Page 11 of The Last Party

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“I’ve got it, remember?” Leo takes out his phone. “I’ll call you now, then you’ve got mine too.” He scrolls through his contacts to findHARRIET NYEand dials.

Instantly, Ffion’s cheeks color. Leo could kick himself. Now neither of them can pretend he doesn’t have her number and that’s the reason he hasn’t texted her—

Why isn’t her phone ringing?

Leo lifts his own to his ear to check it’s working.

Thank you for calling the showroom. Our offices are closed over the holidays, but if you’d like to book a test-drive, please leave your name and number and we’ll get back to you as soon as we reopen.

A long and uncomfortable silence falls between Leo and Ffion before he can bring himself to look away from his phone. Ffion smiles sheepishly. “It really was fun. And it’s not that you’re not—I mean, it’s just that…” Her eyes glint as she mimics his own efforts at letting her down gently.

Leo winces. Ffion keeps a level gaze on him, then grins. “Let’s start over, shall we?”

Leo nods forcefully. “Good plan.”

“We’ll forget last night ever happened and crack on with the job, yeah?” She winks. “Forget we’ve seen each other naked.”

It’s impossible, Leo thinks as he follows the little Triumph out of the car park, to not think of the thing you’re supposed to forget when you have literally just been reminded of it.

Ffion drives as though she’s on rapid response to a burglary in progress. She throws the Triumph around corners, hurtling over potholes with such vigor that Leo flinches on behalf of the suspension. No wonder the poor car looks as if it’s falling apart. Leo follows more sedately as the Triumph bounces over a humpback bridge—a foot of sky between tires and tarmac—before taking a sharp left to climb the track that leads to Cwm Coed.

The narrow, winding road is hewn from the mountainside, with passing places at regular intervals. Sheep appear suddenly at the sides of the road or wander carelessly from one side to the other, and Leo slows to a crawl. There was no snow earlier, but here, a dusting lines the road and collects in the crevices of the rocky sides. As the incline grows steeper, Ffion’s car drops to a walking pace, and Leo falls farther back. He glances at his hands-free, thinking he might try Allie again, but of course there’s no service.

How do people live in places like this? In fact,whydo they live in places like this? Where you can’t get anywhere except by car and you have to walk down a mountain to get a phone signal? Leo had found the move from Liverpool to Chester painful enough, struggling to adjust to an area with more fields than factories, but Allie had wanted to be closer to her parents when Harris was born.

Career-wise, transferring to Cheshire had felt like a shrewd move. Bigger fish, smaller pond. Leo was on CID within six months, had successfully applied to Major Crime the following year, and hoped for promotion within the department. He hadn’t reckoned on DI Crouch, who had taken an instant dislike to him.Calm down, calm down, Crouch is fond of saying whenever Leo opens his mouth in a meeting, paddling the air with his flat palms in a poor imitation of Leo’s accent. Do the rest of the team laugh because it’s funny or because they’re licking the boss’s arse? Either way, Leo’s jaw always tightens, unwillingly justifying Crouch’s stupid impression.

He considered moving back, after the divorce. He thought longingly of the familiarity of his old force, of slotting back into drinks on Friday night and football on Sundays.

“So go back to Liverpool,” Allie had said when Leo mentioned it.

“I’d never get to see Harris.”

Allie had shrugged, as though he’d made his own bed, when Leo wasn’t even allowed to sleep in it anymore. Allie was the one who made the choices. Choices like where they lived, where and when they went out. Choices like fucking her friend’s husband, then ending her marriage to Leo.

“I might as well be in Liverpool,” Leo mutters now, pulling over as a trailer full of hay bales clatters perilously close to the low barrier between the road and the sheer drop on the other side. He’d envisaged having Harris every other weekend and maybe one night in the week. But after Dominic moved in, Allie decided it wasdisruptivefor Harris to sleep anywhere but home. Leo had to pick him up at nine, waiting by the front door of a house he had once paid the mortgage on, and have him back by six. If Leo was rostered to work the weekend, he lost that Saturday with Harris: it wasdisruptiveto switch weekends around apparently. How Allie loves that word. Slowly, it becamedisruptiveto collect Harris before eleven or to return him after two. Leo finally understands why there are so many single dads in McDonald’s on a Saturday lunchtime. Where else do you go when you’re only allowed three hours with your kid every other weekend?

Then, of course, Leo had fucked up. Lost his mind, just once, just for a moment. And Allie won’t ever let him forget it.

Having climbed steadily—and slowly—for the previous ten miles, the road begins to fall away in front of them, and the Triumph picks up pace, racing down the winding path at a speed Leo isn’t inclined to follow. He drags his mind away from Allie and Harris back to Rhys Lloyd and the message he’s about to deliver to the man’s family. There was little online about them. The twin daughters are fifteen; Lloyd’s wife, Yasmin, is forty-six, the same age as her husband. She’s aspace consultant, whatever that is. Something to do with NASA?

The road bends sharply to the left before dropping steeply away. As the view opens up, Leo finds his mouth dropping open. The lake is a lazy letterSin the bottom of the valley, its border of forest dense and dark. Around it, woodland covers steep hills, making it look as though the trees in the distance are a hundred feet tall, towering over the lake.

Mirror Lake itself is a shimmer of silver beneath the day’s thin sunlight. At the far end looms a vast mountain, snow-capped peaks half-hidden in a swirl of cloud. The English-Welsh border runs directly through the middle of the lake, and it feels odd that it should be so invisible, that the water bears no sign of where one country ends and another begins.

Leo’s ears pop as the road descends still farther until he can’t see the lake anymore, only the trees closing in on either side of him. Ffion brakes hard, taking a left-hand fork so fast that the Triumph skids onto the opposite side of the road. Leo follows. This is the English side of the lake, an unmarked road that gradually narrows to become a single track. Every now and then, the trees thin around shallow coves, the lake glinting in the winter sun.

It would make a nice walk on a sunny day, Leo supposes. If you liked that sort of thing. Maybe by next summer, Allie might have forgiven him, might let him take Harris for a whole day—for a weekend, even. They could paddle or buy one of those fishing nets on sticks and see what they could catch.

Leo is brought up short by a wide turning flanked by enormous pillars. Vast wooden letters are positioned along the first twenty meters of the driveway.

THE SHORE.

Leo takes his foot off the accelerator. You can’t see the resort from the main road, and a sign to Leo’s left makes it clear the site is PRIVATE PROPERTY. Clipped hedging runs either side of the drive, and every few meters, rustic posts suspend discreet bulbs to light up the route when dusk falls. This is more like it, thinks Leo as he follows Ffion’s Triumph into the complex. Stylish, luxurious, and not a sheep in sight.

As he nears the end of the drive, the space widens into parking. On the right, nestled into the trees, are several visitor bays, and Leo pulls in next to Ffion.

“Hideous, isn’t it?” Ffion says as he gets out. Leo is too busy staring at the lodges to answer. They’re built directly on the lakeshore, each with a narrow path leading from the front door to a private parking space marked by more discreet lighting. The lodges are clad in wood, the grain left to weather naturally, and with the pine trees as a backdrop, Leo thinks they could be in Switzerland, not North Wales. It feels a few degrees colder here than in Chester, and Leo pulls up the collar of his overcoat.


Tags: Clare Mackintosh Mystery