The Last Party (DC Morgan #1)(122)

Across the water, The Shore has doubled in size since last summer. The slope of the forest means the second row of lodges is higher than the first, although nothing could match the panoramic views of the front five properties. There are people on the middle deck – too small to make out – and, as Ffion watches, someone dives from the pontoon, shallow and long.

Elen Morgan never swims with a float, and she shuns the brightly coloured swim hats advised by the lake wardens. Like Angharad, she swims barefoot, seemingly unaffected by the sharp stones around the water’s edge.

Ffion scans the lake until she catches movement, travelling from one buoy to another. Elen swims breaststroke; unhurried, but faster than most. No splashy showmanship, just smooth, even strokes, low in the water. She is as much a part of the lake as the reeds which edge the coves; as the buoys which spend all year in the water, weeds clinging to their chains.

Ffion sits on the end of the jetty, letting her feet dangle in the cool water. Beside her is the black bin bag from the shed, and as Elen swims closer to the jetty Ffion carefully arranges the contents of the bag. There’s a handful of photographs taken at the summer camp party, a note from Mia slipped into the envelope. Thought you and Ffion might like to see these. Trip down memory lane! Elen had not shared the photos with Ffion and, as Ffion looks through them now, she can see why. In every photo, Rhys is looking at Ffion, or Ffion is looking at him.

Elen Morgan knew Seren’s father had been at that party. These photographs had been enough to send her in search of proof.

Elen had sent for a DNA test. Wrapped in a carrier bag is a an ebony hairbrush, the letters RL etched on the back, and a folded piece of paper.

Rhys Lloyd is not excluded as the biological father of Seren Morgan. The probability of paternity is over 99 per cent.




Even though it could be no other way, Ffion catches a sob in her throat. The paperwork is dated November last year. Elen had known Rhys was Seren’s father months before Ffion told her. Before Seren discovered the truth.

Ffion’s pulse is a drum in her ears, as she watches Elen pierce the mirrored surface of the lake. She feels the beat in her toes, as the water ebbs against her sun-baked skin. She pictures Rhys’s corpse on its stainless-steel bed.

In the bin 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 metres 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 of Ricinus 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 towards Ffion at the end of the jetty. ‘I brushed it on to 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, throwing 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.