Free Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham Page A

Eastern Avenue, where the only serious casualty was a little boy who lost both his legs and suffered significant facial injuries. All the time we were getting him out of the car and into the ambulance, he was crying and holding his little tiger toy against his neck. Not only did I not cry but it wasn’t until a few days afterward that I realized I was meant to have cried, or at least felt something.
    I reflect on all this as Amanda cries and I say “It’s all right” like a mechanical toy, wishing one day to find some tears of my own.
    Eventually she’s done.
    “Amanda, would you like to come to the funeral? We don’t yet know when it’ll be, but I could let you know.”
    That sets off another round of crying, but Amanda manages a “Yes, yes, please. Someone ought to be there.”
    “I’ll be there,” I say. “I’m going to be there.”
    The call ends, leaving me faintly dazed. I’m going to the funeral, am I? That’s the first I knew of it, but I realize that I do really want to go. I’ve also got D.C.I. Jackson’s comments from earlier buzzing in my ears. Was that the good D.C. Griffiths, the one with the great interview technique? Or was that an example of the bad one, a fingernail’s breadth away from triggering another complaining phone call to the boss? I don’t know, and right now I don’t care.
    I’ve got too many things in my head and don’t know where to put them all. The racehorse that Penry co-owned had five other owners. Four of those five were individuals. One was an offshore, privately held company, with no publicly available information about its ultimate ownership. But it had two directors and a company secretary—D. G. Mindell, T. B. Ferrers, and a Mrs. Elizabeth Wilkins, respectively—who were also directors and company secretary at one of Brendan Rattigan’s shipping companies. One of the individual co-owners of the racehorse was also a senior executive at Rattigan’s steel company. A second man was godfather to one of Rattigan’s children, something I learned from a Google search that took me to various gossip magazines. I couldn’t trace any links between the other two owners and Rattigan, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
    And besides, even the links I knew about seemed to imply something. A company, almost certainly belonging to Rattigan, owned a chunk of a racehorse, as did one of his company executives and one of his oldest friends.
    As did Brian Penry.
    Maybe that was just coincidence. Maybe he had nothing to do with Rattigan and he was just there to make up the numbers.
    Or maybe not. Penry had spent about forty grand more on his bullshit purchases than he had stolen from the school or than could be accounted for from his salary. It was, I reckoned, just about possible that Penry had found some way to cash in his police pension in order to fund his purchases, but who on earth would do that? And why?
    Why, why, why?
    Wasn’t it more likely that Penry had another source of cash and, if he did, then wasn’t it also possible that Rattigan was in some way the origin of that cash? And if so, and if Rattigan did have some connection to Mancini, then didn’t that imply that Penry was in some way involved with the Mancini murders?
    If, if, if.
    It’s five o’clock.
    Because I haven’t made any progress on the Mancinis’ Social Services records, I decide to take them home. Little Miss Perfect has a minor issue of conscience there. The records are confidential, and we’re not meant to take confidential data out of the office on a laptop, but that’s the kind of rule which is broken all the time and I feel the need to get home reasonably early. Tonight is meant to be a gym and ironing and tidying up sort of night, but I have a feeling that it’s going to be nothing of the kind.
    Before I leave, though, I decide I need a bit of human contact. I go on the prowl and come across Jane Alexander, who’s just back from house-to-housing. I find Jane a bit scary, if truth