Talking to the Dead (2 page)

“He’ll plead guilty.”

“I know he’ll plead guilty.”

“Got to be done, though.”

“Ah, yes, forgot it was State the Obvious Day. Sorry.”

“Thought you might be interested in this.”

He passes me a clear plastic evidence bag that contains a Visa debit card. Lloyds bank. Platinum account. Expiration date October last year. Name of Mr. Brendan T. Rattigan. Card neither shinily new nor badly marked. It is a dead card, that’s all.

I shake my head. “Nope. Don’t think so. Not interested at all.”

“Rattigan. Brendan Rattigan.”

The name means nothing to me. Either my face says it or I do. I sip at the tea—still too hot—rub my eyes, and smile an apology at Brydon for being a cow.

He wrinkles his face at me. “Brendan Rattigan. Newport’s finest. Scrap metal man, moves into steel. Mini-mills, whatever they are. Then shipping. Worth some ridiculous amount of money. A hundred million pounds or something.”

I nod. I remember now, but it’s not Rattigan’s wealth that I remember or care about. Brydon is still talking. There’s something in his voice that I haven’t yet identified.

“He died nine months back. Light aircraft accident in the estuary.” He jerks his thumb in the general direction of Roath Dock in case I don’t know where the Severn Estuary is. “No cause established. Copilot’s body recovered. Rattigan’s body never was.”

“But here’s his card.” I stretch out the clear plastic around the card, as though getting a clearer look at it will unlock its secrets.

“Here’s his card all right.”

“Which hasn’t spent nine months in salt water.”

“No.”

“And you found it where exactly?”

Brydon’s face freezes for a moment. He’s stuck between two alternatives. Part of him wants to enjoy his little triumph over me. The other part of him is grimmer, a fifty-year-old head on younger shoulders, gazing inward at the dark.

The grimmer part wins.

“Not me, thank God. Neath police station got a call. Anonymous caller. Female. Probably not elderly, probably not a kid. She gives the address of a house here in Cardiff, Butetown, says we need to get over there. A couple of uniforms do that. Locked door. Curtains over the windows. Neighbors either out or unhelpful. Uniforms go round the back. Back garden is”—Brydon turns his hands palm upward and I know instantly what he means—”Rubble. Garbage bags that the dogs have been at. Rubbish everywhere. Weeds. And shit. Human shit … The drains inside are blocked and you can imagine the rest. The uniforms had been hesitating about going inside, but not anymore. They break down a door. The house inside is worse than the garden.”

Another short pause. No theater this time. No hesitation. Just the awful feeling that decent human beings have when they encounter horror. I nod, to say that I know what he feels, which isn’t true but is what he needs to hear.

“Two bodies. A woman, maybe twenties. Red-haired, dead. Evidence of class A drug usage, but no cause of death established. Not yet. And a little girl. A cutie, apparently. Five, maybe six. Thin as a matchstick. And … Christ, Fi, somebody had dropped a fucking sink on her head. A big farmhouse-style thing. The sink didn’t even break, it just crushed her. They hadn’t even bothered to fucking move it afterward.”

Brydon has emotion in his eyes, and his voice is crushed too, lying under that heavy stoneware sink in a house that stinks of death, even from here.

I’m not that good at feelings. Not yet. Not the really ordinary human ones that arise from instinct like water bubbling up from a hillside spring, irrepressible and clear and as natural as singing. I can picture that house of death, because the last few years have taken me into some pretty bad places and I know what they look like, but I don’t have Brydon’s reaction. I envy it but can’t share it. But Brydon is my friend and he’s sitting in front of me, wanting something. I reach for his forearm. He’s not wearing a jacket, and the exchange of warmth between his skin and mine is immediate. He breathes out through his mouth. Noiselessly. Releasing something. I let him do it, whatever it is.

After a moment, he throws grateful eyes at me, pulls away, and drains his tea. His face is still grim, but he’s one of those elastic sorts who’ll be fine. It might have been different if he’d been the one finding the bodies.

Brydon indicates the platinum credit card. “In among the crap, they find that.”

I can imagine it. Dirty plates. Furniture too large for the room. Brown velour and old food stains. Clothes. Broken toys. A TV. Drug stuff: tobacco, needles, lighters. Plastic bags filled with useless things: car mats, clothes hangers, CD cases, nappies. I’ve been to those places. The poorer the house, the more the stuff. And somewhere in among it, on a dresser under a pile of late notices from the utility companies, a single platinum debit card. A single platinum card and a little girl, a cutie, with her head smashed to nothing on the floor.

“I can imagine.”

“Yeah.” Brydon nods, bringing himself back. He’s a D.S. This is a job. We’re not in that house, we’re in an office with low-energy ceiling lamps and ergonomic desk chairs and high-output photocopiers and views out over Cathays Park. “Major hoo-ha.”

“Yes.”

“Jackson is running the inquiry, but it’s an all-hands-on-deck affair.”

“And he wants my hand on his deck.”

“He does indeed.”

“This card. Why it was there.”

“Yep. It’s probably just some druggy card-theft type thing, but we need to follow the lead anyway. Any connections. I know it’s a long shot.”

He starts telling me things about the investigation. It’s being called Operation Lohan. Daily briefing at 8:30 sharp. Sharp means sharp. Everyone expected to show, that includes non–core team members like me. The press has received a very brief statement, but all further details to be kept quiet for now. Brydon tells me all this, and I only half-hear him. It’s called Lohan because there’s an actress named Lindsay Lohan who’s a redhead and has had drink and drugs issues. I know this only because Brydon tells me, and he tells me only because he knows I’d have no idea otherwise. Famous for my ignorance, me.

“You got all that?”

I nod. “You okay?”

He nods. Attempts a grin. Not a brilliant attempt but more than passable.

I take the card back to my desk, pulling the plastic bag tight around my finger and tracing the outline of the card with the thumb and forefinger of my free hand.

Somebody killed a young woman. Somebody dropped a heavy sink onto a little girl’s head. And this card—belonging to a dead millionaire—was there as it happened.

Routine is fine. Secrets are better.

3

The briefing room next morning, where sharp means sharp.

One side of the Incident Room is taken up with notice boards in pale buff that are already starting to swarm with names, roles, assignments, questions, and lists. The bureaucracy of murder. The star of the show is a set of photos. Crime scene images which are all about documentary accuracy, not careful lighting, but there’s something about their bluntness which gives them an almost shocking truthfulness.

The woman lies on a mattress on the floor. She could be sleeping, or in some drug-induced coma. She doesn’t look either happy or unhappy, peaceful or unpeaceful. She just looks like the dead look, or like anyone at all looks when they’re sleeping.

The child is another matter. You can’t see the top half of her head, because it isn’t there. The kitchen sink stretches right across the photo, out of focus on its upper edge, because the photographer was focusing on the face, not the sink. From beneath it peep the child’s nose, her mouth and chin. The force of the sink has ejected blood through her nose and sprayed it downward, like some joke shop trick gone wrong. Her mouth is pulled back. I imagine that the weight of the sink caused the skin or muscle to pull backward. What I’m looking at is simple mechanics, not an expression of feeling. Yet humans are humans and what looks like a smile is interpreted as a smile, even if it’s no such thing, and this girl with the top of her head missing is smiling at me. Smiling out of death, at me.

“Poor little thing.”

The coffee-breathed speaker behind me is Jim Davis, a veteran copper, in uniform for most his time on the force and now a sturdily reliable D.S.

“Yes, poor little girl.”

The room is full now. Fourteen of us, including just three women. At this stage of an investigation, these briefings have an odd, jumpy energy. There’s anger and grittiness on the one hand, a kind of remorseless male heartiness on the other. And everywhere, people wanting to
do
something.

Eight twenty-eight. D.C.I. Dennis Jackson motors out of his office, jacket already off, sleeves already rolled up. A D.I. Hughes, Ken Hughes, who I don’t know very well, follows him, looking important.

Jackson gets up front. The room falls silent. I’m standing by the photo wall and feel the presence of that little girl on the side of my face as intensely as I would if it were a real person. More intensely, maybe.

The case is less than twenty-four hours old, but routine inquiries have already thrown up a good pile of facts and suppositions. Jackson goes through them all, speaking without notes. He is possessed by the same jumpy energy that fills the room, snapping off his phrases and throwing them out at us. Iron pellets of information.

No one on the electoral roll registered at that address.

Social Services appear to know the woman and child, however. Final identification is hoped for later in the day, but the woman is almost certain to turn out to be Janet Mancini. Her daughter is April.

Assuming those identifications are confirmed, then the backstory is this. Mancini was twenty-six at the time of her death. The child just six.

Mancini’s home background was lousy. Given up for adoption. Taken into care. A few foster families, some of which worked better than others. Started at adult education college. Not bright, but trying to do her best.

Drugs. Pregnancy. The child moving in and out of care, according to whether Mancini or her demons were on top at the time. “Social Services pretty sure that Mancini was unstable but not a lunatic.” A grin which is more of a grimace. “Not a sink dropper, anyway.”

The last contact with Social Services was six weeks back. Mancini had been apparently drug-free. Her flat—not the address where she’d been found but one in one of the nicer bits of Llanrumney—was reasonably tidy and clean. The child was properly dressed, fed, and attending school. “So. Last contact, no problems.”

The next time Social Services come round to visit, Mancini is a no-show. Maybe at her mam’s. Maybe somewhere else. Social Services are concerned but not hitting alarm buttons.

“The house where they’re found is a squat, obviously. No record of Mancini having any previous connection with it. We’ve got a statement from the neighbor on one side. Nothing helpful.” Jackson stabs at the notice boards. “It’s all there and on Groove. If you haven’t got up to speed already, then you should have.” Groove is our project management and document-sharing system. It works well, but it wouldn’t feel like an incident room unless there were notice boards fluttering with paper.

Jackson then stands back to let Hughes rattle on through other known facts. The evidence from utility bills, police records, phone use. The things that a modern force can acquire almost instantly. He mentions Rattigan’s debit card, without making a big thing of it. Then he finishes, and Jackson takes over.

“Initial autopsy findings later today, maybe, but we won’t have anything definitive for a while. I suggest, however, we proceed on the assumption that the girl was killed by a kitchen sink.” His first attempt at humor, if you can call it that. “The mother. OD, possibly. Asphyxiation? Heart attack? Don’t yet know.

“Focus of the investigation at this stage is, Continue to gather all possible information about the victims. Past. Background. Known associates. Query drug dealing. Query prostitution. House-to-house inquiries. I want to know about anyone who entered that house. I want to know about anyone that Mancini met, saw, talked to, anything in those six weeks since Social Services last saw her. Key question: Why did Mancini move to that squat? She was drug-free, looking after her kid, doing well. Why did she throw all that away? What made her move?

“Individual assignments here”—meaning the notice boards—”and Groove. Any questions, to me. If you can’t get hold of me, then to Ken. If you uncover anything important or anything that might be important, let me know straightaway, no excuses.”

He nods, checking he hadn’t left anything out. He hadn’t. Briefings like this, early on in any serious crime investigation, are partly theater. Any group of coppers will always treat murder as the most serious thing they ever have to deal with, but team dynamics demand a ritual. The haka of the All Blacks. Celtic woad. Battle music. Jackson puts his weary-but-determined look to one side and puts on his grim-and-resolute one instead.

“We don’t yet know if Janet Mancini’s death was murder, but we’re treating it that way for now. But the girl. She was six years old. Six. Just started at school. Friends. At their Llanrumney flat, the one she left six weeks ago, there were paintings of hers hanging up on the fridge. Clean clothes hanging up in her bedroom. Then this.” He points to the photo of her on the notice board, but none of us look at it, because it’s already inside our heads. Around the room, the men are clamping their jaws and looking tough. D.C. Rowland, Bev Rowland, a good friend of mine, is crying openly.

“Six years old, then this. April Mancini. We’re going to find the man who dropped that sink, and we’re going to send him to jail for the rest of his life. That’s our job. What we’re here to do. Now let’s get on with it.”

The meeting breaks up. Chatter. A charge for the coffee machine. Too much noise.

I grab Bev. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine really. I knew today wasn’t going to be a mascarary kind of day.”

I laugh. “What have they got you doing?”

“Door-to-door, mostly. The woman’s touch. How about you?”

There’s a funny kind of assumption in her answer and her question. The assumption is that I don’t quite count as a woman, so I don’t quite get the jobs which female D.C.s are usually assigned. I don’t resent that assumption. Bev is the sort to cry when Jackson puts on his gravel-voiced tearjerker finale. I’m not. Bev is the sort of comfortable soul that people will happily open up to over a cup of tea. I’m not. I mean, I can do the door-to-door stuff. I’ve done it before and asked the right questions and sometimes obtained valuable information. But Bev is a natural, and we both know I’m not.