Talking to the Dead (6 page)

Jackson is frustrated, but Price is just a pathologist, a reader of evidence. He can’t look into the past any more than we can. I’ve filled out thirteen pages of my notebook in the loopy handwriting that I dislike. My first job tomorrow will be to type it up and get it on Groove. But there’s one big question still to be asked. If Jackson doesn’t ask it, I will, but Jackson is an old pro. He bends the Anglepoise down until its springs groan.

“Fatal respiratory depression,” he says.

Price nods. He knows where this is going.

“What about respiratory depression that isn’t enough to be fatal? Presumably the symptoms are still there. Slow breathing. Weakness. Disorientation?”

“Correct. There’s not enough air coming into the lungs to permit the necessary gas exchange. Taken too far, it’ll prove fatal. But even if it doesn’t go that far, you’ve still got a person who’s badly disoriented. Maybe conscious, maybe not. Weak and uncoordinated. Quite possibly not able to stand. Perhaps temporary problems with vision.”

“A near overdose, in other words,” says Jackson. “If she’s left alone, she’ll live. Lucky to be alive, maybe, but she’ll recover.”

Price nods again. “And if she’s not left alone …”

“Whoever it is has got themselves the perfect victim. If anyone wanted to kill her, they could just put their fingers over her nose, close her mouth, and wait.”

“A minute or two,” says Price. “Easy.”

5

Job done.

We’re standing in a little reception area that boasts an empty desk, a row of empty chairs, and one of those office plants that look as though they’re made of plastic and never seem to grow, flower, form seed, die, or do any of the other things that ordinary plants do.

Jackson and Price are outside the men’s changing area, talking about when the autopsy report will be finalized, how long DNA identification will take, and the like. Man talk. I’m not included. I’m standing next to them in my long white gown and ridiculous boots, feeling like an extra from some low-budget horror movie, when I notice that my heart is fluttering. Not a bad flutter, like when I had my moment at Cefn Mawr, but something definite all the same. I pay attention to these signals, because I often need physiology to show me the way to my emotions. A jumpy heart means something, but I don’t know what. I let my awareness expand and go where it wants.

Almost instantly it finds the answer.

I haven’t finished in the autopsy suite. I need to go back there.

The answer, when I find it, clicks into place. It makes sense.
Why
it makes sense, I have no idea, but I don’t always bother with the whys. I just do what I have to do.

“Oh, just a minute, I think I left my spare pen in there,” I mumble.

The two men don’t break their talk. Jackson just looks down at me and nods. He’s about six foot two, I guess, which makes him about a foot taller than me, and Price isn’t much less. It’s worse than I’d thought. I’m not just in a horror movie, I’m a dwarf in a horror movie. I taffeta-rustle back through to the autopsy suite, letting the door swing shut behind me.

The peace of the room welcomes me. I relax almost instantly. I can feel my heart rate slow and lose its jitteriness.

I reach for the light switch, but realize that I like the violet twilight that’s starting to possess the room, so I leave the switch alone.

I take my only pen and shove it under the cloth shrouding Janet Mancini, so that I have something to “find” if need be.

Apart from that, I don’t
do
anything. I have one hand on Janet’s enviably slim calf, the other on the gurney. The peace of the room sinks into my bones. It’s the most peaceful place in the world. I bend my face down, so it’s touching the blue hospital cloth over Janet’s feet. There’s a faint medical smell, but the human smells are long gone.

I’d like to stay there for ages, quite still, just breathing the empty, medical air. But I don’t have long, so I force myself to move. I uncover the two bodies, just so I can see their faces again. Janet’s expressionless one and April’s smiling half of one. April’s head bandage has fallen in again, so I smooth it out for her.

Here, without anyone to bother them, they look like mother and daughter. I can’t tell anything about the eyes, of course—April doesn’t have any—but her mouth is a miniature version of her mam’s. Her little, dimpled chin too. I stroke April’s cheek, then Janet’s as well. Each is as dead as the other. No reason to make distinctions now.

I stare at them.

Janet stares back at me. She’s not saying anything just yet. Still getting used to being dead. April can’t look, but she does smile at me. I don’t think being dead is going to be too hard for her. Life was tough. Death should be a cinch in comparison.

We smile at each other for a while, just enjoying each other’s company. I bend down to Janet’s hair. Smell it, touch it, comb it through with my fingers. The combing releases both a smell of antiseptic and a smell of shampoo. Apple, or something like it.

I stand with my fingers in Janet’s hair, trying to trace the root of the impulse that brought me here. Janet’s scalp feels surprisingly delicate under my fingertips. I can feel little April smiling beside me.

Something in our interaction seems incomplete, but I don’t know what’s needed to complete it.

“Good night, little April,” I say. “Good night, Janet.”

It’s the right thing to say, but the incompleteness is still there. I pause a few seconds more, but to no avail. The thing that was left hanging a few moments before is still hanging now, and I don’t think I’m going to find it by waiting.

I don’t want Jackson and Price to think I’m a freak, so I “find” my pen, cover the girls, and go rustling out of the suite, brandishing the pen with a dumb look of triumph. The guys don’t care. They’re moving through to their changing area anyway.

I get changed slowly. Rubber boots in one bin. Oversize gown in another. The door to the cleaning cupboard stands next to the entrance of the women’s changing room. Nice touch that. Don’t frighten the men by letting them see mops and buckets. I swing open the door and stare inside. It’s a big, roomy cupboard—a small room, really—with cleaning equipment. I don’t know why I’m staring, so go out into the lobby beyond.

The men still aren’t done. I don’t see why I should wait for them, so I yell, “Thank you, Dr. Price. See you tomorrow, sir.” I push the door to leave and can’t budge it. It doesn’t pull open either. I’m trying to work out if these are unusually heavy doors and I’m just being wimpish when Price comes out to help.

“I’ve got to buzz you out,” he explains. “It’s a secure area.”

“Oh.”

Everything’s a secure area these days. What do they think? That the corpses will escape? We say good night—him automatically, me woodenly—and he buzzes me out.

Because I’m feeling a bit odd, I manage to get lost and end up tramping up and down some of those endless hospital corridors, looking for the way out. Pale yellow vinyl tiles that squeak underfoot and reflect too much fluorescent light. My head is full of hospital words. Pediatrics. Orthopedics. Radiotherapy. Phlobotomy. I don’t do well with the light or the words, and I end up walking around at random. Taking lifts, up or down according to which way they were going at the time. Getting on and off when anyone else does.

Hematology. Diagnostic imaging. Gastroenterology.

At one point a nurse stops me and asks me if I’m all right. I say, “Yes. Quite all right,” but I say it too loudly, and I go squeaking off down the yellow vinyl to show how all right I am.

Eventually, I realize it is the hospital itself which is making me feel weird. I need to get out. I find myself at a T-junction in the corridor, wondering how to find the exit, then realize I’m staring directly at a large black-on-metal sign which says WAY OUT ⇒. I treat this as a clue and pursue it all the way to the main exit, where I find fresh air and a swell of wind. Cardiff air smells of grass or salt, depending on which way the wind blows. Or so they say. Mostly it smells of car fumes, the same as anywhere.

I stand in the entrance for a while, letting people push past me, feeling myself return.

I’m trying to remember where I parked my car when my phone chirps the arrival of a text. Brydon nudging me about the drink. The drink I’d forgotten. I should go. I’m already late.

On my way to the car, I salute the mortuary.

“Good night, April. Good night, Janet.”

I don’t get an answer, but I bet April is still smiling.

6

Sharp means sharp, and today no one is sharper, smarter, or more bushy-tailed than me.

Not long into Jackson’s morning briefing, I get my moment of glory.

He summarizes the result of the meeting at the mortuary yesterday, then adds, “Fiona Griffiths will be getting her notes onto Groove as soon as she can. Right, Fiona?”

“Already done, sir,” I say.

“You’ve done it?” He doesn’t believe me.

“All done. I didn’t want to waste time.”

He raises his eyebrows—which have turned shaggy before their time, so the gesture is a bit of a signature look for him. Either he’s impressed or (more likely) he doesn’t believe that I’ve done a decent job. But I have. I came in early and whizzed through it. I learned to type at Cambridge, and I’m blitzkrieg fast.

“Okay. Good. That means you lot can read all about it.”

Jackson delivers a few other nuggets—the most important of which is that we’ve now got the full case files from Social Services up on the system—then hands over to Ken Hughes. Hughes summarizes the first batch of findings from the door-to-door work. Eighty-six Allison Street had accrued a good bit of hostility from its neighbors, being variously described as a drug den, a squat, a place taken over by the homeless, and much more.

“Putting aside more fanciful ideas,” says Hughes in his depressive, and ever so slightly hostile, monotone, “the general picture seems to be this.”

He tells us that the house had been rented for some years, then fell vacant around two years ago. Landlord not yet traced. For some time, it just stood there, getting quietly damper and older. Then the back door was forced, possibly by kids out to cause trouble, possibly by a drug dealer wanting a place to operate from, possibly by a homeless person wanting a roof for the night. In any case, once the back door was gone, the house began to attract trouble.

From the visual evidence, the house had certainly been used as a squat for a period longer than the Mancinis’ few weeks of residence. It was highly likely that drugs had been taken in the house for some considerable period. If drugs were used there, they were probably dealt there too. If drugs had been bought and sold there, then it was likely enough that there were women selling themselves for drugs, although the place wasn’t remotely nice enough to have prospered as even the most basic of brothels. (At this point, there’s a muttered comment from one of the lads nearest Hughes, and there’s a burst of hard male laughter. Hughes catches the comment and glowers at the culprit, but we girls, standing at the back and edge of the room, are excluded from what would most certainly have been an extremely hilarious observation. Ah well.)

So much for the background. Specifics. Janet Mancini had definitely been seen around the place for the past several weeks. Farideh, the girl I’d talked to at the convenience shop, had reported seeing Janet several times. She remembered her hair—which meant nothing, because Janet’s hair color had been widely mentioned in the press—but she also correctly described some clothing and an item of jewelry that had been found at the house. She also—and this was a clincher—remembered selling Janet a frozen Hawaiian pizza whose wrapper featured in the long inventory of the rubbish that had been found at the house.

“Hawaiian, sir?”

This question from Mervyn Rogers, who has been taking notes. His pen is poised and his face is serious.

Hughes is suspicious, because he thinks Rogers is taking the piss (which he is), but he’s not sure enough to make a thing out of it, so he just confirms the pizza identification and moves on. A little ripple of amusement runs round the room and includes us girls this time. We’re thrilled, I can tell you.

“Yes, Hawaiian. Mancini clearly had April with her in the house, because the same source confirms purchases of such typically childish foods as Coco Pops and Nesquik banana milk.”

He knows he sounds idiotic, so he glares angrily at us as he says it. He can’t tear himself away from his written notes, though, and on he plows.

“Sources whom we take to be reliable and who have confirmed Janet Mancini’s presence in the neighborhood; all agree that they did
not
see April Mancini with her at the time. We are for the moment presuming that April was present in the house but not inclined or not permitted to go out.”

He’s got another few pages of notes to get through, but none of us can bear much more of it and Jackson steps in to rescue things.

“Anything else is up on Groove. Familiarize yourself with it all. Short summary: We have no reports of anyone other than the two Mancinis at the house. No reports of April Mancini being seen outside at any time. No reliable reports of any regular visitors, or irregular ones for that matter. Curtains always closed, lights off—no electricity, remember. No music. The place was quiet.

“So, we have to shift resources to other lines of inquiry. CCTV. The nearest cameras—the nearest working cameras—were five hundred and seven hundred yards away. It’s fairly likely that one of these picked up Janet Mancini at some point over the last few weeks. We need to see if she was with anyone at the time. Jon Breakell—where are you, Jon? There—you’ll take the lead on that.”

Because I feel on the fringe of the inquiry and want to make myself more central, I lift my hand. Jackson doesn’t notice me, so I butt in.

“There’s CCTV at the convenience shop too, sir. Maybe they’ll have footage.”

There’s a short exchange of conversation up at the front. Apparently someone’s already noticed the shop’s CCTV, and getting access to their footage is already on an action list somewhere.

“Okay. Meanwhile, Janet. We need to dig into her past. There’s a good chance she knew her killer, so we need to locate the people she knew and how she knew them. If she was working as a prostitute and was killed by one of her punters, then it’s a fair bet that this wasn’t the first time they’d had sex together.