Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  “Yes, I do. From what you say, Mancini wasn’t as far gone. She stood a better chance. Also …”

  She trails off, wondering whether to complete the thought.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I don’t know if it helps, but Stacey Edwards has a big anti-immigrant thing. I don’t think it’s racist, particularly. Her best friend is a West Indian woman. It’s the business end of things Stacey doesn’t like. She thinks all these women coming in from the Balkans have made the game more dangerous. The drugs are worse, she says. More heroin from Russia. Afghanistan originally, but it comes via Russia. And meantime, the women are made to work harder. Violence has become more common.”

  “From punters?”

  “No, from the pimps and pushers. It’s all got more organized, nastier. Anyway, if Janet Mancini had had anything to do with the Albanian crowd, Stacey would have been doing her best to warn her off.”

  “We’re looking for people who might have known Mancini. Obviously Stacey Edwards would be one. Do you know any others who might have done? Maybe friends of Stacey’s?”

  Williams considers that request, then shakes her head. “No. Can’t help you there. I mean, I know who Stacey hangs out with, but I’ve got a duty of confidentiality.”

  “Janet Mancini is dead. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “And Stacey Edwards is alive. That’s why I’m shutting up.”

  I accept that.

  I say, “I’m going to show you a phone number. I don’t need you to give me a name or an address, but can you just tell me if you recognize that number?”

  I show her the phone number that texted me outside the chip shop this morning.

  Williams gets out her own phone and scrolls through her address book, searching.

  “Yes.”

  “Would I be right in thinking that the owner of that phone number would be a prostitute who might well have known Janet Mancini?”

  “I don’t know if they knew each other, but yes to the first part of that question, and quite possibly to the second.”

  “And it’s not Stacey Edwards?”

  “You’re not allowed that question, but the answer’s no. Not Stacey.”

  The night is black now. The bushes on the riverbank are clotted with shadows. Williams in her canvas jacket is fine, but I’m feeling the cold now. The night and the danger. I don’t like being here, and I want to go.

  “Good luck, Bryony. Thanks for talking.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t help more.”

  “You don’t know how much you’ve helped. I don’t. Sometimes the little things turn out to be the most helpful.”

  “Hope so.” Williams is doing her eagle-eyed thing, examining some interaction upriver which my eyes aren’t practiced enough to see. She gets up, ready to plunge into the fray.

  “One last thing,” I say. “When Mancini died, we were alerted by an anonymous phone call to a police station. But not here in Cardiff. In Neath. We’ve got no explanation for why it was Neath. Female caller.”

  Williams grimaces. “Stacey’s sister lives in Neath. That’s where she goes to get away. If she was shaken up by something … she’d have gone to Neath.”

  “Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Williams reaches a hand out to me, and I shake it. We like each other.

  “You catch the fucker who did it,” she urges me.

  “I will. And you get your girls away from all this.” I wave my hand at the riverbank and the darkness.

  “Women, Fiona. They’re women.” But she’s grinning as she says this, and I watch her white teeth and her ciggy pass away into the night. Saint, hero, angel, nutcase.

  I make it back to my car and click the doors locked. I don’t usually lock the car doors when I’m inside, but I do now. I didn’t like that riverbank, and its fluvial stink is with me still. Its smell is violence.

  The plan—so brightly hatched next to Jane Alexander’s desk—was to go on to talk to a couple more of the StreetSafe volunteers, but right now I’m not sure if I can face it. I think about calling home, but it’s Dad I want to speak to more than Mam, and he’ll be at work, and calling him at work is always a nightmare. He shouts all the time and I never have his attention.

  Then I think about calling Brydon. We haven’t yet rescheduled that drink, but I don’t read anything sinister into that. Lohan is eating a lot of energy from the department, and Brydon will be feeling that just as much as me. But I can’t bring myself to call him. He’s a creature of sunlight, and I don’t feel in a sunshiny place myself right now. Not since this case started to get a hold on me. I don’t know what I’d say to Brydon.

  I jiggle the phone up and down, needing something, but I’m not sure what.

  Then I send a text. HEY LEV, ARE YOU AROUND? JUST WONDERED. FI.

  I press Send. From where I’m parked I can just see the house on Blaenclydach Place where Bryony and I sat, but what lies beyond is hidden from me. I start the engine and am pulling out when I get a text back.

  CAN BE IF YOU NEED. WHY? ARE YOU IN TROUBLE?

  Don’t know what to say to that. Yes, Lev mate, I’m a fuckup and I worry that I’m on the brink of something horrible. So instead I calm things down.

  NO. DON’T THINK SO. JUST CHECKING. FI.

  I feel better knowing that he’s around if needed. The thought fires me up enough that I call on another two StreetSafe volunteers. The information they give me fills out Bryony’s picture a bit but doesn’t fundamentally change anything. The thing about Neath seems like a huge piece of information. Even Jackson is going to love me if I’ve found his anonymous caller.

  At ten forty-five, I’m done interviewing. I zoom home. My car has a satnav which alerts me to speed cameras, which is just as well, really. There’s nothing much to eat when I get back. Forgotten to eat, forgotten to shop. I pile fruit and muesli into a bowl, then add an energy bar all crumbled up. That’s a meal, isn’t it? I gobble it. Then as I’m tidying up—my version of tidying, I mean—I find an old packet of salami and eat that too, along with an only slightly suspect tomato. Feast.

  Type up my notes, fast and furious. By quarter past midnight I’m all done. I close up. April’s sextuple face shines out at me.

  “We’re getting closer, lamb,” I tell her.

  She shows no sign of caring. I’ve been awake since five and I’m knackered.

  The next day, what is there to say? I wake up far too early again. The kind of waking which prohibits any thought of further sleep. Same weird prickling in my body, made a bit better by knowing that Lev is on call if required. Another smoke in the garden, taking me well over my self-imposed weekly limit. Then another breakfast. Another drive into the office. Another briefing. It’s Saturday, but you’d hardly know it. Lohan is the beast that eats weekends and munches overtime. Everyone’s tired. Everyone’s working hard.

  Ted Floyd, a uniformed sergeant and a good friend of Jim Davis’s, is having a quick cigarette outside Cathays Park when I turn up. Floyd was one of my early training partners on the force, but he avoids me now, in a way I think is almost certainly deliberate. Great.

  And now this.

  Jane Alexander and I arrive at Stacey Edwards’s flat just a fraction before eleven thirty. She lives on a rough-looking estate in Llanrumney. Blocks of flats on the left, houses on the right. The kinds of houses with builders’ rubble in the front garden, rubble that’s been there so long there are weeds growing in it. Broken fridges and decaying mattresses. And those are the houses. The flats will be worse.

  I’ve dressed casually on purpose, but Jane Alexander is in a pale green linen suit over a creamy scoop-neck top, and her shoes have been chosen to match her suit. No one here looks like that, not even the social workers.

  Edwards lives on a ground-floor flat in one of the blocks. Her doorbell isn’t working. I try it a couple of times, and the flat’s small enough and crap enough that we’d hear the doorbell if it was ringing.

  Someo
ne inside clatters down the stairs from the flats higher up and lets us into the entrance area. Stacey Edwards’s front door is a flimsy thing with a polished plywood front. I knock on it. Then Jane knocks.

  Still nothing.

  I’d managed to persuade Gill Parker from StreetSafe to give me Edwards’s mobile number. I call it. The phone rings inside the flat, but it’s not answered. Jane and I look at each other. At the front of the block, there’s a parking area with room for six cars. Just two berths are taken. There’s a silver Skoda and a dark blue Fiat.

  I call Bryony Williams and ask her if she knows whether Edwards has a car and if so what. She says she thinks it’s a dark blue Fiat. I thank her, hang up, and tell Jane.

  “Maybe she’s just popped round to a friend,” she says.

  Maybe. The estate doesn’t look like the popping round sort of place to me. I doubt if Stacey Edwards has Jane Alexander’s popping round sort of life. Farther on down the road, a footpath out to the fields is enclosed between spiked railings that have been looped with barbed wire. It’s that sort of place.

  “We wait half an hour, then try again?” I say, making it a question.

  Jane nods, and we go back to our car—Jane’s, not mine. If it were me, I’d want to drive a little distance away, so we didn’t look like we were watching the house, but I’m trying hard not to boss things too much. For the time being, I’m trying to be the sort of officer that D.C.I. Jackson wants me to be.

  We wait half an hour, mostly in silence. Jane has a couple of hairs on the shoulder of her jacket, and I pick them off for her, absentmindedly, then stroke the fabric flat. She turns to me and smiles. I wonder what it would be like to kiss her. Quite nice probably. When I was at Cambridge, still trying to get my head together, I wasn’t sure whether I was straight and had a short lesbian phase. Experimenting. I liked kissing women, but that was about it. Lesbian sex never quite worked for me. I don’t miss it.

  I don’t share these thoughts with Jane. I’m not sure that doing so would be a winning development for our friendship.

  After twenty-six minutes, we’re both twitchy, and I try Edwards’s mobile again. Still no answer. There’s been nothing happening at the front of the flat, and when we knock at the door again, there’s still no answer.

  Decision time.

  We inspect the flat outside, peering in where we can, but there are heavy nets down over grimy windows and it’s not possible to see very much. At the back, we get a clear view into a small kitchen—cleaner than Penry’s but hardly a model of its kind—and nothing else. There’s a small frosted window—the toilet, presumably—which has been left ajar for ventilation. The window’s at head height and offers a gap of six or seven inches if opened to the max.

  The gap’s too small for a normal adult to climb through, but Jane has the same thought that I do. She looks appraisingly between me and the window.

  Entering premises without permission and without a warrant is a big deal. Obviously rules need to exist around these things, but that doesn’t stop them being a nuisance. They make our life harder, which is precisely what they’re designed to do. Anyway, we can’t enter the property unless we’re there to make an arrest, or unless we have reasonable grounds to suppose that entering is necessary to save a life or prevent serious injury to person or property.

  “I’ll call one of the StreetSafe people,” I say.

  I call Bryony Williams on her mobile, basically fishing for her to tell me that she’s worried about Stacey Edwards. She is worried, but doesn’t quite come out and say it.

  “Bryony, I need you to tell me that you fear for Stacey Edwards’s safety and that you need us to enter her property. I need you to say that in so many words.”

  She thinks a moment, then says it. I hold the phone between Jane and me so that we can both hear her saying it. Then I thank Bryony and hang up.

  Jane nods. “I’ll just run it past Jackson first.” She does. He’s okay with it, even asks us if we want backup. Jane raises her eyebrows at me. Backup means that if we want a couple of burly uniforms to bash a door down, then we can have them.

  “I’ll be okay,” I say.

  Jane hangs up.

  “I think,” I add.

  There’s a horrible rickety picnic table, one of those all-in-one things incorporating the benches as part of the structure, on a paved area at the back. We drag it under the window. I catch Jane looking at her hands afterward, wondering where she can clean them. She’s not the one who’s about to slide through a toilet window.

  I climb up on the table, which wobbles a bit but not too much. My version of “casual” for this visit involves a loose gray cotton skirt, flat shoes, and a long-sleeved top. I can’t see how me and the skirt are going to negotiate the window simultaneously, so I take it off. Jane takes it from me and tells me again that we can get backup. Too late really. By the time a girl is half naked on a wobbly picnic table under a toilet window, she doesn’t have much more dignity to lose.

  I open the window as far as it’ll go and stick my head and shoulders in. Inside there’s a toilet, a small basin with a mirror over, some clutter. I guess there’s probably a correct technique for managing these things, but I don’t know what it is. I thrash with my legs and squeeze with my arms, and soon I’m balanced on my belly in the window aperture. I can see my own face red in the mirror and Jane’s shape through the frosting on the other side of the window.

  I kick on. My thighs scrape painfully as they come through the window, and I’m suddenly scared that I’m going to lose my grip on the inside windowsill and come crashing down on my head. But I don’t. I’m not quite sure how I manage it, but I slither through without calamity. I’m inside. The fronts of my thighs are scraped red and angry. Jane pokes my skirt through the window after me, and I put it on. I’ve got dust and black mold marks all over my top, and my hair is full of crap as well. Jane definitely won’t want to kiss me now.

  I wash my hands and open the toilet door, then release the back door so Jane can come in too.

  We try the living room first. Nothing. Or rather, some needles, bits of foil, candle, and matches. An old half lemon. Some of the foil is blackened with candle smoke. Jane and I exchange glances, but we’re not here to hunt for drugs.

  Then the bedroom. White walls and tarty red drapes. A big purple duvet. Mirror. And Stacey Edwards. Her hands have been cable-tied behind her back. There’s duct tape over her mouth. No pulse. No breath. Her skin is at room temperature. The only expression in her eyes is no expression at all. Not fear. Not rage. Not anguish. Not love. Not hope.

  Jane steps to the doorway and dials out. We want backup now. We want all the backup we can get.

  While Jane makes the call, I sit down on the bed and put my hand on Edwards’s belly. She’s fully clothed, and her clothes don’t look disordered in any way. I don’t know what that means, but perhaps it means she wasn’t raped before she was murdered.

  In my head, a hundred thoughts, but one stands out. Jane Alexander and Jim Davis would have gone to interview Stacey Edwards right after the briefing yesterday afternoon. They wouldn’t have had my lovely briefing notes. Jim Davis would have been a crap interviewer. I doubt if Edwards would have said anything to either of them. But she’d have been visited by police officers before her death. She’d have been given a chance, a warning, an escape hatch. Most likely, she wouldn’t have taken it. Drug-addicted prostitutes with zero self-esteem usually don’t. But the hatch would have been there all the same. That’s all we can ever offer.

  And I was too clever for that. Got Davis out and me in. Persuaded Jane to let us prepare for the interview beforehand. Arrived, oh so cleverly, at just the right time to catch Edwards having her morning cornflakes. And found her dead. No escape hatch. Just duct tape, cable ties, and—I’ll bet my car on it—a skinful of heroin and a murderer who closed up her nose. The lightest of pressure with finger and thumb. A minute. Two minutes. Five at the outside. Then he’d have been on his way, job done, as Stacey Edwa
rds’s thwarted little soul flew out of the window beyond him.

  Seven thirty that evening, and the Incident Room breaks up. Lohan is now in overdrive. When Janet Mancini died, most officers on the force would have said, correctly, that these things happen when you mix drugs and prostitution. They wouldn’t have meant that they should happen, that it’s remotely okay for them to happen, just that they do. True, April’s murder made the whole thing worse, but she seemed like collateral damage. Don’t take drugs. Don’t be a prostitute. Bad stuff happens when you break those rules. If your daughter happens to get killed—well, treat that as a memo to self on the importance of sticking to the straight and narrow.

  But Stacey Edwards’s death was no coincidence. Jackson’s assumption—which I and everybody else share—is that the manner of Edwards’s death was intended to send a signal. That Mancini’s death was murder, not accidental overdose. That her death wasn’t just a one-off. That there could well be others in danger right now. Edwards’s murder was presumably intended as a warning. Keep your mouths shut, or else.

  As officers disperse, Jackson jabs a finger at me, then at his office. His face is craggy and impassive. I can’t read anything there, but assume that there’s going to be some kind of bollocking, since Jackson seems to have a taste for it at the moment.

  “Sit down,” he says. “I want some tea. Do you want anything?”

  The coffee machine dispenses teas and coffees. For my herbal stuff, you have to go to one of the kitchenettes and make it yourself. I can’t ask a D.C.I. to make herbal tea for me, so I just say, “No. I try to avoid caffeine.”

  “No fags. No booze. No caffeine?”

  I shrug. A sorry-without-being-sorry shrug.

  “You vegetarian?”

  “No, no. I eat meat.”

  “That’s something.” Jackson gives me a shaggy-eyebrowed look which would probably speak volumes if I had the codebook. But I don’t. “You want herbal or anything?”

  My face must show my indecision, as I try to figure out the right response. Jackson solves the problem by opening his door and yelling at someone to bring him tea “and something that tastes like wet hay for D.C. Griffiths here.” He bangs the door shut.