Page 88 of A Game of Lies

‘By treating my boyfriend like a suspect!’

‘I’m just doing my job, Seren.’

‘You’re shitting on your own doorstep.’

Seren turns and runs, and Ffion doesn’t go after her. She presses her fingers to her temples. Thinks about Caleb, about Ceri.

Seren’s right. The police service says it values officers with ‘local knowledge’, but that knowledge comes at a cost. Once again, Ffion’s dealing with suspects as familiar to her as family, and the stress of it is a thunderstorm in her head. She’s too close to this job, but how can she walk away?

The Crime Scene Investigators have finished in Miles’s studio and Ffion sits down gingerly. It feels bizarre to be in the chair where he died, looking at the same monitors he was looking at when his attacker arrived.

Was it Ceri?

Or Ryan?

Or someone else?

Ffion goes through the motions of checking the footage, already knowing what she’ll find. The contents of the hard drive have been downloaded and recorded as an exhibit, but nevertheless Ffion is tentative with the controls, wary of accidentally deleting something. The system is surprisingly straightforward, with a clickable tracker enabling the viewer to jump directly to a specific time. Ffion plays with the tracker, jumping between days, watching a few minutes then diving into another day, another conversation. It feels even more voyeuristic than watching the TV show.

Ffion moves the tracker to start a few minutes before the murder. She watches Lucas lost in thought by the fire, then moves back in time and clicks on the label marked CONFESSION POD. Henry is already in full flow, although – like a lot of men Ffion knows – he’s using a lot of words to say nothing of great importance.

‘I’ve been racking my brains,’ he says to the camera. ‘And I honestly don’t know what “secret”Exposureplans to reveal, so I just wanted to jump on here quickly to say sorry.’ His eyes flick to the left.

Quickly?Ffion snorts. Henry’s self-indulgent apology –Sorry to anyone I might have unwittingly hurt. Sorry to my parents, sorry to my friends, to my colleagues– is almost forty-five minutes long, and not once does he mention the mother of the kid he’s allegedly abandoned, or the alcoholism he reluctantly disclosed to Ffion. Instead, he rambles on about makingbetter life choices. Henry was hoping to get away with his secret, Ffion realises. He was hoping to win.

She clicks back in time and sees Henry enter the pod; rewinds a second time and there’s Henry again, making another visit to the pod only a few minutes before his great Shakespearian confession. The man takes navel-gazing to a whole new level.

Ffion switches to the camera giving the best view of the box of secrets and plays it quadruple speed from the time of Miles’s murder until she sees Dario, acting on Leo’s and Ffion’s orders – appearing in order to extract the contestants.

No one goes near the box.

Ffion walks up the mountain towards theExposurecamp. She’s heading nowhere in particular, she’s walking to delay the moment at which she goes back to Carreg Plas and does what she should have done the moment she opened the box of secrets. She sees a dirty white outline through the trees and realises she’s walked around the edge of the camp, to where Dario’s caravan is pitched.

Could he have murdered Miles? Ffion would like to believe it – for Ceri’s sake – but Leo’s point about the window was valid. Dario going into Miles’s studio via the door wouldn’t give anyone cause for suspicion, so why would Miles let him in through the window?

Ffion looks through the window of the caravan. It’s empty. The seats have been folded out into a bed, and two pillows are bunched on one side. There’s no sheet, just a duvet in a striped cover. In the kitchenette, a mug stands on the counter next to a saucepan and an open tin of beans.

She walks around the caravan and tries the door, but it’s locked. Ffion’s almost glad – she can imagine what the inside smells like. There’s a pair of wellington boots under the caravan, but otherwise there’s nothing outside except for an oil drum a few metres away, its outside blackened and cracked. Ffion wanders over to it, knowing she has to get back, that Leo will be wondering where she is.

The drum is empty apart from a few charred scraps of paper. Ffion considers them. There’s no stack of logs, no sign that Dario has been keeping a fire going to stay warm. Has he been burning something? Ffion leans into the drum and fishes out the burnt paper. It’s nothing but scraps, but what’s left of the printed letters shows the same word again and again.

Exposure.

‘Did you find anything?’ Leo says, when Ffion returns.

Ffion doesn’t answer. She’s looking at DC Alun Whitaker, who should be in the CID office at Bryndare and is instead installed at the kitchen table. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘The DI asked me to drop by. See how you were.’

‘Check up on me, more like.’ Ffion scowls at Alun.

‘I met your sister,’ Alun says. ‘She was just leaving when I got here.’

‘I’ll book her in for therapy.’

‘She had some choice words to say about you.’

Ffion doesn’t bite.

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