Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  At the end of the type fest, I say, “It’s pretty skinny stuff, isn’t it?”

  For a second Jane thinks I’m criticizing her notes, and I fall over myself trying to set her straight. It’s not her notes I’ve got an issue with, it’s the lack of leads that seem to be coming from all our work.

  “Oh, but the forensic stuff will give us a few names. Maybe CCTV. A few interviews. Something will start to come out. That’s the way these things go.”

  Jane’s attention is wandering away from me now. Jacket on. Hair flicked in one blond shampoo-ad movement out from the collar. A quick inspection to make sure that every fold of fabric is obeying orders. Handbag, mobile, purse check. Perfect lifestyle all present and correct. Spaceship Alexander is ready for blastoff.

  “See you tomorrow,” I say, already scared of her again.

  She gives me a nice big smile, bigger than regulations require, although also one that shows very orderly white teeth, nicely arranged against exactly the right shade of lipsticked lips.

  “Yes, see you tomorrow. Thanks, Fi. I’d have been stuck here for ages otherwise.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  And she is welcome, truly. She blasts off to wherever it is she berths for the night. She has a husband and a young son.

  I have neither and go back to my desk to pick up my stuff. My computer is still on. Brendan Rattigan’s platinum card is catching a last ray of evening light.

  Janet Mancini was so scared of something that she took her daughter to that house of death.

  Brendan Rattigan liked rough sex with street prostitutes. His wife didn’t tell me with words, but she said it every other way she possibly could.

  Brendan Rattigan died in a plane wreck, but his body was never found.

  His card was reported lost, but Janet Mancini had it.

  Brian Penry bought a horse with stolen money, and Brendan Rattigan, it seemed, was one of its co-owners.

  Five thoughts buzzing round my head like flies in a glass jar. No one but me appears to care about these things, but that doesn’t make the flies go away.

  I Google around and come up with the names of some racecourse photographers who do a lot of work at Chepstow. Also one who works at Ffos Llas in Camarthenshire, and another couple who work at Bath. I make some calls, get through to four voice mails, and leave messages.

  Get through to one real person—Al Bettinson, one of the Chepstow boys—and make an arrangement for tomorrow.

  I don’t have a good feeling about any of this, but there’s at least one fly I reckon I can squash, so I do my best to squash it. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch reports on every plane accident in the U.K., no matter how small the plane or how minor the incident. All AAIB reports are available online, so I call it up, print it off, and shove it into my bag, along with my laptop, the photos, and a bundle of papers.

  It’s been a long day.

  And it isn’t over yet.

  Home. Blue sky and golden light.

  I live in a newbuild house in Pentwyn. A modern semi built on an estate of modern semis. Every house has its own bit of paved driveway, its own garage, its own tiny patch of close-board fenced garden behind. Human rabbit hutches.

  I let myself in.

  The back of the house faces west, and is full of light. I wander outside and have a smoke, a slow one, sitting on a metal garden chair with the sun full in my face. When was the last time it rained? I can’t remember.

  Why was I so sure that I was going to go the Mancinis’ funeral? Don’t know.

  I sit outside until the sun leaves my face, then go to the shed to check my plants, then lock up and go inside. There’s not a lot in the fridge, and I feel tempted to nip over to my mam and dad’s, just ten minutes and half a world away. When I first moved in here, I did that all the time, so much so that I realized I hadn’t properly left home. These days I work hard to be more independent, so the fridge is all I’ve got. Some lettuce. Some sushi which is a day past its sell-by date, and a bean salad which is turning fizzy three days after its. I decide that fizzy beans won’t kill me, plonk everything onto a plate, and eat it.

  After a few minutes of vegetating, doing nothing, I stir myself. Upstairs I have some putty adhesive somewhere and retrieve it, rubbing it around in my hands to warm it up. There’s a mirror over the mantelpiece in the living room. I don’t know what the point of mirrors is. They tell you what you already know.

  I take it down and lean it against the fireplace, which—talking of useless—has never been used. I get the Mancini photos out of my bag and spread them over the floor and sofa. A dozen faces staring out at me. Faces I last saw in the mortuary.

  I arrange and rearrange the pictures on the floor, trying to make sense of them.

  The ones of Janet are good. There’s one which we found inside a bundle of photos at the squat. One of her alive. Face to the camera. Decent lighting. Nice, clear, useful. It’ll be a perfect picture to use when asking people to identify her. But it’s dull. It doesn’t hold my interest. I don’t like it.

  I much prefer a shot of her taken at the crime scene. All expression gone. The contingencies of life wiped away. The person herself remaining. That photo I could look at for hours, and might well do except that it’s April who fascinates me. April Mancini, the sweet little dead girl. I’ve got six pictures, all eight-by-tens.

  In a sudden burst of decisiveness, I thrust the pictures of Janet back into my bag and tack the pictures of April up over my mantelpiece, in two rows of three. She’s a peaceful presence. No wonder she was a popular child. I like having her in the house. The toffee apple kid.

  “What do you have to tell me, little April?” I ask her.

  She smiles at me, but tells me nothing.

  I work hard for the rest of the evening. Social Services case files, the AAIB report. My Penry case notes, ready for the accountants tomorrow. Names. Numbers. Dates. Questions. Connections. At quarter to one in the morning, I stop, feeling done in and surprised at the time.

  April’s face is staring down at me in sextuple. She’s not telling me anything, so I tell her good night and go to bed.

  Accountants come in pairs these days. A middle-aged man in a dark suit and a sheen of perspiration, plus his younger accomplice, a woman who looks like her hobbies are arranging things in rows and making right angles.

  I don’t know if I’ll be able to persuade Jackson to let me onto Lohan. He said not, but he also bothered to call me over to his office to say so. I can’t help feeling that our session was three-quarters bollocking, one-quarter encouragement, or something like that. In any case, it’s clear I won’t be allowed to work on Lohan properly until I’ve got the Penry case tidied away. I can’t do that until the lads and lasses of the Crown Prosecution Service tell D.C.I. Matthews that they’re as happy as pigs in muck, and that won’t happen until the accountants have produced a report that will give the CPS what they need.

  “We’re missing about forty grand, yes? Known expenditures about forty grand greater than incomings, even taking into account the money we know he stole.”

  “Forty-three, seven five four,” says the more senior accountant, giving me the precise number, as though I were unable to read it. “Of course, that’s only an estimate. We don’t have receipts for most of the expenditures.”

  I stare at him. Don’t have receipts? The man’s an embezzler, for fuck’s sake. You expect him to keep receipts? But I don’t say so. Instead I say, “The question is, When can you get us your report?”

  “I believe we’re scheduled to deliver in the second week in June. Karen …?”

  The younger accomplice has a name, apparently. She also has a goal now. Find a precise date. Eliminate numerical uncertainty. She dives into her papers to give me the exact date.

  I interrupt.

  “Sorry. That won’t work. We’ve got a gap of forty thousand pounds to make sense of. We’ll need your report right away, even if it’s only in draft form.”

  We squabble for a bi
t, but I hang tough. I make it sound as though the forty K gap is their fault, which it isn’t. As though D.C.I. Matthews is pissed off, which he isn’t. Just to make my arguments even more effective—and to annoy the female accomplice—I seize the moment to make a mess of the papers in front of me. No right angles anywhere now. No rows of anything. Karen’s feeling twitchy.

  Eventually I win. They’ll deliver a draft report to the CPS by the end of the week, and a final version later in June. I’m delighted, but do my best not to show it. To celebrate, as I’m showing the accountants out of the building, I shake hands with the female accomplice very earnestly and for three seconds longer than she is comfortable with. “Thank you so much for your help,” I say, looking into her eyes. “Thank you so much.” As she’s retrieving her hand, I give her upper arm a quick squeeze and fire off a for-your-eyes-only smile at her. She almost runs for the door.

  Upstairs again, I arrange things for the day. D.C.s are meant to show initiative, but my experience has been that no one likes it if you show too much, and I’ve got a feeling that D.C.I. Jackson would like it if I showed a whole lot less. On the other hand, D.C.I. Jackson has spent less time than I have with the Weatherbys breed register, and a lead is a lead is a lead.

  So I arrange a meeting with the Crown Prosecution Service. I say I’ll come over to their place. I let Matthews know that’s what I’m doing and tell Ken Hughes (because Jackson is out of the office) that he’s going to have to put someone else on Lohan telephone duties.

  When I’m done, I take my papers, get into my car, drive out of the car park, and call the CPS people. I tell them that something’s come up and ask is it possible to postpone things? We make a new appointment for four that afternoon. Six clear hours to use as I please.

  I drive as fast as speed cameras permit over to Chepstow. A Welsh town, but one that smells English. One of King Edward I’s castles plonked high above the river to remind us all of how it is. There are invaders and the invaded. The English fuckers and the Welsh fucked.

  Bettinson’s house is a redbrick 1970s thing, all sliding doors and brown carpets. I don’t get to see it though. His office is in his garage. No natural light, just halogens overhead and on the desks. Two desktops and a laptop. A printer. Camera gear and lighting equipment stashed in a corner.

  Bettinson has got that look photographers have. Like a teenage boy has been given stubble, a hangover, and freedom from female interference. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and cargo pants, and a much-pocketed canvas vest hangs over the back of a chair. He is brown-haired and doesn’t use deodorant.

  “Coffee?”

  “I’m fine, thanks. If you don’t mind, I’d rather just get cracking.”

  Bettinson is surprisingly solicitous. He’s going out on a job, but he’s happy to let me browse. He sets me down at one of the two desktops and shows me how things are arranged. Photos from each day are filed in their own folder. The photos have numbers for file names, and the folders are arranged by date but nothing else. A spreadsheet logs which assignments were done on which days, plus some cost and billing information. He shows me how to toggle between viewing the photos as thumbnails and seeing the full images.

  “They’re arranged by date, so if you don’t have a date …”

  “I know. And I don’t.”

  “Do you want to say what you’re looking for?”

  I hesitate. “I’m trying to find a connection between two individuals. They both had an interest in racing, both lived locally. A photo of them together at the track could establish a connection.” I don’t want to say more. I’m paranoid about Jackson finding out that I’m here.

  “Well, you’ve got some dates, then.”

  Bettinson gives me a couple of old racecourse calendars with race dates marked, asks me again if I want coffee, then swings off with his camera gear.

  To judge by his accumulated images, Bettinson does everything. Weddings. Schools. The races. A bit of news photography. But his biggest gig by far is the racetrack, and maybe 40 percent of his images are shot there. Most of those, inevitably, are of horses, but 20 percent of Bettinson’s racing images—so about 10 percent of the entire archive—are shots of owners and racegoers, social scenes down at the track.

  I can’t think of any better way of doing it, so I just start the week before Rattigan’s death and work backward. After forty minutes of solid work, I’ve covered one month of the archive. Colored shapes move behind my eyelids when I close them. Endless photos of men in tweed jackets, horses’ noses, rosettes, silver trophies, award ceremonies with low stages and country-themed adverts, horsy women in padded vests, and fashionable babes with big smiles and low tops. None of Penry. A few of Rattigan when one of his horses won something, but nothing that seems to help much.

  I wonder if I’ve missed something.

  I check my voice mail, worried that there’s a message from Hughes or Jackson. There isn’t.

  I carry on working. More horses. More tweed. More rosettes. The more photos I look at that aren’t the photos I’m after, the less optimistic I become. By the time Bettinson gets back, I haven’t found what I’m looking for and I’m very unsure if there’s any such thing to be found. I need to leave.

  He asks if I’ve got what I was after, and I tell him no.

  “They’re like specific individuals you’re searching for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you allowed to say who?”

  “Well, don’t shout it around but, yes, Brendan Rattigan is one of the two. I’ve—”

  “Rattigan? You should have said. Fuck, I’ve got about a million Rattigans.”

  Bettinson taps the other machine. The one I wasn’t working on. He starts to jiggle it out of hibernation.

  “I thought I was looking at the complete archive? I thought I was running through your archive?”

  “The archive, yeah, that’s the archive. Actual projects and stuff are here. I’d never find the stuff otherwise.” He clicks around on the other desktop and brings up a whole list of files. He clicks the first one, and up pops a shot of Brendan Rattigan grinning with a bay racehorse leaning over his shoulder. “I did loads of stuff for the Rattster. Lost my best client when that plane went down.”

  He asks me if I have a laptop—which I do—and he attaches a cable to it from the desktop, then copies across the entire collection. Five hundred and sixty-three megabytes of it.

  I arrive forty minutes early for my meeting with the CPS.

  The CPS meeting goes okay. I accomplish less than I wanted, but more than I expected. There’s some sort of plan in place, anyway, and they’re happy with the stuff that the accountants are preparing.

  It’s not strictly required, but I go back into the office afterward to finish up a few things. Inevitably, I can’t resist looking at my laptop. And within five simple minutes, I have what I’m after. Penry and Rattigan together at the racetrack. Champagne glasses in hand. Laughing hard at something off camera. Celebrating a winner, from the look of it. Friends, not just casual acquaintances. I flick on through the entire collection. Perhaps I’m missing some shots—I’ll need to do this more thoroughly at some point—but I can log at least seven dates when Bettinson snapped Rattigan and Penry together at Chepstow. Fifteen months. Seven dates. The millionaire and the embezzler.

  One of the dates is in March 2008. That fact resonates for some reason, but I can’t work out why. I stare at the list, until I decide that staring isn’t a useful investigative technique. I also realize that I haven’t done any of the things I came into the office to do, so I hurry up and finish them quickly.

  I work till eight, then go to Mam and Dad’s for dinner. It’s been my first time this week, so I don’t feel like I’m breaking my own rules. They live over in Roath Park. A place of big houses, mature trees, and geese flying overhead, heading for the lake, commuters late home from work. I only have to turn up Lake Road to feel easier in my spirit. This place calms me. Always has, always will.

  Dad’s not at home,
his huge mock Tudor home, because he’s off at work, but Mam’s there, and Ant-short-for-Antonia, my younger sister, who’s turning thirteen now and is already nearly my height. I’m the runt of the family, it is clear.

  We eat ham, carrots, and boiled potatoes, and watch a TV chef telling us how to bake sea bream in the Spanish fashion.

  Ant has homework that she wants help with, so I go upstairs to help her. The homework in question takes about fifteen minutes. Ant waits for me to give her the answers, then writes what I tell her to. She plays music, fiddles with her hair, and tells me some involved story about her friend’s dog that damaged its forelegs and now has a kind of trolley it pushes itself around on. She lies on her belly on the bed, kicking her calves in the air. She’s at that age when she’s almost exactly half girl, half young woman. I wonder if I did that at her age. Lay on my belly, kicking my calves behind me. Feeling ordinary, feeling safe. Three years before my life exploded.

  “It hurt its legs?”

  Ant looks at me as though I’m an idiot and continues talking to me in that way which makes every sentence a question. “Yes, the front legs? She didn’t lose them exactly, but there was some problem with the joints? So she couldn’t walk anymore?” She continues with her tale. I don’t bother to listen, and she doesn’t expect me to. She wants a TV in her room and is trying to enlist my support in lobbying Mam.

  “Don’t ask Mam, Ant. Ask Dad.”

  “He says ‘Ask your mam.’ ”

  “I know. And she’s never going to say yes, is she? It’s Dad you need to work on.”

  “Kay has one.”

  Kay’s my other sister. Eighteen. Smokily sexy with random teenage sulks. Trails broken hearts behind her, I’d imagine.

  “She didn’t get one till she was sixteen. But you need to forget about Mam anyway. Work on Dad.”