Talking to the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

isn’t. But there’s something there.
    I go for it.
    “Just a few more questions,” I say.
    “Certainly.”
    “Your sex life with your husband. Was it completely normal?”

4
    The traffic is slow as I come back past Cwmbran. I fiddle with the radio to try to find a channel I want to listen to, but end up settling for silence. To the left of me, green hills and lambs. To the right, the intricate folds of the old mine works. Long black tunnels leading down into the dark. I prefer the lambs.
    Into Cardiff, I can’t quite face going back to the office immediately, so I don’t. Instead of keeping straight ahead on the Newport Road, I pull off left.
    Fitzalan Place. Adam Street. Bute Terrace.
    People say they like the new Cardiff. The redeveloped center. The Assembly Building. Fancy hotels, regional offices, coffees at 2.50 pounds a cup. This is the new Wales. A Wales taking charge of its future. Proud, confident, independent.
    Me, I can’t get my head round any of that. It feels like a con trick with me as the patsy. Everything about it is wrong. The look. The style. The prices.
    The names too. The city center has a Churchill Way, a Queen Street, a Windsor Place. Where’s the sodding independence there? If it were up to me, I’d name every damn street after one of those thirteenth-century Welsh princes that spent their lives fighting the English and getting massacred in the process. Llewelyn ap Gruffydd—Llewelyn the Last. He’d get the biggest street named after him. The last king of Wales. A heroic, ambitious, quarrelsome failure. Tricked, attacked, murdered. His head ended up on a spike over the Tower of London. I’d name every major landmark in Cardiff after him. If the English didn’t like it, they could give us his head back. The queen’s probably got it in a boot room somewhere. I expect Wills and Harry use it to practice their keepie-uppie.
    I relax only as I get away from the center—the part where I work—and out into Butetown. In Butetown, people drink tea more than coffee, and neither ever at 2.50 pounds a cup. In Butetown, it’s true that the occasional drug addict gets murdered, and every now and then you find a little girl whose head has been splattered under a large piece of upscale kitchenware, but I prefer it that way. Crimes you can see. Victims you can touch.
    My car pulls to a halt just up the road from 86 Allison Street.
    I get that creepy feeling I get when I’m close to the dead. Tingly.
    I step out. Allison Street isn’t much of a place. Cheap 1960s council houses that look like they’ve been made of cardboard boxes. Same color. Same blocky construction. Same thin walls. Same resistance to damp. There’s no one around except a kid repetitively slamming a red ball against a windowless wall. He looks at me briefly, then continues.
    Number 86 still has a few ribbons of yellow and black crime scene tape around it, but the forensics boys will be mostly done by now. I pick my way through the tape and ring the doorbell.
    First silence, then footsteps. I’m in luck. A solid-looking scene of the crime officer, with short gingery hair and pink ears, comes to the door.
    I show him my ID. “I was just passing,” I explain. “I thought I’d look in.”
    The SOCO shrugs. “Five minutes, love. I’m just resampling fibers, then I’m done.”
    He goes upstairs, leaving me alone downstairs. I go into the living room, where April and Janet died. Red curtains hang over the front window—just as they were hanging on the day of the killing—but yellow halogen lamps of the type that builders use have been strung up here and in the kitchen. Their glare is too strong to be real. I feel like I’m in a film set, not a house.
    Some of the stuff that was here in the house has been removed as evidence. Other items have been sifted, inventoried, then destroyed. Still other items have been left in place, tagged as appropriate. I don’t know enough about these big forensic investigations to recognize the