Talking to the Dead (29 page)

But I don’t say that. I just sit mute as Jackson lobs rockets at me.

“Fiona, what made you chase after Fletcher? Don’t tell me it was conspiracy hearsay crap, because I won’t believe you.”

“It
was
a bit to do with that, sir, but there is another part that I can’t tell you about. Sorry.”

“It’s not your father, is it?”

“No, nothing to do with him. I made a promise to someone and I have to keep it.”

There’s a pause. Crackle on the line. Microwave radiation from the formation of the universe.

“I would love to give you a formal warning. I really would. The police force is a structured organization. There are reasons for the structures, and we work better because they exist.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s not like—it’s not like the way your dad works. It’s not like the way, I don’t know, some Cambridge philosophy department works.”

“No.”

“And it pains me to say it, really pains me, but much as I would like to give you a bollocking for this, I can’t quite do it. I’ve checked with Alexander and Rogers and the lab, and they tell me you’ve been on the case. And you did find two hundred grand in drug money.”

“Thank you.” Yes:
thank you.
You noticed. Hallelujah.

“But you’re not off the hook. I am not sure if you are the kind of detective we can use in South Wales. You’re either very good, or absolutely terrible, or a bit of both. And I can’t use terrible. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve spoken to Gethin Matthews and Cerys Howells, and they agree with my assessment. You’re not going to be able to play them off against me, or the other way round. We’re in the same place on this.”

“I understand.”

“Okay. Now, if I asked you what you wanted to do next—interview with Jane Alexander in Cardiff or attach yourself to this Gwent inquiry—what would you tell me?”

“I’d like to do both. As much as I can. I think Jane and I are working well with our prostitutes, but I don’t think we should lose sight of the Fletcher angle.”

“You’ll manage to do both, will you?”

“I’m not sure. Working with prostitutes is an afternoon or evening thing anyway. Maybe I could work in Newport in the morning, then come over to Cardiff for the afternoon.”

“Okay. Don’t kill yourself, but a little bit of self-harm where you’re concerned—that would do me fine. I’ll call Axelsen and let him know to expect you. Don’t get yourself into any trouble with him, because if you do, I will murder you. Literally murder you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And no flying solo again with me, ever, under any circumstances. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay.”

Jackson hangs up. I’m in Pentwyn and I haven’t been fired.

31

Six days slide by almost unnoticed. Dark fish in an urban canal. Sleep and I aren’t best of friends at the moment. I’m averaging four or five hours a night, and that only with the futon and gun arrangement. It’s not the regular way to get some kip, I know that, but I’ve given up on being Little Miss Regular a long time back. I’m tired all the time and I’m not eating properly, but I’m surviving. I’m getting by. When I wake up at dawn, I go downstairs for a smoke, then come up again and read in bed, drinking tea and listening to music. It’s not sleep, but it’s not a bad substitute. It’s all I’ve got, anyway.

My mornings are spent down at Newport. Gwent Police has taken over a chunk of the Rattigan Transport building, and our little team works out of a conference room there. It smells of warm laptops, copier paper, and male sweat. Mine too, for all I know. The aircon is another area where Rattigan seems to have saved his pennies.

And the stuff I learn. Stuff I never even knew existed. Like, for example, deep-sea fishing off British coastal waters. That image you have of it—all Hemingway, and bulging forearms, and Floridian sunshine, and ninety-pound marlins dangling from the scales—all that is bollocks. Maybe it’s not bollocks in the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s proper oceangoing bollocks if it’s the Severn Estuary and the Irish Sea you’re talking about.

In British waters, the sort that Brendan Rattigan and his best buddy, Huw Fletcher, used to fish in, you don’t get marlin. You don’t get tuna. You don’t get fish that you want to hang from scales and show your buddies in the pub.

You get cod. You get whiting. You get herring, for God’s sake. Turbot. Small, cold fish swimming around in small, cold seas. Gray waves and rain. It’s a sport for blokes who bring tea with them in thermoses and boast about how bad the weather was.

That first morning, I call Cefn Mawr and get Miss Titanium again. I tell her who I am. She’s icy with me. Hostile. She doesn’t say anything she shouldn’t, but that’s what you get from paying top dollar for your support staff. Even their hostility is classy.

“Look,” I say, “I’m very sorry to have caused an upset last time. The investigation was important, and the questions did need addressing.”

“Maybe so.”

“I don’t need to bother Mrs. Rattigan this time, but perhaps I can ask you a number of simple questions. Just three. Literally.”

“Very well.”

“First, have you ever heard of a man called Huw Fletcher? A colleague or friend of Mr. Rattigan’s, perhaps?”

“No, never.”

“Have you ever heard of a man called Brian Penry?”

“No.”

“Okay. Last question. A certain person currently under investigation claims to have been deep-sea fishing with Mr. Rattigan. Not just once, but many times. Days on end, sometimes. In the U.K., probably. Or starting from here. So the Irish Sea, the North Atlantic. Perhaps the North Sea or the Baltic—”

I haven’t even finished before Titanium interrupts. “No. Your information is incorrect. I’ve never heard of the late Mr. Rattigan showing any interest in fishing at all. He didn’t even fish on the river outside the house here. I can’t imagine anything he would have liked to do less. Will that be all?”

She’s got a nasty edge of triumph in her voice. She wants me to believe that I’ve fucked up, that I’ve got it wrong, that we police are idiots. So I say, very warmly, “That’s
exceptionally
helpful. No interest in fishing at all?
Excellent.
Thank you
very
much.” I say that to offend and annoy her, and hang up satisfied at a job well done.

But that was a highlight. For the rest of the time, me and three junior officers from the Gwent force are simply sifting through heaps of tedious data. Vessels and routes handled by Rattigan Transport. Logistics issues. Client contacts. Bills of lading. Customs dues. Bonded warehouses. Emails. Phone logs. Bank statements.

No one knows what we’re looking for. We all assume we’ll know it when we see it, except that I don’t think we will. Either it’s under our noses already, or it isn’t here at all. We get Jim Hughes and all his colleagues together and press them to supply any photos they have of nights out with clients or any other images they may have of Huw Fletcher’s contacts. Most of them have nothing at all, but Andy Watson turns out to have a fair few on his phone, and we start collecting names and images. We can check the names against the criminal records system. The images we can start to show to prostitutes and the people from StreetSafe. It all feels like fishing in the dark. The cold, rainy dark.

Those are my mornings.

The afternoons are more or less the polar opposite of all that. Or not afternoons exactly, but early evenings. My routine is now this. By about two in the afternoon, I’m back at Cathays Park. I catch up on paperwork for an hour or so, then at three have a briefing with Jane Alexander. Not on Sunday, of course. I more or less take that day off, and the Saturday is a half day too, though I’m too shattered to relax. But apart from those breaks that don’t feel like breaks, we push on, talking to as many prostitutes as we can, trying to gain their trust, trying to find Jackson an angle that will break the case open.

To begin with, our technique was simple. We brought as many prostitutes as we could together in one place—their own homes or flats, of course; we avoided Cathays Park completely—and bribed them with cakes and chocolates, if need be. Then we showed them photos. Loads of them. Photos of the victims: Janet and April Mancini, Stacey Edwards, Ioana Balcescu. Photos of anyone associated with the crime scene or the primary suspect: Sikorsky, Kapuscinski, Leonard, Vaughan, Lloyd, and anyone else we can connect to those names, Sikorsky’s in particular. Any CCTV images we have that seem relevant for some reason. Photos from the Fletcher inquiry down in Newport: Russian shipping clients that just might have a drug connection somewhere along the line. Piles and piles of photos.

It didn’t work. We got exactly nowhere. Kyra, who had been so stupidly free on the phone with me, clammed up completely when she understood what we wanted. The other girls were sullen. As soon as we showed them photos that were really meaningful—Sikorsky, Kapuscinski, Stacey Edwards—they just stopped talking. They ate our cake, chain-smoked, and squirmed under our questions like teenagers at a family gathering. Jane got tart and police officerish with them, and the mood deteriorated completely.

After two days of that, at my suggestion, we tried another tack. We got Tomasz to print off bundles of celebrity photos from the Internet. Film stars, TV actors, singers. Cleverly, he added in photos of people who were celebrities only in Poland or the Balkans, photos that would get the East European girls chattering.

And chatter they did. The conversation flowed. We mixed up all the photos so there was no particular order to them, and the girls were vastly more talkative. When we showed them the Tony Leonard photo, two of the girls reported that he had dealt them drugs in the recent past. The pictures of Sikorsky and Kapuscinski made them clam up, but even then their clamming up was significant—a sign that they knew things they didn’t want to say, not just a general protest against having police officers in their living room.

As we got out of the house that evening—a two-up, two-down a couple of hundred yards from the Taff Embankment—Jane was vertiginous with pleasure, doing a little dance of triumph down the pavement, a slim, blond Ginger Rogers waltzing to the river.

“That was brilliant,” she said to me. “That was probably the best thing that’s happened to me since being in the CID.”

She phoned Jackson on his mobile, getting him at home. She told him that we had reasonable suspicion to arrest Tony Leonard on drug charges and enough grounds to apply for a warrant to search his house.

She listened a bit to whatever Jackson had to say. “Yes,” she said. “Yes … Yes.” With each new
yes,
she tried to curl her hair back behind her listening ear, only to lean forward again, causing the hair to fall forward. When she got off the phone, she did another side-shuffle, fist-pumpy thing of pleasure.

“Jackson’s going to arrange a dawn raid. Apparently the London lab has just confirmed that the London heroin matches the samples found at Allison Street. This could be it. It could be the thing that breaks the case open.”

Because Jane was obviously so pleased, I allowed myself to do a high five with her. I felt an idiot doing it—and didn’t think that raiding Tony Leonard’s house would give us what we needed—but I liked Jane in Ginger Rogers mode, and I didn’t want to be the party pooper.

Sure enough, Jackson does organize a raid and starts to rip Leonard’s house to shreds. Because I’m over in Newport a lot, I don’t hear all the details, but I bet the lads involved love it. Mervyn Rogers is assigned to do the interviewing, and he’ll love it. He does a good tough interview and Leonard will be a soft target. There’s a decent chance that Leonard says something to implicate Sikorsky.

Meantime, Jane and I keep our noses to the grindstone. A grindstone that turns and brings us nothing further, beyond bloody faces.

Sikorsky is still out there. So is Fletcher. So is Kapuscinski. And so is Brian Penry, who probably knows how the whole thing stitches together. Keeping his mouth shut as people die.

I’ve stopped knowing who I am.

32

By Thursday, I’m feeling ragged.

I’ve had my worst night yet. Three scant hours of sleep. Smoking in my dressing gown in the garden for the two hours from dawn onward. Then back to bed for mint tea, energy bars, and Amy Winehouse singing to me from downstairs.

I think about Brydon. On my weekend off—the one that didn’t feel like a weekend and during which I never felt off duty—we tried to have a second date together. We met in the same wine bar as before. Cathedral Road. All very middle-class. I dressed nicely and washed my hair just for him. I remembered about smiling and asking Brydon questions about himself. I remembered all about how I was meant to be girlish and supple and appreciative and not tough. But the date was still a disaster. After I had asked Brydon the exact same question for the third time—”So, what do you like doing when it’s hot? I can’t see you as the sun-bathing type”—he took control.

“Fi, are you sleeping properly?”

“No.”

“Do you get bad dreams at all?”

“No.”

“But it’s this case, isn’t it? It’s getting to you.”

“I suppose. Everyone’s telling me that.”

“But no bad dreams?”

I shook my head. None that I’d count.

Brydon nodded. This man was a soldier once and probably knows something about bad dreams. After our drink, Brydon took me next door to a pizza place. I asked for a salad, and he countermanded me, adding a pizza and doughballs and large orange juice to my order. He made sure I ate and drank it too, bossing me into eating the bits I wanted to leave.

In the end, I just let him boss me. I probably forgot to smile lots and ask questions, but I’m fairly sure I didn’t say anything offensive either. When I’d eaten as much as I could, Brydon asked for the bill and drove me home.

“Don’t worry, Fi. Whatever this is will soon be over. And there’s no rush. With us, I mean. We’ll just take it slow. Okay? Get some sleep. Take each day as it comes. And we’ll be okay.”

I nodded. I believed him. We kissed. I couldn’t really feel the kiss, but these days I’m not feeling anything much. Right now, I’m in bed with mint tea on the bedside table and my gun lying flat on my stomach. The gun is the only thing I can feel, and I don’t let go of it all the time I’m there.