Talking to the Dead (20 page)

Of the numbers on Penry’s phone, there were eight where I couldn’t get through to a human being. To those eight, I sent a text:
MUST
MEET
ASAP.
THIS
PHONE
CD
BE
COMPROMISED.
TEXT
ME
ON
NEW
NUMBER
____
BRIAN
. I gave out my phone number, and so far I’ve received five texts back. Of those, four come over as simply baffled. I
S
THIS
A
JOKE?
says one typical message.
SEE
YOU
DOWN
THE
PUB.
MIKE
.

But the last of the five is my prize specimen.
DON’T
EVER
CONTACT
ME
AGAIN.
JUST
FUCK
OFF.
FUCK
RIGHT
OFF.
FLETCH
.

I love everything about that message. I like the fact that it’s properly spelled and punctuated. I like the repetition of the
FUCK
OFF
. Not elegant, but pithy, and give me pith over elegance any day of the week. Best of all though, I love the
FLETCH
. A nickname that’s no more than a sawn-off surname. I don’t know who Mr. or Ms. Fletcher may be, or how he or she fits into this puzzle. I don’t even know if this is one puzzle or two puzzles or maybe more, but I do know that right now I’d rather lay my hands on the enigmatic Fletcher than on the darkly menacing Karol Sikorsky.

Just as I’m marveling over Fletcher’s text, Jane Alexander comes over to me.

“You okay?”

“Yes. Emergency dentist thing this weekend. Feels like someone’s run over the side of my face.”

“God yes, sorry. That does look sore.”

“Oh, you meant—”

“Yes. After Saturday. It was brave of you to go in through the window.”

I shrug. May as well give myself a reputation for toughness, even if it’s not quite deserved. “I’m glad you were there.”

“Still. You’re okay to go out again this afternoon?”

“Prozzer patrol?”

She gives me a slightly stern “Yes.” “Start after lunch? Two o’clock?”

I agree. The timing’s good. When Jane goes, I give Bryony Williams a call. She answers, but there’s a din in the background as though about two hundred children are being asked to see how much noise they can make.

“Are you okay to talk?” I say, once I’ve succeeded in letting her know who I am.

“Sure, just give me a sec.” A door slams somewhere, and the sound level drops. “Sorry. My day job is teaching art. They’ll be okay for a bit anyway.”

I ask her if we can meet for lunch. It turns out that she’s working quite close by and we agree to meet in Cathays Park at one. That’s helpful. I want to be as prepped as possible for the interviews I’m doing with Jane.

I poke around on our records system for interesting looking Fletchers but don’t find anyone who takes my fancy. I check my Penry case files. I don’t recall any Fletchers there and my memory for such things is normally good, but it seems an obvious place to look. No joy there though.

Ten fifty. I’ll need to leave in two hours. Two hours to find a Fletcher. A maker of arrows. That’s what a fletcher was. A missile man. A weapons guy.

I do everything I can to trace him. Our databases. Newspapers. Google. I do everything a good copper should do and come up with nothing that seems to make any sense. Either I’m not seeing a connection or I’m missing something obvious.

Then my time’s up. It’s one o’clock, near as dammit. I run to the park, and get there just as Bryony Williams arrives.

24

Butetown.

The morning started out fine, but the clouds have scuttled in from Cardiff Bay and now lie damply gathered over the warm streets, as though anxious to cut off an escape. The city feels like what it is. A smear of brick and concrete slotted into the narrow gap between earth and sky, more beautiful than neither. This is the layer where the violence starts. We’re only three hundred yards from 86 Allison Street, and the ghosts of that place are pressing close.

Jane Alexander is her normal brisk, bright, efficient self. Me, I’m nothing of the sort, still disturbed by yesterday. My neck feels jolted, as though something was knocked out of line by Penry’s blow and hasn’t yet slipped into place again. But it’s not so much a physical thing. More a mental one. As though some of my equanimity, my confidence, was dislodged. I keep remembering, not the actual blow as such, more the state of myself in the instant following. A rag doll utterly useless on the bottom step.

Not a good state to be in.

Not a good state to be in when our third interview of the day—the first two having been bland and unhelpful—starts with a dark doorway swinging open and a pale face looming toward us from the darkness beyond. A pale, frightened face.

Ioana Balcescu. A prostitute.

No known link to Janet Mancini or to Stacey Edwards. No known link to organized crime. We’ve got only her data from the records kept as a routine matter by the Vice Unit. She’s dressed in leggings and a loose cotton top. Long dark hair, not styled or even, from the look of it, combed. A thin face not unattractive. But it’s not the shape of Balcescu’s nose that catches the attention, or whether her lips are full enough. What catches the attention is the dark purpling bruises around her eyes. The gashed lip and swollen jaw. The way one arm holds the other, providing a sling. The caution in every painful step.

I find myself staring at her in shock, as though into a mirror. I feel exposed. I half-expect Jane to swing around, look me up and down, and say, “I
knew
it wasn’t the dentist.”

She does no such thing and the moment passes. Balcescu doesn’t want to talk to us, but we’re here on her doorstep and she can’t summon the strength to tell us to get lost. We go through to her front room, which is halfway between somebody’s grotty living room and a tart’s boudoir. There’s a red light and a large unframed poster of a topless girl with her lips open and her eyes half closed, pulling down on her bikini bottom as though it’s chafing her. There are a few other pictures, not as big but more explicit. Also dirty wineglasses, a TV listings magazine, a gas bill, a portable telly.

Jane Alexander sits on the edge of the couch, as though to sit back on it will transform her into a drug-addled prostitute. She’s dressed the way she’s always dressed. Far too classy for her present surroundings. And though she’s too professional to show it to Balcescu, I can tell right away that she’s not comfortable. She feels out of her depth. When she explains why we’re here, her voice is excessively formal. Tight and unrelaxed.

I step in.

“Would you mind, Ioana? We’ve been on the go all afternoon, and if you had a cup of tea, it would be just brilliant.” I’ve noticed before when working with these Balkan women that they’re all scared of the police. They don’t expect us to protect them. They assume we’re here to jail them or beat them up or extort money. Those feelings can be helpful or harmful in an interview situation, depending on how you play them. My instinct is that we need to go softly, softly. “Here, if you show me where the tea things are, we can make it together.”

Ioana takes me to the kitchen. Jane remains where she is. If it were me, I’d be poking round the room. Since it’s Jane, she won’t be.

Ioana stops at the kitchen door. I go on in, fill the kettle—an old-fashioned metal one—and pop it on. I find three cups, clean them, find tea bags and make tea. No herbal, but this is about relaxing Ioana, not about drinking tea.

I put my hand up to her eye and touch it very gently. “Poor you. That looks horrible.”

She jerks her head away, but I gently persist. I move my hand to her side, which flinches from the touch.

“They gave you a really good going-over, didn’t they?”

No response.

I lift her top very gently. There are bruises all down her side, front, and back. “My God. You poor love.” She’s got prominent ribs and small breasts, like those of a girl. I wonder if she has an eating disorder. When I touch one of her ribs where the bruising is at its worst, she winces. A possible fracture.

I put her top down. There is nothing premeditated in my look of sympathy. It’s as real as the walls and air. “Have you been to a hospital?”

Stupid question that, because the answer is inevitably a no.

“How do you take your tea, Ioana? How many sugars?”

“One sugar, please.”

“Do you know what? I’ll give you two today. You’ve had a big shock, and a big cup of sweet tea will do wonders. It was yesterday they hurt you, was it? Those bruises look horrible.”

Ioana doesn’t answer directly but tilts her head in a way that makes me think yesterday was correct. The teas are made, and Ioana tries to pick up one of the cups.

“Here, no, don’t take that, you just look after yourself. I’ll follow you through.”

She moves back into the front room. I follow with the cups.

“Now, Ioana, where would you be most comfortable? The big sofa maybe? Jane—this is Jane, by the way, you don’t need to call her D.S. Alexander, and you can just call me Fiona, or just plan Fi if you prefer—Jane, I wonder if you could make space.” Jane gets up, looking awkward, but also relieved that someone else is running things for the moment. “Ioana, why don’t you sit here? Or lie, if that’s more comfortable. Where does it hurt most? I can fetch you a pillow from upstairs if you’d like. I’ll put the tea just there so you can reach it easily. There, that’s better.”

After a bit, Jane gets the idea as well, and turns from a vaguely scary blond detective into something a bit more maternal and mumsy. She does mumsy better than me, in fact, when she gets in the groove. I lift Ioana’s top again so Jane can see her injuries. Jane looks on in silence, and her face is grim.

“Now, Ioana,” I say, exchanging glances with Jane and getting her permission to continue. “We’re going to ask you a few questions. You don’t have to tell us anything at all. You’re not under suspicion. We’re not from Immigration, so we’re not about to ask to see your visa or your passport or anything like that. Do you understand all that?”

She nods.

“Now, if you’d like us to call you ma’am or Miss Balcescu, then we’ll do that, but if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to call you Ioana. Such a lovely name. It’s the same as Joanna, is it?”

Another micronod.

“Now then, we’re here because we understand that you may have known Janet Mancini. Is that right?”

A leading question. Bad police practice, but Jane allows me to get away with it.

Ioana nods.

“Horrible what happened to her. I don’t know if you knew Stacey Edwards too, did you?”

No nod at all this time. A stiffening. Fear.

“Well, you know what, let’s not go into that now. I mean after what happened last night, there’s only so much you want to be reminded of. You’re probably scared that if you say too much to us, they’ll come back again. Is that what you’re scared of?”

“Yes.” A firm nod. Still the fear, but at least there’s something else in the room now.

I exchange glances with Jane. She’s meant to be leading this interview. She led the last two while I took notes. That’s the way D.C.I. Jackson said to do it. As I recall, his precise words were
You fuck up, Fiona, you fuck up at all, and you’re never working on a delicate assignment for me again.
But there’s more than one way to fuck up and, though I’m not absolutely sure what Jane’s glance meant, it didn’t mean “shut up right now,” so I’m going to continue.

“Okay, Ioana, we don’t want to get you into trouble, so we’re going to make it really easy for you. And I want you to know that we came here in an unmarked car. Do you know what that means? Not a police car with a siren and everything, just a perfectly ordinary car. And we look like two perfectly ordinary people. No one knows that we’re police officers, and we’re not going to tell anyone either. Do you understand that?

“Good. And I think you’re going to need some help. I think you need to see a doctor.” Ioana instantly starts to protest, and I raise my hand to stop her. “I know you won’t go to hospital. That’s okay. But if we send someone to the house, that’ll be all right. We’ll do it the same way. An unmarked car. Not a police car. And a doctor just in ordinary clothes. Looking like anyone else. All right?”

“And then I know you know Bryony Williams. You know who I mean? The StreetSafe lady. Short curly hair.” Ioana nods. The name relaxes her a little. “I saw her this lunchtime. She said to me that she has a program you can go on to help you deal with the drugs. We know you take heroin—smack—and that’s okay. You’re not going to get into trouble with us. We just want to help, don’t we, Jane?” Jane is quick to nod, and again we exchange glances. This time I’m pretty sure that she is telling me to go on, so I do.

“And, Ioana love, what we’d really like to do is take you away from all this. I know that’s scary, but it’s what we want and what Bryony wants. You don’t have to say yes now, but just don’t say no. We’ll take things one tiny step at a time. Do you understand what I mean? One tiny step at a time.”

“Yes.”

Ioana’s yes is half-saying that she understands, half-saying that she’s signing up for the deal. If I were a window salesman, I’d know this was the moment of maximum reward, maximum vulnerability. I shift over to the sofa where Ioana is lying, and put my hand on her arm. Leave it there. Human contact, without threat, without money, without drugs, without demand. When was the last time Ioana felt that?

We fall silent. I trust Jane to keep her mouth shut. There’s something precious in this silence.

Finally, “Ioana, you know we need to ask you some questions. I’m sorry but we do. I don’t want you to say anything at all out loud. Just nod, or shake your head. If you don’t know, raise your eyebrows. Yes, just like that. It’ll take only a few minutes. We won’t write anything down. We just want to know. Then we’ll go. The next person you’ll see will be the doctor. Then maybe Bryony. Are you all right with that? Do you understand what I’ve said?”