There’s a brief pause as the pathologist looks keenly at Leo, then at Harriet. Leo coughs. Okay, so this is awkward. But Leo isn’t the first man to give a fake name to a girl he’s met in a bar, and he won’t be the last. In the three years he’s been divorced, Leo has found dating an uncomfortable experience. Eighteen months ago, he had enjoyed what he’d understood to be a mutually agreeable one-night stand, only to find himself stalked—no,hounded—for several months afterward. He hasn’t used his real name since.
But this still doesn’t explain what Harriet Jones—or Johnson, or whatever—is doing at the mortuary.
“I take it you haven’t met,” the pathologist says. Leo and Harriet look at each other.
“Well—” says Leo.
“No,” says Harriet firmly.
The pathologist looks baffled. As well she might: Leo is struggling to understand himself. Has Harriet been following him? Intercepting his messages? For one wild moment, Leo imagines her bugging Crouch’s office, keeping meticulous notes on Leo’s movements.
“Harriet…” Leo says warily. He’ll be firm with her, but nottoofirm. She’s quite probably mentally unwell—this is not the action of a sane woman.
“Harriet?” says the pathologist.
“Um…” says Harriet. There’s a long pause.
“Shall we crack on?” There’s a note of frustration in Izzy Weaver’s voice. She waves a hand in Leo’s direction. “Detective Constable Leo Brady, of Cheshire Constabulary.” Then waves the other in the opposite direction, toward Harriet. “Detective Constable Ffion Morgan, from North Wales Police.”
Leo raises an eyebrow. “Ffion?”
“Ffion,” Harriet says quietly. Or rather, Ffion says. Leo’s head spins. At the same time, quite unexpectedly, his groin recalls the previous night. It’s an unsettling combination, helped little by the waft of disinfectant.
Harriet—Ffion!—Christ—had taken forever to leave this morning. Leo had been desperate to pee, and instead he’d had to lie there, pretending to be asleep while she fidgeted next to him, clearly waiting to be taken for breakfast. Leo never knows what to say the morning after, and staying asleep is infinitely easier than negotiating a conversation. She’d thumped out of bed eventually, crashing about in the bathroom in the hope he might wake up before giving up and going home.
Detective Constable Ffion Morgan. She doesn’t look like a Ffion. Harriet suits her better. Perhaps it’s a middle name, and she only uses Ffion for work. So by introducing herself last night as Harriet, she wasn’t giving a fake name exactly, just—
“Not Marcus, then?” Ffion raises an eyebrow.
“Who the hell is Marcus?” the pathologist says. “I was told there were only two of you coming. It’s a morgue, not a séance.”
“Sorry,” Leo says on behalf of both of them, although Ffion doesn’t look remotely sorry. Her expression is amused—a little quizzical—as though waiting for Leo to expand.
As Izzy Weaver ushers them into the depths of the mortuary, Leo feels a sense of misgiving come over him. He hopes to hell this turns out to be an accidental drowning, because Ffion Morgan looks like trouble.
Three
New Year’s Day
Ffion
Well, this is awkward. In the twelve months since walking out on her marriage, Ffion has successfully avoided bumping into a one-night stand after the event. It’s one of the reasons she spends her social life away from Cwm Coed—that, and the fact that when you live and work in the village in which you grew up, you remain forever a child in the eyes of everyone who knows you. Look at Sion Ifan Williams: sixty-five if he’s a day, yet known by everyone as SionSos Cochon account of a schoolboy enthusiasm for tomato ketchup.
Ffion herself has tried, and failed, to shake off the moniker of FfionWyllt.
Wild Ffion.
“It’s only because of your hair,” Mam used to say firmly, wrestling Ffion’s frizzy mane into a plait, refusing to acknowledge that an entire community considered her young daughter untamable. Elen Morgan had grown up thirty miles from Cwm Coed, and despite a long marriage and two children through the village school, there are many who still consider her an outsider. A place like Cwm Coed needs four generations in the graveyard before you can call yourself local.
At first, Ffion went along with herWylltmoniker. If the hat fits, she thought, impressing friends with booze stolen from her parents’ drink cabinet and inventing ever more outlandish “truths” at the inevitable games of Truth or Dare. It was funny, living up to her name.
Until it wasn’t.
Sometimes, when she and Mia have a pint at Y Llew Coch, they look around at the faces that haven’t changed in twenty years.
“Still would,” Mia would say of Hari Roberts, who fitted bathrooms and volunteered as a firefighter.
“Definitely wouldn’t,” they’d say in unison of Gruffydd Lewis, who now teaches in the same school that once gave him detention for sliding a mirror under the door to the girls’ changing room.