The Cold Light of Mourning (18 page)

“Well, I must get off or my sister and her husband will be wondering whatever happened to me. They’ll have been expecting me long since. Good-bye, then.”

“Good-bye, Gwennie,” said Victoria, watching as she left and giving a little wave.

Penny made no move.

“Earth to Penny!” said Victoria. “You didn’t say good-bye to Gwennie. Are you all right?”

“Sorry, I’m fine,” said Penny. “I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about something else.”

She watched as Gwennie’s receding figure got smaller, turned a corner, and disappeared from view. Shrugging, she smiled at Victoria and pulled herself together.

“A little trip down memory lane. That was Emma’s coat. I didn’t realize she’d given it to the charity shop. I’m glad someone’s getting some good use out of it. To tell you the truth, I never really liked it at the time, but now I think it’s rather smart. Very retro. Vintage!”

Victoria smiled at her.

“That’ll be the nostalgia setting in,” she said. “It comes to us all. I get that way thinking about glass milk bottles and the lovely, dear men who used to deliver then.”

She shook her head and they walked on. As they turned the corner they saw Gwennie further on down the street hoisting her bags into the back of what looked to them like a high-end BMW.

“There’s his good deed for the day,” Victoria observed. “David Williams giving Gwennie and her bags a lift home. How nice.”

Twenty-five

P
enny had always enjoyed daytrips to Llandudno. She could have had her supplies shipped directly to the salon, but she looked forward to closing her shop early once a month or so and visiting the charming seaside town, with its elegant Edwardian architecture, handsome shops, fine restaurants, and half-mile long Victorian pier that juts into Llandudno Bay with views to the famous limestone cliffs.

When they had finished choosing the salon supplies, Penny and Victoria decided to leave their parcel behind to be picked up later, and take a leisurely stroll along the sweeping promenade. They admired the regal, four-storey terraced hotels as they went, and soon found themselves outside the region’s best-known contemporary art gallery, Oriel Mostyn.

“This was one of the last places Emma and I visited,” said Penny wistfully, “before she became too ill to get out and about.

“I was thinking this morning that I’m going to retire her Altar Ego polish. I can’t see myself using it on anyone else.”

Victoria nodded sympathetically and put her arm around Penny.

“I’m sorry you lost Emma,” she said softly. “But I’m here now. As friends go, will I do?”

After a few moments, she pointed in the direction of the pier.

“Just for fun, should we pretend we’re holidaymakers and take the sea air properly? It’s been years since I walked along the pier and maybe we’ll feel like a cup of tea at the café, if it’s open.”

“All right,” said Penny, “but when we come back I want to have a good look around Marks and Spencer. Be funny if we bumped into Mrs. Lloyd. She always shops there and then treats herself to a nice tea at Badgers. I’ve just realized that I’ve got nothing to wear. Must get my hair done and lose a pound or two, while I’m at it.”

Victoria smiled to herself as they turned in the direction of the pier, with its decorative turquoise wrought-iron balustrades and lattice-work railings.

“Imagine all the people who have made their way along here over the past hundred and some years,” mused Victoria as they stepped onto the pier. “Why do you suppose the Victorians had such a thing about piers? They must have loved them, they built so many of them.”

“Like God and poor people,” laughed Penny. “Maybe piers served as a safe destination for courting couples and were seen as a wholesome place for families to go, although exactly what people did beyond just hang out for a bit, I really don’t know. But look how crowded it is today, and this isn’t even a weekend. So whatever the attraction was, it’s still going on today, apparently.”

They walked on in silence, and then stopped to lean on the railing and admire the views out over Llandudno Bay toward Craig y Don. Seagulls called to one another and swooped over the blue waters of the bay.

After a few moments, they resumed walking, their footsteps making soft sounds on the pier’s wooden planks. A gentle breeze, carrying with it the unmistakable smell of the sea, rippled their hair.

Suddenly, Penny placed her hand on Victoria’s forearm, stopping her.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” Victoria said.

“That woman up ahead, in the head scarf. I think she’s the one who came to the shop that morning for a manicure. The wedding day! I think it’s her!”

“You’re kidding!” said Victoria.

“No, of course I’m not. Why on earth would I kid about something like that? And why do people always say that?” said Penny impatiently.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Victoria. “What should we do?”

“Let’s turn away so she can’t see us,” said Penny, as she shifted to face the railing and bent over pretending to tie her shoelace. She turned her head slightly to look up at Victoria.

“She doesn’t know you. You stand in front of me here and watch and see what she does and tell me what’s happening.”

Victoria swayed slightly to the right to get a better view and to block Penny.

“Right. Well, she’s just standing there looking around,” Victoria said quietly. “She has that anxious look about her that you get when you’re meeting someone. You know, have I come to the right place? Did I get the time right? I think she’s looking for someone. That’s what these piers are good for … meeting people. You know, I’ll meet you on the pier at two o’clock, that kind of thing.”

“Never mind that,” whispered Penny. “What’s happening now?”

“Nothing. She’s just standing there looking around but she seems, oh I don’t know what the word is, furtive. That’s it. She seems furtive. Maybe you should back off a bit in case she sees us. She might recognize you.”

“Good idea,” said Penny as she stood up and sidled a few steps toward shore.

Crowds of people drifted past them in both directions, and a few moments later Victoria let out a small gasp.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “It can’t be. Don’t look now, but I think it’s …”

Penny turned her head a fraction and watched in amazement as a tall man, wearing blue jeans and a pale green golf shirt, approached the woman. He placed his hands on her shoulders and kissed her gently on both cheeks. As he turned to stand beside her, smiling, Penny recognized Emyr Gruffydd.

She closed her eyes for a second and, heart pounding, turned toward Victoria, who looked horrified.

“They’re coming back toward us,” Victoria whispered. “Look out over the water.”

The two women turned their backs to the pier and then, rotating slowly, saw Emyr and the woman begin to make their way casually back toward the town.

“What should we do?” whispered Victoria.

“We’ll have to follow them, and see where they go,” said Penny. “If we phone Gareth now it’ll take too long for him to get here. We want to find out as much as we can. Where’s your mobile?”

Victoria reached into her bag and pulled out her mobile phone. She switched it on, and then groaned.

“I forgot to charge the batteries,” she wailed. “It’s dead.”

“Well, never mind that now,” said Penny. “Come on, let’s get after them or we’ll lose them. We’ll ring him later, first chance we get.”

They followed the couple at a discreet distance and watched as they left the pier, ambled slowly along the promenade toward Mostyn Street, and then ducked into a pub. The two women stopped in front of a bookstore a few doors down and looked at a towering display of bestsellers.

“Should we go into the pub, do you think?” asked Victoria.

“You look in the window and see if you can see them, while I stay here out of sight,” said Penny. “Just walk past and look in as if you’re thinking about maybe having something to eat.”

A few minutes later Victoria was back.

“They were looking at the menus,” she said. “They might be there for a while. Do you think we should try to find a phone box and ring the police?”

“I don’t know. I wish we could hear what they’re saying, but that would be too obvious. They’d see us and know what we were up to. I don’t think one of us can leave, either, to find a phone in case they decide to leave. If one of them leaves, or if they split up, then we’ve really lost them.”

“Argh, I wish I could think this through.”

Suddenly, Victoria started to snicker.

“It’s just like something in the movies, only we don’t have a clue what we’re doing.”

“Be serious, Victoria,” admonished Penny. “We have to get this right. The only thing we can do is wait and see what happens, and phone Gareth as soon as we can.”

They kept watch on the pub for what seemed like an eternity, and eventually the couple emerged and stood on the pavement as if unsure what to do next.

Emyr made a faint gesture with his right hand and the woman smiled at him.

She reached up and patted him on the shoulder and then, still smiling, turned and walked away down the side street. He stood there for a few moments looking after her and then ambled away.

The two women were left staring after them.

“What was that all about, then?” asked Victoria. “They’re leaving? Is that it? Do you think we should follow her to see where she goes?”

“Well, we don’t need to follow Emyr,” said Penny. “We know where to find him. But we’d better see where she goes and what she’s up to. But if she realizes she’s being followed we could do more harm than good so we’ve got to be careful. Come on, let’s get after her.”

They followed the woman down the side street at a safe distance and watched as she turned into one of the better hotels.

“You have to admit this doesn’t look good, the two of them together, whoever she is,” said Penny. “Right. I’ll have to wait out here and you get in there and see what you can find out.”

Victoria looked mortified.

“Me? Find out what, exactly?”

“Well, who she is, of course! That’s what we need to know. Then we’ll really be getting someplace with our investigation.”

Victoria sighed, took a few steps toward the entrance, and then turned around to look at Penny who nodded encouragingly and gave a little flutter with her hand in the direction of the door.

A few steps later Victoria found herself in a large, old-fashioned hotel lobby, filled with overstuffed wing chairs and sofas, huge potted plants, and a couple of side tables with folded newspapers on them. In the distance, she could hear the steady, back and forth drone of a Hoover.

She made her way across the highly patterned burgundy carpet to the long wooden reception desk where a young man in a dark green uniform was tapping away on a keyboard. Victoria stood in front of him until he stopped typing. He shifted his eyes from his computer screen and gazed at her with an impatient, sullen look as if he deeply resented the interruption.

“Good afternoon. May I help you?” he asked impersonally.

Victoria cleared her throat and smiled weakly.

“I hope so, yes,” she began, and then gaining confidence, added, “I think I just saw a woman come into the hotel. She’s about thirty-five, well dressed. I believe she was a friend of my, ah, niece’s, yes, that’s it, niece’s from school and I wondered if you could just let me have her name so I can tell my niece I saw her.”

She groaned inwardly at how lame and pathetic it sounded.

“I’m sorry, madam, but hotel policy is that we do not give out personal information about any of our guests. I am sorry I cannot help you.”

With that, he walked away to retrieve some papers from a pile sitting beside another computer terminal.

“Well, thank you anyway,” said Victoria softly. As she emerged from the hotel back into the sunny afternoon she glanced at Penny, shrugged, and shook her head.

“Well, never mind,” said Penny. “Let’s find a phone and call the police. We’ll have to think of something else.”

The desk clerk, meanwhile, envisioning a hefty tip from a grateful guest, reached for his telephone.

Two hours later, as they were putting away their supplies, Penny groaned.

“Damn! In all the excitement, we didn’t get to Marks and Spencer and now I’ve got nothing to wear. The next time I see him I’ll have to make do with something old and awful. That’s if he’s still speaking to me, of course.”

“Never mind about that,” said Victoria. “It’s too bad we weren’t able to reach him, but we did try. We can’t help it if Bethan wasn’t answering her mobile and you’ve left a message. They’ll figure it out.”

“God, I hope we did the right thing following her,” said Penny anxiously. “I’m really having second thoughts about that and I just hope we didn’t screw it up. It all happened so quickly and we didn’t have enough time to come up with a plan. What if we put the wind up those two and now they’re on to us?”

She thought for a moment.

“But we have to find out who she is. You know, we considered that there might have been someone in Meg Wynn’s past who didn’t want the wedding to go ahead, but what if we got it the wrong way around and the person from the past was connected to Emyr? Maybe she’s an old girlfriend and she got very jealous and killed Meg Wynn. And if that’s what happened, did he know about it? Was he in on it? Is he covering up for someone?”

Victoria looked startled.

“You know, I might be wrong, but she could be the woman who picked up David Williams after the funeral. How would that fit together? Maybe they were all in on it.”

Twenty-six

I
’m old fashioned,” Davies said to her a few days later. “I’ll call for you. Sevenish suit you? We’ll talk about it then.”

It was a beautiful evening with hours of daylight left as the two of them made their silent, awkward way in the direction of The Leek and Lily. The street was crowded with townsfolk enjoying the fine summer weather as they did a bit of late shopping or ran a last-minute errand.

Penny and Davies, both dreading the chat to come, didn’t take much notice of their fellow pedestrians, least of all a good-looking man wearing a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes who passed them headed in the other direction. He stopped, shifted the cellophane-wrapped bouquet of flowers he was carrying from one arm to the other, and waited under the awning of the stationery store until they turned the corner into the High Street, and then he crossed the street and headed up Station Road.

A few minutes later Victoria, who was just settling in with a magazine and a glass of wine, was startled when the bell in the flat rang to announce someone at the salon door. Thinking Penny must have forgotten her keys and come back to get them, rather than risk waking her up if she returned late, Victoria hurried down the stairs to let her in.

“Oh hello,” she said as she opened the door. “What gorgeous flowers! Who are they for?”

Penny entered the pub first, and Davies, ducking his head slightly, followed her in. Two steps down to the right and they were in the large, welcoming main room. Mercifully, it had somehow been spared the modernizing trend of the 1980s, and retained a look from a much earlier period. The low ceiling featured genuine oak beams, the whitewashed walls had lovely old prints of Llanelen’s historic ties to the local quarry, and there wasn’t a pseudo horse brass in sight. Facing them as they entered the room was a large fireplace, empty and cold now, but when the nights began to draw in, it would provide the welcome warmth, comfort, and soft, flattering light that it had since the pub opened in the 1920s. And best of all, the real look of the place went with the real ale it served.

Along two walls were large tables with bench-type seating and smaller tables were scattered throughout with simple wooden chairs. The pub was about half full, and as Penny and Davies entered, a few regulars stopped their conversations long enough to look at the newcomers and then went back to their pints.

“White wine is it? Davies asked.

“No,” said Penny. “Better make it a large G and T, please.”

“Right,” said Davies. “Be right back.”

He made his way over to the bar, spoke a few words to the amiable barmaid, affectionately known as Lily, and returned in a couple of minutes with their drinks. Setting them down on the table, he looked around for a moment before taking a seat opposite Penny.

“Not too many in tonight,” he commented.

“No, not yet,” agreed Penny. “I don’t come here very often, but when I do, I ask myself why I haven’t been back sooner. I like it but I’m just not a pub person, I guess. Well, cheers,” she added as she picked up her drink and raised it toward Davies.

“Cheers,” he replied and then took a sip from his pint of Honey Fayre, the locally brewed beer.

“Mmm,” he said. “That’s good.”

The tension hung in the air between them like thick, acrid smoke.

He hadn’t spoken to her since the sighting in Llandudno, sending Bethan to interview her and Victoria. You could see the steam coming of out his ears, Bethan had told them, when he’d heard about their clumsy attempt to discover the mysterious woman’s identity. By the time the police got there, Bethan said, she’d undoubtedly been tipped off, probably by the desk clerk, and was long gone. Not only that, but Emyr had apparently gone missing. Penny had apologized profusely to Bethan and had been dreading the moment when she would have to face Davies.

Now that he’d had a chance to cool down, he was ready to discuss it. He cleared his throat.

“You did exactly what I asked you not to do,” he told Penny sternly. “Not only did you put yourselves at risk, but if you’d done this by the book, we might have had her in for questioning by now. I told you to leave it to us, and I wish you had.”

He sighed and took another sip of his beer.

“I can’t tell you how sorry we are,” Penny said. “We didn’t know what to do for the best and we thought we were doing the right thing.”

Unable to look at him, she gazed around the pub and welcomed the diversion of a group of regulars calling out greetings to one of their mates who had just arrived.

A short, middle-aged man with a ruddy complexion that gave the impression of long years of outdoor work, waved to a group sitting around a corner table and made his way over to them, leading a black-and-white, medium-sized dog of uncertain parentage on a lead.

His cronies greeted them and slid down the bench to make room for the two of them. The dog hopped up on the seat and the man unfastened the lead, placed it on the table and, announcing it was his round, took the drinks orders from his companions and walked over to the bar.

The man sitting beside the dog put his arm around it and gave it a friendly pat. The dog looked at him and then, its lips drawn back in what passed for a smile, panted lightly and looked happily and expectantly around the room.

Penny watched all this play out and then turned back to Davies.

“That’s Mackie, and the dog’s called Buster,” she explained. “Mrs. Lloyd told me that he rescued the dog from an abusive owner, and they’ve been together ever since. Mackie does odd jobs, a bit of gardening, clearing out your gutters, that sort of thing, and takes the dog everywhere with him. Just adores him… .” Her voice trailed off as she stared at the group.

“What is it?” Davies asked.

“I’ve just remembered something Gwennie told Victoria.”

She got up slowly and made her way to the table. Davies watched as she leaned over to give the dog a pat and then spoke briefly to the man sitting beside him.

She turned around to face Davies, holding the dog’s lead. Unlike a simple, old-fashioned leather leash, this one was retractable, designed to give a dog the chance of a bit of controlled roaming. On the business end was a clip that attached to the dog’s collar, then a short strip of heavy nylon banding about an inch wide, and then a long cord like a stout fishing line that disappeared into a heavy blue plastic case with a built-in handle. Davies watched as Penny grasped the case in her right hand and taking the clip end in her left hand, slowly wrapped the band two or three times around her hand as she carefully pulled the lead from the case until she had exposed about two feet of heavy nylon cording.

Now what she held was a formidable weapon.

Allowing the cord to rewind inside the case, she made a heavy chopping motion with it.

Davies licked a trace of foam from his top lip and set his glass down on the table. Mirroring his action, Penny set the lead down on the table, nodded her thanks to the mystified men, and returned to Davies.

“Remind you of anything?” she asked softly. “What do you think? Imagine the case is red plastic instead of blue. And Gwennie told Victoria that the dog’s lead went missing the morning Meg Wynne disappeared.”

“We’ll have to ask Gwennie about the dog’s lead and interview the wedding boys again,” he said. “Find out if the groom had time for a little dog walking.” As the frosty, formal atmosphere between them began to thaw, Penny felt a slight glimmer of hope that she might have redeemed herself.

“Too bad we can’t just ask Trixxi,” said Penny. “She’d know.”

“Trixxi?”

“Emyr’s dog.”

Davis nodded and took another sip. A few minutes later Penny set down her drink and looked at him.

“I don’t know why,” she said, “but I’ve got a bad feeling and I’ve suddenly started to feel anxious. I need to go home.”

“Right,” agreed Davies. “Let’s be off.”

They made their way back to the flat more quickly than they had come, scarcely speaking.

“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” Davies said. “I have to get in touch right now with Sgt. Morgan and prepare to track down Emyr and the rest of them. She’s been in London for a couple of days checking out Meg Wynne Thompson’s life there but so far she hasn’t turned up anything that we think concerns us.”

As they approached the salon, they slowed down and Davies looked at Penny.

“Look,” he said, “things are going to speed up now, and I don’t think this case is going to go on for too much longer. But once it’s wrapped up and all this is behind us, I hope that we can, that you’ll …”

They had stopped in front off the salon and Davies reached out to Penny and putting his arm around her waist, pulled her gently toward him. She reached out to steady herself and as she touched the door to the salon, it opened a couple of inches.

Reacting to the startled look on her face, Davies turned to look at the door and immediately understood.

Gesturing to Penny to stand to one side, he pushed open the door and cautiously looked in.

“Oh God, no!” he said as he sprang through the door.

“What is it?” said Penny as she charged in after him. “What’s happened?”

Reaching for his mobile phone, Davies gestured at the floor and a few moments later was speaking rapidly into his mobile.

“It’s Davies. I need an ambulance to the manicure salon on Station Road in Llanelen. We have a woman here who seems to be unconscious.” He bent down and touched Victoria’s forehead. “Her skin is very hot and flushed. Sweaty. Oh, and we’ll need officers, too. Quick as you can.”

Penny was crouching beside the limp Victoria, stroking her hair, gently lifting her up. A small moan escaped from her lips and Penny bent closer as Victoria struggled to speak.

She looked up at Davies, with tears in her eyes.

“She said ‘die’. She told me she’s going to die,” Penny whispered. “And look.”

Mixed in with the broken blossoms strewn across the hardwood floor was a syringe.