‘You were fourteen.’ Lloyd had been forty-six when he died; he’d have been thirty when he . . . Leo looks at Ffion, huddled in the passenger seat, and nausea swells in his stomach. Fourteen is statutory rape. Fourteen is a child.
‘People called me Ffion Wyllt.’ She pulls her knees to her chest. ‘It means “wild Ffion”。 I bunked off school, answered back, nicked stuff from the shops. I played up to it a bit, I suppose. Told the teachers I’d been up late drinking and partying, when all I’d done was watch TV with Mam and Dad. Told my mates I’d got off with this lad and that lad, when I hadn’t got off with anyone at all.’
‘When did you meet Lloyd?’
‘The school persuaded him to come back one summer to run a camp for a few kids who were good at music.’ Outside, a handful of snowflakes spin this way and that. ‘I haven’t sung a note since,’ she says quietly.
‘You don’t have to do this. Not now. Not unless you want to.’
‘He was good-looking. Smooth. Kind of charming, I guess. Older, but not old like parents. Some of the others told him how crazy I was – how I drank and slept around, and all the rest of the crap I’d made up for them. And I played along, because, once you’ve got a reputation, that’s who you are.’ Ffion’s jaw wobbles, and she pulls her mouth into a grimace. ‘Anyway, we had a summer party. Rhys’s idea. Celebrate the end of the project.’ Ffion speaks fast, her face screwed up as though she’s in pain. ‘He took me outside. Said he had a bottle of champagne just for the two of us to share. My dad had been diagnosed with cancer – it was a really shitty, shitty time, you know? I wanted to be somewhere else – be someone else.’
‘Where did he take you?’ Leo’s interviewed dozens of rape victims in his career, but he’s never found it so hard to force out the questions.
‘To his studio, in his mum’s back yard.’ Ffion gives a hollow laugh. ‘I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t know how to say no, and all we were doing was talking and drinking so . . .’ She trails off, staring at the windscreen. The snow’s settling, covering the rocky shore with a dusting of white. ‘I started to feel nervous – out of my depth – and I remember seeing her at her kitchen window on the first floor, hoping she’d look down and see me, that she’d somehow know I wanted to go home.’
‘And did she?’
Ffion’s face is deathly white. ‘The light went out. I guess she went to bed. And I always wondered if she knew what her son was like. What he might do.’ She starts crying again, slow, mournful sobs which make Leo’s heart hurt. He can’t bear to hear any more, but, more than that, he can’t bear Ffion to have to say it. He reaches for her and holds her until her breathing steadies.
Leo leans his head against Ffion’s, and watches the wind chase waves across the lake. Rhys Lloyd raped Ffion and fathered a child she had to give up. Little wonder she hated the man. Slowly, he lets himself acknowledge what he’s been thinking ever since he found out the truth.
Had she hated him enough to kill him?
THIRTY-FIVE
LATE JULY | DEE
Dee Huxley’s faculties are still in full working order, thank you very much, but soon after her seventieth birthday she had finally conceded it was time to slow down a little.
‘This house is too much for you to manage, Mum.’ Her son had come for one of his six-monthly visits. ‘There are some lovely warden-controlled flats overlooking the river.’ He had slid a brochure across the coffee table. A born salesman.
Dee was blowed if she was leaving her five-bedroomed Victorian rectory, with its sweeping lawns and walled orchard, to live in a beige box, with bingo on a Wednesday evening and the smell of cabbage seeping through the walls. She’d flicked through the pages. ‘There’s no room for an office. Where would I keep my paperwork?’ Dee’s study at the rectory was lined with bookshelves, neat handwriting labelling each year’s meetings and accounts.
‘So step down from the board! Come on, Mum – you should have retired years ago.’
‘I wonder if you would say the same if I were a man?’ Dee had no wish to retire, and, although the business ticked over perfectly well without her input, she liked to keep an eye on things from a distance.
Nevertheless, she’d had to agree the house was getting on top of her. It wasn’t so much that she couldn’t prune the fruit trees, or shin a ladder to clear the gutters, it was more that she no longer wanted to.