Ceri waits on the doorstep, thinking it might be a tip, although Yasmin already gave her a Christmas card with a gift card for Primark.
Rhys comes back with a pile of creamy cards. ‘We’re having a New Year’s Eve party. Thought we’d invite some people from the village.’ He clears his throat again.
‘Are you . . .’ Ceri is incredulous. ‘Are you inviting me to your party?’
Rhys colours slightly. ‘Well, if you like. But actually, we wondered . . . I mean . . . I’ve written a list. Of people who might like to come.’ He hands her a printed list of around twenty people.
The penny drops. Ceri’s the postwoman, so she can deliver their mail. For free. Rhys Lloyd has got a bloody nerve. She stares at the invites and she wants to tell him where to stick them, only inside she’s still the fourteen-year-old girl who once threw herself into stinging nettles to avoid Rhys’s cruelty; still the teenager made to hate herself so much, she swallowed every paracetamol she could get her hands on.
Ceri takes the invitations.
After she’s dropped the van at work, she walks through the village towards her house. Glynis is cleaning the shop windows. She asks how Ceri is, as she always does, in an intense, insistent way as though checking on Ceri’s welfare now negates what her son did back then.
‘They’re having a party at The Shore.’ Ceri holds up the creamy invitations.
‘It’s nice they’re asking people from the village,’ Glynis says, with a touch of defensiveness.
‘It is indeed.’ Water under the bridge, Ceri thinks, as she moves on. She looks at the list of people Rhys and his friends consider worthy of an invitation. Business owners, Rotary members, the vicar and his wife. A local historian; a television presenter with a family home nearby. Does Rhys even like these people, or is it all just for show? Ceri flicks the invites with her thumb, mentally working out a route to deliver them.
What is she doing?
Ceri feels a surge of anger that she’s once again allowed Rhys Lloyd to fill her time and her head. She pushes open the door of Y Llew Coch. The lunchtime regulars sit in the window seat – old boys with pints of ale and years of memories – and a couple of walkers tuck into sausage and chips. At the bar, Huw Ellis is talking to Steffan Edwards.
Ceri nods to the men. ‘Iawn?’
‘Alright, Ceri?’ Huw says. Out of habit, Ceri glances at Steffan’s drink, but – like Huw’s – it’s just a coffee. Steffan doesn’t notice, he’s intent on his conversation with Huw, and Ceri slaps the pile of invitations on the bar.
‘Can I nab a bit of paper?’ she asks Alun, behind the bar.
He picks up an invitation and reads it. ‘They don’t seriously expect anyone from round here to go, do they?’
‘Glynis Lloyd’s going.’ Ceri scribbles a note on the piece of paper Alun gives her.
‘With instructors,’ Steffan is saying to Huw, beside her.
Alun is shaking his head. ‘Shame on her. When she knows full well Jac wanted T?’r Lan left alone. Even put it in his will. The man must be turning in his grave.’
‘Why didn’t he say anything?’ Steff is saying, but Ceri has had enough of The Shore, enough of broken-record locals and blokes in pubs. She walks out of the pub, leaving the invitations on the bar, topped with her note.
Open invitation, it reads. Free bar.
Ceri tells people it’s all water under the bridge.
It couldn’t be further from the truth.
NINETEEN
JANUARY 5TH | FFION
Just as Ffion and Leo arrive at The Shore, Bobby Stafford jogs towards them.
‘I’ve downloaded the footage from my door-cam,’ he says, as he reaches them. ‘I don’t know if it’s useful, but Rhys passed our place around half-ten on New Year’s Eve.’
‘Thanks.’ Leo takes the USB stick.
Ffion’s already walking away, her attention caught by a movement in the trees. She walks towards it, Leo a few paces behind, and finds Caleb Northcote lurking by the water’s edge, a hoodie pulled over his face. He throws a cigarette into the undergrowth behind him.
Ffion eyes him suspiciously. ‘What are you doing skulking about here?’
‘I’m not skulking. I thought you were going to nick Bobby.’
‘Should we?’ Leo says.
‘He’s alright, he is. He’s teaching me to fight.’ Caleb shifts his weight, his eyes looking around, as though searching for the emergency exit. His face is pinched and anxious.
Ffion thinks of the glance that had passed between Felicia and Tabby, when they’d heard Rhys was dead. ‘You hang out with the Lloyd twins a lot, right?’