Talking to the Dead Read Free

Secrets are better.

3
    The briefing room next morning, where sharp means sharp.
    One side of the Incident Room is taken up with notice boards in pale buff that are already starting to swarm with names, roles, assignments, questions, and lists. The bureaucracy of murder. The star of the show is a set of photos. Crime scene images which are all about documentary accuracy, not careful lighting, but there’s something about their bluntness which gives them an almost shocking truthfulness.
    The woman lies on a mattress on the floor. She could be sleeping, or in some drug-induced coma. She doesn’t look either happy or unhappy, peaceful or unpeaceful. She just looks like the dead look, or like anyone at all looks when they’re sleeping.
    The child is another matter. You can’t see the top half of her head, because it isn’t there. The kitchen sink stretches right across the photo, out of focus on its upper edge, because the photographer was focusing on the face, not the sink. From beneath it peep the child’s nose, her mouth and chin. The force of the sink has ejected blood through her nose and sprayed it downward, like some joke shop trick gone wrong. Her mouth is pulled back. I imagine that the weight of the sink caused the skin or muscle to pull backward. What I’m looking at is simple mechanics, not an expression of feeling. Yet humans are humans and what looks like a smile is interpreted as a smile, even if it’s no such thing, and this girl with the top of her head missing is smiling at me. Smiling out of death, at me.
    “Poor little thing.”
    The coffee-breathed speaker behind me is Jim Davis, a veteran copper, in uniform for most his time on the force and now a sturdily reliable D.S.
    “Yes, poor little girl.”
    The room is full now. Fourteen of us, including just three women. At this stage of an investigation, these briefings have an odd, jumpy energy. There’s anger and grittiness on the one hand, a kind of remorseless male heartiness on the other. And everywhere, people wanting to do something.
    Eight twenty-eight. D.C.I. Dennis Jackson motors out of his office, jacket already off, sleeves already rolled up. A D.I. Hughes, Ken Hughes, who I don’t know very well, follows him, looking important.
    Jackson gets up front. The room falls silent. I’m standing by the photo wall and feel the presence of that little girl on the side of my face as intensely as I would if it were a real person. More intensely, maybe.
    The case is less than twenty-four hours old, but routine inquiries have already thrown up a good pile of facts and suppositions. Jackson goes through them all, speaking without notes. He is possessed by the same jumpy energy that fills the room, snapping off his phrases and throwing them out at us. Iron pellets of information.
    No one on the electoral roll registered at that address.
    Social Services appear to know the woman and child, however. Final identification is hoped for later in the day, but the woman is almost certain to turn out to be Janet Mancini. Her daughter is April.
    Assuming those identifications are confirmed, then the backstory is this. Mancini was twenty-six at the time of her death. The child just six.
    Mancini’s home background was lousy. Given up for adoption. Taken into care. A few foster families, some of which worked better than others. Started at adult education college. Not bright, but trying to do her best.
    Drugs. Pregnancy. The child moving in and out of care, according to whether Mancini or her demons were on top at the time. “Social Services pretty sure that Mancini was unstable but not a lunatic.” A grin which is more of a grimace. “Not a sink dropper, anyway.”
    The last contact with Social Services was six weeks back. Mancini had been apparently drug-free. Her flat—not the address where she’d been found but one in one of the nicer bits of Llanrumney—was reasonably tidy and clean. The child was properly dressed, fed, and attending school. “So. Last