Talking to the Dead Read Free Page B

the sort to cry when Jackson puts on his gravel-voiced tearjerker finale. I’m not. Bev is the sort of comfortable soul that people will happily open up to over a cup of tea. I’m not. I mean, I can do the door-to-door stuff. I’ve done it before and asked the right questions and sometimes obtained valuable information. But Bev is a natural, and we both know I’m not.
    “I’m mostly on the Brian Penry case. Bank statements and all that. In my spare time, if I stay sane, I’m meant to track down that debit card thing. Rattigan’s card. Funny place for it to show up.”
    “Stolen?”
    I shake my head. I called the bank yesterday after talking with Brydon and—once I’d managed to clamber through all the bureaucracy to someone who actually had the information—got answers fairly easily. “Nope. The card was reported lost. It was duly canceled and a replacement issued. Life goes on. It could literally be just that. He dropped it. Mancini or whoever picked it up. Kept it as a souvenir.”
    “Brendan Rattigan’s platinum card? I would have kept it.”
    “You wouldn’t. You’d have handed it in.”
    “Well, I know, but if I wasn’t the handing in type.”
    I laugh at her. Trying to use the inner workings of Bev Rowland’s mind as a model for guessing at the inner workings of Janet Mancini’s mind doesn’t feel to me like an obvious recipe for success. Bev makes a face at me for laughing but wants to rush off to the ladies’ so she can sort her face out before hitting the road. I tell her to have a good day, and she says, “You too.”
    As she leaves, I realize that what I said to her wasn’t true. Janet Mancini couldn’t have picked up Rattigan’s debit card from the pavement. It wasn’t possible. Mancini and Rattigan didn’t walk the same streets, didn’t go to the same pubs, didn’t inhabit the same worlds. The places where Rattigan might have dropped his card were all places that would, explicitly or otherwise, have forbidden Mancini entry.
    And as soon as this thought occurs to me, I understand its implication. The two of them knew each other. Not casually. Not by chance. But meaningfully, in some real way. If you asked me to take a bet on it right now, I’d bet that the millionaire killed the drug addict. Not directly, I assume—it’s hard to kill someone when you’re dead—but indirect killing is still killing.
    “I’m going to get you, you fucker,” I say out loud. A secretary looks at me startled as she walks past. “Not you,” I tell her. “You’re not the fucker.”
    She gives me a little smile. The sort that you slip the schizo type muttering swearwords in the street, the sort you offer park-bench drunks quarreling over cider. I don’t mind. I’m used to that kind of smile by now. Water. Duck’s back. Paddle on.
    I head upstairs.
    My desk stares balefully at me, flaunting its cargo of numbers and sheets of paper. I go over to the kitchenette and make myself a peppermint tea. Me and one of the secretaries drink it, no one else. Back to my desk. Another sunny day. Big windows full of air and sunshine. I lower my head over my mug of tea and let my face warm up in the perfumed steam. A thousand boring things to do and one interesting one. I’m reaching for the phone, even as I pull my face away from its steambath. It takes me a couple of calls to get Charlotte Rattigan’s number—widows of the superwealthy are unlisted, inevitably—but I get it anyway and make the call.
    A woman’s voice answers, giving the name of the house, Cefn Mawr House. She sounds every inch the servant, the expensive sort, titanium-plated.
    “Hello, my name’s Detective Constable Griffiths calling from the South Wales Police. May I speak with Mrs. Rattigan, please?”
    Mention of the police causes a moment’s hesitation, as it almost always does. Then the training kicks in.
    “Detective Constable Griffiths, did you say? May I ask what it’s regarding?”
    “It’s a police matter. I’d prefer to