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In the bag from the shed is a smoky-brown apothecary jar, identical to those on Angharad’s kitchen shelves, and Ffion thinks of poor Elijah and the ease with which his theories had been dismissed.
A few meters from the jetty, Elen stands, shaking water from her hair and tipping her head to catch the last of the sun. She smiles.
“Oh, Mam,” Ffion says quietly. “What have you done?”
Elen takes in the objects lined up on the jetty. Tiny fish dart around her, glinting in the light.
“You were fourteen.”
“God, Mam.” Ffion’s way out of her depth. “How did you get his hairbrush?”
“I used your key to get into Huw’s house when he was at work. I took the keys to The Shore and went to Rhys’s lodge when the place was closed for building work.”
“Does Angharad know you took the ricin from her house?” Ffion remembers Angharad’s description ofRicinus communis, the ease with which she sailed past the truth.
“No!” Elen starts walking out of the water. “She had nothing to do with it, Ffi. She uses it in a homeopathic remedy, but not in its purest form—not like that.” She indicates the jar, and Ffion shivers. You only need a tiny amount to kill someone, Elijah said. A poison so deadly, it hardly leaves a trace.
“You sent it to him, didn’t you?” Ffion picks up the pack of envelopes she found in the bag. The cellophane is torn, an envelope missing.It’s a paper cut, Leo said of the tiny cut on Rhys’s tongue. He and Ffion had been so close—so damn close. The ricin hadn’t been at the crime scene for them to discover.
“I mixed the ricin into a paste.” Elen wraps a towel around her, walking toward Ffion at the end of the jetty. “I brushed it onto the seal of a stamped addressed envelope and sent it with a request for a signed photograph.”
Ffion scrambles to her feet. Poison applied to the seal of a stamped addressed envelope, the evidence sent away from the crime scene by the victim himself. It was the perfect murder. Around them, crickets pulse in the long grass. Ffion thinks of the witness accounts from the night of the party, the way Rhys appeared blind drunk. She thinks of his erratic heart rate, the ease with which Glynis’s attack ended his life.
“You killed him.”
Elen says nothing.
“Mam…” Ffion gathers up the evidence and throws it back into the black plastic bag. She thinks of how she told Leo she was related to half the village and how a criminal’s a criminal, no matter which branch of your family tree they sit on. “This is—I’m a police officer, Mam. I’ve got a duty to—” She breaks off, rubbing her head, unable to process what’s happening. “You let Glynis think she’d killed her own son!”
“I know.” Elen is calm. It’s Ffion who’s crying. “It’s okay, Ffi. I did what I had to do,cariad. Now you do what you have to do.”
No one in Cwm Coed can remember what year the swim began, but they know they wouldn’t welcome the New Year in any other way. They don’t remember which year it was that Dafydd Lewis went in wearing nothing but a Santa hat, or when the rugby lads bombed off the jetty and drenched poor Mrs. Williams.
But everyone remembers last year’s swim.
“No dead bodies this year, hopefully!” someone shouts. Everyone laughs, but it’s an uneasy, uncomfortable laugh. It will take longer than twelve months for the people of Cwm Coed to forget that one of them is a murderer.
“Bloody freezing, it is,” Ceri says. “I hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for.” She’s brought someone with her—a woman with laughter lines and a silver chain around her neck, who touches Ceri’s arm when she talks and makes her eyes light up.
“I know a good way to warm up.” Bobby winks at Mia, and the pair of them giggle like kids.
The first klaxon sounds, and there’s a collective cry of excitement. Everyone races for the water, squealing and hopping from the sharp stones. Steffan—sober nine months and counting—stands up in the safety boat, siren at the ready.
“Five!” he shouts, and the crowd picks up the countdown. “Four! Three!”
“Ready?” Ffion says. She looks down the shore to where Seren and Caleb are bunched with the other teenagers.
“Two! One!”
“Ready,” Elen says. They run, eyes bright with cold, with adrenaline. They wade into the lake, and when they’re deep enough, they plunge, mind over matter, through the low-lying mist. Cold clamps a vice around their chests, mouths opening in shock as their breath is wrenched away. Keep moving, keep moving! Ripples become waves, the movement of people this way and that as the wind picks up and sends shivers across shoulders.
Out in the center of the lake, far below the kicking legs of Cwm Coed’s New Year’s Day swimmers, is Angharad’s red-sailed boat. Every few months, a piece of it washes up in one of the many coves around Llyn Drych, but for now, the hull lies wedged between the rocks at the bottom of the lake.
Close to the boat, a black plastic bag is tied tightly to a heavy weight. It lies half-buried in silt, the rope so tightly knotted, it could never come free. Weeds have grown around the rope and tiny fish flick round it, biting, nibbling.
One day, the rope will fray, and the bag will begin to move through the water.
One day.
But not yet.
