The Last Party (DC Morgan #1)(32)

‘I want to go through the hashtag on Instagram,’ Leo adds quickly. ‘Be quicker with two of us.’

Ffion shrugs. ‘Sure.’

They settle on a Chinese restaurant called Wok this Way, sliding into a narrow booth by the door. ‘King prawn chow mein?’ Leo says, scanning the list of dishes.

‘Whatever you want.’

‘Lemon chicken?’

‘Why are you asking me? Oh, God.’ Ffion puts down her menu. ‘You’re one of those.’

‘One of who?’

‘A sharer. Look, I don’t mean to be funny, but if I order crispy duck, it’s because I want crispy duck, not because I want half a crispy duck.’

‘Technically, it actually is half a—’

‘You order what you want. I’ll order what I want. That’s how restaurants work.’

They work as they eat, each scrolling through Instagram on their respective phones. A woman at the next table gives them a pitying glance, whispering to her boyfriend. She thinks he and Ffion are a couple, Leo supposes, out on date night with nothing to say to each other.

‘This was posted at eleven p.m.,’ Leo says, looking at a photo of Lloyd in the Charltons’ kitchen. His face was red and shiny, sweat sticking his hair to his brow.

‘It could have been taken earlier, though. Some of the guests will have waited till they got home to post. The reception’s rubbish on that side of the lake, and I can’t imagine Jonty Charlton handing out his wifi password.’ Ffion shows Leo a series of images. ‘Loads of them are in a weird order. Clemence Northcote hadn’t finished drying her hair when the party started – look – but this photo wasn’t posted till the end of the night. And see this one of the Charltons? There’s an almost identical one from a different angle, but posted two hours later. We’ll have to get Tech to check the time-stamp on them all.’

Ffion stops. She flips her phone around. ‘This is interesting.’

The image is heavily filtered, but Leo can make out Bobby Stafford, talking to a woman with a nose ring. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Eira Hughes. Primary school teacher. But that’s not the interesting bit.’

Eira is laughing, perhaps at something Bobby was saying – he has a smile on his face. Next to them is another knot of people. The image is cut off, but you can see the back view of a woman in black leather leggings, standing with her back to Stafford.

‘Look at his hand,’ Ffion says.

Leo looks. Bobby’s fingers are entwined with the woman’s behind him. ‘Ashleigh?’

Ffion shakes her head. She takes back her phone and scrolls to a different Instagram post. ‘This is what Ashleigh was wearing.’ Bobby’s wife is in a red dress, clingy and short. Ffion taps back, her thumb swiping images across the screen. She stops, and Leo catches a glimpse of a woman in black.

‘Is that her? Do you recognise her?’ Leo squints to view the photo Ffion’s staring at.

‘Nope.’ Ffion swipes away quickly. A little too quickly.

‘Not local, then?’

‘What?’

‘If you don’t know her’ – Leo finds himself leaning across the table, his head low, in an effort to get Ffion’s attention – ‘she’s probably from out of town. Right?’

Finally, Ffion looks up. ‘Sorry. Yes.’

‘So if the Tech team pull the metadata on all these posts we can cross-reference them with the data from Rhys’s Apple Watch, to see what he was doing when his heart-rate went loopy.’

‘Hoping to see Professor Plum in the drawing room with the candlestick?’

‘You never know.’

Leo scrolls through the Instagram feed on his own phone, looking for more pictures of the mystery woman in black. There are a couple of Yasmin and Rhys Lloyd on their own deck, presumably taken before the party – Lloyd looks significantly less dishevelled. Behind them, the lake is a dark mass, the outline of black clouds heavy overhead. Perhaps it’s only because Leo knows that by the end of the evening Rhys will be in the water behind him that even the twinkly lights strung along the balustrade seem full of foreboding.

Rhys’s twin daughters are both on Instagram, their grids carefully curated and heavily edited. Tabby Lloyd’s most recent post is a poignant photo of her father’s empty study, his chair at an angle as though he’s just left the room for a moment. Leo stares at the image, remembering the glossy photographs he looked at this morning and trying to pinpoint what looks different. He wishes he hadn’t left the magazine at home. ‘Are there any photos of Lloyd’s office from before he died?’

‘Yasmin showcased the whole place on her grid, back in the summer. Hang on.’ Ffion scrolls through the images, and the Lloyds’ life spools backwards, in tiny filtered squares. New Year’s Eve, then Christmas, then London life. Half-term holiday at The Shore, then London again, then summer at The Shore. Ffion stops. ‘Here.’

Leo holds his phone next to Ffion’s, and they bend over the near-identical images of Rhys Lloyd’s study. The room is small – essentially a wide landing between the master bedroom overlooking the lake, and the two smaller rooms at the front of the lodge. In addition to the desk – tidier in Yasmin’s photo than in her daughter’s – there’s a small armchair, a music stand and a potted plant. Above the desk is a shelf on which stand a number of trophies and awards.