Rhys Lloyd is not excluded as the biological father of Seren Morgan. The probability of paternity is over 99 per cent.
Even though it could be no other way, Ffion catches a sob in her throat. The paperwork is dated November last year. Elen had known Rhys was Seren’s father months before Ffion told her. Before Seren discovered the truth.
Ffion’s pulse is a drum in her ears, as she watches Elen pierce the mirrored surface of the lake. She feels the beat in her toes, as the water ebbs against her sun-baked skin. She pictures Rhys’s corpse on its stainless-steel bed.
In the bin bag from the shed is a smoky brown apothecary jar, identical to those on Angharad’s kitchen shelves, and Ffion thinks of poor Elijah and the ease with which his theories had been dismissed.
A few metres from the jetty, Elen stands, shaking water from her hair and tipping her head to catch the last of the sun. She smiles.
‘Oh, Mam,’ Ffion says quietly. ‘What have you done?’
Elen takes in the objects lined up on the jetty. Tiny fish dart around her, glinting in the light.
‘You were fourteen.’
‘God, Mam.’ Ffion’s way out of her depth. ‘How did you get his hairbrush?’
‘I used your key to get into Huw’s house when he was at work. I took the keys to The Shore and went to Rhys’s lodge when the place was closed for building work.’
‘Does Angharad know you took the ricin from her house?’ Ffion remembers Angharad’s description of Ricinus communis; the ease with which she sailed past the truth.
‘No!’ Elen starts walking out of the water. ‘She had nothing to do with it, Ffi. She uses it in a homeopathic remedy, but not in its purest form – not like that.’ She indicates the jar, and Ffion shivers. You only need a tiny amount to kill someone, Elijah said. A poison so deadly, it hardly leaves a trace.
‘You sent it to him, didn’t you?’ Ffion picks up the pack of envelopes she found in the bag. The cellophane is torn, an envelope missing. It’s a paper cut, Leo said, of the tiny cut on Rhys’s tongue. He and Ffion had been so close – so damn close. The ricin hadn’t been at the crime scene for them to discover.
‘I mixed the ricin into a paste.’ Elen wraps a towel around her, walking towards Ffion at the end of the jetty. ‘I brushed it on to the seal of a stamped addressed envelope and sent it with a request for a signed photograph.’
Ffion scrambles to her feet. Poison applied to the seal of a stamped addressed envelope, the evidence sent away from the crime scene by the victim himself. It was the perfect murder. Around them, crickets pulse in the long grass. Ffion thinks of the witness accounts from the night of the party; the way Rhys appeared blind drunk. She thinks of his erratic heart-rate, the ease with which Glynis’s attack ended his life.
‘You killed him.’
Elen says nothing.
‘Mam . . .’ Ffion gathers up the evidence, throwing it back into the black plastic bag. She thinks of how she told Leo she was related to half the village, and how a criminal’s a criminal, no matter which branch of your family tree they sit on. ‘This is – I’m a police officer, Mam. I’ve got a duty to—’ She breaks off, rubbing her head, unable to process what’s happening. ‘You let Glynis think she’d killed her own son!’
‘I know.’ Elen is calm. It’s Ffion who’s crying. ‘It’s okay, Ffi. I did what I had to do, cariad. Now you do what you have to do.’
No one in Cwm Coed can remember what year the swim began, but they know they wouldn’t welcome the new year in any other way. They don’t remember which year it was that Dafydd Lewis went in wearing nothing but a Santa hat, or when the rugby lads bombed off the jetty and drenched poor Mrs Williams.
But everyone remembers last year’s swim.
‘No dead bodies this year, hopefully!’ someone shouts. Everyone laughs, but it’s an uneasy, uncomfortable laugh. It will take longer than twelve months for the people of Cwm Coed to forget that one of them is a murderer.
‘Bloody freezing, it is,’ Ceri says. ‘I hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for.’ She’s brought someone with her – a woman with laughter lines and a silver chain around her neck, who touches Ceri’s arm when she talks and makes her eyes light up.
‘I know a good way to warm up.’ Bobby winks at Mia, and the pair of them giggle like kids.
The first klaxon sounds, and there’s a collective cry of excitement. Everyone races for the water, squealing and hopping from the sharp stones. Steffan – sober nine months and counting – stands up in the safety boat, siren at the ready.