Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  “But tell her, though, will you? She listens to you.”

  I don’t know that Mam does listen to me, but I’m flattered Ant thinks she does. In any case, I doubt if Ant’s life would be made better by a TV in her room.

  “You can get everything on iPlayer anyway.”

  Ant makes a face at me. I think betrayal of the sisterhood, teenage alienation, and a certain existential suffering are the major themes of the look in question.

  I spend a bit more time with Ant. Then go down and have a cup of herbal tea with Mam, who’s onto a box set DVD of some Trollope costume drama by now and switches it off with reluctance.

  “Have you seen this yet? It is good.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll lend you the set when I’m done, if you like.”

  I smile at Mam in a way that allows her to believe that a box set of Trollope would make my life complete. Slipping my shoes off, I poke my feet onto her lap for a foot cuddle, an old tradition of ours.

  “Ant seems to want a TV a lot.”

  “Only because her friends do. She doesn’t really like the telly that much.”

  “It’d keep her off the computer though, I suppose. God knows what kids find on there these days.”

  Mam makes a face. Everything was better when people wore corsets, that sort of face.

  “You can get limiters, you know. Things that stop the kids watching TV after a certain point in the evening, or whatever.”

  Mam pulls my toes for that. “You’re as bad as your father, you are.”

  I smile at her. Ant is halfway to her telly, I reckon.

  “I should go, Mam. Thanks for supper.”

  “Don’t be silly, love.” She hesitates momentarily but doesn’t invite me to stay the night, which she did reflexively for the first nine months I was living away from home. She still does it sometimes. “You coming over at the weekend? Your dad would love to see you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh, don’t be like that, love. You know he would.”

  I laugh and explain, as I put my shoes back on. My “maybe” meant maybe I might come over at the weekend, not maybe my dad would love to see me. But Mam’s misinterpretation was instructive. When I got my job as a copper, Dad went through a bit of a thing with me. Me choosing to do that with my life, given the things he had chosen to do with his—it wasn’t treachery, exactly, but he couldn’t quite get his head around it either. All that created an atmosphere, but it got actively difficult only when I transferred into the CID. Dad thought that was uncalled for, and said so. I thought it wasn’t his business what I did with my life, and said so too. Forcefully. We had our first ever proper row, in fact, a row I believed now lay far behind us. Perhaps Mam’s reaction indicates not.

  “I’d love to come over if he’s around,” I say. “He’s off all weekend, is he?”

  “No, he’ll probably go in on the Saturday. They’ve been busy this year.”

  I laugh. “That’s good. It’s good to be busy.”

  I get another face from Mam for saying that. She’s a good Methodist girl married to a man who’s never been a very good Methodist boy, and Mam’s liked none of the businesses that have claimed her husband’s attention.

  Or so she says. She could have married a bank manager.

  I tell Mam to enjoy her Trollope, and she promises again to lend me the DVDs when she’s done. I say goodbye and not to get up, but she does get up and sees me to the front door. It’s a big house, without Dad in it.

  I head home.

  I’d forgotten the photos of April, so they take me by surprise. I don’t turn the living room light on, and stare at the photos in the half-light of the streetlamps outside.

  Six little Aprils. No answers.

  There’s one answer I can find, though. I boot up my laptop and check the notes I made on all those racing websites. March 2008, Penry’s horse had some veterinary problem that kept it from racing for eight weeks. A problem with its leg. It was Ant’s story about the trolley dog that jogged my memory. Yet Penry and Rattigan were still there, down at the track, all buddy-buddy over champagne and horse dung. Horse-racing friends without the horse.

  I’m tired. I close down the laptop and grin up at April. I get six little smiles back again.

  “It’s been a long day,” I tell her.

  No answer to that, but it wasn’t a clever thing to say. She’s got only night, and it stretches forever.

  “I know where you did your drawing,” I say, changing tack.

  No comment.

  “I used to draw a lot as a kid. I probably did flowers like you.”

  No comment again six times over, which makes for a lot of silence in one small living room.

  I don’t know if I did draw a lot as a child. Because of the illness in my teens, my childhood seems like something viewed over the other side of a hill. Little snippets come back to me, but I don’t know where they’ve come from or if they’re true. I’ve got a story about my past more than actual functional memories of it—but for all I know, everyone is in the same position. Maybe childhoods are things we live through once, then reconstruct in fantasy. Maybe no one has the childhood they think they’ve had.

  “You think too much,” says April—or at least, that’s what she’d probably say if she didn’t have this omertà thing going.

  “Good night, sweetheart, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I sleep well and dream of Ant endlessly combing her hair in front of a mirror. In the dream, I want my hair to look like hers, but I know it never will.

  Five the next morning.

  Phoebus and a rosy-fingered dawn are already busy, lighting the sky up over Llanrumney, Wentlodge, and all points east. I know within a minute or two of waking that that’s it for my night.

  I sit up in bed for a few minutes. It’s strange. I live on a modern housing estate crammed with humans, and I can hear almost no human noise. There is an odd feeling in my body, a kind of prickle, but I can’t put words to it and I don’t know why it’s there. When I was coming out of illness, my doctors gave me exercises to practice. They were mostly bullshit and had very little to do with my recovery, but they’re still a fallback for me and I practice them now. Try naming the feeling. Fear. Anger. Jealousy. Love. Happiness. Disgust. Yearning. Curiosity.

  My doctors had imaginations as narrow as their educations and never came up with more than six or eight emotions in total. I’ve got more imagination than is good for me and I have far too many words. A sense of excess. That’s a feeling, isn’t it? Desire for simplicity. Envy of my sister’s hair. I’ve got a hundred names for a hundred feelings, and they all seem clumsy and inappropriate, like wooden coins. Clothes fitted for a different body shape.

  My failure to come to grips with whatever I’m feeling freaks me out a bit. I practice my breathing, the way I’ve been taught. In-two-three-four-five. Out-two-three-four-five. Long, slow breaths, bringing my pulse rate down. A good exercise. When my breathing and my heart rate are both in good shape, I give it another two minutes, then pull a dressing gown on over my pajamas and go out into the garden. I smoke, drink tea, and eventually eat a bowl of muesli and half a grapefruit.

  The morning becomes gradually noisier. More traffic. The sound of breakfast TV from next door. Kids kicking balls around outside. A delivery van. I like it. I want to go on sitting around in my dressing gown, looking at my stupid shred of lawn, smoking and thinking of nothing, but duty calls. The last couple of days have been good ones for me, and I don’t want to lose their momentum. I don’t want to lose the security of doing something in a way that earns the respect of my peers. In an ideal world, I’d earn the respect of my bosses too, but you can’t have everything.

  I shower and get dressed—reasonably hurriedly, because inevitably I’ve let things get late and I’m in danger of missing the sharp-means-sharp morning briefing. As I leave the house, I notice my clothes. Beige trousers. Brown boots. White shirt. Khaki jacket. The office version of combat wear. Ah, well. I
don’t have time to change and probably wouldn’t even if I did. I compromise by applying a neutral, almost self-colored lipstick using the car’s rearview mirror. It doesn’t make much difference, but I bet Ant and Kay would approve.

  Up and at ’em. I drive, too fast, into the office and am in the briefing room by eight eighteen, and only the fourth officer present. The prickle is still there, albeit fainter, and I’m deciding to treat it as a good thing, a positive energy. An energy I intend to put to work.

  When I log in to the Weatherbys website, I know what I’m looking for and I’m not surprised when I find it. Brian Penry owns only a share in one racehorse, the one I already know about, the one whose existence I’ve already cross-checked. But Brian Penry has an alter ego, a Welsh one, Brian ap Penri, who owns shares in four more horses. Two of those have Rattigan as a co-owner. One more has at least two close Rattigan associates as co-owners. The last has no obvious connection to Rattigan, but I bet there is one all the same. One of Brian ap Penri’s horses was a winner at Chepstow the day that Brian Penry’s horse was laid up and unable to race.

  Five horses, not one.

  The two men were friends, not acquaintances.

  And yesterday’s forty-thousand-pound hole has just grown into something a whole lot deeper, and ten shades darker. I wonder whose bodies may be lying at the bottom.

  I’m standing up and reaching for my car keys before I’ve even logged out of the site.

  Rhayader Crescent, off the Llandaff Road.

  The ordinariness of the place is almost overwhelming. The street is modern, but nice modern, semis mostly. The architectural touches are gently reassuring—dark hardwood details, those expensive bricks mottled by the firing process to give an old-fashioned look, paving slabs that are concrete but that have been made to look like they’re stone or clay. This is the kind of street which politicians seek to conjure when they talk about the hardworking families of Middle Britain. A street for teachers married to nurses. Middle managers and youngish solicitors. Also, it turns out, a street for corrupt ex-coppers.

  I ring the doorbell of Number 27. There’s a car—an old Toyota Yaris—in the parking area. No area set aside for lawn or flowers. No pots. The neighbors all have at least an attempt at planting. The weather’s warm again today, but with a kind of pressing closeness. Distances blur into haze, while objects that are close at hand seem preternaturally distinct. The whole world wants a good hard rainstorm to wake it up. Or I do.

  I’m about to ring again, when I catch noises from within—a shape glimpsed behind frosted glass—then the sound of the catch and the door swinging open.

  “Mr. Penry, I’m D.C. Griffiths. We met six weeks ago, down at Cathays Park.”

  I say this to jog his memory. We met when he was being interviewed, but I wasn’t, by a long shot, the main entertainment of the day, and I don’t expect him to recognize me. I say “Cathays Park,” not “Police Headquarters,” because first of all Cathays Park is the term any copper would use, and second of all, I’m not here to set neighbors gossiping.

  Penry’s a tough-looking fifty. Hair still dark, worn longish and untidy. His face is mostly unlined, but the lines that are present are deeply marked. He’s the sort of cop that would have fitted straight into a 1970s TV drama, all leather jackets and free-flying fists. Right now, he’s wearing jeans, with no shoes or socks, and a ropy old T-shirt that advertises some sailing club. His feet are tough and brown, with nails like slices of old horn.

  He doesn’t answer immediately, or open the door any further, or indeed do anything else, other than look at me and smirk to himself.

  “Well, it must be important if they’ve sent you.”

  “May I come in?”

  It’s a real question, as Penry well knows. If he says no, he means no, and the English law of my-home-is-my-castle, the law made sacred by Magna Carta and everything since, means that his “no” has the strength of iron bars. He pauses a long time before answering.

  Then: “Do you want coffee?”

  His question sounds invitational, but his posture is anything but. He’s still hanging on the door, scratching his chest inside his T-shirt, showing me his abs and pecs and body hair as he does so. Oh, here we go.

  I don’t normally respond well to macho stuff, but I’m being very professional here, and in any case Penry knows every police trick in the book, so I stay calm.

  “I don’t drink coffee, but if you’ve got herbal tea, then I’d like that.”

  “You’ll need to wash up first. The mugs are in the sink.”

  Ah, it’s the washing up now, is it? But I stay professional. “Well, if you sort out the tea things, I’ll wash the mugs.”

  That response gets another second or two of posturing, then Penry swings the door open and walks through to the kitchen. I follow.

  The house is messy, but not slum-messy, just single-man messy. Or perhaps more accurately, single-man-who’s-not-expecting-to-score messy. He’s not kidding about the mugs either. His kitchen sink is piled with dirty crockery, with a fatty scum on the surface of the water. The lid of his garbage pail is missing, and the bag is full of beer cans, juice cartons, and frozen meal wrappers.

  Penry ostentatiously flicks the switch of the kettle from the off to the on position. That’s his share of things done, he’s telling me. He stands behind me, too close, deliberately crowding my space. I don’t want to touch his mugs or his crockery, let alone put my hand in the orangey oil slick of the sink. I compromise by picking the two least repulsive mugs, running the tap into the sink, and doing a quick, crude decontamination job. I present Penry with the mugs, wash my hands in the still running water, then turn it off, just as the orangey slick threatens to spill out over the draining board. There’s an overflow pipe in there somewhere, but it’s not draining anything fast, if at all.

  Penry puts coffee granules in his cup and pours hot water on. No milk. No sugar.

  “I don’t have any herbal tea, no.” He grins at me, challenging me to respond.

  “Good. Then I won’t need this.” I take the unused mug and toss it into the garbage pail. “Shall we talk?”

  Penry leaves the mug where I threw it. He seems genuinely pleased by this interaction and barefoots his way into the living room, which is untidy but not squalid. There’s a view through to the back of the house, where Penry’s Georgian conservatory juts out into suburban Cardiff like a schooner nosing into Cowes Week. I pause for just long enough to take it in. The conservatory is empty, except for some plastic wrapping and some builders’ debris, swept into a corner but not cleared. A pair of keys hang on a nail driven into the frame next to the door. The piano is there, but dusty from the building work, and I can’t see any music for it.

  Penry sits in what is obviously his armchair—unobstructed view of the TV—and I take a seat on a sofa, where I get a slightly angled view of his face.

  “I thought you might like to know where our case stands. I also have one or two further questions. And of course, the more you cooperate, the more your cooperation will be taken into account when it comes to sentencing.”

  Penry stares at me some more, then sips his coffee. He says nothing. It was a back injury that forced his retirement, and I notice that his chair is one of those ugly orthopedic numbers. There’s a packet of acetaminophen on the table. You always suspect that when a cop retires with a back injury, it’s mostly a question of the job having taken its toll over the years. Too many years of hassle, and retirement the easy option. The acetaminophen suggests otherwise, however.

  I quickly summarize where we are in preparing the prosecution case—which is pretty much all systems go, following my meetings with the CPS and the accountants yesterday. I advance a guesstimated time line for the prosecution.

  He answers with a question.

  “How old are you?”

  I pause for long enough to demonstrate that I’m answering because I choose to, not because I’m stuck in one of his stupid games.

  “Twenty-six.�
�

  “You look younger. You look like a baby.”

  “Good skin care.”

  “Who are you working with?” I don’t immediately answer, so he prods away. “Gethin Matthews probably. Him or Cerys Howells, I should think.”

  “Matthews.”

  He acknowledges the answer with a grunt, but he’s already sacrificed a little of his authority. He’s managed to establish that I have answers he wants, and he’s reminded himself that baby-faced D.C. Griffiths here is representing grizzled old D.C.I. Matthews. It’s the first tiny victory I’ve won. He must know that somewhere, because he reverts to silence. I hear the slightly asthmatic whine in his breaths, the only thing you could hear on the interview tapes.

  I let the pause continue. It’s my pause now. I own it, and I ride that fact for all it’s worth. When I do speak, I say this:

  “The thing is, we’re both coppers, so we both know the deal. You stole money. We found out. You’re going to jail. The only question is how long for. That’s the only factor you can influence.

  “And we both know that the less cooperative you are, the longer you go down for. In a way, your life is fucked up whatever, but you can choose just how fucked up to make it. Anywhere on a range from quite a bit to quite a lot.

  “With ordinary crooks, I don’t expect too much. They don’t cooperate because they’re not being rational, or they can’t bear to help us out, or whatever else it is. You’re not like that. You’re a pro, so you’ll be hard-headed about these things. And the fact that you’re telling us nothing makes me curious about a few things. And if you care to know what I’m curious about, then I’ll tell you.”

  The silence in the room now has a frozen quality to it, as though it might crack like ice if you tried to move against it. Penry can’t tell me that he’s hungry for information, because that would offend against his crappy little power games. On the other hand, he can’t say anything else, because he wants to hear what I have to say. Once again, I let the silence do its work.

  “Number one, where did your money come from? Some of it came from the school all right, but you spent more money than you stole, or your friend Mr. ap Penri did anyway.