Talking to the Dead (34 page)

I start to apply it. Think, Griffiths, think.

First, this whole issue about shock. Clearly, I tick most of the boxes for PTSD. Pretty clearly, I am looking and acting like someone in the grip of major-league shock right now, this minute.

At the same time, however, I’m missing the single most crucial ingredient in the formula, a “terrifying or traumatic event.” That’s a puzzle, but not one that needs to be solved right now. I decide to leave it.

Next, I need to find some way to lessen these symptoms. I’m not managing them well at the moment, and I know how dark they can get. I make a list of my standard techniques for dealing with head craziness. My list runs (1) smoke a joint, (2) bury myself in work, (3) go to stay with Mam and Dad, (4) breathing exercises, et cetera.

I immediately cross out item one. I smoked too much yesterday, and dope goes only so far. It’s excellent self-medication, but it helps only when my problems are mild to moderate. Right now, they’re moderate-to-bad, with the course set for hard to severe.

Item two is likewise forced to bite the dust. I’ve just been fired by the Gwent police force. Everyone on Lohan is looking at me strangely and telling me to go home. I’ve got no work to bury myself in. And the work wasn’t helping.

Item three is more interesting. It would probably work. Not straightaway, but give it a few days and I’d be right as rain. But it feels like a backward step. A palliative, not a cure. I decide to set that one aside and come back to it if there’s an emergency.

Number four is like a pair of sensible shoes or a high-fiber cereal. Good for you, but sinfully dull. All the same, four is a good ‘un. I’ll come back to it shortly.

Floating around, though, is a possible number five.
Making love.
I’ve never had many lovers. A few women early on. Then two or three spottily awkward male students at Cambridge, ickily overeager to get into bed with anything in a skirt—and I was ickily overwilling to let them. Then one sort of but not quite boyfriend after Cambridge. A nice chap. Runs a bookshop now. And Ed Saunders. Ed was the only one I felt right around. In bed and out of it. With Ed, I think I used to use sex as a way of coming into being. A trick akin to smoking dope or running home to Mam and Dad.

And now Brydon. Part of me wants to go rushing off to Brydon. Get him into bed. Make love urgently enough that I could use it as a way to feel myself again.
Use
him.

I only have to understand that to decide against it. With Brydon, I want to do things right. I want to learn the art of being a girlfriend. A proper one. A permanent, stable one, for whom lovemaking is about nothing more than making love. Not a fucked-up sort of self-medication.

I make a cup of tea and spend forty minutes doing exercises. Breathing first.
In
-two-three-four-five.
Out
-two-three-four-five. When I’ve done fifteen minutes of that, I start my bodywork. Move my arms. Move my legs. Feel them as I move them. Stamp on the floor to see if I can feel down to my feet. Ed Saunders would be proud of me, though he might be a bit concerned to learn my thoughts on the topic of lovemaking. Or perhaps he already knew.

I think he already knew.

One day I will apologize.

But for now I need to focus on things closer to home. I’ve done the immediate essentials, but what next? What should I do next? What do I want? Nothing comes to me, so I get out my paper again and write:
WHAT
DO
I
ABOUT
?

Almost immediately, I write in strong capitals APRIL MANCINI. I move my pen, ready to add more names to the list. Janet Mancini. Stacey Edwards. Ioana Balcescu. The names of the victims. And maybe there are other things, other people I want to find out about. Rattigan. Fletcher. Penry. Sikorsky. But my pen doesn’t move. APRIL MANCINI. That’s who I care about. She’s all I care about. The toffee apple kid.

With a sudden, awful rush, I realize that I’ve forgotten her funeral. I promised to go to it. I even promised to tell the nice lady—Amanda, I think it was—who phoned the help line and started crying when I told her how Janet and April died. She was going to come to the funeral too.

I phone the office. I can’t find anyone there who knows or cares. I phone the hospital. Ditto. But I’m not on maximum power, so I’m probably asking the wrong people in the wrong way. Instead, I phone Bev Rowland. She doesn’t know but promises to find out, and sure enough calls me back in ten minutes. The funeral is going to be Tuesday, the day after Stacey Edward’s autopsy. Unless something unexpected crops up at the mortuary on Monday, Stacey Edwards and Janet and April Mancini will all be cremated the folllowing day.

I thank Bev and put the phone down.

I feel instantly more human. I know what I’m doing now. I need to arrange a proper funeral for April. I don’t know why, but I do. April needs me to.

I phone her school. Insist on being put through to the head teacher. I encounter a bit of resistance from a pointlessly obstructive receptionist, but my juices are rising now and I’m getting harder to resist. I bulldoze my way through to the head teacher and tell her that April’s entire class needs to come to the funeral. She tells me that their lessons have already been planned. I remind her that someone dropped a sink on April Mancini’s head and she isn’t lucky enough to have any lessons. The head teacher tells me, tartly, that the crematorium is too far from the school and it’s too late to organize transport. I tell her that that’s a good point, when does she want transport and how many kids are there in April’s class? Ten minutes later I call back, having hired a bus to come and pick up the children. The head teacher says fine. She even thanks me.

Zoom zoom. My speed is picking up. Next stop, neighbors. Not neighbors at the squat, because they barely knew Janet, but at the complex in Llanrumney where she and April used to live. I get a local print shop to print up five hundred flyers. Nothing much. Just information about the funeral arrangements and at the bottom a request for information. “Janet and April Mancini were murdered. Call in confidence.” That, and my phone number.

I drive over to the complex and find a couple of kids mooning around on BMX bikes. I offer them fifty quid to distribute my flyers to every house and flat on the estate. Twenty up front. Thirty when they’ve done it. I tell them I’ll check three random doors to ensure that the flyers have been delivered. They have a brief discussion, then agree. I stick around for just long enough to see that the flyers are entering some letter boxes, then off I zoom.

There’s a drug users’ drop-in center that Janet used to go to. I go there and get them to put up a notice. A helpful woman serving tea says that she’ll email a few people who might be interested. Good for her. I ask her if she knows any women’s centers that might be interested in knowing about the funeral. She says yes, and she’ll get straight onto it. I tell her she’s an angel.

I call Amanda, the lady who cried. I tell her when the funeral is. She cries again, promises to come, and says she’ll phone some of the other mothers.

Back to Llanrumney. The kids are still shoving flyers through letter boxes. Good enough for me. I give them the thirty quid.

I ask them if they want another fifty quid for doing the same farther up the road, around Stacey Edwards’s old stomping ground. They look at me as though I’m mad, and I take that as a yes. I phone the print shop again and get them to run off more flyers, only with Stacey Edwards’s name in place of Janet’s and April’s. I tell the kids where they can pick up the flyers and tell them to call me when they’re done.

The kids pedal off, delighted at my inability to drive a decent bargain.

Zoom zoom.

What else? Flowers. Music.

I call the Thornhill crematorium. What do they do for music? They’ve got tapes. I don’t want tapes. I want an organist. I want a choir. I want a parade of trumpeters, for fuck’s sake. After a bit of discussion, I learn that I can get a string quartet and a solo vocalist for four hundred quid. That seems steep to me, but I say yes. I do ask about a trumpeter, but they’re out of stock, alas.

I have this conversation as I’m driving to Cardiff Market. Not on the hands-free, just juggling the phone, the steering wheel, and the gear stick as I drive. I know that sounds bad, but it helps build concentration and does wonders for the coordination. Like simultaneously rubbing your tummy and patting your head, only harder.

I arrive at the market as it’s closing down. A clutter of stalls housed in a palace. Like some entrepreneurial refugees got stuck in some Victorian railway terminus, and set up shop there. Stallholders are taking down their T-shirts, their ethnic jewelry. Pulling shutters down over veg boxes and book stands. A pleasant, end-of-day mood. A box of red apples being flogged off for two pounds the lot.

I run round looking for a flower stall, find one, and ask the bloke in green wellies how much for his flowers. He looks at me like I’m mad. He points to the buckets. Each one has its own little blackboard on a spike, with prices chalked on each little board. I look at him like he’s mad. I don’t want one stupid bouquet, I want his flowers. I want the whole shop.

Once I manage to explain this, he asks me if I’m serious, then quotes a price of five hundred quid. I’ve a feeling I could get them for a lot less, but I don’t want April to think that I’m stingy, so I say yes but can he help get the flowers into my car and can I have the black buckets as well.

He agrees, which proves to be a bad move on his part, because my lovely Peugeot isn’t really the acres-of-boot-space sort of car and it takes half an hour of careful wiggling to get everything inside.

I get a call from the BMX kids and go to pay them.

Then home.

Eat. Drink. Make some more calls. The church in whose parish Janet Mancini was found dead. Ditto the one in the part of town where she used to live. Ditto Stacey Edwards’s old parish. I speak to the vicars. One of them agrees to say a blessing. He’s nice about it actually. A good soul. I say to him, “You don’t happen to know a trumpeter, do you?” and, Lord bless the man, he does. He gives me a phone number, and two minutes later, I have my trumpeter. He asks me what kind of music I want played. I say I don’t know, but I want it to be upbeat. Not funereal. Triumphant, if he can think of something. He says he can. He says his rates are sixty quid for up to two hours, but given the circs he won’t charge anything. I tell him that he’s my new favorite trumpeter.

I call a couple of newspapers and place funeral notices there. I pay extra for all the bits and bobs. Extra words, bold type, boxes.

I’m just wondering what to do next when I get a call. It’s Brydon, back at Cathays Park. He says that the office is going full pelt on Lohan, and the forensics on the Kapuscinski house look positive. I don’t care about that and say so.

“Listen, I’ve got the day off tomorrow,” he says. “I thought maybe we could—”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say maybe we could spend some time together.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow morning, then? We could go somewhere.”

That sounds like a man plan to me.
We could go somewhere.
Gosh, the imagination! But I don’t argue. A man plan is good enough for me. We ring off.

I’m slowing down now. Tired but in a good way. I need to get an early night tonight, so I can catch up on some sleep, but there are things to do first.

I make up some bouquets. I’m not the world’s best bouquet maker, but I don’t need to be. I make about twenty, tie them with kitchen string, and drop them on the passenger seat of the car. In each bouquet, I’ve put a handwritten note:

Most of all, I would like it if you came to the funeral. But I am also a police officer. If you want to tell me anything about Brendan Rattigan, Huw Fletcher, Wojtek Kapuscinski, Yuri Petrov, or Karol Sikorsky, then please call me, in total confidence, on the number below.

Very many thanks, Fiona Griffiths.

I drive down to the Taff Embankment. Blaenclydach Place. It’s a bit early for things to be really busy, but Friday night is crazy night, and the girls are already out, hunting for business. I know a lot of them now. Some of them even like me.

One bouquet at a time, one prostitute at a time, I approach.

With each girl, I explain who I am and why I’m here. I’m a friend of Janet Mancini’s. Also of Stacey Edwards. It’s their funeral on Tuesday. I wanted people to know. I also wanted to give out flowers.

I see Kyra, the stupid cow who gave Jane and me nothing at all that first time we met her. She’s wearing platform shoes with five-inch heels. She’s absurdly happy to see me, which means nothing about me, everything about how recently she’s taken smack.

“Flowers? For me?” she asks.

“For you. Or for you to bring along to the funeral to place on the coffins. I don’t mind. Either way, the flowers are to commemorate the women who died. And Janet had a little girl, so the flowers are for her too. She was six years old, and her name was April.”

Kyra looks at me as though I’m crazy, but she takes the flowers. Same with the other girls I meet. They think I’m nuts, but I tell them that I’ll see them at the crematorium on Tuesday.

It takes me four hours to hand out most of my bouquets. I’m beginning to sway with tiredness when I hear a familiar voice behind me. Bryony Williams. Equipped with her ciggy, her canvas jacket, and her messy hair. And a bouquet-wielding prostitute whom I vaguely recognize. Altea, she might be called.

“I heard someone was doling these out,” says Bryony, indicating the flowers. “Thought it might be you.”

I grin. “Three more to go, and I’m done for the evening.”

Bryony says she’ll do them. I tell her about the notes I’ve put inside, and she nods approvingly.

“Where did you get the flowers?” she asks.

I bought the shop, I tell her. I explain that I want people to come to the funeral. I don’t know why it feels important, but I think it’s because Janet and April and Stacey had such unnoticed lives. I want them to go out in a blaze of glory. I tell Bryony about my trumpeter and the coachload of schoolchildren.