Tried on the one I told you about but it’s really short . . .
Rhys smiles at the ellipsis, inciting the response he knows she wants.
Wear the dress, he types.
Tonight could be interesting after all.
Outside, the air is crisp; the sky a bright winter’s blue. A Fortnum & Mason driver’s talking to Dee, who leans both hands on her stick. As Rhys approaches, the van moves away and Rhys has no choice but to walk past his neighbour.
‘Good morning, Rhys.’
‘Mrs Huxley.’ He still finds it hard to look her in the eye; still gets the jitters at the thought of what she knows. Recently, he’s found himself thinking about the girl at Number 36 – and not in the way he once thought of her. He’s found himself wondering if the girl （what was her name?） really had enjoyed herself as much as he once believed she did. He’s been thinking of that night – of her big eyes and her silent resistance – and he’s felt something akin to contrition.
‘I’ve just passed the triplets down by the lake,’ Dee says, pleasantly enough.
Rhys frowns. ‘Triplets?’
She laughs, brushing away the joke. ‘Your girls, and their friend, from the village. Seren, is it? Like peas in a pod. Except for the hair, of course.’ She eyes Rhys’s dark hair with a pseudo-critical eye. ‘No sign of red there – you’re in the clear!’
She laughs again, but Rhys is only half listening. He’s thinking about another redhead he once knew – a local girl, years ago. Fox-red, with curls just as wild as Seren’s. He’s thinking that the last time he saw her was at a party, how they’d got together and . . .
As Dee says goodbye – time to report to Blythe for my next task! – Rhys is doing sums in his head.
Triplets. Peas in a pod.
Blood buzzes in his ears. He stumbles away from the lodges, down to the water’s edge. For a moment, he can’t remember her surname – she was only ever Ffion Wyllt – then it comes to him. He gets out his phone, searches Ffion Morgan, scanning the hundreds of hits in vain. He adds Cwm Coed and gets a dozen hits for the local police force. He’s about to try a different search term when he sees a photo attached to one of the articles. He opens it and zooms in.
Ffion Morgan is a police officer.
Rhys dimly recalls knowing this – a snippet of information shared by Glynis in her weekly round-up of News from home, as though Rhys really cared that Mrs Roberts, three doors down, had had a cataract op, or that the old surgery was being turned into flats. The Morgan girl’s joined the police, can you believe?
A moment of recognition, that’s all: the memory of that night as brief and as careless as a shrug. Ffion Wyllt. She’d been maybe seventeen or eighteen? Something like that. Older than the others, certainly. Rhys has had many comparable encounters over the years, and he assumes the women he meets are similarly promiscuous. Why else would they be so flirtatious, so willing?
Rhys looks across the water to where Cwm Coed lies, behind the band of trees. He hasn’t thought about that summer for years, but slowly the memories are filtering back. Those God-awful workshops at the school, made bearable only by the flirting of half a dozen girls, competing for his attention. The celebratory party, all kids and cola, till Rhys and Ffion made an after-party of their own.
He feels a kernel of disquiet, like a fruit seed lodged in a tooth. He works at it, wanting to be free of it. He thinks of the girl at Number 36, who said yes to everything until she said no, only by then Rhys wasn’t listening. He thinks of Mia, so provocative, so teasing, and yet oddly unyielding beneath his touch. Despite the cold of the day, heat spreads throughout his body, the seeping, uncomfortable sweat of a fever, of sickness, of shame.
Google only gives a switchboard number for North Wales Police, but as Rhys searches further he finds Ffion’s details on an old community Facebook group. He calls the mobile before he can change his mind. He has to know.
‘Detective Constable Ffion Morgan.’
Rhys hasn’t planned what to say. His words dry up, his mouth working uselessly, and she speaks again, irritation in her voice.
‘Hello? Who is this?’
‘It’s Rhys,’ he manages. ‘Lloyd.’
There’s a tiny sound on the other end of the phone. A silence, then: ‘What do you want?’
Rhys can hardly hear her. He searches for the right words. ‘Did we – were you . . .’ Peas in a pod, Dee said. But she couldn’t – it couldn’t . . . He takes a deep breath and tries again. ‘This is crazy, but is Seren—’