The Last Party (DC Morgan #1)(4)
‘Someone said his face was all smashed in.’ Seren rises, eyes wide, deliberately ghoulish. Her hair is even redder than Ffion’s, with the same frizzy curls you can’t do a thing with. Ffion mostly fights hers into a messy bun, while Seren leaves hers loose, to settle on her shoulders like a big ginger cloud. She’s pale, smudges of last night’s make-up around her eyes.
‘Stop your gossip, Seren, and eat your porridge. Your bones’ll be cold till lunchtime.’
‘I only got in as far as my knees.’
‘You’ve bones in your legs, haven’t you?’
‘Someone will have been reported missing, though, surely . . .’ Ffion starts to say, but then she reaches the final message in her voicemail and her pulse quickens. She unplugs her phone. ‘I have to go.’
‘You just got home!’
‘I know, but . . .’ Ffion jumps up to pull a clean top off the airer, wondering if she can swipe a bra without Mam seeing. Half a dozen socks fall off the rack, one landing neatly in the porridge pot.
‘Ffion Morgan!’
Thirty years old, with a marriage and a mortgage behind her, yet Mam’s tea towel is still a force to be reckoned with. For the second time in as many hours, Ffion beats a hasty retreat.
As she pulls away, the car’s exhaust coughing in protest, she dials one-handed, balancing her phone on the passenger seat. Leaving the village, she pulls out in front of a car: a Sunday-best couple on their way to visit family, three bored kids in the back. The driver leans on the horn, staying on Ffion’s tail, making a point.
‘Mia?’ Ffion says, when the voicemail kicks in. She puts her foot flat on the accelerator. ‘It’s Ffi.’ Her pulse buzzes in her temples. ‘If Mam asks you where I was last night, tell her I was with you.’
TWO
NEW YEAR’S DAY | LEO
‘Keep your coat on!’
The shout comes as Leo Brady reaches his desk at Cheshire Major Crime Unit, at precisely nine a.m. Reluctantly he buttons his heavy wool overcoat back up and heads to the boss’s office, where Detective Inspector Simon Crouch is standing by his chair. Leo has only walked from the car park to the police station – a few hundred metres at most – but his feet are like ice cubes. He wiggles his toes inside his brogues. Too cold to snow, people keep saying, which has never made sense to Leo.
‘I need you to get your fat arse over to Mirror Lake – they’ve had a body wash up.’
Leo isn’t fat. He is, in fact, in far better shape than Crouch, whose pale flesh looks as though it’s been moulded from lumps of Play-Doh, but this doesn’t stop Crouch asserting his authority through the medium of playground insults.
‘Isn’t that in Wales?’
‘I didn’t ask for a geography lesson.’ Crouch shares his iPad screen to the smart board on the wall, and for a split-second Leo is treated to the first two lines of everything in Crouch’s inbox. In among the burglary overviews and the violent crime statistics, Leo sees a message from a Joanne Crouch entitled Your mother AGAIN, and an urgent-flagged email from Professional Standards, before Google Maps fills the screen.
Leo takes a moment to get his bearings. In the centre is a thin, meandering lake marked Llyn Drych, through which runs the border between England and Wales. Mirror Lake, Leo knows, although he has never had a job take him that far towards the boundaries of Cheshire Constabulary. A mountain range stands on the northern tip of the lake, and on the west side, just into Wales, is the small village of Cwm Coed. Between the town and the water is a band of green, running around the lake.
Crouch points at a patch of green on the eastern side, at the far end of their area. ‘Just before you got in, we had a MisPer report from here.’ He taps his screen, and the map changes to a satellite view. The green is woodland, not grass, Leo realises: trees packed tightly around the water’s edge. Crouch draws a wonky circle and taps it meaningfully. ‘This picture’s a couple of years out of date.’ He closes the map and swipes through his apps to find Safari. Mail, Weather, Sky News – is that Tinder? ‘This is what’s there now.’
A website appears on the large screen, a film playing soundlessly in the banner image. It’s a Shore thing . . . reads the caption. Sun sparkles on the surface of Mirror Lake, as the camera swoops closer to a row of wooden cabins at the edge of the water. A laughing child, frozen in mid-air, swings on a rope above a deck more suited to the Maldives than North Wales. It isn’t a film, Leo now sees, but a computer-generated animation: an artist’s impression of what is clearly a high-end development.
‘This is The Shore,’ Crouch says. ‘And don’t get any ideas, because the chances of you affording a place there are on a par with you ever progressing beyond the rank of constable. One of them’s owned by that ex-boxer actor. The one who’s married to her with the massive tits.’
‘Who’s the MisPer?’
‘The resort’s owner, Rhys Lloyd. A male opera singer.’ Crouch slots the words alongside each other as though the combination were experimental. He refers to himself as a traditionalist, which Leo has found, during the course of his own thirty-six years, is often synonymous with bigoted arsehole. ‘Very well known, I’m told,’ Crouch goes on. ‘If you like that sort of thing.’