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January 5
Leo
The pay-as-you-go phone Yasmin used to send her venomous tweets to Rhys is a flip-style Nokia, slim enough to slip into the lining of her handbag, which was precisely where Leo and Ffion had found it. The phone had no passcode, and there was just one phone number stored in the contacts: Jonty Charlton’s.
The string of saved text messages was a mixture of logistics—“See you by the generator at 6:30”; sentiment—“I miss you so much, angel pie”; and pure filth—“I want to take your throbbing—”
“Don’t! I can’t bear it.” Ffion claps her hands over her ears.
Leo looks up from the list of messages he’s been reading and grins. “Don’t you like my sex talk?”
“Not when I have to picture Jonty Charlton and Yasmin Lloyd doing it behind the bike sheds at The Shore.”
“They actually did do it there.” Leo finds the relevant text message and reads it out. “You can bend over and I’ll park my—”
“Stop! It makes me want to bleach my ears.”
“I didn’t have you down for a prude, Ms. Morgan.”
“YouknowI’m not a prude, Mr. Brady.”
For a second, they lock eyes, and Leo feels that same jolt of electricity he felt on New Year’s Eve. Somewhere in the office, the printer whirs into action. “So,” Leo says after a beat, because focusing on work feels like the most straightforward route right now, “Yasmin inherits her husband’s life insurance and Jonty Charlton becomes the controlling partner of The Shore. That’s a pretty solid motive for getting shot of Lloyd. I’ll tell Crouch we want to arrest Yasmin for murder. We can hang fire on Charlton till we hear what she has to say.”
Faced with the revelation that his client had failed to disclose an affair with her husband’s business partner, Yasmin’s solicitor had stopped the interview for a consultation, which has already gone on for well over an hour. Leo and Ffion wandered back to the office, where Ffion commandeered the desk opposite Leo’s and is now doodling on a piece of scrap paper.
Leo opens his laptop to message the DI, who has already left the office for the day. He remembers the door-cam footage Bobby Stafford gave him earlier, and while he’s waiting for a response from Crouch, he inserts the USB and double-clicks on the drive. The Shore’s cameras show Lloyd around ten thirty p.m. on New Year’s Eve staggering across the drive to throw up in the bushes, but once he returns to the footpath, he’s frustratingly out of shot. Maybe Bobby’s camera will show something new. More usefully, it will help fill in the blank space left by the glitch experienced by the resort cameras earlier that day. Aside from Lloyd, only Jonty Charlton had access to the CCTV. Could he have deliberately messed with the footage to cover his tracks? Or his lover’s?
“Maybe it wasn’t premeditated,” Leo says, thinking out loud. “Several witnesses say the Lloyds had a fight before the party started.” The software loads and the screen shows Bobby Stafford’s bright yellow McLaren, parked outside his lodge. “Things get heated, Rhys goes for his wife, and she grabs the award to defend herself. He dies, she panics and calls her lover to get rid of the evidence.”
“Mmm.” Ffion is adding whiskers to the cat she’s drawn on what Leo now sees is the back of a witness statement. He watches her over his laptop. He must have gotten his wires crossed over Seren’s elimination prints—or Seren really did change her mind. Ffion might sail a bit close to the wind occasionally, but she wouldn’t actually lie.
His desk phone rings and he hits the speakerphone, answering with a distracted, “DC Brady,” as he navigates through the door-cam footage.
“Hi, it’s Elijah. Elijah Fox. From the mortuary? Although I’m actually at home, because—well, anyway. Um…have you got a minute?”
“Go ahead, Elijah. I’m with Ffion now.”
“The thing with toxicology,” Elijah says, “is that you have to know what you’re testing for. And without an unlimited budget, the lab’s never going to speculatively test for hundreds of poisons, just on the off chance of finding a trace of one.”
“Right.” Leo can just about make out the cars either side of the Staffords’ lodge as well as the visitor bay on the opposite side of the drive. He moves the cursor to two p.m.—roughly when The Shore’s camera system went on the blink—and plays the footage at triple time.
“So I took a few samples home.”
“You did what?” Leo looks at Ffion, whose mouth has dropped open.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind doing stuff like that in my own time. I don’t have a girlfriend or anything like that.”
“I wonder why?” Ffion says under her breath.
“I thought to myself,What would be readily available to a murderer in North Wales?No point testing for batrachotoxin when the nearest golden dart frog’s five thousand miles away, right?” He laughs, high-pitched and—to Leo’s ears—a little manic. Should a mortuary technician be taking blood samples home? Does Izzy know about this? On his laptop, Caleb wanders down the driveway of The Shore.
“Belladonna, on the other hand…aconite, cyanide from fruit stones… You’d be amazed how lethal your average garden is. And then I hit on it.” Elijah is triumphant. “Ricin.”
“Ricin?” Leo says. He tries to remember the list of medications seized from the Lloyds’ bedroom. It was all over-the-counter stuff—is ricin ever a legitimate ingredient? If Yasmin slipped him something at the party, it would explain her reaction when they showed her the list. “You mean, poison-tipped umbrella, KGB-operatives sort of ricin?”
“It does rain a lot in North Wales,” Ffion says, laughing. “They’d fit right in.”
“Ricinus communis,” Elijah says. “That’s where it comes from. It’s quite popular. Monty Don had it onGardener’s World.”
