Talking to the Dead (30 page)

At eight thirty, Amy Winehouse has fallen silent. Gone back to black. I call Axelsen over in Newport and tell him that I’m not feeling well and won’t be coming this morning. He’s fine with that. I don’t think he wants me on his team anyway.

Sikorsky still hasn’t been found.

Under questioning from Rogers and gang, Tony Leonard has admitted to dealing drugs. Drugs that he’s bought from Sikorsky. He knows Kapuscinski by sight, but nothing more.

I feel increasingly detached from myself, from the investigation, from Brydon, from everything. Because I know that I need human contact when I’m in this state, I play everything according to the book. Call my mum, chat with her. Call Bev, chat with her. Call Brydon, get his voice mail, don’t leave a message but send a text instead.

I call Jane, who’s in the office. I tell her I’m taking the morning off. She tells me not to worry. “You really need it, Fiona.” She tells me that she’s got more prostitute interviews set up for tonight, but “only come in if you feel you can. You need some rest.”

She and I never know what to call the prostitutes. They call themselves “girls,” which seems patronizing. We mostly call them “prostitutes,” which seems derogatory. Gill Parker always refers to them as the “sex worker community,” which makes them sound like a cross between an important export industry and a bunch of special-needs schoolkids. Which, come to think of it, at least has the virtue of accuracy.

At midday, I realize I haven’t really eaten anything. I take the gun off my belly, put some clothes on, and skedaddle out in search of something like food. I go to a sandwich shop up by the Aldi at the top end of the Glyn Coed Road. It’s a rubbish shop, but at least I know my way there and I get the dozy shop assistant to put some gloopy tuna-sweetcorn mix into an aging baguette. She completes the concoction with a lettuce leaf that’s brown along the edges. But it’s food.

I sit outside in the sunshine to eat it.

On a bit of grass opposite the Aldi, I check my phone. A message from Brydon. I’d forgotten that he was back up in London, and his text says,
PROBABLY
STILL
BE
HERE
TOMORROW.
SEE
YOU
AS
SOON
AS
I
CAN.
DAVEX
. These days, he texts me with a kiss at the end. He’s found a macho way to do it though, converting Dave into Davex. Or maybe he’s just lazy about putting in the space. Or maybe I’m overanalyzing. I think about texting back, but the worse my head is the more tightly I cling to my Standard Operating Procedures. And the Standard Date Girl Operating Procedure is to play it cool, so I do. I won’t call or text again until this evening.

I can’t quite put the phone away, though. I go on chewing my baguette, which isn’t too bad in the mouth but then turns to something like decorator’s caulk in the belly. I was right to take the morning off, but I’m feeling a little lost. I like the banter of colleagues. I’d even like it if Jim Davis were on the case with me, sucking his yellow teeth and laughing his cynical
hur, hur, hur.

I make further progress with the baguette, but the blunt, pointy end has an armor plating that I can’t penetrate. I scoop out the last bit of tuna with my fingers, swallow that, and chuck everything else away.

Then I hesitate no longer. I lick the tuna gloop off my fingers and send a text. To Lev. My contact, not Dad’s contact. My own personal helper of last resort. A wanderer on the dark side.

My text says,
IF
YOU’RE
AROUND,
I’D
LIKE
TO
SEE
YOU.
FI
. Before I even get home, I get one back.
TONIGHT
.

I feel relief. Lev’s coming. Everything’s going to be okay.

That evening with Jane, we’re sitting with five prostitutes in a bedsit near Llanbradach Street. Photos. Chocolate cake. Cigarettes. Net curtains in the windows and carpet worn down to the warp. The battery pulled out of the smoke alarm, because it goes off otherwise. A pink lace top hung over the bedside lamp, because the whole place risked looking too classy without it.

Silly girls swapping clothes and comparing underwear and giggling at the photo of George Clooney and not telling us anything that would allow us to save them from whichever bastard is going around murdering their friends.

I lose it. Jane has shoved the photo of Wojciech Kapuscinski at them, and they’re wanting to turn quickly on to another image. And I lose it.

I shout. I really shout. These things aren’t just a question of volume—though I give it all I’ve got—they’re a question of energy too. Of really meaning it. And I really mean it.

“Don’t touch that!”
I shout at the girl, Luljeta, who’s about to toss the Kapuscinski photo to one side. “Don’t you dare fucking touch that! You know this man, don’t you? Look at me.
Look
at me! You know this man, don’t you? Yes or no? Give me a fucking yes or no. Don’t lie.”

Luljeta is terrified. The room—including Jane in her powder blue linen dress next to me on the sofa—is utterly silent. And Luljeta nods.

“Yes.”

“What’s his name? Give me his name.”

She pauses, trying to be tactical, but I’m too angry for tactics. I open my mouth ready to yell again, but Luljeta preempts me. Her voice is tiny, but truthful.

“Wojtek. Polish guy.”

“Surname?”

Luljeta shrugs, but that’s probably real. She probably doesn’t know.

“Kapuscinski, yes? Wojciech Kapuscinski. Is that correct?”

“Yes, I think.”

“And what do you know about him? I need to know everything. Not just you, Luljeta. All of you.”

It takes time, and I have to yell twice more, but we get it. Kapuscinski is one of Sikorsky’s thugs. Sikorsky is reputed to have organized and maybe committed the Mancini and Edwards killings. All that much is hearsay. No search warrants for hearsay. But then Jayney, one of the Welsh girls, pulls up her top. She’s bruised and cut everywhere from her knicker line up to her shoulders. Old bruises now, yellow and purple, but still horrendous. Not just fists either. It looks like boots to me, and maybe a stick or iron bar or something as well.

“This was him,” she says. She’s crying as she says it and pointing to the photo of Kapuscinski. “He’s who Sikorsky mostly uses. He said that I’d been buying from someone else, but I hadn’t. I just haven’t been using as much recently. I had flu and wasn’t working, but he didn’t believe me. He just came in and—”

She continues.

Jane’s perfect policewoman mode is called for now. Her pencil is flicking across the pages of her notebook, recording names and dates and times and places. Jayney’s admission prompts something similar from Luljeta, and further confessions follow. Accusations, in fact, but they feel and sound like confessions. By the time it’s over, we have material evidence not just on Sikorsky—where we already had it—but on Kapuscinski, a Russian called Yuri, and someone else called Dimi.

Warrants to obtain. Arrests to make.

Jane takes about two hours to get through the evidence that comes tumbling out. I don’t participate, or almost not at all. I feel drained and empty. I ought to be taking notes, to supplement Jane’s, but I can’t. I pretend to, but I don’t really manage anything at all. Jayney has her top down again, but I see straight through it. All these girls look naked to me now. Little bodies, covered with bruises. Bruises that exist here and now, in Jayney’s case. Bruises that exist only in the past or in the future—or in the past
and
in the future—for the other girls here. Bruises that will go on existing, go on multiplying no matter what bunch of arseholes is controlling the drugs trade, because whenever young women sell their bodies for sex, there will be leather-jacketed men to make sure that the profits end up in other hands, other fists.

Twice, as Jane is doing her stuff, I put my hands up to my eyes. I want to see if I can feel any tears. I can’t, but I don’t know whether people can feel themselves crying or whether they have to make a physical check to be sure. Even if there aren’t tears here right now, I’ve got a feeling inside which might be the sort of thing that normally goes with crying. I don’t know, though. I’m not the best person to ask.

I would like to kill Sikorsky and Kapuscinski and Fletcher and Yuri Someone and Dimi Whoever.

And then, after I had done all that, I would like to resurrect the drowned and fish-eaten Brendan Rattigan from the waters of Cardiff Bay, so that I could kill him too.

I let Jane do her stuff and sit next to her in a daze. I’m pleased she’s here.

When we emerge onto the street, it is 9:00
P.M.
Jane has magicked a navy blue cardigan from somewhere and puts it on. I’m wearing trousers and a white top, but I’m not cold, or not cold in that way.

“Are you okay?” Jane asks.

“Yes.”

Jane brandishes her notebook. “I’ll deal with this, if you like. Jackson will want to know.”

I nod. Yes. Jackson will want to know. He’s finally got what he wanted.

“If you want to … I mean, if you want to tell Jackson with me, then you should.”

I’m puzzled by that. I don’t understand. I presumably say or do something to indicate my puzzlement, because Jane explains.

“I’ll tell him anyway. That it was you who did that in there. I don’t know how you knew to do that, but it worked all right. I’ll make sure Jackson knows that.”

I shake my head. I didn’t
know
to do anything. I just did it. “I lost it, Jane. That’s all. I couldn’t stand those girls keeping their mouths shut anymore. I just lost it.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“Yes.” Everyone is asking me that at the moment. “I think I’ll go home. Is that okay? Sorry to leave you with all the follow-up.”

“You go home.”

The sky above is that mid-blue of late summer evenings, neither light nor dark. The streetlights are blinking on, but they’re not needed, not yet. The house behind us is quiet. The little Edwardian street is mostly quiet too. At the bottom end of the road, the river files past, holding its silence. A river insect, confused by the lamplight, ends up fluttering around in my hair. Jane reaches for it and releases it.

“Thanks,” I say.

She smiles at me, tidies my hair back into place where she and the insect ruffled it, then says, “Drive safely.”

I nod and do just that. Sober and safe and under the speed limit. It’s not what I want, though. Some part of me wants the exact opposite. Some part of me would like a two-hour drive on empty roads and no speed cameras. A curving ride through the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountains. A sunset that never quite dies, just beckons onward into the next valley, up the next slope, round the next bend. No traffic, no direction, no destination.

I don’t get that, but I do get home in one piece.

I microwave a meal straight from the freezer. It’s icy in the middle when I eat it, but at least I eat it.

I think about a smoke and decide against.

I have a hot bath. I think about putting some music on but can’t think of anything that will alter anything, so I just leave the silence.

When I get out of the bath, I don’t put on office clothes again. Lev’s coming in a bit, and he’s not an office clothes kind of guy. I wear jeans, gym shoes, and a T-shirt. I’ll add a fleece top if we go out.

Then Brydon calls. He’s in London but has just heard the news Jane brought in to Cathays Park. Huge excitement, apparently. He wants to talk all about it, but I close him off. We’ve spent enough time talking about work things in our lives, so instead we talk rubbish—nice, affectionate, directionless rubbish—for twenty minutes, then he yawns and I tell him he should go to bed.

“See you soon, Fi.”

“Yes, see you soon. I’m missing you.”

“Likewise. Look after yourself.”

I have an image of him making love to me on the living room floor. Urgent and intense. Not too many words. Not too gentle or too solicitous. A lovemaking that leaves bite marks. I wonder if that’s how ordinary people have sex. It wasn’t like that with me and Ed Saunders, but that’s not a very big sample to go from.

We say goodbye.

I’d snooze if I could, but my adrenaline is up and I don’t know when Lev will be coming. I never do, except that it’ll be far too late. Not a morning person, is our Lev.

I have the TV on. It’s after
Newsnight
has closed down. There’s a black-and-white film on BBC 2. It involves violence against women, so I watch it with the sound turned off and even then all I can see is Jayney’s bruises. I shouldn’t even be watching it really. Sometime after midnight, I start to doze. And then I hear a car engine coming to a halt outside the house, and catch a couple of headlights shutting off.

I get my bag, check the gun, go to the door.

33

Lev.

He looks like he always looks, which is to say like not much. Old jeans, a much-washed sweatshirt, sneakers. Not a big guy, maybe five foot eight, something like that, and not particularly broad. Lean and muscled in his leanness, the way you might expect an ocean sailor or a mountain climber to be. Dark hair, always a bit too long and never very combed. Ambiguous skin that could place him anywhere in the arc that runs from Spain through to Kazakhstan and beyond, though I’m damn sure he’s not Spanish. His age is similarly indeterminate. I used to think he was about my age when I first met him, a bit older perhaps, but not much. Then I realized from one or two snippets he let fall about his past that he could be a fair bit older. He could be anywhere between thirty and almost fifty. I honestly couldn’t narrow it any more than that. The one thing you really notice about Lev—or more accurately, something you don’t notice at all and only find yourself thinking about afterward—is the way he moves. Catlike. That would be the normal term, but I imagine that whoever first developed that queen of clichés never spent much time looking at cats, who are always licking their bits or finding new ways to scratch themselves. That’s not Lev at all. He’s still mostly, but there’s a poise in his stillness, a potential for sudden flowing action, which means that his stillness has more motion in it than anyone else’s movement. More motion and more violence.