Fifteen
“Hello, Penny.” Detective Inspector Gareth Davies smiled at one woman and then the other. “Mrs. Lloyd.” Penny had turned in her chair and, in the awkwardness of the moment, started to rise.
“Now, Penny,” said Mrs. Lloyd, “why do you look so surprised to see the inspector? He’s investigating a dead body that’s been found in a building you own, so of course he’s going to come and talk to you.”
But before coming to the salon, he had had a word with Victoria. Victoria had watched as he ducked under the yellow police tape and started walking toward his car. When she’d called his name, he turned round and, seeing who it was, smiled and waited for her to catch him up.
“Oh, Gareth,” Victoria said, “before we get into all this business”—she tossed her head in the direction of the building—“I just want to tell you I’m so sorry about what’s happened with you and Penny. Listen, I think she cares about you, but she’s confused. You need to talk to her and get things sorted out.”
“I did talk to her and she pretty much told me to get lost.”
“Well, from what I’ve heard, you haven’t talked about everything,” Victoria said, making little quotation marks with her fingers around the word “everything.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look, I might as well tell you. I saw you coming out of the Red Dragon Hotel about a week ago early one morning with another woman.”
“And you told her this?”
“I thought she would want to know.”
“So she thinks that I . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Yes, she does.”
“Oh, God! That was . . . never mind. Where’s Penny now, do you know?”
“At the salon,” Victoria replied.
“Right.”
“But before you go,” Victoria said, “please tell me what’s happening here.”
“We’ve processed the scene and we’ll be removing the remains soon.” He looked at his watch. “It’s getting a bit late in the day now, but I would think that your workmen should be back on the job by tomorrow afternoon. We don’t want to hold up work any longer than we have to.”
He smiled and touched her arm.
“Thanks for telling me. I need to go and see her. I can put this right.”
And so, a few minutes later he found himself in the salon, anxious to speak to Penny, but faced with Mrs. Lloyd, he knew that what he was aching to say would have to keep.
“Yes, we found skeletal remains in the building,” he told the two women. “No, we don’t know who or even how old they are. They’ll be examined and we should know more soon. As far as the renovating goes, we should be out of your way by tomorrow, and work can resume.”
“Is that it?” a disappointed Mrs. Lloyd asked. “Is that all you have to tell us?”
Davies lifted a shoulder slightly and turned over his hand in a deprecating gesture.
“That’s all I have at the moment,” he said, and let it go at that. Mrs. Lloyd, an experienced gossip, knew that if she kept silent, sooner or later he’d start talking to fill the silence. But she was no match for him. The silence stretched on while Mrs. Lloyd looked at him, then looked at Penny, then looked at her nails. Gareth caught Penny’s eye and when he saw the faintest twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth, he thought his bruised heart would melt. He smiled at her and she cleared her throat.
“Right, well, Mrs. Lloyd, I think your nails should be dry enough now,” Penny said diplomatically. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to close up so I can get down to the site and check up on Victoria. It’s been a long day for her.”
Accepting defeat in a good-natured way, Mrs. Lloyd got to her feet, making a great show of being careful not to touch her nails.
“If you’ll just get my bag for me, Penny,” she said, and a few minutes later Davies was closing the door quietly behind her. He turned to face Penny, who picked up the towel from the worktable and started toward the back of the shop with it. He took her gently by the arm.
“Leave it for a moment and sit down. Please.” For an instant he feared she would break away from him, but then he felt her relax under his grip as she folded herself back into her chair. He sat down across from her, and they looked at each other across the worktable.
“Thank you. Now, I need to tell you something, and I want you to just listen to me. I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Apparently you’ve heard that I was leaving the Red Dragon Hotel the other morning with another woman, and you think that I . . .” He paused as she picked up a bottle of nail varnish and rotated it slowly. “Penny, it wasn’t what you think it was.
“I was with a detective sergeant who happens to be an expert on counterfeit money. There’s a lot of it about at the moment, and we’d had a call from the hotel about some bogus twenty-pound notes. So we had a little chat with Mrs. Geraint, and then we left. I wanted to stop in and see you, but Bethan called and we had to go to a farm on the other side of Betws y Coed. More agricultural bother. So that’s all it was.”
Penny bit on her lower lip and then finally brought her eyes to meet his.
“Did you really think I could do something as stupid as that, feeling the way I do about you?” he asked. “I wake up every morning, and the first thing I think about is you. I wonder if I’m going to see you that day. I try to find ways to run into you. You have no idea how much I want to put things right between us.”
He looked at her with a mixture of fear and hope in his eyes.
“Well? Say something. Are we good?”
He waited for a moment, and then, this time, he did move in to fill the silence.
“What am I looking at?” Davies asked, turning the photo over to read the writing on the back. Penny stood very close to him, looking at the photo over his arm, and then took it away from him.
“If you’d come to Liverpool with me,” she began. He winced.
“If you’d come to Liverpool with me, you’d know that Alys was part of a group of influential and up-and-coming 1960s artists that included Millicent Mayhew and Cynthia Browning. Also part of that circle was a curator called Andrew Peyton. I found this photo on the first day I was here.” She lost herself for a moment in the black-and-white image, the woman in her dark mini dress with the white buttons, holding the fox terrier puppy.
“I thought it was a photo of Emma. Who can tell after thirty or forty years? People change. And everyone looked like that in the sixties. The hair, the clothes, the makeup. But now I think this is Cynthia Browning. It looks like the same woman in the Liverpool Echo photograph. And I know this is a big leap, but I am wondering if the remains of this woman and that poor little dog are the ones that were found today in the spa building.”
She paused and touched his arm.
“At first, I thought it was Emma,” Penny repeated, “but now I think she was the one who took the photograph.”
Davies nodded. “Yeah. Could be. But it’s a huge leap to connect a hit-and-run from decades ago to the body we found today.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be too hard to establish the connection, if there’s one to be made, when your forensics people tell you if the bones are male or female and how old they are.” She shrugged. “We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess.”
Smiling up at him, she added, “Do you know who lived on that street, by the way?” She responded to his blank look by telling him. “Only John Lennon. At number two fifty-one. The house was called Mendips.”
“We can ask Merseyside police to help,” Davies said. “Look, do you mind if I keep this for a bit?”
Penny shook her head. “No, you take it.”
“Have you come across anything else I should know about?”
She pointed at the ceiling. “I haven’t been through Emma’s bedroom yet, but I have to do it soon. Bronwyn wants things for the annual harvest jumble sale. You’re good at that sort of thing—going through people’s effects. You do it all the time. I don’t suppose you’d give me a hand with it, would you?”
Davies glanced at his watch.
“I suggest we leave Emma’s room until morning. It’s easier to do that sort of thing in daylight, and a few more hours shouldn’t make a difference. But, for now, I’m going back to the building site to give Bethan a hand with the wrapping up—shouldn’t be too long. May I take you to dinner after that? We’ve got some catching up to do.”
“I’d be good with that,” Penny replied. “And listen, I’m sorry I doubted you. I shouldn’t have.”
“It’s okay,” Davies said. “I understand. We’re just getting to know each other. And I learned a long time ago that things are not always what they seem.”
“So you’ll be back for me in what, about an hour?”
“Yeah, if that’s all right with you?”
“You know, I think I’ll come with you. Could you drop me off at the flower shop? Then I’ll walk over to the site, and we’ll meet up there and then go for dinner.”
“Great. Ready to go?”
“Almost. I just want to get a phone number.”
Penny paused for a moment to take in the cool beauty of the lilies, roses, and carnations as they stood in their ugly buckets waiting to be plucked from their refrigerated unit and turned into beautiful arrangements. But something about a flower shop’s heady fragrance always reminded her of a funeral.
“Hello,” said the girl behind the counter. “I’m going to be closing up soon. Is there anything special I can help you with this evening?”
Why would she even mention closing the shop, Penny thought, when there’s a customer standing right in front of her?
“Hmm. Possibly. I’m hoping you’ll do something for me. Would you please ring this retirement home in Llandudno and say you have a floral delivery and are calling to confirm that a Millicent Mayhew is a resident there?”
The girl took the piece of paper, eyed it suspiciously, and gave a thoughtful chew on a hefty wad of gum.
“Why don’t you ring it yourself?”
“Because they probably have call display, and when they see it’s a florist, they’ll tell you what I want to know.” At that point, she could feel the niceness draining out of her. And because I’m the customer, I’m here to buy flowers, and I asked you to do it, she thought. What was it with shop assistants these days that made them think they had the right to insult their customers?
She had a sudden flashback to the Eaton’s department store of her Canadian youth. No one at Eaton’s would have spoken to a customer like that.
The girl hesitated and brushed the hair out of her eyes in a desultory way.
“I’m thinking about sending her a dozen roses,” Penny remarked.
The girl sighed, picked up her telephone, dialed the number, spoke briefly, and then replaced the receiver.
“She lives there,” the girl said.
“Do you know, I think I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll send those roses after all,” Penny said. “I’ll take them with me, if you wouldn’t mind wrapping them up.”
Penny left the shop with her purchase, making a mental note to have a word with the shop’s owner. She’d want to know how her customers are being spoken to. I know I would. Oh, dear God, thank you for sending us Eirlys, she thought.
By the time she reached the spa building, the ribbon had fallen off the flowers, the paper wrapper was soaked through at the bottom, and the cello tape had come undone at the top.
Most of the crowd had seen all there was to see and moved on, and although the crime-scene tape was still in place, the police cars were gone, taking with them the sense of drama and urgency.
She introduced herself to a tired and bored-looking uniformed officer, who waved her through into the building where Gareth was waiting for her at the entrance.
“Victoria’s gone home,” he said. “Said something about being desperate for a bath. Crime scenes often take people that way.” He smiled at her. “I expect you’d like to see where we found the remains.” In response to her quizzical look, he added, “It’s all right. The crime-scene people have finished. There wasn’t much to work with after twenty years or so.”
The cement floor was littered with jagged lengths of broken boards, dusty cider bottles, piles of crumpled newspapers, an old shoe, a couple of filthy T-shirts, empty paint cans, and bits and pieces of metal work.
“The workers pulled out the ductwork and discovered the bones,” Davies explained. “It looked as if the body had been placed inside and then the grille replaced. We’ll know more when we’ve dated and typed the bones and determined what the building was being used for at that time.”
Penny bent over and peered into the dark, empty space.
“Not much to see, is there?”
She straightened up and looked around. “What a huge mess. And the smell!”
Davies pointed at the flaking ceiling. The plastering had come away, exposing bare wood.
“Not sure if I should ask this, but are you sure you and Victoria can manage this renovation? Do you have any experience with this kind of project?”
“I don’t, but Victoria does. She and her ex-husband did up properties in London and sold them. Made a lot of money. That’s why her divorce settlement was tied up for so long.” She sighed. “But I know what you mean. Still, the building inspectors tell us the place has good bones,” she glanced at him, “so to speak. We’re practically building it all new, so when we’re done, it’ll be something else. You wait and see.”
“I believe you, though thousands wouldn’t. Right, how about that dinner? What do you feel like tonight?”
“Hmm. The Barley Bin, I think. I fancy something hearty with mashed potatoes.”
“Sounds good. Shall we go?”
“Just one more thing.”
Penny walked over to the hole where the body had been found and gently laid the red roses on the floor in front of it.
“Of course, if the body is that of Cynthia Browning, we may have some problems finding any relatives,” Davies said as the waiter brought them each a glass of wine. “Her parents are probably long dead. If people thought she emigrated, she would never have been reported as missing. And after all this time, there may be a problem obtaining dental records, but if she is who you think she is, Merseyside police will be glad to help, I’m sure.”
“What will you do if it turns out not to be Cynthia Browning?” Penny asked. She helped herself to a bread roll, broke it in half, buttered it, and popped it in her mouth.
“We’ll learn what we can from the remains and then search missing persons records for the right time frame. But that’s business. Let’s talk about something else.”
“There is one thing I’d like to know,” Penny said. “Why didn’t you want to go with me to Liverpool? I thought we could have made a nice day of it.”
Davies looked away and grimaced.
“I didn’t think about it like that until later, and of course you’re right, we could have.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what to say, really. It’s just that when you asked, I didn’t feel like going to Liverpool. Later, of course, I wished I had, but by then it was too late. I don’t know if it was the drive or what, but I . . . I’m sorry, I know this is sounding hopelessly lame. It wasn’t that I had anything better to do. And it certainly wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with you.”
He gave her a soft smile.
“What did you do that afternoon, if I may ask?”
“You know, I can’t remember. I expect I worked in the garden and took a nap.”
Penny laughed.
“And how far off is your retirement, did you say?”
They settled back in their chairs and, when their salads arrived, tucked in.
A few minutes later, Penny picked up the conversation where they’d left off.
“I am going back to Liverpool, though, you might be interested to know. There’s a multimedia exhibit opening soon of mid-twentieth-century Liverpool artists, and Victoria and I were planning to go. But I’ve been thinking about it—and I think you’ll find the next bit rather clever—originally, we were just going to go to the exhibit, but now I want to go to the opening, because I reckon if there’s anybody around from that time, they’ll be invited, and I want to know who they are and to talk to them.”
She gave him a sideways nod, with raised eyebrows.
“Well?”
When he leaned forward with a smile, she realized he had thought she was asking him to accompany her. She held up her hand and smiled.
“And no, I’m not asking you to go with me. Victoria and I are going, and we’re going to treat ourselves to a good time. We might even stay overnight, maybe at the Adelphi.”
He made a little gesture with a clenched fist. “Well, I am sorry I didn’t take you to Liverpool. I guess I just didn’t get it. Men are like that. You have to put the dots really close for us, so we can connect them. And that evening when I came round to you to try to sort all this out, I should have brought a peace offering. Flowers or chocolates. Sorry.”
Penny finally had to laugh.
“Enough with the apologies. You didn’t do anything wrong. Let’s move on.”
Davies paid the bill and they left the restaurant as dusk was falling. A grey gloom, heavy with the hint of damp autumn chill, was seeping through the streets. She tucked her arm in his, and they walked silently to his car.
“I’ll bring some boxes in the morning and we’ll make a start on the bedroom,” he said as he parked outside the cottage a few minutes later. “I’ll have to come early, say eightish, and I can only stay for a couple of hours.”
Penny nodded. “We can get a lot done in two hours. I’ll see you in the morning. Thank you.” She reached out to him, and he pulled her into him. He held her for a few minutes, and then let go.
“I love the way you smell,” she whispered. “Like a garden after the rain.”
He watched as she entered the cottage, and when the light came on in the sitting room, he drove off.