes properly and get them on Groove.

  Then it’s back to Penry’s damn bank statements, which don’t add up, or don’t when it’s me operating the calculator anyway. I call the school to check there wasn’t some other bank account that he could have been nicking money from and am a bit peeved when they say no, definitely not. No let-off there.

  My mood is just beginning to take a turn for the worse when I get a call from Jackson, summoning me downstairs.

  He wants to know more about Cefn Mawr. I give him the gist. I try to keep my language bland and professional, the way we’re trained, but Jackson isn’t fooled.

  “You said what?”

  “I asked if Mr. and Mrs. Rattigan had enjoyed normal sexual relations, sir. I apologized for the intrusive nature of the inquiry, but—”

  “Cut the bullshit, Griffiths. What did she say?”

  “Nothing directly. But I touched a nerve. She could hardly speak.” And her ears burned. And her eyes were full of injury. And the absence that had been drowning me before was suddenly very, very full of matter.

  “And you left it there. Please tell me you left it there.”

  “Yes. Almost. I mean she’d already half-told me that—”

  “She hadn’t told you anything. You said she could hardly speak.”