A Brush with Death: A Penny Brannigan Mystery - By Elizabeth J. Duncan Page 0,57
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.”