“He was here at midnight,” Jonty says. “Wasn’t he?”
Blythe raises her palms skyward. “I think so, but it was all a bit crazy.”
“Come to think of it,” Jonty says, “I don’t know when I last saw the chap. People were coming and going all the time. You know what it’s like. Champagne flowing…just your average party.”
“Just your average party,” Leo says when he and Ffion are back outside. “Just a dead body and thirty-odd potential witnesses, all drunk.”
“Forensics’ll be a nightmare.”
“Pinning down the guest list will be a nightmare. They basically don’t have a clue who was there, and it’s not as though they all came up the drive. At least half of them walked through the woods.” Leo’s phone rings, and he glances at the screen. “It’s the boss.”
Ffion stares at the lake. Several guests had come by boat, Jonty told them. At one stage, there’d been a line of motorboats from one pontoon to the next.
“Yes, sir,” Leo says. “I’ll tell her, sir.” He covers the end of his phone. “The DI wants you at the five p.m. briefing.”
“Why?”
Leo’s mouth works silently for a moment before he addresses his boss. “Um, in terms of added value, sir, what are you hoping she’ll bring to the…er…table?” Ffion raises an eyebrow. “Right. Yup. I’ll tell her. Thanks, sir.” He ends the call. “He says—” He catches himself. “Actually, never mind what he said. You have to be there.”
“No, I don’t.” Ffion rolls a cigarette. “Your DI, your briefing. I’ll see you at the PM.”
Leo stares at her. “You’re something else, you know?”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It wasn’t meant as one.”
Ffion follows the shoreline back toward the village. She can just about keep her shit together when only Leo’s involved. But a DI and a packed incident room? She simply can’t risk it.
Nine
January 3
Leo
Once Yasmin Lloyd had formally identified her husband’s body yesterday afternoon and the newly appointed family liaison officer had driven her home, Leo had reported to Crouch, as per his instructions. He was there for under five minutes before Crouch dismissed him.Come back when you’ve got something useful to share.
Ffion had made the right call. Leo thinks enviously of the freedom she seems to have. On paper, their jobs are practically the same, but in practice, they couldn’t be more different. Ffion appears to work her patch entirely unsupervised, while Leo reports for duty at the start and end of every day as though he’s a schoolkid, not a murder detective.
Yesterday, after the briefing, he had felt suddenly emboldened. “The postmortem’s at midday tomorrow,” he told Crouch. “Is it okay if I work from home in the morning?”
“They did a survey about people who work from home,” Crouch said. “Thirty-nine percent said they masturbate during the working day.”
Leo bitterly regretted asking.
“Work from home? More likewankfrom home.” Crouch guffawed with such ferocity that he went puce.
Not for the first time, Leo considered how much easier it would be to deal with Crouch if Leo were a woman. A female officer making a complaint about inappropriate language from a male boss would surely be robustly dealt with in the current age. Did the fact that Leo was a man make this sort of thing okay? Allie frequently accused him of being a snowflake.
“Is that all right, then?” Leo said. “To go straight to the mortuary from home?” he added quickly before Crouch could repeat his earlier witticism. The DI reluctantly agreed.
As a result, Leo has achieved more in half an hour this morning than he would have done in an entire morning in the busy open-plan office with Crouch ripping the piss at every opportunity. He has read all the open-source material available on Rhys Lloyd, slowly building a picture of him and his family, as well as the history of The Shore. The ill feeling from the Cwm Coed community is well-documented in the local papers but ignored by the glossy magazines, which tout The Shore asthe luxury resort Wales has been waiting for.Hello!magazine gave over three pages to interior shots of the Lloyds’ lodge, and Leo studies the photo of Rhys at his desk, a shelf of awards on the wall above him—proof of his early success.
Had Lloyd’s stalker been an obsessive fan? A jealous rival? Leo had requested details of Lloyd’s harassment complaint from the Metropolitan Police, and the file came through first thing this morning. Rhys Lloyd had been receiving abusive messages on social media for almost a year before he’d reported it to police, some six months before he died. Was there a connection? Leo reads the statement, handwritten by an officer attending an incident at the Lloyds’ house in Highgate, London.
My Twitter address is @RhysLloydSings. I use the account to let fans know about tours and album releases but otherwise am not active on the platform. Mostly the tweets directed at me are enthusiastic, but occasionally I receive negative comments about my appearance, voice, or politics. These generally amount to one or two tweets, which I ignore. Around twelve months ago, I noticed I was receiving frequent messages from an account called @RhysLloyd1000, and also from @RhysLloyd2000. Later, accounts were set up with the suffixes 3000 and 4000. The messages began as relatively harmless, criticizing my dress sense or my decision to take a particular role. They escalated to (unfounded) accusations of nepotism and deception and began to take on a threatening tone. I did not make a report of harassment at this stage, as I was not concerned by the messages and considered it an unfortunate side effect of being in the public eye.
On the evening of April 28 this year, I was having a drink at my club in Soho. I returned home to find my wife, Yasmin, in a state of distress, having received a visit from a stranger she described as a “madwoman.” The woman had referred to our children, Tabitha and Felicia, by name and made threats that gave Yasmin—and therefore me—grave concerns for our safety.