The Cold Light of Mourning - By Elizabeth J. Duncan Page 0,42
Brannigan, please, let me make sure I understand this correctly. You’re saying that you don’t think the woman who came to you on Saturday morning was Meg Wynne Thompson?”
“That’s right,” said Penny. “They look a lot alike, same kind of haircut, same build, maybe, but there’s something different about the face, around the mouth. And there’s another reason why I don’t think it was the same woman.”
Morgan listened without speaking and then moved to end the call.
“Right. Well, thank you for this, we’ll be in touch. Are you at home now if we need to see you tonight?”
“Yes, I’ll be here for the rest of the evening. But I’ve had a difficult day, and if it could wait …”
Morgan rang off, knocked on Davies’s door, and burst in at his shouted, “Come in!”
With his jacket off and shirtsleeves rolled up Davies looked every inch the busy detective. His office was painted a pale, institutional green, with a window covered in dusty blinds that overlooked the car park. On top of two file cabinets behind his desk stood several limp houseplants that he was nursing back to health. There were no family photos on his desk but a couple of plaques on the wall spoke to his community involvement and dedication to duty.
He peered at Morgan over his glasses.
“Yes, Bethan, what is it?”
“I’ve had that manicure woman on the phone, Penny Brannigan. She has some interesting information for us. She kept your card, apparently.”
“I’m astonished,” said Davies.
“That she has information?”
“No, that she kept my card and actually rang us. How many cards do you think I give out in a year? Five hundred? And the minute I’m out the door, they’re in the bin. Nobody ever keeps them and nobody ever calls back. I wonder why I bother.
“But never mind. What did she want?”
“Well, sir, if she’s right, the case has just gone in a different direction. According to Brannigan, we’ve got a ringer here. She says the woman who came to her for a manicure on Saturday morning couldn’t have been Meg Wynne Thompson. Or at least the woman she saw is not the same woman whose picture was in the Post today.”
Davies held his pen at both ends and looked levelly at his sergeant.
“Could she be wrong? After all, that was a formal kind of photograph. She would have been wearing fancy makeup … maybe had her hair done differently.”
Morgan nodded. “Right, but she said there was something else, and it really rang true for me. She said in the photo Meg Wynne’s hands are resting in her lap. She said she could be wrong about the face but she does know hands, and those aren’t the nails she worked on that morning. And she spent almost an hour looking at them. Everybody’s hands are different, she said, and so are their nails.”
Davies gazed thoughtfully at her, and then rose slowly from his seat.
“Is she in? We’d better get around there and interview her again.
If she’s right, there are all kinds of implications. Everything we’ve done so far has been misplaced because we’ve got a whole new timeline here. Meg Wynne could have gone missing at least an hour earlier than we thought she did. And then who the hell is the woman in the surveillance video? What’s her connection with all this? See if you can get them to enlarge and enhance an image from the video so we’ve got something to show her. That Penny woman.”
The two set off for Llanelen where Penny, tired and emotionally drained from the funeral, was reluctantly ready to talk to them.
“I’ve been down to the shop and picked up the client card I wrote that morning. It’s really all I have. Of course, I thought I was writing it for Meg Wynne, but whoever she was, that other woman, here’s the card.”
Penny gave them the small card with the details of the service she had provided to the woman she had thought was Meg Wynne Thompson on Saturday morning.
Davies turned it over slowly, and then looked at Penny.
“I’m sorry, Miss Brannigan, but we’re going to have to ask you to go over everything that happened once again. But before we do that, would you please take a look at this photo and see if you think this is the woman who came to your shop on Saturday morning? Take your time.”
He handed Penny a photo lifted from the grainy surveillance video. She looked at it carefully, and then nodded.