Talking to the Dead (11 page)

Penry puts coffee granules in his cup and pours hot water on. No milk. No sugar.

“I don’t have any herbal tea, no.” He grins at me, challenging me to respond. “Good. Then I won’t need this.” I take the unused mug and toss it into the garbage pail. “Shall we talk?”

Penry leaves the mug where I threw it. He seems genuinely pleased by this interaction and barefoots his way into the living room, which is untidy but not squalid. There’s a view through to the back of the house, where Penry’s Georgian conservatory juts out into suburban Cardiff like a schooner nosing into Cowes Week. I pause for just long enough to take it in. The conservatory is empty, except for some plastic wrapping and some builders’ debris, swept into a corner but not cleared. A pair of keys hang on a nail driven into the frame next to the door. The piano is there, but dusty from the building work, and I can’t see any music for it.

Penry sits in what is obviously his armchair—unobstructed view of the TV—and I take a seat on a sofa, where I get a slightly angled view of his face.

“I thought you might like to know where our case stands. I also have one or two further questions. And of course, the more you cooperate, the more your cooperation will be taken into account when it comes to sentencing.”

Penry stares at me some more, then sips his coffee. He says nothing. It was a back injury that forced his retirement, and I notice that his chair is one of those ugly orthopedic numbers. There’s a packet of acetaminophen on the table. You always suspect that, when a cop retires with back injury, it’s mostly a question of the job having taken its toll over the years. Too many years of hassle, and retirement the easy option. The acetaminophen suggests otherwise, however.

I quickly summarize where we are in preparing the prosecution case—which is pretty much all systems go, following my meetings with the CPS and the accountants yesterday. I advance a guesstimated time line for the prosecution.

He answers with a question.

“How old are you?”

I pause for long enough to demonstrate that I’m answering because I choose to, not because I’m stuck in one of his stupid games.

“Twenty-six.”

“You look younger. You look like a baby.”

“Good skin care.”

“Who are you working with?” I don’t immediately answer, so he prods away. “Gethin Matthews probably. Him or Cerys Howells, I should think.”

“Matthews.”

He acknowledges the answer with a grunt, but he’s already sacrificed a little of his authority. He’s managed to establish that I have answers he wants, and he’s reminded himself that baby-faced D.C. Griffiths here is representing grizzled old D.C.I. Matthews. It’s the first tiny victory I’ve won. He must know that somewhere, because he reverts to silence. I hear the slightly asthmatic whine in his breaths, the only thing you could hear on the interview tapes.

I let the pause continue. It’s my pause now. I own it, and I ride that fact for all it’s worth. When I do speak, I say this:

“The thing is, we’re both coppers, so we both know the deal. You stole money. We found out. You’re going to jail. The only question is how long for. That’s the only factor you can influence.

“And we both know that the less cooperative you are, the longer you go down for. In a way, your life is fucked up whatever, but you can choose just how fucked up to make it. Anywhere on a range from quite a bit to quite a lot.

“With ordinary crooks, I don’t expect too much. They don’t cooperate because they’re not being rational, or they can’t bear to help us out, or whatever else it is. You’re not like that. You’re a pro, so you’ll be hardheaded about these things. And the fact that you’re telling us nothing makes me curious about a few things. And if you care to know what I’m curious about, then I’ll tell you.”

The silence in the room now has a frozen quality to it, as though it might crack like ice if you tried to move against it. Penry can’t tell me that he’s hungry for information, because that would offend against his crappy little power games. On the other hand, he can’t say anything else, because he wants to hear what I have to say. Once again, I let the silence do its work.

“Number one, where did your money come from? Some of it came from the school all right, but you spent more money than you stole, or your friend Mr. ap Penri did anyway.

“Now I’m going to take a wild guess and say I know the answer to that. I think the money came from Brendan Rattigan. But that brings us to question number two: What services were rendered in exchange for that money? As far as I know, multimillionaires aren’t in the habit of giving something for nothing.

“And number three, just how much precisely do you know about this?”

From my case, I extract the evidence bag with Rattigan’s platinum card inside it. Penry reaches for it, stares at it, then hands it back. He’s not even pretending to be uninterested now. His brown eyes have a complexity in them that was missing before.

“You might also like to know where we found it. We found it at Number 86 Allison Street. An address where we found a woman dead and her daughter murdered. The mother may have been murdered too. We can’t yet say for definite.

“So you see why I’m curious. If it were only the debit card and only the fact that you happened to share an interest in racing with its owner, then I’d say it was all a coincidence. Something worth investigating maybe, but not the sort of thing that Gethin Matthews would start throwing resources at. As it is, though, your silence kind of connects you to that house, doesn’t it? Any reasonable ex-policeman in your position would be cooperating with us to bring his sentence down. And you haven’t cooperated at all. And the more you don’t tell us, the more you’re telling us that we have to investigate as closely as we possibly can. Which turns an ordinary little bit of embezzlement into something altogether more interesting. Something that’s maybe just a step or two away from murder.”

I finish.

I say nothing. Penry says nothing. As a way of gathering information, this trip has not precisely yielded a rich harvest, but not all harvests look the same or ripen quickly.

I stand up. From my case, I dig out the information wanted poster that was up in Farideh’s shop window and elsewhere in Butetown. I drop it onto the coffee table, but it slithers on from there to the floor. Neither Penry or I stir to pick it up.

“That’s the murdered woman. That’s her murdered child. That’s the number you’d need to call with information.”

I snap my case shut and go to the front door to let myself out. Penry doesn’t move. “By the way, this house is a shithole,” I call through to the living room. “And you should see someone about that asthma.”

Outside on the too-bright street, I take stock. Penry is probably watching from the living room, but if he is I don’t care.

His Yaris is dark blue. There’s a rust spot above the offside wheel arch, and the whole car could use a wash. Who owns shares in a clutch of expensive racehorses and drives a car which, if not quite rubbish, is not exactly a thing of beauty? The only CDs I could see in Penry’s house were modern rock music and a couple of Classic FM brand compilations. Those musical tastes might impel you to buy a piano, or then again they might not. But Penry bought one. An upright piano, a Georgian conservatory, and a sink full of orange scum.

I look back into the living room. Penry is at the window scrutinizing me. I smile, give him a twinkling wave, and return to my car.

On my way back into the office, my mobile bleeps the arrival of a text.

Because I’m an extremely skilled, police-trained driver, I have the resources to check my texts while driving, without compromising the safety and security of other road users. Either that, or I’m a selfish idiot. And this text is an interesting one. It reads:
JANS
NOT
DEAD
YOU
LIARS
IF
SHE
IS
SHES
LUCKYER
THAN
SOME
. My first thought is that this is a windup from a colleague, my second that this is an answer to the ad I’d put in the shop window.

I pull over and jam the car into an available space on the Cowbridge Road. I text back
WHAT
HAPPENED
TO
HER
THEN?

And wait. I’m parked up by a chip shop. A young mum, overweight, leads two overweight kids outside. One of the two, a boy with a taut red face, starts eating from a bag of chips, holding them away from his brother, jamming them successively into his mouth with a savage intensity.

Obesity. Violence. Drugs. Prostitution. A million different ways to screw your life up. Brian Penry chose embezzlement, his own sweet route to self-destruction. What made him take that turning? What accounts for the beat-up Yaris and the expensive, empty conservatory?

Then, just as I think I’m not going to hear back, a text comes in. It reads
RICH
PEPLE
DONT
HAVE
POLICE
SHIT
ITS
PEPLE
LIKE
JAN
THAT
GET
IT
.

There are two ways to read these texts. The obvious one is the way my colleagues will read them. They’re deranged. They have zero evidential value. Maybe even subzero, given that the accusation made in the first text is obviously false. My colleagues might also gently note that there is a reason why requests for information are channeled through official 800 numbers, not to officers’ personal mobiles.

But that’s not the only way to read these messages. For one thing, anyone who knows what happened to Janet Mancini is quite likely a poorly educated, drug-addicted prostitute, so bad spellings and nonexistent grammar may actually be signs that the texter is in a position to know something. And that second text is odd. It’s making a connection—albeit a kind of crazy one—between Janet’s death and “rich peple.” That would mean nothing, except that Brendan Rattigan’s card was found in Janet’s squat. And that in itself would mean nothing, except that Charlotte Rattigan implied that her husband liked it rough and nasty. And all of that might still mean nothing, except that the frozen silence I experienced with Brian Penry told me there were big things hovering close by, unsaid.

No other text comes through, so I send one back. I say I won’t make any further attempt to be in contact, but that whoever it is should feel free to call or text me at any time.
I
WANT
TO
HELP
JAN
AS
MUCH
AS
YOU
DO
, I write, then press Send.

Nothing makes sense.

It’s why I became a policewoman, this ambition to make sense of things. As though the various mysteries and challenges of my life could be made better through the repetitive solution of other people’s puzzles. I’m on a dead end to nowhere, you might say, but even that phrase intrigues me. Death in one half. Nothing at all in the other. The phrase itself is a mystery wanting solution.

My brain is too busy. I figure that there’s one way to lower the pressure and that’s to make sure Rattigan is well and truly dead. I root around in the back of the car for the AAIB report. I find a number and dial it.

With an extraordinary lack of bureaucracy, I am put through swiftly to the person I need to speak to.

“Robin Keighley.” English voice. The sort of voice that Americans love to mock. The sort they associate with effete, end-of-empire aristocracy. But it’s friendly and competent. Good enough for me.

I introduce myself and tell Keighley why I’m calling. I ask him about the plane crash. He’s open and easy with his answers, which roughly speaking follow the gist of the report. The plane had taken off from Birmingham and was heading for Rattigan’s holiday home in southern Spain. They ran into bad weather, and the pilot reported an unidentified problem with the right-hand engine. He asked Bristol Airport for permission to make an emergency landing. Permission was given. His course duly altered, then silence, then a short radio burst, which basically consisted of two brief expletives from the pilot, then nothing.

I speak to Keighley for about twenty minutes. The plane was a Learjet, a good plane properly maintained. Until the very end of the flight, proper procedures had been followed. I notice, though, a slight hesitation in Keighley’s voice when he mentions the pilot. When I ask, he says, “Well, nothing really. The pilot was experienced enough, but had no background in either the RAF or one of the big commercial airlines.”

“Any significance in that?”

“Not really. RAF pilots are obviously trained to operate in extreme conditions. Equally any pilot for a big commercial airline like BA will be put into a flight simulator every six months and have every kind of disaster thrown at him. Those guys have to take it all and pass their tests, or they’re grounded till they do.”

“So maybe a pilot a bit less experienced than you’d like?”

“Less experienced than
I’d
like, yes. But then flight safety is my business. Rattigan’s pilot was fully qualified to be flying the plane he was flying.”

“Any evidence of foul play in the wreckage? Anything at all? Even a whisper of a hint that you couldn’t put in your report because there wasn’t enough to go on?”

“No, nothing, but most of the plane is at the bottom of the sea. I couldn’t rule out foul play, but I have no reason to suspect it.”

“Was this an aircraft type known to have problems? Does the accident fit any kind of known pattern?”

“Yes and no, I suppose you’d say. No in the sense that this was a perfectly decent plane and all the rest of it …”

“But?”

“But then again, if you do get human or maintenance error, you’re most likely to get it with smaller aircraft owned by outfits that don’t have the depth of technical and safety culture you’re going to find at a BA, say, or any one of its peers. That’s why most accidents are and have always been in the general aviation sector.”