The Cold Light of Mourning - By Elizabeth J. Duncan Page 0,50

busy night.

A few hours later the fax machine in the North Wales headquarters churned out the document they had been waiting for.

“Right, Bethan, you’re going to have to work flat out for the next couple of hours. I need you to organize the press office, arrange for the videographer and still photographer, the crime scene people—everybody. The earth moving equipment is ordered?”

At Morgan’s nod, he gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder.

“Well, then, I’ll leave it with you. I need to notify the superintendent and the other senior officers. Get everything ready tonight and then pick me up at four-thirty. We’ll aim to start at first light or just before.

“Oh, and don’t forget,” he added, “we’ll need a few rolls of yellow tape to establish the perimeter area.”

Sometime in the night, Penny was awakened by the gentle sound of rain pattering on the leaves of the trees outside her window. As she lay there listening, wrapped in melancholy, she thought of the whole sorry business that would unfold in the coming day, and felt a small tear trickle down her cheek. The rain was making everything seem unbearably sad. She turned over and looked at the clock—4:22. She doubted she would be able to get back to sleep but it was too early to get up, and besides, she didn’t want to disturb Victoria who had settled in for the night on the sofa. She would have to wait it out in the silence of the pre-dawn darkness, with her fears and memories to keep her company.

As she lay there, her thoughts turned to Emma and how much she missed her quiet, undemanding companionship. Philip Wightman had been right; they had been a lot alike, especially in the way they took great pleasure in the simplest things. They had read the same kinds of books, mostly biographies and mysteries borrowed from the local library but sometimes bought secondhand from the village bookstore; treated themselves on special occasions to afternoon tea with scones, strawberry jam, and clotted cream in the village tea shop; and regularly taken long rambling walks in the beautiful countryside that framed the town while they discussed what kind of dog they’d choose to have trotting along beside them—if they were to get a dog, that is.

They always had a jigsaw puzzle on the go in the front room of Emma’s cottage that they pieced together on lazy Sunday afternoons, gin and tonic in hand, as the warm sun filtered through the mullioned windows, casting dappled grey shadows that shifted and swayed in time with the gentle rustling of the apple tree in the front garden. Penny remembered fondly how her friend used to hide the lid of the puzzle box so she, Penny, would have to put it together without knowing what the final image was meant to look like. But Emma was predictable in her choice of puzzles and Penny knew that eventually they would have assembled a lighthouse with threatening waves crashing around it in the moonlight, an exuberant garden filled with blowsy roses in every imaginable colour, or some idealized Scottish castle perched high on a hill. But once, after Penny had complained she was getting a bit bored with all the chocolate-box landscapes, a picture of a smiling Queen Mother in a hat dripping with lilacs had emerged.

“Now then, Miss Smarty Pants,” Emma had teased. “I knew the flowers on her hat would mislead you! It didn’t turn out to be what you thought it was, did it?”

As Penny was drifting back to sleep a small convoy was winding its way along the dark, damp road leading to Llanelen. The vehicles’ headlights gave off an eerie, diffused yellow light revealing mist clinging to black trees. And as the rain let up just before sunrise the vehicles came to a stop beside the church and cut their engines.

Moving silently in the muted greyness that signals the coming dawn, a practiced, proficient team of experts went about their tasks. Conversation was kept to the minimum and when they needed to speak to one another, they spoke in soft voices.

Their arrival, however, had been noticed.

“Someone’s coming, sir,” said Morgan in a low voice, pointing to a figure emerging from the darkness.

“That’ll be the rector; he said he wanted to be here and I’d expect him to be,” replied Davies.

“Good morning,” said Rev. Evans as he broke through the mist. He looked as if he had dressed in a hurry and Davies doubted if he’d slept