“Look here, that’s simply not fair. Yasmin would never have found out if you hadn’t told her. And frankly, she’s not the only one pissed off with you. I’m pretty fucked off with you myself, truth be known.”
Rhys is staring at Jonty, but his eyes are wild, unfocused. Jonty can’t even be sure Rhys can see him, hear him. The man is utterly wasted. He won’t remember any of this in the morning, and Jonty can’t resist the opportunity to twist the knife.
“I’m not going to bail you out, you know. I had to fend off that chap you owe earlier, and if you think I’m going to do it again, you can think again.” Jonty leans closer, hissing in Rhys’s ear. “If I were you, I’d be checking over my shoulder.”
Eleven
January 3
Leo
“Your boss is a dick.” Ffion sits on Leo’s desk, the heel of one boot resting on the handle of the bottom drawer. A crescent of dried mud has fallen on the floor, and Leo itches to pick it up. “I wouldn’t put up with it.”
Crouch had greeted them with a loud aside to Ffion to tell herLet me know if he doesn’t pull his weight—he’s a lazy fucker.
Leo doesn’t want to put up with it. He even started writing an email to HR once, but when he’d looked at the list of Crouch’s petty taunts, it had seemed so pathetic that he’d deleted it. Moaning about someone calling youfatty bumbumis the sort of behavior you were supposed to leave behind in primary school. It’s just banter, isn’t it? What lads do. He hears Allie’s voice in his head.Snowflake.
“Is he like that to everyone?” Ffion says.
“Yes.” Leo’s response is automatic, then he thinks for a moment. “Actually, no. Just me.”
“Racist, then.”
“No, he’s never said anything racist. He wouldn’t dare.”
Ffion yawns. “Exactly. He targets you for no apparent reason, and the only difference between you and the rest of the office is…” She looks around the room, where every officer has one thing in common. They’re white.
An email pings into Leo’s inbox, relieving him of the need to continue the conversation. Out on the streets or in an interview room, resolving conflict comes naturally to him, but his personal life is another matter. Leo once switched gyms rather than tell the personal trainer he’d been allocated that he hated the rowing machine.
“Tech team update.”
Ffion jumps off the desk to see over his shoulder, resting a hand on the back of Leo’s chair. It brushes against him for a second before she leans forward to read out the email. “Lloyd’s Apple Watch stopped recording a heartbeat at 11:38 p.m., which is consistent with the pathologist’s report.”
“But look at his heart rate.” Leo points to the reading, which averages sixty beats per minute for the first half of New Year’s Eve, then shoots into the eighties from midafternoon onward before it finally slows and then stops completely. “Something made it spike. Or someone.” Leo says.
Ffion’s bent over the data, and for a second, he thinks she looks guarded. “Maybe he had an argument,” he says.
“For seven hours?”
“He could have been shagging.”
“I refer my learned friend to my earlier rebuttal.”
“Drugs, then,” Leo says. “Yasmin said he wouldn’t touch them because they mess with the vocal cords, but she wouldn’t be the first wife not to have a clue what her husband was up to. Or maybe someone slipped something into his drink.”
“In that case,” Ffion says, “we’re wasting our time looking at the locals. The party started hours after the data shows a heart-rate spike.”
“Plenty of suspects at The Shore, though. Not to mention plenty of opportunity: I doubt that lot waited till seven thirty to open the champagne. Did you see their recycling bins? They must have it on their cornflakes.”
“Granola,” Ffion says. “They wouldn’t have anything as common as cornflakes.”
“Have they all given elims?” Uniformed officers have been tasked with requesting elimination fingerprints from all the owners, a process that will also need to be undertaken with every guest identified as being at the party.
Ffion opens the file. “Clemence Northcote refused permission for her son.”
“Refused?”
“She says Caleb spent the evening hanging out with the Lloyd twins in the Northcote lodge, a story that is backed up by the twins themselves.”