Talking to the Dead (35 page)

She gives me a hug, hard and long. When she comes away, her cheeks are wet.

I envy her her tears. I wonder what they feel like. I wonder if they hurt.

36

Saturday.

Dave Brydon calls me at eleven. I’m ready for him, give or take. It’s another proper summer’s day, a hot one. I’ve tried on four different outfits, and ended up with the pistachio-and-coffee striped top that I was wearing the day Penry hit me, a long skirt, and flat shoes. I look nice. I look all right.

When he calls, I’m amazingly nervous. I think he is too. We start out very awkward, and only begin to shake free of it when we decide that rather than him coming to collect me, or vice versa, we should meet out of town somewhere. The beaches are going to be absolutely heaving today, but I don’t mind that. I’d quite like it. We agree to meet at Parkmill on the Gower peninsula. He tells me to bring my swimming costume. I tell him that I bet he’s got white legs and that he burns after ten minutes in the sun.

We hang up. I don’t have a swimming costume. I can’t even swim very well, but I do have a couple of bikinis and, after trying them both on, I choose the one that gives me a tiny bit more cleavage and wear it under my clothes.

I drive to Parkmill. The traffic is ridiculously slow because we’ve chosen the worst day of the year to make the trip, but I don’t care. Brydon and I talk to each other on the hands-free comparing notes on how rubbish the traffic is. We agree not to talk about work. Our awkwardness is evaporating in the heat.

He gets there first, and he tells me which café he’s in. He says we can pretend this is a blind date, that we’ve never met before.

I get to Parkmill, park, and go to find Brydon. I’m so nervous that, fifty yards away from the café, I have to stop and collect myself. But it’s a natural sort of nerves. No depersonalization. No losing touch with my feelings. I’m nervous but okay.

I spend a moment texting Bryony. I think I need to stay away from the streets tonight, and I tell her that I’m on a date and won’t be able to get away. I tell her to spend as much money on flowers as she wants, give them out to whoever she wants, and that I’ll pay. That leaves me with a stackload of flowers to deal with, but I’ll just take them to the funeral with me.

Then, as I move closer to the café, I see Brydon at a table. White parasol flapping in the sea breeze. Shadows jumping to avoid the sunshine. He’s nervous too, and I realize that he’s nervous because he cares. Cares about me. I feel a wave of pleasure at that thought. What have I done to be so lucky?

I come closer, and he sees me only at the last minute. We play our blind-date game for a bit, and it definitely helps to deal with the nerves. I’m awkward and klutzy, but Brydon accepts it in a way which makes it seem endearing, not just edge-of-breakdown weird.

Brydon does have white legs, and I bet he will burn before the day is out. In this light, his hair looks properly blond, not just sandy.

We eat lunch. Brydon has a glass of beer. We walk along the beach. He swims. I sort of swim. We throw water at each other. I try to duck him under and fail totally, until he laughs at me and does this huge pretend drowning act. Then he picks me up and drops me in. I shriek, but I like the way my body feels in his arms. When I’m duly ducked, we stand up and he kisses me. I feel Comrade Lust tugging at me again, but I send the good comrade packing. Me and D.S. Brydon are taking things slow. I’m going to be his girlfriend, you know.

When we’re tired—which comes fairly early in my case—we drive back to my house. I cook spaghetti Bolognese, and we eat that with a bottle of extremely cheap red wine that I have knocking around for such contingencies. I have only a token sip, but Brydon disposes of half the bottle manfully.

When the Bolognese is done, Brydon washes up. I’m supposed to dry, or do something, but I don’t. I just watch him. The way his hair is speckled with ginger and has tiny salt crystals glittering close to the scalp.

I kiss his neck and ask if he’s okay with going home. I’m trying to be sensible. I know that I need to take this all slowly and I was just trying to say, in a nice Date Girl way, that I wasn’t ready for sex quite yet.

He doesn’t take it that way.

“Not exactly,” he says, with exaggerated patience. “No. Not unless you’ve got me a special license to drive with raised blood-alcohol levels.”

I stare at him. Is he serious? He’s had half a bottle of wine and won’t drive the ten minutes it’ll take him to get home?

For a second—maybe twelve seconds—I’m genuinely panicked. I think this is some kind of ruse on his part to get into my knickers.
Oh no, Fi, I can’t possibly drive home. I’ll have to spend the night here. No, I can’t use the spare room. Come here, my beauty.
My panic is temporary, but immediate and all-consuming. Comrade Lust is nowhere to be seen. Shuddering, knock-kneed, in the understairs cupboard. It’s as though my reason has been taken over by a troop of Methodist grandmams, wagging their fingers at me and declaiming,
They only want
one
thing, you know.

I don’t know what look I have on my face, or what I say or do. What I do know is that Brydon reacts like the sane me would expect him to react.

“Hey, hey, hey, it’s okay. I can’t drive, but I can order a taxi.”

He phones for one, ostentatiously. When the cab firm asks what time he wants the pickup, he says to me, “We’ve got time for coffee, haven’t we?” The Methodist grandmams go into overdrive, chorusing about the double entendre in the word
coffee,
but I am already calming down and tell the grandmams to shut up. I tell Brydon of course he’s staying for coffee.

He orders a cab for half an hour’s time.

I make coffee for him, peppermint tea for me.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m not very good at this.”

There’s a question on his face, which I answer. “I’m not a virgin, but … I’m not very experienced.” I think about that answer and realize that it’s the truth but not the whole truth. “Also, I’m an idiot.”

“Duly noted.”

“You do know that I’m not quite like you, don’t you? That I’m a bit strange?”

He makes a joke. Deflects. Is a man.

I persist. “No really. It matters. I’m not like you. If that’s a problem, then—I don’t know. But you need to know that. Sometimes I’ll go to places that you’ve never been. I might need your help.”

He looks at me. I can’t interpret the look on his face. He says, “Well if you do, just ask,” which sounds like the right thing to say, but somehow isn’t.

I don’t quite know what the best thing to say is, so I say what is almost certainly the wrong one.

“And I’m not great with rules. I don’t get on with them very well.”

“I’m a police officer, Fi. So are you.”

“Yes, but …”

“Rules are our business.”

“I know …” But the gun. The marijuana. The thing I’m planning for Monday. The thing I’m planning for later in the week. The list of possible buts is long and getting longer. I don’t finish my sentence. Nor do I push the point. Another rule of mine:
Always, always put off till tomorrow anything that doesn’t have to be done today.
I don’t apply that to work, but I do to pretty much anything in my personal life.

For our last twenty minutes we cuddle together on the sofa. Brydon is a good kisser. A broader repertoire than you’d guess. He’s good on the passionate knee-wobblers, but he’s got a good range of nibbly, nuzzly, intimate, flirty kisses too. I wonder again what I have done to be so lucky. As I’m wondering, my phone bleeps the arrival of a text. It’s Bryony. She tells me she’s giving out flowers and notes like crazy, and finishes,
HAVE
A
GOOD
TIME.
YOU
DESERVE
IT
.

“Anything important?” says Brydon.

“No.”

We go on cuddling till the taxi comes and it’s time to see him off at the door. I feel like a true citizen of Planet Normal. I am going to be a girlfriend. This is going to be my boyfriend. We’re police officers, you know. CID. My boyfriend is law-abiding, so this is him leaving in a taxi. And here am I seeing him off at the front door. Watch us kiss goodbye. Watch me smile and wave. Just watch how normal I am.

Once the taxi leaves, I don’t close the front door right away. I hold on to it, this feeling. I am a citizen of Planet Normal. This is my boyfriend. I am his girlfriend. Just watch how happy I am.

37

Sunday is a nothing day. Pretend to clean my flat. Fail to go to the gym. Forget to eat anything much. Go to my mam and dad’s for tea, and end up staying till ten. I talk to Brydon twice on the phone, but we don’t see each other. Slowly does it.

The next morning, Monday, is another one of those weird ones. I come into work—bang on time, no fogginess, no shock—and find that life has once again moved on. Over the weekend, they kept an eye on what they believed to be Sikorsky’s Cardiff address. After no sign of any movement there, they launched a dawn raid this morning and searched the place. A massive SOCO type operation, the biggest yet by all accounts. Office rumor says that Forensics have taken some clothes and think they have a blood splash on a trouser leg. If the blood is April Mancini’s, then Sikorsky is inching ever closer to a life sentence. Better still—and unbelievably—the address has yielded a roll of duct tape and some cable ties from a DIY shop. Both used, though still in the original shopping bag with the receipt. Rumor has it that the cut end of the duct tape in Edwards’s flat matches the roll in Sikorsky’s bag. It’s unbelievable how stupid most criminals are. Unbelievable and lucky. We’d have a hell of a job convicting them otherwise.

All we need now is Sikorsky himself. The prosecution case feels largely complete. But a case isn’t much use without a criminal to convict. To make it as far as we have without getting our hands on the probable killer feels frustrating, to say the least of it. The betting around the coffee machine is that Sikorsky is already in Poland or Russia. If the former, then we’ve a 20 or 30 percent chance of getting him, because the Poles aren’t too corrupt and because they’re EU members who try to behave themselves. If Sikorsky is in Russia, then we’re pretty much fucked.

Most officers reckon he’s in Russia.

If I had to guess, I’d say he was there too.

Meantime, Axelsen’s effort seems to be winding down. Traces of cocaine have been found both in Fletcher’s home and in a desk drawer. We already know, from my interview with Charlotte Rattigan, that the big man used to do the odd bit of coke when he was still alive, so the ruling assumption is that Fletcher was dealing. That’s where his cash came from. Some drug-world problem made him do a runner. He might be in another country. Or dead. Whatever it was, it must have been a pretty urgent problem to make him leave two hundred grand in cash lying around. As for the whole Rattigan fishing trip thing, it’s being assumed that Rattigan and Fletcher were coke buddies. Fletcher got to hang out with—and sell drugs to—rich people. Rattigan got his kicks out of hanging out with criminals. Stranger things have happened.

Because it’s all go on Lohan, because Axelsen isn’t exactly desperate to have me back in Newport, and because Jackson and Hughes both have other things on their minds, no one really cares what I do today.

Just as well. I’m busy with funeral stuff and I want to save my energies. Yesterday afternoon, I called a journalist at the
Western Mail
and told him about the people’s power demonstration of solidarity that was expected at the crematorium. Because bugger all happens on a Sunday, which means they’re always desperate for material to fill the paper on a Monday, we’ve got the whole front page of the newspaper:
HUNDREDS
EXPECTED
AT
DEAD
GIRL’S
FUNERAL
. Gill Parker of StreetSafe is quoted as saying that the funeral will show Cardiff’s opposition to violence against women. A rent-a-quote local pop star is reported as saying much the same thing, and implies that she’s intending to be there herself, although if you look carefully at the way she says it, she’s left herself plenty of wiggle room.

I spend some time on Facebook groups and other Cardiff women’s group things, getting the word out. I call the bus company and ask them if they can provide more transport if need be. They say yes. Then I call eight head teachers of schools close to April’s. I tell them that there’s a big kids’ movement wanting to protest against violence. I tell them that transport is arranged and paid for. They just need to call the bus company to arrange pickup times. Six of the eight head teachers sound really interested. I think the newspaper headline helped. Maybe the pop star too. I call the crematorium and tell them to expect eight hundred. I call another flower place and tell them to send a thousand pounds’ worth of flowers to the event. They say what sort of flowers and I tell them the sort with petals.

When I give them my card to pay, they tell me it’s declined. I tell them to try eight hundred pounds, then seven hundred. Seven hundred seems to work, so I tell them that I’ll give them the three hundred later in the month, when my pay comes in. They say okay. I haven’t yet paid the bus company either, so they’ll have to show some patience too. Payday is the middle of the month, so I’ll only have to get through a week without money. Should be a doddle. The only thing that bothers me is the state of my fuel tank, but my Peugeot, bless her, is pretty much full. She needs to be.

All the time I’m making calls, I’ve got April’s little dead face up on my screen. “We’re doing good, kid,” I say to her. She smiles at me. She’s never had a funeral before, so she’s looking forward to this one, and quite right too.

I’m doing all this when I spot Brydon drifting over. He smiles at me and sits on the corner of my desk. Nothing unusual. We haven’t talked about it much, but neither of us want the office to know about our relationship, so we play it cool. Only a lift of his eyebrow as he sits indicates that he quite liked the way he spent Saturday. I wrinkle my eyes back at him, to indicate the same thing. If truth be told, I feel a little odd about the way we finished. That thing about rules. Was that really Brydon telling me that he was going to have a problem with little things like the occassional speeding ticket or unlicensed handgun? I was hoping for a bit more give-and-take than that. But still, no need to worry about that now.
Always put off till tomorrow.