“I’m nottaking him away.” Allie waggles her fingers in the air. “I’m giving him opportunities. This country’s a shithole.”
“Somewhere closer, then.” A note of desperation creeps into Leo’s voice. “France. Spain.” He doesn’t want his son to go anywhere at all, but at least if he’s in Europe, Leo will be able to visit more often.
Allie wrinkles her nose. “Nobody speaks English there.” She licks another envelope, then winces and runs her tongue around the inside of her mouth. “Why do paper cuts hurt so much? Anyway, it’s all arranged. Dominic’s going to be departmental head at a great secondary school, and there’s a primary school on site, so he can take Harris with him.”
“Like fuck he can.” Leo promised himself he wouldn’t lose his temper today, but it’s that or give in to the sobs welling up in his chest, and he won’t give Allie the satisfaction of seeing him cry.
“You see? This is what I mean. Time and time again, I give you another chance, only for you to go off on one. It’s not acceptable, Leo. To be honest, I think Harris would be better without you in his life. You’re a bad influence.”
“I love him.”
“You put him in danger!” There it is. Allie’s trump card. “He was terrified, Leo! God knows what mental scars it will have left. When I think of his little voice on the end of the phone…” She puts a hand to her mouth, crocodile tears squeezing from her closed eyes. Leo says nothing. What can he say that he hasn’t already tried?
He had been taking Harris back to Allie when it happened. Along with most of his colleagues, he’d spent much of the week looking for Kieron Tackley, a sixty-five-year-old pedophile with enough of the right contacts for his prison van to be intercepted. Instead of facing trial, Tackley was now roaming the city, and every day that passed put another child at risk.
“Who let the dogs out?” Leo was singing along to the radio.
“Who, who, who, who, who?” came the response from the back seat. Never mind “Wind the Bobbin Up,” Baha Men had Harris dancing like nobody’s business.
Kieron Tackley was standing by a bus stop. Head down, hood up, but definitely Tackley. Leo switched off the music, pulled in behind a parked car, and reached for his police radio.
“You put the job before your own son,” Allie says now. “It’s quite obvious where your priorities lie, and they’re not with Harris.”
Leo walks out. What’s the point?
“Wait!”
He turns, and Allie thrusts an envelope at him. “Here you go. Saves me a stamp.”
Ffion’s getting out of her car when Leo pulls into Brynafon mortuary. She doesn’t wait for him, and by the time he catches up, she’s with Izzy Weaver. Leo has the distinct impression Ffion is avoiding being alone with him. He wonders if Seren’s told her about their exchange on Cwm Coed high street.
“I gather you’ve got a tenner on the wife offing him with his own sleeping tablets?” Izzy says as he joins them in the morgue. The technician, Elijah, is tidying up from a previous autopsy.
“It’s just a hunch,” Ffion says. “She was definitely weird when we showed her the list of medication.”
“Well, I can’t comment on the wife, but toxicology showed no trace of the tablets, I’m afraid, so DC Brady’s quids in.”
“Are you sure?”
Izzy gives Ffion a withering look. “No drugs at all, in fact. Your man was relatively healthy.”
“Then why did he die?”
“Much as we pathologists like to think we’re God, postmortems are often more about elimination than diagnosis: narrowing down the clinical signs until they point to one thing.” Izzy takes off her glasses and hooks them onto the top of her gown. “In this case, the assault itself appears severe but in fact it’s relatively superficial. There are no cerebral contusions, no subarachnoid or subdural hemorrhage. Not enough to kill him but enough to bring on the heart attack that proved fatal.”
“Witnesses say he was completely out of it at the party,” Ffion says. “Everyone assumed he was drunk.”
“That would fit with the early stages of heart failure, especially in otherwise healthy patients. We know from the Health app on his watch that his pulse was erratic for most of the afternoon, becoming dangerously slow in the evening. That drop in blood pressure alone would have triggered symptoms of confusion.”
“And vomiting?” Leo asked. “A witness saw him throw up outside.”
“It’s not uncommon.”
“Ask if they had mushroom canapés at their party,” the technician says. “And who made them.” Like Izzy, Elijah is in a disposable gown, with blue plastic bags over his shoes. He wears small round glasses, his long hair pulled into a high bun. “Even a small amount of death cap will make you sick in a matter of hours.”
“Elijah is midway through a toxicology degree,” Izzy says. “Which apparently makes him an expert.”
“The symptoms would fit,” Elijah says mildly, ignoring the barb.