Talking to the Dead (26 page)

Brydon is on the step above me and I’m talking somewhere in the region of his belly button. “First things first, Fiona,” he tells me. He comes down a step, then hoists me up to where he’d been standing. We’re still not eyeball to eyeball, but we’re a lot closer.

“Do I see D.C. Griffiths in a dress?” he says. “Have all relevant authorities been notified?”

That’s Brydon humor for you, like it or lump it. “And heels,” I say. “Look.”

He smiles at me. A nice smile, but I know that half his mind is occupied by the clock. He needs to get off to London as soon as he can.

There are still no sounds on the stairs. There’s a hum from the print room, where one of Tomasz’s machines is doing its thing, but nothing that needs to disturb us.

“I just wanted to tell you, I might need to take things slow.”

“Okay.”

“It’s just … things can get a bit crazy in my head, and slow tends to be better than fast.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want you to think that because I—”

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, so I end up not saying anything.

“You don’t want me to think that, although you almost walked out into a line of cars on Cathedral Road last night, you’ve got some kind of death wish.”

“That’s it,” I say. “That’s exactly what I was trying to say.”

For a moment I think he’s going to kiss me again, and I really want him to. I feel lust pulling at me like wind. But he doesn’t. Fortunately for my composure, he bails out of the kiss and just chucks me under my nose with his index finger.

“Slow is fine,” he says.

He’s laughing at me again, and I realize it’s nice being laughed at. Did Ed ever laugh at me in this way? I don’t think so.

Then he’s off. Up the steps. Heavy and light. Thumping the door at the top open so hard that it whacks against its doorstop. The stairwell echoes with the noise of his departure, a reverberation of wood against metal, then returns to silence.

I sit on the step, getting my head into shape again. My pulse rate is high, but it’s steady. I count my breaths, trying to bring my breathing down to a more relaxed range. I move my legs and feet, to make sure that I can feel them as normal, which I largely can.

I’m feeling something, and I think I know what it is. But I do the exercise by the book, and the book says that I have to run through a range of feelings to find the best available match.

Fear. Anger. Jealousy. Love. Happiness. Disgust. Yearning. Curiosity.

Fear. Anger. Jealousy.
Love.

Love.

This isn’t love. Not yet. But it’s heading off in that direction: love, plus a good old splash of happiness. This is the first time in my life that I’ve felt those twins prepare to take up residence. Please make yourself at home, my friends.
Mi casa es su casa.

I go on with the exercise though. Feel the feeling. Name it. Feel it. Put the two things together. Stay with the feeling. Don’t forget to name it. Give it time. And don’t let it take you over. Keep an eye on your heart rate. Watch your breathing. Check to see that you remain “in” your body. Feel those arms. Feel those legs. It can be useful to stamp your feet on the floor to make sure that you feel right down to your feet.

The door above me bangs open again. Two people. Neither of them Dave Brydon. I don’t know either of them. I budge over on my step to make room for them. They peer at me but don’t say anything, just go on into the print room.

This isn’t love and this isn’t happiness. But it’s like I’m in the hallway and can hear their music spilling out of the living room. Hear their laughter, see their candlelight. I’m not there yet. I do know the difference. I’ve had just one single date with Dave Brydon. Nothing that remotely constitutes a relationship. These are early, early days, and anything could happen from here. But, for once in my life, for once in my hopeless, crackpot life, I’m not just in the same time zone, I’m actually shouting-distance close to the love ‘n’ happiness twins.

I feel the feelings, piece by miraculous piece. Bum on a concrete step. Heart thumping. A floaty green dress and sandals with two-and-a-half-inch heels. A man who hoisted me up a step because I was talking into his belly button. This is what humans feel like when they are getting ready to fall in love.

I get up from my step and walk slowly back upstairs to my desk. This is what humans feel like. This is what it’s like to be normal. Fiona Griffiths, human being, is reporting for duty.

But what exactly that duty
is
today is not quite clear. There’s a voice mail from Jane Alexander. Her son is ill and she’s been unable to arrange for alternative child care, so she’s stuck at home. She tells me to call her if I need to. In the meantime, though, my interviews for the day are probably off, unless I can find a D.S. who’ll interview prostitutes with me—which, given the recent news, I probably can’t.

Jackson and Hughes and pretty much everyone else who counts is out of the office, and won’t want to be contacted.

I’ve got a pile of various tedious paperwork type jobs to do, but few of them are urgent. On the other side of the office, a couple of D.C.s are making piles of empty coffee cups and trying to knock them over by throwing a soft indoor rugby ball at them. There are yells of laughter when they succeed, more yells when they fail. I sometimes think it must be a lot easier to be a man.

I pull out the notes I made on all those Social Services files. April and Janet. Stacey Edwards.

There are a million points of comparison between their stories, but there were bound to be. It’s not any old person who becomes a prostitute. It’s the messed up ones. Broken homes, muddled childhoods, some disastrously wrong steps in adolescence. Janet and Stacey both ended up in care, because their parents were crazy, sick, violent or useless. In effect, they never knew their parents. The state took over. What kind of person could go through all that and not end up a bit crazed herself?

That’s part of what hooks me about the Janet and April show. Janet had a crap life, and she fought hard to give her kid a better one. She failed. And yet it’s not her failure which captures me, but the depth of her trying.

Inevitably, I have the photos of April up on screen as I review all this. The interesting dead ones, not the dull toffee apple ones. It’s not quite true that April is trying to tell me something. It would be more accurate to say that I already know it—whatever
it
is—and April’s job is to remind me. I can’t figure it out, though. I stare away from my desk out to the boys fooling around with the rugby ball.

I should be doing other things.

In London, they’re searching Karol Sikorsky’s house.

Last night Dave Brydon kissed me and today he almost kissed me again.

In the glove box of my car, I have a gun. At home I have 490 bullets. The rest are already in the gun.

I’m thinking these thoughts when I get up to make tea. I’m on my way to the kitchenette when a phone starts ringing. It’s not my desk—it’s Mervyn Rogers’s—but since there’s no one else around to do it, I pick it up.

It’s Jackson. “Who’s that? Fiona?”

“That’s right. I don’t think Merv’s around. Do you want me to—?”

“No, don’t worry about that. Listen. We’re in the house here in London and we’ve come across about a kilo of what we’re pretty damn sure is heroin. It’s going straight off to the lab, obviously.”

“Okay, so you want me to get onto the lab here—”

“Yeah. Let’s see if we can make a connection between the stuff we’ve got here and the stuff at Eighty-six Allison Street.”

“And Tony Leonard? Kapuscinski? People like that. You want me to start seeing if we can connect them to the drugs?”

“Precisely. And listen, I want as many warrants as I can get. Leonard. Kapuscinski. Sikorsky’s buddies, basically. Do you think there’s any chance that your prostitute—”

“Ioana Balcescu—”

“Right, any chance that she’d broaden her evidence? Name some more names?”

“I don’t know. I can try. But if we’re right, then any number of prostitutes might be able to testify against these guys.”

“Anything you can get on them. No matter how minor. We just need enough to justify an arrest and a search warrant. I want to start interviewing with a charge sheet behind us.”

“I’ll get onto it right away.”

“Take my name in vain, if you need to. Don’t let things get held up for lack of resources.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay, good. Any problems, shout. Any breakthroughs, tell me right away.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jackson has rung off before I’ve even finished my “sir.” The office seems even quieter now. For a moment, I forget why I’m at Rogers’s desk and not my own, then I remember my tea, then decide against making any.

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
fuckstorm,
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.”