First thing Monday morning, carrying a plastic bag, Penny entered the Llanelen police station and asked to speak to Inspector Bethan Morgan. She was shown into an interview room and told that Bethan would be with her soon. After several minutes, Bethan entered the room and closed the door quietly behind her.
“Penny. What can I do for you?”
“I’ve come to share my theory with you, and if I’m right, you could be making an arrest before lunchtime.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” said Bethan as she took the chair opposite Penny.
“But first, let’s get something out of the way,” said Penny. “Andrea Devlin had nothing to do with either murder. I heard she’d been brought in for questioning. Mrs. Lloyd was worried about her. You didn’t find anything, did you?”
“No. She wasn’t at Speke Hall on the day Barbara Vickers died, and the mate she’s staying with in Betws said she was at home on the Friday evening Gaynor Lewis died, from eight o’clock onward. She’s in the clear. But we wanted to talk to her again about something Gaynor Lewis said to her during that conversation they in the café. So now that you’re reassured on that score, tell me what you think happened.”
“The chain of events started when someone took Florence’s marmalade by mistake, and after that, everything got out of hand. I never knew entering cakes and jam in an agricultural show could be so competitive and cutthroat, but apparently it is.”
“Only not usually to this extreme.”
“We thought an insecure rival wanted Florence’s marmalade out of the competition, but it wasn’t that at all. You see, Florence’s marmalade was taken by mistake—Elin Spears wanted Gaynor Lewis’s marmalade out of the competition but was unable to get it. So she rang her partner, Carwyn, who had gone home to fetch the cake stand set that she’d forgotten, and asked him to get Gaynor’s marmalade for her. ‘The jar will have a red-and-white top,’ Elin told him. But what she didn’t know was that Florence’s jar had a red-and-white gingham fabric topper, whereas Gaynor’s was just a red-and-white metal screw-on lid.
“When Carwyn got to the tent, Joyce and Barbara had just left, but his former wife, Gaynor, who’d arrived late with her entry, was still there. I don’t know what she was doing, but probably she was looking at the entries. She wouldn’t have known which entries belonged to the members of the Women’s Guild, but she would have wanted to have a good look at them anyway.”
“Hold it there, Penny,” said Bethan. “I’m just going to switch on the recorder.”
On Bethan’s signal, Penny continued.
“So while she’s stood there looking at the entries, in comes Carwyn with the Women’s Guild cake stand, server, and knife that Elin had asked him to fetch from home. She’d won the Best in Show award for baking the year before, so she got to keep the silver set for a year, and then had to return it for this year’s show.
“Gaynor and Carwyn had a hard breakup. Gaynor hated him, and Elin and Gaynor hated each other. Even after all these years, there was a lot of bitterness festering among all three of them. And I believe Carwyn and Gaynor got into a terrible argument because Gaynor was about to take away the most precious thing in Carwyn’s life.”
“Which was?”
“At first, I thought the murder might have something to do with his chickens, which he loved so much, and then I realized it was something more precious.”
Bethan’s eyes widened.
“Macy. His granddaughter, whom he loves more than anything. Gaynor and Michelle were planning to move to Spain, and naturally they’d take Macy with them.”
“So Carwyn and Gaynor get into a violent argument,” Bethan said, picking up the narrative. “He begs her not to take Macy away. She taunts him, and as she turns to walk away, he snaps, grabs the Women’s Guild cake knife off the table, and stabs her.”
“And now, of course, he’s panicked,” said Penny. “He’s horrified by what he’s done. He’s got to do something with the body, and quick. Joyce could return at any minute to lock up. So he stuffs the body under the table and tries to hide it, along with Florence’s cake, which Gaynor had put her hand in when she grabbed at the table as she collapsed.”
“Yes,” Bethan said. “That matches the forensics.”
“And then Carwyn grabs the jar of marmalade with the red-and-white top that Elin told him to get, and he legs it. He can’t get out of there fast enough. But he’s grabbed Florence’s marmalade by mistake, not Gaynor’s,” said Penny. “Because when Joyce accepted Gaynor’s marmalade into the competition, she didn’t put it with the others. She told Victoria and me that she left it at the end of the table. Maybe she intended to put it with the others later, when she locked up, and maybe she did, and that’s where the judges found it in the morning.”
“So Carwyn took a jar of marmalade with a red-and-white top home to Elin, just as she’d asked him to do,” said Bethan.
“Right. And as soon as she saw it she knew it was the wrong jar. You can imagine how annoyed she must have been after all the trouble she’d gone to, that Carwyn had taken the wrong jar, and at the show the next day, Elin discovers that Gaynor has won after all. And instead of throwing the jar out, as she probably should have, she’s too thrifty and can’t bear waste, as she said at Macy’s party, so she gives the marmalade to Barbara as a little gift, passing it off as her own,” explained Penny.
“And Barbara realized the marmalade wasn’t Elin’s, probably because it was better,” said Bethan. “And poor Barbara was starting to realize what had happened, and Elin overheard her telling you on the way to Speke Hall that she had noticed something odd, and she realized Barbara was on her way to working out what had happened, because Elin had given her Florence’s marmalade—so either Elin or Carwyn had been in the tent after the deadline closed. And all it would take would be a conversation with Joyce and she and Barbara would work out what must have happened.”
“Exactly. So Elin alerted Carwyn, who followed Barbara into Speke Hall, confronted her, and tried to kill her to keep her quiet,” Penny concluded.
“The scene set up at Speke Hall bothered me,” said Bethan. “It seemed cumbersome that the killer would attack Barbara, grab the cordon and ‘Wet Paint’ sign, set all that up, then risk being seen while he escaped. But after talking to Merseyside, we discovered there’s a simple explanation, as there almost always is.”
“Let me guess: He set up the cordon and ‘Wet Paint’ sign before he attacked Barbara,” said Penny, “thinking it would keep people out and he wouldn’t be disturbed. And how did he get away? He used the ladder beside the chimney flue. His hobby is rock climbing. Scrambling up that thing would have been easy for a fit person like him.”
“So how did you put all this together?”
“Well, the thing that struck me about both murders is that they weren’t planned. You can just imagine the killer panicking, trying to hide the bodies, and knowing they’d soon be discovered. So I thought about who could pull off something like that.”
“The second murder,” said Bethan, “was one murder too many. It was really sloppy. When killers are trying to think on the fly, they always make mistakes. Mistakes that cost them dearly.”
“And there’s something else,” said Penny. “Something that might connect Carwyn to the Gaynor Lewis murder. On the morning of the show, he wasn’t wearing his green puffy vest that he always wears. I think he couldn’t wear it because there was blood on it from when he killed his wife the night before.”
“He probably got rid of it,” said Bethan. “Too bad.”
“But he didn’t get rid of everything,” said Penny. “It had little pins attached to it. Farming pins and chickens. I’ll bet if you were to have them tested—”
“Gaynor’s DNA!” exclaimed Bethan, interrupting Penny.
“Yes,” said Penny. “But I don’t have anything that actually places Carwyn in the marquee at the time of the murder.”
“Maybe you don’t have to.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“We have something. A piece of evidence we held back from the public. When we analyzed the carrot cake Gaynor Lewis took down with her, we found a feather stuck in the cake. Could be a chicken feather.”
Penny opened the bag she had brought with her and removed a rolled-up white towel. She carefully unrolled it and pointed to the fluffy white feather with a dab of pink nail varnish on it.
“Did it look like this, by any chance?”
Bethan grinned. “Where did you get that?”
“I did a birthday manicure for Macy Lewis, and she touched her granddad’s vest and got this feather stuck in her nail varnish. It was still tacky.”
“Well, I can’t use that one—there’s an issue with chain of custody—but I will send someone to his farm to collect feathers from his chickens and we’ll DNA them. And once he’s been fingerprinted, we can see if his prints are a match to the sets Merseyside were able to recover from the bedroom at Speke Hall. The handle of the cake knife had been wiped. Even the most amateur of murderers would know to do that.”
“I’m sure you interviewed Carwyn Lewis about his whereabouts at the time Gaynor was killed.”
Bethan sighed. “Of course we did. He lied to us. But that’s not unusual. Everybody lies to us.”
“And Elin?”
“Quite likely an accomplice. We’ll dig deeper to see if she assisted in the cover-ups. We’ll be bringing both of them back for questioning, and as you said, we could very well be charging the pair of them by lunchtime. Or by this evening at the latest.”
Carwyn Lewis was arrested that afternoon and charged the next morning with the murders of Gaynor Lewis and Barbara Vickers, and Elin Spears was arreseted on suspicion of being an accessory in the murder of Barbara Vickers.
“Why couldn’t Gaynor have left us in peace?” Carwyn said. “All we wanted was to be happy. She should have just stepped aside and let us be happy.”