“But death cap mushroom poisoning would also cause kidney and liver failure, neither of which I found in our chap.” Izzy turns to Ffion and Leo, effectively dismissing Elijah. “Practically all poisons leave their mark. Corrosives burn the digestive tract, paracetamol shows as jaundice in the whites of the eyes, arsenic gives the stomach lining a velvety texture.”
Leo feels a bit queasy. He feels sorry for Elijah, who has gone back to his tidying, and he wonders if the technician really doesn’t mind Izzy’s rudeness or if he’s quietly plotting her downfall. Sometimes, when Crouch is being particularly unpleasant, Leo imagines his boss falling from a great height or afflicted by uncontrollable diarrhea.
“Izzy Weaver’s a bit much, isn’t she?” he says once they’ve left the mortuary and are safely out of earshot.
Ffion leans against her car. “I like her.”
Leo checks his emails. Twitter has finally released the IP addresses attached to some of the threatening tweets Lloyd received, and Leo is expecting results on the trace. Had Lloyd’s stalker traveled from somewhere else to confront Yasmin at the family home, or did she live in London? If she murdered Lloyd, how did she get to The Shore? The mystery stalker is still their prime suspect, and the sooner they identify her, the better. They might even find her prints at the crime scene. The thought reminds him of Seren Morgan.
“I bumped into your sister—” he starts, but Ffion talks over him.
“The Met’s been looking into Rhys’s club. Number 36. They’ve had low-level intel on it over a number of years, and guess what?” Ffion takes a drag of her cigarette. “It’s a brothel.” She blows a slow plume of smoke. “A high-end one—whatever that is—but nevertheless a brothel. They’re pulling an operation together as we speak.”
“Do you think Yasmin knows?”
Ffion grinds the butt of her roll-up beneath the heel of her boot. “That her husband was a cunt?”
Leo isn’t quite sure what to say. He refreshes his inbox and reads the incoming email with a slow smile. He looks at Ffion. “I think we’ve just found Lloyd’s stalker.” Leo taps the number at the bottom of the email and puts the call on loudspeaker.
“I thought it wouldn’t take you long to get back to me.” Gwen, from Major Crime’s tech team, sounds pleased with herself.
“I’ve got Ffion Morgan with me,” Leo says. “Talk us through what you’ve got.”
“In October last year, someone sent an abusive tweet to the victim’s account, and get this: the IP address is a café on Cwm Coed high street.”
Leo and Ffion look at each other. Lloyd’s stalker is local.
“That in itself doesn’t tell us anything—the mobile’s untraceable—but most criminals carry their own phones with them as well as a burner, so I looked to see how many other devices were logged by the Wi-Fi network at the same time.” Gwen pauses for what can only be effect.
“And?” Ffion prompts.
“Just one. Another mobile phone, but a contract one this time.”
Leo’s pulse picks up. “Registered to whom?”
Gwen’s triumph is audible. “Yasmin Lloyd.”
Eighteen
December 27
Ceri
The Shore is the last stop on Ceri’s postal route. She leaves the engine running, the midday news on the radio, and opens the rear doors of the van. There are more clothes for Ashleigh Stafford, who frowns at the parcels when Ceri hands them over.
“There should be one from ASOS.”
“That’s all I’ve got.” Ceri wonders if Ashleigh does anything with her time at The Shore except online shopping. In the summer, when the couple spent the whole of August here, Ceri delivered packages every single day. Ashleigh never once said thank you, but once, when Ceri had staggered up the path with a pile of boxes, Bobby Stafford had pressed a twenty-pound note into her hand.
Jonty and Blythe Charlton, at number one, rarely have post.
“Everything goes to the main house,” Blythe explained in the summer. Ceri hadn’t long turned forty, celebrating by closing on a two-bedroom house with a mortgage she’ll still be paying into her seventies. How the other half live.
She has a stack of post for number four. Ceri’s curious about Clemence Northcote and her son. She delivered all their Christmas cards and a number of bills, and today she has a brown envelope from the Inland Revenue, which seems an odd thing to have delivered to your holiday home. A fat package is too big to fit through the door, so she rings the bell. Caleb answers, yawning so widely, Ceri can see his tonsils. He scratches the band of midriff between his pajama bottoms and a faded hoodie featuring a band Ceri has never heard of.
“All right,” he says. It isn’t really a question.
Ceri hands him the mail. The boy smells of cannabis and sleep, but that’s preferable to Call-me-Clemmie, whose insistence on shuffling through a conversation in Welsh has made Ceri late to clock off on more than one occasion. She wonders if Clemmie knows that her son smokes weed or that he’s been seen on the hillside gathering the psychedelic mushrooms that have grown there ever since Ceri was at school.