Page 72 of A Game of Lies

‘Go ahead,’ the CSI says. ‘Everything around the desk has been dusted and swabbed.’

Ffion pulls on a paper suit and a pair of latex gloves. The monitor is still on, the camera still trained on the campsite view Miles was watching when he was killed. Ffion watches Leo walk slowly around the fire.

She calls his radio. ‘Put your hand on your head.’

Leo does as he’s told.

‘You lose – I didn’t saySimon says.’

‘I take it we’re live.’

‘Seems so.’ They test the connection with numbers, Ffion calling ‘one, two, three, four, five’, while Leo holds up the requisite fingers in time with the beat.

‘There’s no time delay,’ Ffion says. ‘Lucas was definitely on live camera at the time of the murder. He can’t have killed Miles.’

They repeat the exercise from the confession pod, Leo sitting on the throne-like chair. ‘Still no delay?’ he asks through the camera.

Ffion radios her answer. ‘None.’ Henry’s alibi was as solid as Lucas’s.

That leaves Ceri, who claims to have been collecting kindling at the time of the murder. And, since her two campmates were otherwise engaged, there is no one to vouch for her movements.

‘You don’t seriously think I killed him?’ Ceri leans in the doorway of her stable room.

‘You can see our predicament, though.’ Ffion scuffs her boots on the gravel in front of the door, then looks at Ceri. ‘What secret was Miles holding over you?’

Ceri shrugs. ‘Dim syniad.’

‘You must have some idea.’

‘I don’t. Maybe he found out I was a lesbian.’

‘This is the twenty-first century, Ceri – that’s hardly breaking news.’ Ffion can’t make Ceri meet her eyes. ‘What are you keeping from me?’

‘Nothing.’ Ceri puts a hand on the door. ‘Now, are we done?’

Ffion looks at the woman she goes drinking with; the woman who laughed like a drain when her trousers split that day they went to Chester races, and who always puts the kettle on when Ffion needs apanedand a moan about work. She suddenly feels she doesn’t know her at all.

‘We’re done,’ she says. ‘For now.’

Ryan Francis has been seen by the doctor and declared unfit for interview. He’s been taken to a psychiatric ward, to be reviewed in the morning. When he’s well enough, detectives in DCI Boccacci’s team will put the murder to him, along with allegations of assault and criminal damage.

But Ryan didn’t kill Miles.

The more Ffion thinks it, the more she believes it. Miles’s murder was planned. It was methodical and tidy, carried out in a high-risk environment with extraordinary levels of control. The murder scene is a stark contrast to Angharad’s cottage, where the chaos Ryan left behind seems to more accurately reflect his state of mind.

He could be putting it on, of course – he wouldn’t be the first suspect to try to wriggle out of a charge by pleading insanity – but Ffion doesn’t think so. From what she’s seen and heard of Ryan, he’s a man genuinely pushed to the brink.

If Ryan didn’t kill Miles, the killer is still out there.

Ffion looks at the dense woodland surrounding Carreg Plas, and the formidable mountain rising towards the sky. She thinks of the keyboard warriors who made death threats towards theExposureteam, and wonders if any of them were bold enough to take it further. The CSI tent flaps noisily in the wind and Ffion pulls her attention back to the courtyard, to the seven closed stable doors, and the shuttered rooms of the imposing farmhouse.

Is the killer out there?

Or in here?

Ffion is suddenly cold. She retreats to the warmth of the kitchen, but she feels on edge. She drinks a cup of coffee standing by the sink, looking on to the courtyard, and it’s only when she sees Leo coming through the gate from the mountainside that she realises she was waiting for him.

She opens the kitchen door, but before Leo reaches the house Ffion hears the crunch of a second set of footsteps on gravel. A woman wearing a blue denim apron appears around the corner.

---