Talking to the Dead (16 page)

“This minute, this evening, or in my life generally?”

“The first two of those.”

“Pouring whiskey, settling down to watch an
Inspector Morse
repeat on the box.”

“Which episode and have you seen it before?”

He tells me which episode, and no, he hasn’t. I tell him the name of the murderer, the critical clue, and how Colin Dexter handles the misdirection. I hear the TV snap angrily off in the background.

“Thanks, Fi. Well, you’ve really freed up my evening.” He doesn’t sound completely thrilled.

“Good. I was hoping I could drop by, maybe. But I didn’t want to watch
Inspector Morse.
”

“Whereabouts are you?”

“Peering in through your front window. Is that a new sofa?”

He whips around, sees me peering in, and his expression is mixed, but at least two-thirds welcoming. Good enough. He chucks his phone down on the possibly new sofa and goes round to the front door to let me in. We kiss, cheek to cheek, but warmly.

“It’s not the best
Morse,
anyway. Saggy middle.”

He rubs my back, the way you’re allowed to do with someone you once slept with. “Come on in. You’re looking tired. Drink?”

“I’m knackered, but I’m not sleeping. A big case that I’m finding a bit freaky.”

“Is that a cry for whiskey?” His hands are hovering over a collection of bottles and glasses.

I hesitate. I used to avoid drink completely. My head was fragile enough that I didn’t take anything that might unbalance it. These days, I’m a tiny bit more adventurous, but only a tiny bit, and my head doesn’t feel too solid at the moment.

“Um. Too alcoholic. I want something that tastes alcoholic but isn’t.”

“Gin and tonic, with lots of tonic and just a smell of gin?”

“And ice and lemon. Sounds perfect.”

Good old Ed. He mixes me the perfect drink, knows to ask me if I’ve eaten, isn’t surprised that I haven’t, and digs out some spinach and ricotta tortellini for me, serves them warm with a splash of olive oil and a bowl of green salad.

“Homemade,” he says, indicating the tortellini. “I’ve been playing with my new pasta maker.”

“God, I like the English middle classes,” I say with my mouth full. “Who else has homemade tortellini waiting for drop-by waifs and strays?”

“The Italians?”

“Don’t quibble. Their homes would be full of grandmothers and screaming babies. Give me the divorced English middle classes any day.”

Ed has moved from whiskey to red wine, presumably in accordance with the some bit of English etiquette that he knows and I don’t.

We have an odd relationship, him and me. We first met when I was a heavily medicated teenage nutcase in the hands of shrinks who thought their job was to pour more pills down my throat if I showed any sign of independent thought, movement, emotion, or argument. Especially argument. Ed—Mr. Edward Saunders—was a clinical psychologist who believed that maybe independent reasoning was a positive sign in a patient, even if that reasoning tended to suggest that all mental health professionals, and psychiatrists in particular, should be towed out to sea in a big boat, which would then be surrounded by sharks and scuttled. And then depth-charged.

As for Ed—well, he just spent time with me. I don’t know how many weeks or hours were involved, because time was so unclear for me back then. But he treated me like a human being, and eventually I became one again. It wasn’t only his help that brought me round. It wasn’t even mostly him. I owe more to my family and my own bollocky stubbornness. But of the entire mental health crew, Ed was the only one that I’d have airlifted to safety from that boat. He kept the faith. Faith in me. That was precious to me then, and still is now.

Then we lost touch. I went to Cambridge. Ed went on being a solid gold nugget in the heap of manure which is the South Wales mental health service. He’s a home counties boy—solicitor father, brother who’s something tedious and lucrative in the City—but he wound up in South Wales and seems to have stuck. We met again, because he had some temporary research gig in Cambridge for a couple of terms. We bumped into each other on the street. One thing led to another. His marriage had essentially died but was still in the process of completing its funeral rites. We began a friendship, then thought since that was going well we ought to go to bed together. We did, off and on for a few months. It was nice. Ed was a good lover as a matter of fact. I didn’t know they bred them that passionate in Hertfordshire. But we were never really meant to be lovers. The sex got in the way of the friendship, so we eased back to where we were and have been there pretty much ever since. We see less of each other than we ought to, because he’s busy and I’m busy, but also maybe because he’s got some funny feelings about having had a sexual relationship with an ex-patient of his.

I eat up like a good girl. It turns out that I’m famished—when was the last time I ate a hot meal?—and I wipe out his entire stock of tortellini, make a serious dent in his salad reserves, and do considerable damage to an apple crumble which I find in the fridge. Ed has this idea of me as someone who eats all the time. That just shows what a bad scientist he is. If he made the experiment of having no food in his house, other than some old salami and tomatoes decorated with two different types of mold, he’d get a more balanced view of my eating habits.

Ed puts some cheese on a plate—Cheddar, Welsh goat, and a squishy French one—and we go back to the living room. Ed has two kids from his marriage, a boy of ten and a girl of eight. He’s got photos of them both at different ages around the place, and for some reason I’m fascinated by them. There are a few of the girl—Maya—at about the age that April was when she died. These in particular catch my attention. There’s a vital difference between these ones of Maya and the ones I have of April. There’s some tantalizingly important discrepancy between the two, but I can’t seem to reach it.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just trying to figure something out, that’s all. How are the kids?”

Ed starts to tell me. They’re fine. Doing well at school. Having problems with their stepfather, a property developer in Barry. Blah blah.

We pick away at the cheese, chat a bit, cuddle on the sofa, and end up watching the last half hour of
Morse.
I announce all of the essential plot points before they arise, and Ed rumples my hair or, if I’m being particularly annoying, pulls my ears till I say “Ow.” When
Morse
runs out, we segue into
Newsnight.

Terrorism. Cuts. An argument over education reform. We talk about whether Jeremy Paxman has had his teeth whitened.

When
Newsnight
gets too boring even for us, I roll over and lie on Ed’s chest.

“If I wanted to go out with you again, would you?” He kisses me softly on the forehead.

“Probably.”

I sit up on him. I can feel him getting hard underneath me. I bounce up and down a bit, to get him back for pulling my ears. He holds me so that I can’t do too much damage, but mostly just lets me bounce.

“I don’t think we should,” I say, “but I like knowing that you wouldn’t necessarily say no.”

“Not necessarily, no.”

“Why don’t you ever come round to see me?”

“I don’t know. Busy, I suppose.”

That’s no answer, and I escape his grip to give a more vigorous bounce, hard enough to make him wince.

“Proper answer,” I demand.

“Okay then. I think if I came round to see you, we would end up going to bed. We would end up back together.”

“And you don’t want that?”

“No, it isn’t that. I’m not sure if it’s what
you
want. I don’t want to be hanging around waiting for you to make your mind up. Waiting for you to find out who you are.”

“You think I don’t know?”

“I’m damn sure you don’t. You’re a work in progress.”

I think about bouncing up and down some more but decide that he’s right on all counts and that being right doesn’t necessarily require punishment. I give him an affectionate squeeze and slide off him, groping around on the floor for my shoes. “That’s what I like most about you, Edward Saunders. You’re not a work in progress at all. You’re the finished article. Shrink-wrapped and ready to ship.”

He smiles mildly, watching me get ready to leave. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It is. From me, it is.”

I go into the kitchen to find a plastic bag so that I can steal his cheese.

“What are you doing?”

“Stealing your cheese.”

He lets me take it. We kiss each other on the cheek, the way we did when I arrived, but we also say that we’ll see each other again soon, and I think we both mean it. On my way out, I look again at those photos of Maya, and this time I get it. I get what’s been puzzling me about them. I laugh at myself for being an idiot.

I drive home, staying within the speed limit for a change, and with another wash of rain painting the road black in front of me. I’ve got the Bach cello suites in my CD player, and I play them loud enough that the swish of the wipers doesn’t get in the way. I wish I had farther to drive.

I get home. No escallonias, but not much to cheer the heart either. It’s very magnolia, my house. Magnolia, white, and stainless steel, and I don’t like any of those things.

The sextuple April grins down at me as I remember to put the cheese in the fridge. I get a glass of water and sit down opposite her.

Looking at the pictures of Maya, I finally figured out what was funny about my photos of April. All the ones I had printed off were of her at the crime scene. April with the top of her head missing. April with a smile but no eyes. Six little dead Aprils, and not a single little live one. It took me this long to notice that all my photos were of April dead.

I grin at myself and feel her grinning with me. Seven grins. I plod upstairs, run a bath, and allow myself a long soak, wondering vaguely whether to take the pictures down, or leave them up and add some of the party dress / beach / toffee apple ones.

Questions for another time, but I’ll probably stick with the photos I’ve got. I’ve never minded the dead. It’s not them that cause the trouble.

19

I wake the wrong side of 6:00
A.M.
, still far too early but at least I’m expecting it now. I sneak downstairs in my dressing gown, get some tea and some cereal, and come back up to eat it in bed. Then, because the house seems too quiet, I go out to the car, still in my dressing gown, to get the Bach cello CD. I whack it on, loud enough that I can hear it upstairs, and continue my breakfast in bed. Sunday morning bliss, just three hours out of place.

I replay the conversation with Jackson in my head. He’s right, of course. My suspects are (1) a dead man, and (2) a man who is going to jail anyway. Also, of course, I don’t think that either of them actually killed the Mancinis or Edwards. They’re just involved. That means that, as well as having a dead suspect and an about-to-be-jailed suspect, I’m missing a crime to connect them to. I don’t remember every word of my CID training, but I’m pretty sure that you need a crime before you can start arresting people, alive or dead.

The trouble is that intuitions like mine are wholly at odds with the way police investigations work. There’s an old joke about an Irish attempt on Everest. It failed because they ran out of scaffolding. Ho, ho. But that’s precisely how we coppers would climb the damn thing. The only difference is that we wouldn’t run out. We’d just keep going, pole after pole, clamp after clamp. Interviews. Statements. DNA tests. Prints. A million bits of data. Thousands of hours of patient, grinding analysis. Remorseless, methodical, inevitable. And one day, as your frozen fingers are hauling up yet another scaffolding board into position, you notice that you’ve run out of mountain. The sunlight is coming at you horizontally. You’ve reached the top.

That’s how Jackson plans this particular mountain climb, and he’s right enough. He’ll get his killer.

But will I get mine? I didn’t make any promises to Jackson. When he asked me for an old-fashioned
yes,
the sort that actually betokens obedience, I’d answered him with a question. The way I see it, that allows me a little wiggle room on the side. And he’s a shrewd old sod. Perhaps he was even happy to leave it that way. In any case, there’s no time like the present.

No time except for the present, if it comes to that. A frightening thought, if you dwell on it.

I get dressed fast. My regular casual wear involves a base coat of jeans and T-shirt, plus whatever else the weather or occasion demands. But it’s too hot for jeans today. Mid-twenties and rising. So I go for something more summery. A floaty pinky beige skirt and a pistachio-and-coffee striped top. Summer wear. Good-mood wear.

Downstairs, I take the Bach CD off and va-va-voom across town. Eastern Avenue is almost completely empty, so I get to my destination fast, even without speeding.

Rhayader Crescent. The teachers, nurses, middle managers, and youngish solicitors are still in bed, or maybe yawning their way through toast, or getting ready for a day of marshaling hyperactive kids. The crooked cop at Number 27 shows no sign of doing anything at all. The Yaris is there. Its hood is cold. No lights in the house. No sign of life.

The crooked cop at Number 27 is almost certainly snoring away upstairs. A late riser.

I don’t have a plan, which I see as a positive. Nothing to go wrong. A side passage leads to the back garden, and I go through, if only to feel less conspicuous. A lady in a garden diagonally opposite is hanging out her wash. She spots me but doesn’t say or do anything. No reason why she should. I don’t look much like a burglar, and it’s hardly burglar o’clock. Gulls are circling over Victoria Park, looking for something to do.

I sit on the back step and wait for the lady to go inside.

Penry’s keys have been bothering me. His house is L-shaped, with the kitchen extension forming the arm of the L. In the crook of the L is the conservatory. The keys to the conservatory door were visible enough in the house—no reason why not—but they’re equally visible from the garden. A burglar armed with a brick could quite easily knock out a pane of glass, take the keys, let himself in. It’s security 1.01 and Penry used to be a copper.