Talking to the Dead (7 page)

“And let’s not forget our anonymous female caller, the one who tipped us off about the house. That caller is still out there. There’s been plenty of media, she knows we want to talk to her, but she hasn’t come in yet. Anything that can lead us to her is also valuable.

“So. Tasks for today …”

Jackson starts listing tasks and responsibilities, and the Incident Room begins to break up. No breakthroughs yet, no easy victory. No one’s concerned yet, and there’s a general assumption that the killer will be found and jailed. All the same, it’s hard not to notice that we remain completely in the dark about who might have killed the Mancinis. Sooner or later, this optimism will demand fuel to keep it burning.

I head downstairs for the print room but am interrupted by a knot of officers round the coffee machine, where Merv Rogers is being honored for his wit.

“Pineapple,”
he is saying. “Adding fruit to a dish which is basically savory. That’s not right, is it?”

I squeeze round them. They don’t make way for me or seek to include me in their banter. That’s partly because I’m physically small. Partly because I’m junior. Partly because I’m a girl. And partly because people think I’m odd.

I go down to the print room, where the ever-so-slightly-Polish print manager, Tomasz Kowalczyk, is bustling around in charge of his papery domain.

“
Dzień dobry,
Tomasz,” I tell him.

“
Dzień dobry,
Fiona. How can I help you today?”

“You shouldn’t say that. It makes you sound like you’re about to offer me fries.”

At least Tomasz likes me. I’m here for some photos, and I show him the ones I want from the system, which now boasts not only the crime scene images but also some of those found among the Mancinis’ possessions. Not so many of Janet, because I suppose she never had a regular person to take photos of her, but plenty of April. April in party dresses, April on a beach. April holding a huge toffee apple and laughing. She had wide blue eyes, like her mam, and when she laughed, everything in her face was laughing too. April Mancini, the toffee apple kid.

I pick out about a dozen pictures in total. Some of Janet. Some of April. Obviously we’ve got printers upstairs, but only regular black-and-white ones. Tomasz’s empire is responsible for all bulk runs, all color printing, all fancy print jobs—and I’m after photo-quality reproduction. Tomasz makes me fill out some forms, which annoys me because I don’t like forms, which means I make a mess of them, which means that Tomasz ends up doing them for me. I polish up one of my nicest smiles and give it to him when he’s ready. He tells me to come back in forty-five minutes.

Back at my desk. Aside from my work on the Penry case, I’ve been tasked with two jobs for today. One is to answer any Lohan-related phone calls from the general public that come in as a result of our media appeals for information. The other is to get stuck into Janet’s Social Services records and see if there’s anything useful there. A grandly named executive summary is what Jackson is after. I take three calls—one nuts, two sane but probably useless—and start on the paperwork. I’m good at this kind of thing. That’s what a Cambridge training does for you: reading mounds of stuff fast and extracting the useful part quickly and clearly. All the same, I’d prefer to be on the inquiry proper, so I work fast, accumulating brownie points.

I’m hard at work when my phone rings. It’s Jackson, using the speakerphone on his desk, to tell me to come over. No reason offered.

I enter his office but hover by the door. Jackson does door-open meetings and door-closed ones. The former sort are usually better, but I’ve had more than my share of the latter. I wait for a signal as to what kind of meeting this is and, from the way he looks at me, guess it’s a door-shut one. I close it.

“Yes, sir?”

“Good work on the autopsy. Fast, accurate. Good stuff.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re doing the same on the Social Services stuff, I expect?”

“That’s the plan.”

I sit down. Jackson is being nice to me, which is a bad sign. I wonder what I’ve done wrong.

“A sudden burst of hyperactivity on the Fiona Griffiths front usually means you want something. So, why don’t you tell me what that is?”

This throws me a bit, because I didn’t know I was so obvious.

“If possible, sir, I’d love to be full-time on Lohan. I think I could contribute.”

“Of course you could. Every officer in the department
could
contribute.”

“Yes. But at the moment, I think there are only two women on the team. D.C. Rowlands and D.S. Alexander. Obviously they’re both brilliant officers, but I just thought that they might be stretched a bit thin. I mean, I know you can get men to do the some of the interviews, but it’s not quite the same, is it? I mean, if prostitution is involved.”

I’ve hardly explained myself brilliantly, but Jackson knows what I mean. It’s all very well getting men to interview prostitutes, but there’s a certain kind of interviewing they just can’t do. There’s always a shortage of women for those interviews, and uniformed officers are often brought in to try to address the shortfall. Which is fine, except that having a female officer in full uniform—baton, handcuffs, radio, protective jacket, and boots—doesn’t exactly get the girlie juices flowing. Jackson is a grizzled old sod, which means that he remembers the old days, when prostitutes were just bundled off down to the interview rooms to be shouted at by whole bunch of blokey officers who exuded dislike, lust, and distaste from every masculine pore. But he’s also an intelligent officer, who recognizes that the old days weren’t exactly bathed in an eternal glow of success, and that other approaches have their merits too. Merits like actually working, for example.

“No,” he says, “it’s not the same.”

I’m not sure if he’s saying that I’m on the team or not, so I stay in my chair, trying to read the runes.

“What else are you on? You’re getting Penry ready for court, aren’t you?”

I tell him that I should be done with that by the end of the week, which seems implausibly early, even to me.

“And our friends and colleagues at the CPS think so too? Gethin Matthews thinks so?”

CPS: Crown Prosecution Service. And no, they don’t think so, nor does D.C.I. Matthews, but I tell Jackson that they will think so by the end of the week.

Jackson does the shaggy-eyebrowed thing at me. “And if you join Lohan full-time, which D.C. Griffiths am I going to be getting?”

I open and close my mouth. I don’t know what to say.

“Look, Fiona. Lohan would benefit from additional female staff. Of course, it would. Gethin asked me if I wanted you transferred over when the case broke. And I thought about it. I wanted to say yes.”

I mouth the words “thank you” again, but the thank-you isn’t the point just now. It’s the thing that’s hovering over the horizon, about to sock me between the eyes.

“The good D.C. Griffiths I’d have like a shot. But the other one … ? The one I ask to do something, and that something never seems to get done. Or if it gets done, it’s done wrong. Or done slowly. Or done after fifteen reminders. Or done in a way that breaks the rules, causes complaints, or pisses off your fellow officers. The Griffiths who decides that if something is boring her, she’s going to make a mess of it until she’s moved to something else.”

I make a face. I can’t say I don’t know what he’s talking about. I do.

“Am I, for example, going to get the officer who makes Brendan Rattigan’s widow break down over some bit of total speculation about her dead husband’s sex life.”

I bite my lip.

Jackson nods.

“I got a call from Cefn Mawr this morning. I handled it. No official complaint. Nothing that’s going any further. But I didn’t want to have to take that call. I don’t want to have to wonder all the time if you’re going to use your mature, intelligent judgment or if you’re going to say and do the very first thing that comes into your head.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Jackson doesn’t mention it—he doesn’t have to—but he and I are both well aware of another incident last year. I was still in my first year in CID, meaning that I was still a training detective constable, effectively on probation. There was a missing persons case, and we were going through the long process of interviewing friends and family. I’d been paired up for most of the interviews, so I could learn from my elders and betters. Then I was given my first solo gig out in Trecenydd—basically a person we were sure had nothing to tell us, just so I could practice my skills and develop my confidence. Unfortunately, the interviewee thought it would be a clever idea to put his hand on my breast. I didn’t react with dignity and maturity, and a few minutes later I was calling an ambulance, so that my interviewee could receive treatment for a dislocated kneecap.

The whole incident was a bit hard to get into any kind of perspective. On the one hand, no one doubted that he had sexually harassed me and that I had a right to defend myself. On the other hand, there were questions raised about the appropriate and proportionate use of force. A disciplinary inquiry cleared me of wrongdoing, but these things do leave a smell.

Jackson was in charge of that case too. He handled it well, I guess. He yelled at me the regulation amount, then did a help-us-to-help-you bit, which I think he meant. We had a long discussion, in which he said all the right things and I said all the right things—or most of them, at any rate—and the right forms were filed and the right procedures followed. Five weeks later, I found myself on a course in Hendon with officers from all over the country on Managing Dangerous and Ambiguous Situations, the general gist of which was that you are supposed to talk firmly to people before dislocating their kneecaps. There were eighteen officers present on the course. I was one of just three women and the only one who didn’t look like a lesbian. The lessons must have worked, since I’ve never disabled anyone since.

“It’s not really about sorry, is it now, Fiona?”

“No, sir.”

There’s a long pause. I’m normally okay with pauses. I can pause with the best of them, but this one is weirding me out because I don’t know what Jackson is doing with it.

“If I may,” I say. “I think it’s significant, the reports we’ve had about April Mancini at Allison Street.”

“We haven’t
had
any reports of her there. Not a dicky bird.”

“Exactly. There’s this window seat in the front window there. One of the SOCOs told me that they found piles of April’s pictures dropped down behind the back. She must have sat there for hours, drawing. Hours and hours. In the front window.”

“Yes, but there are curtains across those windows. Doesn’t look like they were ever opened.”

“That’s what I mean. What kid wouldn’t open those curtains up when Mam went out? You get a good view from the front of the house. I mean, good for Butetown. You see everything that’s going on. Most kids, even if they weren’t allowed out, would be sitting in that window staring out. April didn’t. I think she was terrified, and I think she was because her mother was. It was fear that took them to that house, and whatever it was they were frightened of caught up with them and killed them. I mean, I know we can’t be positive, but it seems like a theory for now.”

Jackson nodded. “Yes. Yes, it does.”

We seem to have tumbled into another pause, but I decide that it’s Jackson’s turn to get us out of this one, so I just stay sitting with my mouth shut, trying to look like a good, professional detective constable, a little half smile on my face by way of defense.

“Fiona. I don’t want you on Lohan. Not properly. Not while I’m in charge. If you want to continue working on Lohan in a support capacity, then that’s fine with me, as long as I don’t get any more calls like the one I had this morning—”

“No, sir—”

“And as long as you don’t injure anyone, piss off D.C.I. Matthews, make a mess of any work you don’t enjoy doing, get on well with your colleagues, and in general act like a good, capable, and professional detective constable.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any fucking around and you’re off the case altogether. You’re this far from being a phenomenal officer.” He opens the finger and thumb of his right hand a couple of inches. “And you’re this far from being a right pain in the arse.” He holds up his left hand, and his finger’s resting on his thumb and not going anywhere.

“Yes, sir.”

Another pause kicks off, but I’m all out of exciting pause strategies and I just sit there waiting for it to end.

“I think you could be right about April. Why nobody saw her. Poor little bleeder.”

Yes, poor little bleeder.

Little April, drawing flower pictures in a stinking room. Little April, told never, ever to open those curtains. Little April, whom Farideh never saw. Little April, invisible to everyone except her killer.

Jackson nods to say I can leave, so I go downstairs and pick up my photos from Tomasz.

7

Back at my desk, I run into Brydon. Our drink together last night confused me. When I’d got his text yesterday, I’d assumed that the drink was a coppers’ night out sort of affair. The kind of thing that happens at least once a week, a bunch of people ending up in Adamsdown, drinking in the kind of bar that will be making work for our uniformed colleagues a little later in the evening. I’m not always invited to those things, but I’ve been to a few. Me and my orange juice. Only later did I realize that Brydon had maybe meant his invitation as a date. Not a big flowers ‘n’ candles date maybe, but as a sort of toe in the water, a deniable date, a drink ready to morph either into a flowers ‘n’ candles jobbie or a simple drink between work buddies. I’m rubbish at decoding these things. I don’t even realize that there are codes involved until it’s all too late.

Last night was a case in point. Because I hadn’t given the drink any great weight, I turned up late and without letting Brydon know that I was on my way. Result: When I finally arrived Brydon had indeed joined up with a couple of office colleagues, and we all had a faintly tedious but good-hearted coppers’ night out. With hindsight, I think maybe that’s not what he’d originally intended—and now maybe I’ve sent him a signal indicating that I’m not interested in a flowers ‘n’ candles evening with him. I never meant to send any kind of signal, and I’m not sure that I’d have sent that one, if I had meant to.