Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  I call the lab straightaway and let them know about the developments up in London. The London lab will liaise with our lab in any event, but it never hurts to let both groups know that we’re breathing down their necks.

  I call Jane Alexander and tell her that she might want to get herself into the office, child care crisis or no. She thinks about it briefly, then says, “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

  I call Ioana Balcescu but don’t even get through to a voice mail. I don’t think she’ll give us anything further anyway, though I’ll keep trying.

  Mervyn Rogers is back at his desk by this point, and I drop by and give him a condensed summary of Jackson’s comments.

  “You were one of the guys who interviewed Tony Leonard, weren’t you?”

  “I was.”

  “Basically, Jackson wants you to pull him back here and give him a third-degree type interview. Tell him that we can connect him to a major drugs ring in London, plus the murder of the two Mancinis. And Stacey Edwards, come to think of it. Terrify him, basically.”

  Rogers grins. It’s the sort of assignment which he’ll relish. I’m aware that I’ve added a little salt to Jackson’s instructions to me, but if there’s a breach of procedure there, it’s mine, not Jackson’s, and I’m 99 percent sure that he’d much prefer Rogers to hit Leonard hard and early. Leonard’s career and character suggest a bit-part player, which means he’s more likely than most to crack under pressure.

  “I’ll start making some calls,” I tell Rogers. “See if I can get anyone to name him as a dealer.”

  “Righty-ho.”

  Back to my desk. I call Bryony Williams at StreetSafe, but my call goes through to a voice mail and I don’t leave a message. I call Gill Parker instead, and get her. I tell her where things stand and what I want from her.

  She sounds doubtful. “I can ask around, if you like. Let you know if any of our women respond to those names.”

  “That’s no use to us, Gill, sorry. That’s hearsay, and we’re in a place where we need more than that. We need grounds to make arrests. That means reasonable suspicion, and that means specific, identified women supplying on-the-record statements about crimes they have witnessed. We don’t need to go public with anything. We just need evidence to put in front of a magistrate.”

  “Yes, but …”

  Gill starts to tell me all the reasons why she can’t do what I want. She speaks as though she’s swallowed some social workers’ dictionary of psychobabble. Every third word is something like support, facilitate, or empowerment. It’s the sort of thing that usually makes me come over all Tourette’s on people. It’s why I called Bryony in the first place. But I persist.

  I point out to Gill that it’s hard to help sex workers challenge their negative self-imaging patterns when the sex worker in question is comatose with heroin, has duct tape over her mouth, and is having her nostrils squeezed shut by some sex-trafficking arsehole.

  I’m being good, so don’t use the word arsehole.

  Gill tells me that she’ll “forum the issue with colleagues” tonight. I remind her that so far two prostitutes have been killed and another one badly beaten up. I remind her that there may well be others that neither she nor we yet know about. “This comes from the very top here, Gill. We need maximum cooperation. There’ll be a shitstorm if we don’t get it.”

  I do use the word shitstorm, but the word I had in mind was fuck-storm, so I still count that as fairly professional. Gill tells me again that she’ll do what she can and we hang up.

  I call Jane Alexander again. She sounds stressy and says that she can be ready at three and work through into the evening, if that’s okay with me. I tell her that’s fine, and I’ll start lining up some interviews.

  I do just that. Make some calls. Phone numbers that we have on our own database. Some further ones that I coaxed from other sources, including some of the girls I’ve already seen. Mostly I go through to voice mail, but I get one girl—Kyra—who seems to think that a police interview would be brilliant fun. She’s probably off her head on smack, but she arranges for me to meet her and “the girls” in a house just off the Taff Embankment later that evening.

  Result. I hope Kyra stays high, because she’ll be more forthcoming that way. I text Jane to let her know the place and time, then grab the landline again, ready to make further calls.

  And don’t do it.

  I can’t. I can’t let go of the Huw Fletcher thing, and that means I can’t persuade myself to do the things that Jackson would want me to do in the way he’d want me to do them. I do try, though. I really do. I have the phone in my hand, trying to will myself to make those other calls, and can’t quite do it. Instead, I call Rattigan’s shipping division and ask to be put through to Huw Fletcher. Same rigmarole as last time, except that this time I ask to speak to a colleague—Andy Watson—and tell him who I am.

  “Detective Constable Griffiths? Yes. How can I help?”

  “I’m pursuing an inquiry which may involve Mr. Fletcher, and I understand that he’s been missing for some time now.”

  “That’s correct. It would have been two, two and a half weeks since we’ve seen him.”

  “And you’ve reported him missing?”

  “No, I … No, we haven’t.”

  “You have tried to contact him on his usual contact numbers?”

  “Um, yes.” Watson checks briefly with a workmate, then more confidently, “Yes, landline and mobile. Also email. He’s got the ability to check in from home.”

  “And no response?”

  “No.”

  “So a man has been missing for two and a half weeks without explanation. You’ve not been getting any response to your attempts to communicate with him. And you haven’t troubled to notify the authorities. Is that correct?”

  Big gulp down the other end of the phone. That’s what I love about being in the police force. The ability to intimidate. Being threatening without making threats. I love it.

  Watson says, “Yes, that’s correct,” and I say, “If you want, you can make a formal report of his disappearance now. We need a report from a member of the public to start up a MisPer—Missing Persons—Inquiry.”

  “Yes. Yes, okay. I’m happy to do that.”

  “Good. There’s some paperwork I need to run through, then. I’ll come over and see you. Be with you in about half an hour.” Watson agrees, and I hang up.

  I add some notes to Groove. Good police procedure. Following a tip-off from Bryony Williams, a prostitution outreach worker, I make a call to investigate Huw Fletcher. I discover Fletcher is missing. I consider that fact relevant to Lohan. I determine to pursue inquiries on the ground. Jackson won’t like it because I’m not making tea and taking notes, but he will like it when he understands I’m onto something. That’s my reasoning anyway.

  I’m about to click goodbye to my little dead Aprils on-screen, but instead of closing down, I bring up an image of Brendan Rattigan. The dead face of a dead man, or just possibly the living face of a living one. There’d have been a time in my life when I couldn’t have handled that ambiguity at all, but right now it doesn’t seem to bother me much. Indeed, I quite like it. There’s something boring about people only ever being one thing or the other. Not Schrödinger’s cat. Schrödinger’s millionaire. Brendan Rattigan and his army of the undead, building castles on the floor of Cardiff Bay.

  “I’m coming to get you, buddy,” I tell him.

  He sneers at me, but that’s not going to stop me coming.

  Up close, Newport is ugly, but there’s purpose to its ugliness. It’s industrial. It makes stuff and moves it. A place of seagulls and docking cranes. Power lines, roundabouts, warehouses, trucks. Steel and seawater.

  Rattigan’s offices are in a low-rent complex on the edge of town, down below Usk Way on the western bank of the river. The grass around the car park is shorn so close that it’s burned and brown. Car windscreens catch the sun and throw it at me across the tarmac.
Over the other side of the road is a field, spiny with marsh grasses, and a billboard offering land for sale.

  Rattigan’s building has corrugated metal sides, painted a color somewhere between gray and blue. A sign gives the company name, nothing else, no frills. Not many of Rattigan’s millions were spent here. At Reception, I’m whizzed straight through to a conference room—Do I want tea? Coffee? Sparkling water? Coke? A girl with the expression of a calf asks me these things, as though the provision of fluid was guaranteed to deflect the wrath of the CID. I unsettle her by saying no to everything. Before long, Andy Watson appears, accompanied by two of his male colleagues and a secretary. They’re all anxious. The men slide business cards at me, as though I care.

  I start out hard-faced and tough, and information flows like sweet wine at a hen party.

  Huw Fletcher was last seen on May 21, 2010, when he put in a full day at the office.

  He did not appear for work on the twenty-fourth. Or the twenty-fifth. Or any day that week. His secretary—Joan, the one in the room with me now—called his mobile number and landline and left messages. An email was also sent. I can have a copy of the email if I would like it. I would, and the email is promptly brought. I take a minute or so to read it, even though it’s just two lines long and of no interest at all, but silence is frightening to the frightened, so I create plenty of it. I’m interested in the dates, though. Janet and April Mancini were found dead on the Sunday night—the twenty-third—but had been killed late on Friday or in the early hours of Saturday. The timing of Fletcher’s disappearance could be just coincidental, but as far as I’m concerned the coincidence is reassuring.

  “The email you sent … Obviously, that means that Mr. Fletcher has remote access to his emails.”

  Yes.

  “Can you tell from here if they’re being opened?”

  Some discussion about that. The consensus is no, only maybe some IT person would say differently. I don’t follow up. Instead I say, “What date did you leave those messages?”

  The secretary, Joan, says, “I sent the email on the twenty-seventh. That would be the Thursday. I think I called and left messages that day as well. Landline and mobile.”

  I record the date in my notebook. Slowly. Silently.

  “Can you give me all the contact information you have for him, please?”

  Yes, yes, of course. Joan rushes out of the room to oblige.

  I turn to the men.

  “Which one of you is Fletcher’s manager?”

  The middle man, Jim Jones, says it’s him. Hughes looks like a fat man who’s lost weight. Either that or he was issued with skin that came two sizes too large. He’s got dark hair and Mediterranean coloring.

  “Is it normal for your employees to go AWOL in this way?”

  “No. Not normal. No.”

  “I can understand that on that Monday, you weren’t too concerned. One day is just one day. But by Wednesday or Thursday of that week, you must have had real concerns.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t do anything? Or tell anyone?”

  Hughes is less worried by my act than anyone else present, but he’s careful to be helpful too.

  “We sent someone—Andy, it was you, in fact, wasn’t it?—round to his house to see if he was there. No sign of anyone. No car. We assumed he’d just taken off.”

  “You didn’t attempt to contact his family?”

  “Family? He’s unmarried. Lives alone.”

  That’s news to me, but I hide it. “I meant parents. Other relations.”

  Jones raises his hands. “We don’t have any contact details for his family. I don’t even know where they are.”

  Joan comes back into the room with a data sheet on Huw Fletcher. An address, among other things. I take it without saying thanks, but ask her to leave new messages on all Fletcher’s lines, including his email. I tell her to say that a Missing Persons Inquiry is being set up and could Mr. Fletcher please make urgent contact with D.C. Fiona Griffiths. I leave the standard 800 number.

  I turn my attention back to Jones. “So two weeks pass, you don’t tell anyone. Why not?”

  A short pause as he composes himself. He’s a shrewd guy, is Mr. Jones.

  “Why not? That’s a fair question, and I’m slightly embarrassed now about the answer. But here it is. When Huw worked here, and when Mr. Rattigan was still alive, the two of them had an unusually close relationship. They used to fish together. Not standing on a riverbank, deep-sea fishing. Huw used to come and go, keep his own hours, do his own thing, really. Back then, if he was away for a week, that was that. He wouldn’t necessarily tell me in advance, but he always came back. At first, I used to try and keep him in line, but if he was off with Mr. Rattigan or going about Mr. Rattigan’s business, then I was hardly going to have much luck doing that. So I suppose it just developed really.”

  “Deep-sea fishing? Overseas or …?”

  “Don’t know. I suppose I—”

  “You suppose?”

  “Well, I always assumed it must be local. He never looked like he’d seen the sun.”

  “And after Mr. Rattigan’s death?”

  “The same. He went away a bit less. Maybe every month for several days, and we just counted it as holiday or sick leave. I imagined he was doing jobs or something for the family. Shouldn’t be done on company time, in all honesty, but …”

  “And on this occasion, the twenty-fourth of May and since then, you thought it was just more of the same?”

  “I suppose. Truth is, I don’t like working that way. If he was really gone, then so much the better. And if he’d come back, I’d have sacked him. Now that Mr. Rattigan’s not with us, I don’t have to make the same concessions.”

  “You have no idea of what he might have been doing for Mr. Rattigan or the family?”

  “No.”

  “Did he have any special areas of expertise? Any special skills?”

  “No.”

  “Was Fletcher good at his job? Or rather, precisely what was his job? What did he do for you?”

  “Shipping management. Managing schedules. Sorting out bookings for shippers. Locating containers that have gone missing. Chasing up customs problems. Boring stuff really, unless you’re in the business. Huw was fine at it, but nothing special.”

  “Did he look after any particular sector, or do you all do everything?”

  Jones looks at Watson and the other man, who’s hardly spoken. “We all do everything, I suppose,” he says. “Andy and Jason here deal more with Scandinavia, maybe. Huw handled most of the cargoes coming out of Kaliningrad, and some of the ones out of Petersburg. But any of us do what needs to be done.”

  “And you’re always based here? Or you need to go out to the Baltic?”

  “From time to time, yes. Mostly it’s phone and email stuff, but it always helps to know the client. Andy was in Stockholm last week, and Jason, you’ll be in Gdansk, what, the week after?”

  “So Fletcher would have gone to Russia occasionally? Saint Petersburg and Kaliningrad?”

  “Yes. And sometimes, maybe a bit longer ago now, he’d have spent as much time in Sweden as in Russia. That’s what you get if you work for a Baltic shipping line.”

  I ask other questions and the answers aren’t too illuminating. What goods do they transport? All sorts. Pulp and paper. Ores. Containers. Vehicles. Some petrochemicals. Anything.

  Fletcher wasn’t known to have a drinking problem. Ditto drugs. No financial problems. No health issues. I fill out the preprinted MisPer form. I ask for a photo, and they say they’ll see what they’ve got and email it over.

  “Did you like him? Did you guys socialize with him?”

  Everyone looks at everyone else, but it’s Jones who says, “Not much. We felt he was taking liberties. I was looking forward to him coming back here, so I could fire him.”

  I leave the office. Outside, I call through to the office with Fletcher’s address and ask for a car registration. They come back wit
h the details, and I ask them to put the license plate on the wanted list. If Fletcher is in his car and driving around, then he’ll be detected by the first camera or police car that he passes.

  But I don’t think he’s driving around.

  I head back to my car and call those prostitutes for whom I have phone numbers. Most don’t answer. One does and doesn’t want to talk. Another one does, and says grudgingly that she doesn’t mind seeing Jane and me later on this afternoon. There are other calls I could make, but I decide to leave them for later. At least I’ve tried.

  I drive around till I find a place that sells me some food and I eat it.

  It’s been forty minutes since I left Rattigan Transport. Not quite enough, maybe. I drive around pointlessly for another fifteen minutes, then head up to Fletcher’s house, the other side of the M4 in Bettws. A nice enough place, only it’d be even nicer if it weren’t a skinny mile from the motorway and not much more from one of the ugliest towns in the world. Modern brick houses, double-glazed and comfortable. Speed bumps in the road and cars neat in their driveways.

  Nothing remarkable about any of it, the house or the street, except that there’s an unloved Toyota Yaris parked up in front of Fletcher’s address, driver’s window wound down, and Brian Penry’s thickly haired arm beating time to some invisible music.

  I’m not surprised to see him. I don’t altogether know what the dark lines are that connect Rattigan, Fletcher, and Penry—though I’ve got my ideas—but I do know that Penry has been good at protecting himself. Not the embezzlement stuff. He stole stupid amounts and in stupid ways because some part of him wanted to get caught and punished, but still—he’s kept well clear of the bad stuff. I was pretty sure he’d have ways of watching Fletcher’s emails or phone messages, or at the very least keeping himself informed if the police started to get on Fletcher’s trail. That’s why I was so explicit about getting Joan the secretary to leave messages for Fletcher on every phone and email address she had. Why I wanted her to give my name.

  I wasn’t sure that any of that would bring Penry, or what I’d do if it didn’t. But I don’t have to worry about that. Here he is.