Ffion stops. She pushes her hands deep into her pockets. “Ceri has lived here forever. She’s in her early forties, I guess. She’d left secondary school by the time I got there anyway, but people were still talking about her.”
“What did she do?”
“Took an overdose in the toilets. The caretaker found her and took her to the hospital. She was supposed to be going to art college, but she dropped out. Now she’s the postie.”
“Because of Rhys Lloyd?”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I only know about the overdose because Mam sat me down and told me it was okay to be gay, straight, whatever—becausethat’snot an awkward conversation to have when you’re twelve—and that if anyone at school ever gave me grief, I was to tell her right away.”
“Your mum sounds cool.”
“She has her moments.” Ffion starts walking again. “The official line on Ceri was that she wasstruggling to come to terms with her sexuality.”
There’s a pause before Leo speaks. “She was at the party.”
Ffion looks at him. “Ceri isn’t a murderer.”
“She might be.”
“Because she was bullied—what—thirty years ago? That’s not a motive for murder. Not like money is.”
“You think Yasmin did it?” Leo says.
“Did you see how jittery she got over the drugs list? I’d put a tenner on the toxicology showing high levels of sleeping pills. I reckon Yasmin liked being married to a rising star. Once he was burned out, she bumped him off for the cash.”
“Why now, though? She’d inherit more once the rest of The Shore was built.”
“Only if she’s the beneficiary there. Jonty Charlton’s the financial partner, remember.”
“I’m sure he’ll be delighted to talk to us again.”
Jonty Charlton is not delighted. He looks at Leo and Ffion as though they’ve been dredged from the bottom of the lake. “Are you harassing the other residents of The Shore, or is that pleasure reserved for me and my wife?”
“We don’t discriminate,” Ffion says cheerfully, taking a step into the lodge so Jonty has no choice but to move back.
“This really is getting rather tiresome, you know. I thought incompetence was a quality particular to the Metropolitan Police, but clearly it’s endemic.”
“You told me this place would be a gold mine when it was finished,” Ffion says. “Who gets that gold mine, now Rhys is dead?”
Jonty looks a little taken aback. “Ah…Yasmin will inherit almost all of Rhys’s shares.”
“Almost?” Leo says.
“He owned fifty-one percent of the business. I have forty-nine percent. Our agreement was that, in the event of Rhys’s death, two percent of the business would be passed to me.”
“Making you the controlling partner?” Ffion says.
Jonty waves a hand, as though her point were moot. “It simply means that whoever Rhys chose to pass his shares to, the integrity of The Shore would be maintained.”
“Why did Rhys have the controlling shares, if you put up all the money?”
“Running a business is a little more complicated than issuing a parking ticket, officer.” Jonty laughs. “I had the money, but Rhys had the land. Most of the plot was owned by an English farmer. There was no permission to build, so Rhys bought it for a song.”
“But the land he inherited from his father already had a building on it,” Ffion says slowly. “So there was a precedent.”
“Not just a pretty face, eh?” Jonty says. Ffion stares at him, unsmiling. “You’re spot on. A small, scrubby bit of land, but arguably priceless. It was still a battle, but there was already a structure of sorts on the foreshore, and eventually we were able to make authorities see sense.”
“Was the business going well?” Leo thinks it’s possible Ffion might actually implode.