Talking to the Dead (12 page)

“So putting aside any official report, your gut feel would be that someone cocked up. If the plane weren’t sitting somewhere out in Cardiff Bay, you might have a chance of identifying the culprit. As it is, you’re obliged to shrug your shoulders and chalk it up as one of those things.”

“Putting any official report a
long
way to one side, then yes.”

“Can I ask one last question? Off the record, nonofficial, wild speculation.”

“Fire away.”

“Okay. Do you attach any significance to the fact that Rattigan’s body was never found?”

I can hear an intake of breath down the line. Keighley is surprised by the sudden turn in the conversation, and he answers cautiously. “Significance, such as what for example?”

“Let’s just suppose there were a theory that Rattigan in some way arranged the plane crash. That he escaped, his pilot died. Or perhaps the accident was perfectly genuine, but Rattigan seized the opportunity to disappear because he happened to want to for some reason. Is there anything at all in the circumstances of the crash which would make better sense in the light of such a theory?”

Keighley is silent for a long ten seconds. Then he says, “Sorry, got to think about that,” and is silent for another fifteen.

“Okay, then I’ve got to say probably no. Nothing comes to mind, except maybe … well, Rattigan’s body was never recovered. The pilot wore a life jacket and was quickly identified, and his body retrieved. If Rattigan had been wearing a life jacket, then his body should certainly have been recovered too. And there was no sign of it at all. That
is
odd. Contrary to the rule book, if you like. Yet even for that, there are a million innocent explanations, all of which might be more likely than your theory. If, for example, he panicked and simply failed to release his seat belt, then he’d have been dragged under by the wreckage. Or if he refused to put his life jacket on, even if the pilot told him to, then that would account for it too. Stranger things have happened.”

We talk on, and Keighley remains helpful, but I get nothing definite. I’m further ahead than I was. Further ahead into nowhere.

I hang up.

The prickle of energy that woke me this morning is still here, and it occurs to me seriously for the first time that it might be fear. I try the word against the feeling.
This is fear. This is fear.
But I’m not sure. There’s not that clicking-into-place sense, when the word really matches the feeling. I’m not sure what it is. I don’t yet have enough clues.

I drive slowly back to the office, breathing properly as I go.

14

At four that afternoon there’s a briefing. All hands on deck. The DNA results are back from the labs, and word is that some of the DNA comes with names.

You wouldn’t quite say there is a hubbub, but there’s a stirring in the waters, a frisson, a raised energy level which comes from people assuming that the investigation is about to start yielding real results. It’ll be the first time we can actually place named individuals in the house of death. All the report filing, statement taking, pavement pounding, and phone call answering that we’ve done so far hasn’t, in truth, yielded a single clue of solid, undeniable weight.

At ten to four, the Incident Room is already busy. I’ve come down armed with my peppermint tea and one of those whole-grain energy bars. Jim Davis is at the coffee machine, driven as a piglet at a teat.

“Hey, Jim,” I say, a little warily. Davis is not my greatest fan, but then the Fiona Griffiths Fan Club is a fairly select body in the CID. I got on better when I was in uniform, probably because I had less opportunity to express myself.

Davis acknowledges me with a nod, but he’s in the midst of a moan-in with some of his buddies. The scuttlebutt is that recessionary budgets mean no promotions. Not from D.S. to D.I. Not from D.C. to D.S.

“More work, less pay. Always the bloody way, isn’t it?”

That’s Jim Davis’s verdict. Personally, I can’t see that a lack of D.I. slots is going to affect Davis’s life chances all that much, but I don’t say so. He has his coffee now and is about to plunge his yellow teeth in for another caffeine bath. I don’t want to watch that, so I squeeze by him. One of his buddies whispers something—possibly about me—and I do catch Davis’s response: a cynical laugh,
hur-hur
hur-hur,
accompanied by lots of savage head nodding.

My lovely colleagues.

By this point the room is full. Hughes and Jackson do their processional thing to the front, and everyone falls silent.

Jackson runs through the DNA findings. The lab has examined over a hundred samples taken from the house. Of those, DNA was successfully extracted from a total of thirty-two samples, yielding seven different profiles in total. Of those seven, two were Janet and April.

Jackson pauses, enjoying the moment of suspense, then releases his news.

“Of the five remaining profiles, we’ve got names on the database for four. That means we can place those four people at the house. We don’t know
when
they were there. We don’t know
why
they were there. But at least we’re in a position to go and ask.”

The briefing continues. The four names are

Tony Leonard. Thirty-eight. Drug user. Small-time drug dealer—that’s how he got his record. No known involvement in prostitution. The DNA sample in question came from a single hair, found on the dirty velour sofa in the living room.

Karol Sikorsky. Forty-four. Prosecuted three years ago for a firearms offense, but the prosecution failed because of a screwup in our chain of evidence-handling procedures. He was prosecuted and convicted instead for a minor charge of affray. Born Russian but possesses a Polish passport, otherwise he’d have been deported. Sikorsky is suspected by the Vice Unit of having involvement in drugs, prostitution, and perhaps extortion too. A poor-quality saliva sample was found on a glass in the kitchen. A much better sample—courtroom-quality, no less—was found on the tip of a nail which projected from the living room doorframe. Sikorsky must have pricked himself on it as he leaned against the door, and enough tissue remained to leave a high-quality trace of his presence. “A brilliant bit of forensic investigation that,” comments Jackson. “To notice the nail, to investigate it, to successfully extract a sample. Brilliant.” We all give the absent SOCO a round of applause.

Conway Lloyd. Thirty-one. Arrested for a public order offense in his early twenties. Never prosecuted, but his DNA has stayed on our database ever since. Thank you, Big Brother. Who needs civil liberties anyway? Big splatter of semen on the mattress upstairs. And hairs found. And saliva. And further semen stains found on the carpet downstairs. Not a tidy boy was our Conway. Bet his mam loves him, though.

Rhys Vaughan, twenty-nine, might have been Lloyd’s twin. Semen found in four different locations, including—get this—a knotted condom which sat in a little china ashtray by the upstairs mattress. Nice touch that. Also saliva. Also hair.

“And,” says Jackson, holding up his hand to shush us. “We’ve got one extra name from fingerprints too. We had preliminary results there last night, but I wanted to wait until we had the DNAs in as well, so we could plan our strategy better.”

The extra name is Stacey Edwards. Thirty-three. Convicted of a couple of soliciting offenses in her twenties. Five contacts with our vice officers in total over the years. Assumed to be still on the game now. Her fingerprints were scattered all over the downstairs of the house, “including,” says Jackson, “the one place we didn’t expect to find anything.” Dramatic pause for effect. “The washing-up brush.” Laughter and a spatter of sycophantic applause.

“Now,” he goes on. “Strategy.”

Jackson is a smart cookie. The bullheaded approach would be to go in all hot and heavy on the names identified. Try to force a confession. Trouble is, there’s a good likelihood that anyone who came to the house to commit murder would have taken basic precautions. Even if the murder wasn’t premeditated—and the choice of a sink as a murder weapon suggests that the level of planning was rather minimal, to put it mildly—any vaguely competent killer these days attempts to defend himself against crime scene investigation. Indeed, our killer took at least basic precautions, since there were no prints at all found on the sink, which would have collected them perfectly.

Vaughan and Lloyd, on the other hand, took no precautions at all. Ditto Stacey Edwards. Maybe Leonard might have tried to clean up after himself, but I’d guess that Jackson doesn’t believe he is likely to be our killer. Of all the names, Sikorsky is the only one who feels like either a possible killer or a man with connections to the killer. The prime suspect.

Jackson’s conclusion—which is the same as mine would be—is that we need to treat at least four of the five names with a little delicacy. Treat them not as killers but as witnesses. People who can provide information. That may involve a little bullying, but not the kind of thing that Brian Penry was probably best at in his prime. Jackson starts to hand out assignments as Hughes writes a new list of actions up on the whiteboard.

The briefing breaks up. I charge across the room to grab Jackson. I’m not the first there, but I’m persistent. As he plows his way back to his office, I tag alongside and enter right on his heels.

I have a banter-rich intro all lined up, but the boss’s face is tired, and the way he says, “Yes?” isn’t exactly designed to encourage. I decide to alter my approach.

“Stacey Edwards, sir. If I can be of help there—”

“Fiona. We’ve got Jane Alexander on that. She’s working with”—he checks his notes—”Davis. Between them, those two have a million years doing this kind of thing. And Jane Alexander is a woman, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, so we’ve got all the feminine tact we need on this.”

I don’t have a counterargument. I just have an urgency of desire that I don’t wholly understand. I use what I’ve got. “Sir, if you were a prostitute. Maybe a friend of Mancini’s. Probably scared of the police. Maybe in possession of crucial evidence. Would you rather talk to Jane and me, or Jane and Jim Davis? These girls are—”

“Women. They’re not girls.”

“I don’t know why, sir, but this case really matters to me. I think I can contribute. I really want to contribute.”

“You
are
contributing. You contribute by doing what you’re told to do. That’s your job.”

“I know. I—”

I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything. Just stand there.

That seems to have the desired effect, though. “Where have you got to on the Penry thing?”

I brief him quickly. He half-listens to me, and uses the rest of his attention to check out my notes on Groove. I’ve got much further with the Social Services stuff than he has any right to expect, and I can see he’s impressed. I don’t say anything about Penry’s extra horses, those strange texts, or about my conversation with Keighley. I just keep it clean and simple. The way the good D.C. Griffiths would do it; or the way I imagine she would.

He pulls his attention away from the computer and shoves the keyboard from him with an annoyed flip of his fingers. Going to the door, he yells for Davis and Alexander. They’re not there, but minions scurry to do his bidding.

Returning to his seat, he tells me, “You fuck up, Fiona, you fuck up at all, and you’re never working on a delicate assignment for me again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m going to ask Jane Alexander to give me detailed feedback on how you comport yourself in your dealings with Stacey Edwards. Alexander takes the lead. You take the notes. She makes the decisions. You make the tea.”

“Yes, sir.”

He gives me a few seconds of shaggy-eyebrowed scrutiny.

“You must have worked late to do this.” He gestures at the computer.

I nod. The repeated yes, sirs are beginning to strain my subordination muscles, and I let them pause for rest.

Our conversation is brought to a close by Davis and Alexander appearing at the door.

“Come in. Jim, I’ve decided we need an all-female team interviewing Edwards. Jane, I want you to lead. You’ll have Fiona for support. Jim, go to Ken Hughes, get an alternative assignment off him. Is that all clear? Okay, then get on with it. Out of here.”

As we leave, Davis throws me the blackest look I’ve almost ever witnessed. He’s saying something under his breath of which the only distinguishable word is
fucking.
No question this time. He’s talking about me. I wonder if Jackson deliberately put me in a position where Davis would see that I’d successfully bumped him from one of the crucial assignments.

Jane looks at Davis’s retreating back. It’s pretty clear that she’s surprised by the strength of his reaction. As she turns to me, she adjusts her face until it shows nothing but friendly competence. The perfect CID superior. But in between looking shocked at Davis’s hostility and reframing itself for me, her face betrayed something else. A microexpression that didn’t last long enough for me to capture and understand it. But if I had to guess, I’d say she’s less than thrilled by having me as her interview buddy. Which is great. Just the effect I aim for.

“Let’s go and …”

She indicates that we should go and have a powwow at her desk. No offices for the likes of us.

“Yes, ma’am.” I try to make the
ma’am
light and jokey, but also respectful and genuine. I don’t know how well I succeed. She doesn’t award points.

When we’re at her desk—she in her regular chair, I in a seat pulled up opposite—I say, “I suppose you’ll want me to prepare an interview briefing? See what we can rustle up on Edwards before we go to see her.”

That’s clearly a new thought for her. It wasn’t the way Jim Davis had been going to go at things.

“Briefing? You think there’s enough material for that?”

“She’s had five contacts with our Vice Unit over the years. We’ve almost certainly got people who have a reasonable idea of what she’s like. She’s probably had contact with the StreetSafe people—you know, the prostitution outreach charity. I’m sure they’d be willing to chat with us, as long as we made it clear that Edwards isn’t a suspect.”