The Last Party (DC Morgan #1)(50)

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 domestic, 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 got 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 mooches 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 medication 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 on Gardener’s World.’

But Leo is no longer listening. He’s staring at the screen of his laptop, where the footage from Bobby Stafford’s door-cam shows a car parked in the visitors’ bay at The Shore for a full thirty minutes on the afternoon of Rhys Lloyd’s murder.

Ffion’s car.





TWENTY-ONE




JANUARY 5TH | FFION


‘Ricin’s a bit exotic for Cwm Coed,’ Ffion says, once Leo’s ended the call. ‘We’re more your couple-of-joints-after-work-and-a-line-at-the-weekend sort.’ She thinks again about Caleb dealing dope to Cwm Coed’s teenagers, and wonders if arresting him would put Seren off, or make him more appealing. Never underestimate the allure of a bad boy, she thinks, with a shiver. She looks up to find Leo staring at her. ‘What?’

‘Has there been much crime at The Shore since it opened?’

‘Only the graffiti on the sign.’

‘Who dealt with that?’

Ffion shrugs. ‘The neighbourhood policing team, I guess. Why?’

‘You’ve not been there on official business, then?’

Leo’s staring at her, and the hairs on the back of Ffion’s neck start to prickle. She jerks her head in a way that could either be a nod or a shake.

‘How about in a personal capacity?’ Leo’s voice is hard.

Ffion makes herself breathe normally, tracing her pen back over the cat she’s doodled, feeling a tremor in her normally steady hand. He doesn’t know. He might guess, but he doesn’t— Leo spins his laptop one-eighty degrees and pushes it hard towards her.