Free Cherringham: A Deadly Confession by Neil Richards Page A

she called Jack straight away.
    He answered on first ring: “Sarah.”
    “Hi, Jack, sorry — it’s been chaotic.”
    “Hey, don’t worry — we fit all this round our real lives, not the other way round, huh? And you have a busy one, that’s for sure.”
    “That’s certainly true today,” said Sarah. “Anyway — as you Americans say — I got the skinny on Mr. Bell.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “He’s a trainer — horses, that is. Runs a racing stables over towards Cheltenham.”
    “Hmm, no surprise there. But I wonder why our priest was paying him every month?”
    “Maybe Father Byrne owned a horse, kept it at the stables?”
    “Unlikely. I think he just liked betting on them. Tell me more about Senor Bell?”
    “Not much to say. He’s small-scale but successful. Owners like him, he trains winners. There’ve been hints online of some shady dealings in the past, a few news stories, but nothing people are willing to risk a lawsuit for saying out loud.”
    “Hmm, well keep digging. I’ll see what our friend Liam knows — if he’s prepared to tell me. Like I said last night — he and Eamon go back a long way. I have a hunch he knows things that he hasn’t told us.”
    “Well, you be careful, Jack.”
    “Keep saying that and I’m going to get worried,” Jack said, laughing. “I’m going to head over there now. You got anything else for me?”
    “Oh — I checked out the meds. Standard issue for his heart. Nothing unusual.”“Okay. Text me Bell’s address — and if I don’t come back, promise you’ll look after Riley for me, huh?”
    “Don’t joke,” said Sarah. “One day you’ll over-do that tough cop act and get yourself in trouble, Jack Brennan.”
    “Talk later, partner.”
    Sarah clicked her phone off and got back to her screen.
    She thought about the retreaters — Gustav, Tom and Isabel.
    Something going on there for sure. Was there a connection between them?
    Time to find out.
    She looked across to Grace who was now sitting on the office floor, surrounded by papers, slowly sifting them into neat piles.
    A few years ago, when Sarah’s life had collapsed under a very nasty divorce, she’d acquired some … unconventional … computer skills.
    The kind that allowed a hard-working wife and mother to discover that her lying, cheating husband was living the high life with his female boss in Brussels, staying in the Maldives with same, and draining cash from the family savings.
    The results of those skills — in the hands of a cagey divorce lawyer — allowed Sarah to leave the lying cheat and move back to Cherringham where she’d grown up.
    And now those very same skills came in handy when there was a case to crack.
    But Sarah had made it a rule from the first time she and Jack started investigating, not to involve her young assistant in anything potentially illegal.
    So now she kept quiet as she first lifted the travel agent’s name from the St. Francis Convent website, then hacked into their records.
    Handy skills indeed…
    It only took a couple of minutes to find the full names of the three retreaters, their travel arrangements laid bare — including home address, phone number, occupation, date of birth, passport information…
    All of which were the key for Sarah to unlock even more information should she need it.
    So: Tom Porter from Boston. Isabel Allard from Caen. And Gustav Stechman from Hamburg.
    Different cities, different countries .
    But was there a connection between them? Now she threw the names into various search engines to find out.
    Nothing — apart from a few shared links to St. Francis’s Convent. But that wasn’t going to help.
    She tried some family ancestry sites.
    Hmm, still no connection.
    Time to step back and try something else.
    Now she put Liam, Eamon and the old people’s home that Jack mentioned — St. Elrich’s into another search.
    She hadn’t expected to get anything, but the screen filled with hundreds of hits.
    Interesting…
    She dragged