The Last Party (DC Morgan #1)(10)
‘We’ll forget last night ever happened, and crack on with the job, yeah?’ She winks. ‘Forget we’ve seen each other naked.’
It’s impossible, Leo thinks, as he follows the little Triumph out of the car park, to not think of the thing you’re supposed to forget, when you have literally just been reminded of it.
*
Ffion drives as though she’s making on blues and twos to a burglary in progress. She throws the Triumph around corners, hurtling over potholes with such vigour that Leo flinches on behalf of the suspension. No wonder the poor car looks as if it’s falling apart. Leo follows more sedately as the Triumph bounces over a humpback bridge – a foot of sky between tyres and tarmac – before taking a sharp left to climb the track which leads to Cwm Coed.
The narrow, winding road is hewn from the mountainside, with passing places at regular intervals. Sheep appear suddenly at the sides of the road, or wander carelessly from one side to the other, and Leo slows to a crawl. There was no snow earlier, but, here, a dusting lines the roads and collects in the crevices of the rocky sides. As the incline grows steeper, Ffion’s car drops to a walking pace, and Leo falls further back. He glances at his hands-free, thinking he might try Allie again, but of course there’s no service.
How do people live in places like this? In fact, why do they live in places like this? Where you can’t get anywhere except by car, and you have to walk down a mountain to get a phone signal? Leo had found the move from Liverpool to Chester painful enough, struggling to adjust to an area with more fields than factories, but Allie had wanted to be closer to her parents when Harris was born.
Career-wise, transferring to Cheshire had felt like a shrewd move. Bigger fish, smaller pond. Leo was on CID within six months, successfully applied to Major Crime the following year, and hoped for promotion within the department. He hadn’t reckoned on DI Crouch, who had taken an instant dislike to him. Calm down, calm down, Crouch is fond of saying whenever Leo opens his mouth in a meeting, paddling the air with his flat palms in a poor imitation of Harry Enfield’s TV Scouse character. Do the rest of the team laugh because it’s funny, or because they’re licking the boss’s arse? Either way, Leo’s jaw always tightens, unwillingly justifying Crouch’s stupid impression.
He considered moving back, after the divorce. He thought longingly of the familiarity of his old force, of slotting back into drinks on Friday night and five-a-side on Sundays.
‘So go back to Liverpool,’ Allie had said, when Leo mentioned it.
‘I’d never get to see Harris.’
Allie had shrugged, as though he’d made his own bed, when Leo wasn’t even allowed to sleep in it any more. Allie was the one who made the choices. Choices like where they lived, where and when they went out. Choices like fucking her friend’s husband, then ending her marriage to Leo.
‘I might as well be in Liverpool,’ Leo mutters now, pulling over as a trailer full of hay bales clatters perilously close to the low barrier between the road and the sheer drop on the other side. He’d envisaged having Harris every other weekend, and maybe one night in the week. But, after Dominic moved in, Allie decided it was disruptive for Harris to sleep anywhere but home. Leo had to pick him up at nine, waiting by the front door of a house he had once paid the mortgage on, and have him back by six. If Leo was rostered to work the weekend, he lost that Saturday with Harris: it was disruptive to switch weekends around, apparently. How Allie loves that word. Slowly, it became disruptive to collect Harris before eleven, or to return him after two. Leo finally understands why there are so many single dads in McDonald’s on a Saturday lunchtime. Where else do you go when you’re only allowed three hours with your kid, every other weekend?
Then, of course, Leo had fucked up. Lost his mind, just once, just for a moment. And Allie won’t ever let him forget it.
Having climbed steadily – and slowly – for the previous ten miles, the road begins to fall away in front of them, and the Triumph picks up pace, racing down the winding path at a speed Leo isn’t inclined to follow. He drags his mind away from Allie and Harris, and back to Rhys Lloyd, and the message he’s about to deliver to the man’s family. There was little online about them. The twin daughters are fifteen; Lloyd’s wife, Yasmin, is forty-six, the same age as her husband. She’s a space consultant, whatever that is. Something to do with NASA?
The road bends sharply to the left, before dropping steeply away. As the view opens up, Leo finds his mouth dropping open. The lake is a lazy letter ‘S’ in the bottom of the valley, its border of forest dense and dark. Around it, woodland covers steep hills, making it look as though the trees in the distance are a hundred feet tall, towering over the lake.
Mirror Lake itself is a shimmer of silver beneath the day’s thin sunlight. At the far end looms a vast mountain, snow-capped peaks half-hidden in a swirl of cloud. The English–Welsh border runs directly through the middle of the lake, and it feels odd that it should be so invisible; that the water bears no sign of where one country ends and another begins.
Leo’s ears pop as the road descends still further, until he can’t see the lake any more, only the trees closing in either side of him. Ffion brakes hard, taking a left-hand fork so fast that the Triumph skids on to the opposite side of the road. Leo follows. This is the English side of the lake, an unmarked road which gradually narrows to become a single track. Every now and then the trees thin around shallow coves, the lake glinting in the winter sun.