The English Boys

by Julia Thomas

  Finally deposited in front of his building, he paid the driver and hesitated on the step before going in. He lit a cigarette, wondering how life could change so drastically in twenty-four hours. After a few minutes, he went inside, taking the lift up to his flat. He locked the door behind him and went into the bedroom, where he fell upon the bed. He tossed and turned for nearly an hour until weariness overtook him.

  The following morning, Daniel woke late. His head pounded as though he hadn’t slept at all. It’s the first day without her, he thought, staring at the window across from his bed; the first day when the sun will rise and set without Tamsyn alive to see it. As he poured his first cup of coffee, his mobile buzzed, and he peered at it before answering. It would be his mother, of course, wondering how he was doing. Instead, Tamsyn’s face stared at him from the screen.

  “Tam?” he said, his heart hammering once again. Had it all been a nightmare after all?

  “No,” said a matter-of-fact voice. “It’s Carey.”

  It took a moment for Daniel to calm down and realize it was Tamsyn’s sister. “Good God, you called from her phone!”

  “I didn’t have your number.”

  “I’m sorry. It startled me.” He tried to recover himself. “How are you?”

  “Holding on. Just.”

  “And your parents?”

  “I haven’t seen them this morning, but they’re devastated. They don’t understand how this could have happened.”

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated, not knowing what else to say.

  “I can’t think of a motive, Daniel. There’s no reason why someone would want her dead.”

  “Nor can I.”

  “Can you meet me?” she asked. “We need to talk.”

  He hesitated, hating himself as he did so. Did Carey blame him somehow for her sister’s death? “When?” he asked. “Today?”

  “This morning.”

  “Yes, of course. Shall I come round to your flat?”

  “No,” she answered. “My parents are coming over. They’ll be making arrangements.”

  “I can meet you anywhere. Just name the place.”

  “There’s a café in Arundel Street, Angelo’s.”

  “Near the university. I know it.” He’d dropped Tamsyn there once when she’d met Carey for lunch. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  Daniel hung up, wondering if he should ring Hugh. Instead, he locked the door and made his way to the Underground. It was cold outside, hardly the spring day the previous one had been, and beneath the streets it was colder still. He exited near King’s College, hurrying down the Embankment. He found the café and went inside to wait. She arrived two minutes after him and spied him the moment she walked through the door.

  Daniel stood as she approached the table. For some reason, he found it unbearable waiting to hear her speak. As different as Carey was from Tamsyn, he knew that her speech patterns and expressions would conjure her sister’s face. She wore a brown hooded cardigan and jeans, looking more like a teenager than a medical student. The impression wasn’t improved when a lock of hair fell over her face and she brushed it back.

  “Have a seat,” he said, pulling out a chair. “I’ve ordered coffees.”

  “Thank you,” she answered, sitting down. “Let’s get straight to the point. I think we should reconstruct the scene to try to figure out exactly what happened. We need to make a list of everyone who was in that part of the Abbey yesterday.”

  “I already have one,” he said, tapping his pocket, where he had tucked the list from Hugh.

  “May I see it?”

  He paused for a moment and then handed it over, watching as she read it through twice.

  “Are you certain this is everyone who was in that room? I didn’t think to look.”

  “Oh, I looked, all right. I was the last one questioned, so I had plenty of time to watch people being called in. This is absolutely correct.”

  “It’s hard to imagine someone she knew this well … ”

  “I know,” he said, cutting her off. He wasn’t certain he could stand this, and he had no idea how she could, either. “Perhaps you shouldn’t try to get involved with things. I’m sure it must be painful.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I only meant—”

  “Oh, I know what you meant,” Carey snapped. “You meant, ‘Leave it to the police.’ Well, I can’t. Tamsyn was the only sister I had. I can’t do nothing. And I should think you, as her friend, would be glad to help.”

  “Of course,” he stammered.

  “Good. I’m sure we can figure things out.”

  “We can’t interfere in the police investigation, you know,” he said. “They take that sort of thing quite seriously.”

  “If we leave it to the police, it will take forever, if it gets solved at all,” Carey said. “I’m not going to have my parents sit through a protracted investigation while the whole thing is rehashed in the papers every day. Someone out there killed my sister, and I intend to find out why.”

  “That’s admirable. I’m just not certain how effective it will be.”

  “Either you help me or you don’t.”

  Daniel could see it was no use. She would not be dissuaded. Then again, in her position, he probably wouldn’t be either.

  “All right,” he said. “But there’s something you need to know. Hugh received a death threat about a fortnight ago. The police are looking into it.”

  “Oh, god. What about Tamsyn?”

  “This threat came to him, not the two of them. He didn’t even know if it was a serious threat.”

  “Even more reason for us to get started,” Carey said. “Let’s divide up this list: family, friends, acquaintances. Hold on, I have some paper.”

  He watched as she fumbled in her bag and took out a pen. The coffees arrived and he took a gulp of the scalding liquid to fortify himself.

  “Family,” he repeated, trying to expedite matters. “That would mean you and your parents. None of whom, of course, are suspect. I say we go straight to some of the others, like Cole and Potter.”

  “You mustn’t jump to conclusions. Inevitably, they’re wrong. I could have hated her for all you know.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “You can’t know that for certain. You don’t know me very well.”

  “That’s true, I don’t,” Daniel agreed. “But I’m still certain you had nothing to do with it. Otherwise you’d never be here trying to find out who did. Now, back to family. That would include Hugh, wouldn’t it? I mean, they were minutes away from becoming man and wife.”

  “Next you’ll say his family counts as her family, too.”

  “Well, say what you want about the Ashley-Hunts, but they’re no murderers. I’ve known them for years.”

  Carey set her pen on top of her paper. “Perhaps this was a mistake after all.”

  “All right,” Daniel said, sighing. “It’s just hard to think of anyone on this list as a cold-blooded killer.”

  “Then think of it as eliminating them, one by one, as possible suspects. We’re exonerating those who are innocent of a crime.”

  Her jaw was set with such determination that he couldn’t even begin to argue with her. What would Tamsyn have wanted? he asked himself. And suddenly he knew that if she could, Tamsyn Burke would come back from Purgatory or Heaven or wherever her soul now resided and insist that he help her sister in this impossible, final act of sisterly love.

  It was the least he could do.

  “How long have you known Hugh?” Carey asked.

  Daniel put the list on the table. “We met when we were thirteen, when we were both recommended for Junior Guildhall, an acting class. I wasn’t having an easy time of it. You know, the kid from Brighton without money or connections, a complete outsider in a cutthroat envi
ronment. I was on the verge of quitting just to escape the bullying when Hugh rescued me. We’ve been as close as brothers ever since.”

  “Tamsyn loved him, too.”

  Daniel sighed. “When’s the funeral?”

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  “So, if one of these people is a murderer, are they more likely or less likely to come?”

  “More likely, I think,” she said after some hesitation. “They wouldn’t want to be conspicuous by their absence.”

  He had to admit she was right, but the thought of sitting through the funeral with a killer in their midst was more than unfathomable. It was terrifying.

  Detective Chief Inspector Gordon Murray of Scotland Yard held the same opinion. He had rung Tamsyn Burke’s parents and inked the funeral into his agenda book. In the meantime, he had men following three of the wedding guests: Marc Hayley, Alex Richardson, and Ciaran Monaghan, although if nothing unusual turned up within the next forty-eight hours, he would turn his attention elsewhere. For the moment, he was not monitoring the activities of the other Richardson brother, Daniel, who had been seen by a number of witnesses arguing with Sarah Williams shortly before the body was found. It had been a heated conversation, and from the witnesses’ perspectives it was clear that Sarah Williams was angry over being jilted by Richardson. The murder inquiry was also complicated by the death threat that Hugh Ashley-Hunt had received, but of course at this early stage it was impossible to tell if it was related to his fiancée’s murder. Now they had to find the source of that email and determine if there was any connection.

  Tamsyn Burke had been stabbed with an ordinary knife, which had been stashed in a plastic bag and then stuffed in an urn. Unfortunately, there were no discernible prints on the weapon, which the lab had confirmed. It was damned unfortunate when there was no physical evidence left behind.

  Murray looked up when he heard a knock at the door. “Come in.”

  It was his subordinate, Detective Sergeant Ennis, with a handful of files. “As you requested, sir,” he said.

  Murray looked back down at the form in front of him and signed his name at the bottom. “Did you find anything interesting, Sergeant?”

  Ennis was an earnest young man of twenty-eight, eager to learn as much as he could from Murray. He’d become indispensable in the six months they had worked together. His mother, a native of Jamaica, had married an Irishman; the couple had settled in London, where an interracial marriage was more acceptable than in his father’s Gaelic village. He was tall and wiry, with a wide, prominent nose and short, cropped black hair. Since working for Murray, he’d become something of a clothes horse, and it had elicited comments among his peers, none of them complimentary.

  For the last few hours, Ennis had been running background checks on the twenty-seven people on the suspect list. Murray was interested to see if there had been any previous arrests or convictions among them.

  “A few of them have had priors,” Ennis said, handing over the files. “It goes way back. Owen Burke had four arrests for drunkenness in the ’80s and ’90s.”

  “The victim’s father.”

  “Right. More recently, Lucy Potter was arrested for theft but not convicted. Alex Richardson has a few minor drug charges. Ciaran Monaghan and Marc Hayley have each been charged once with assault.”

  “How recently for Hayley?”

  “Three years ago. He lost his temper and got into a fight with a reporter in a wine bar in Ealing.”

  “Not exactly unexpected behavior for an actor.” Murray flipped through the files, and after a couple of minutes set them on the corner of his desk. Nothing appeared to point to anyone as a murderer.

  “What do you think, sir?”

  Murray tapped his finger on the desk, frowning. “One thing’s for certain. No one could have stabbed that girl to death and been so nonchalant about it unless they’d killed before.”

  After Ennis left, he looked at the clock on the wall. It was already after six. He hadn’t moved much in the last two or three hours and his neck was getting stiff. Leaving the files on the desk to review in the morning, he took his jacket from the coat rack behind the door and made his way through “A” Division, mulling over what he had read. Something seemingly unimportant, some minuscule fact, perhaps, would filter through the long list of suspects and motives and make its way to the top. He just had to sift through things until it happened. In the car park, he made his way through the sea of dark vehicles and unlocked his Audi. His brow furrowed in concentration as he started the car. Who stands to benefit from this murder? he wondered. As he pulled onto Broadway, he saw that the traffic was bad again. It was always bad these days. When he went out on a case, he usually had Ennis drive him. As it was, he was thinking of giving up the car and relying on the Tube.

  Murray headed north on Grosvenor Place toward Belgravia, to the tall white row house he called home. It had belonged to his Uncle Roger, who had left it to him twenty years earlier. As a young constable, he could never have afforded such a home without the bequest, but it suited him perfectly now. Inside, it was as neat and orderly as it had been when his wife was alive, and he had changed nothing about it from the furniture placement to the dishes in the cupboards.

  When he discovered it had been left to him, it had been quite a shock. He and his wife had been living in a second-floor flat in Islington, surrounded by noisy neighbors with too many children, and had never expected to inherit anything, much less a house. Ingrid, a tall Swedish blonde he had met at university, was the sort of woman he’d never even looked at during his bachelor days. She was too beautiful, too perfect, for an ordinary man like him. Yet somehow, she had loved him. They had been married five years when they’d moved into this house, and though she’d kept all of his uncle’s furniture, she had swept away the stuffiness of the house and filled it with a lightness he had never imagined.

  They had spent years trying to get pregnant, and it was his greatest regret that he had not been able to have children with her. Then, four years ago, she had found a lump in her right breast, and six months later he was a widower.

  When he arrived at the house, he parked the car in the street and went inside, observing his rituals: hanging his coat on a hook, sifting through the mail on the hall table, touching the surface of the buffet in the sitting room where the drinks tray was laid. Ingrid had painted that piece, as she had a few of the others, a Carl Larsson blue. It made him think of their last trip to Sweden and her parents’ home in Katrineholm, where they’d gone shortly after her diagnosis. It had been summer, and they had eaten gravlax and dumplings and walked among the shops, sitting outside on the long summer nights as he listened to her talking about his life without her. He had found it unbearable to speak of such a thing, but living without her had been immeasurably worse.

  Sighing, he picked up the telephone and ordered his usual Monday takeaway to be delivered, and then poured a glass of wine, a Bordeaux that was Ingrid’s favorite, and waited in the sitting room. When the food arrived a half hour later, he took out a pen and paper and began to make notes while picking at his lamb tikka and bombay aloo. Who killed Tamsyn Burke? he wrote at the top of the page. Then he scribbled a name on the paper and circled it. It was process of elimination now, and one might as well start at the top.

  Seven

  Tamsyn Burke had come into Daniel’s life unexpectedly, and all because of an opportunity for him to work with Hugh in a film. Despite their close friendship, Daniel and Hugh had never been cast in any production together since their days at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Their interests, like their personalities, ran along dissimilar veins: Hugh preferred to act in historical pictures when the opportunity arose, while Daniel opted for contemporary films. From time to time, Hugh had mentioned the possibility of working together, but Daniel had privately thought himself far too competitive to star in any film opposite his best friend. He was surprised that
Hugh would welcome it either.

  As they were establishing themselves in the public eye, they were known to be friends, but until Sir John Hodges contacted them, no one else had approached them for the same project. Daniel supposed this was inevitable. Although there existed an incredible wealth of acting talent on their small island, theirs was a field where nepotism mattered almost as much as ability.

  “Come down for the weekend, Daniel, so we can at least discuss the possibility,” Sir John had insisted when he rang. “Ashley-Hunt seems quite eager.”

  Daniel had decided that a break from London after the long, wet month of June was in order, as long as Hugh was so keen to go. They’d taken an early train to Paris, where they rented a car and drove to the Hodges’ home a few kilometers south of Lille. Daniel had been to France a number of times, most notably a couple of years earlier when he’d been involved with an attractive French chef from Perpignan. For one brief weekend he had considered settling down in the Pyrenees, where they would open a restaurant and raise enormous dogs. The relationship, while more serious than any previous one, eventually ran its course, and he smiled to himself when he remembered how he’d avoided the continent for a while after that. Regardless, it was good to be back. The landscape of northern France had awoken from the dormancy of winter and everything was in full bloom. Thick, verdant beech trees lined the road and wildflowers were scattered across the fields.

  They arrived mid-afternoon, pulling up to a late-nineteenth-century house. It was pink stucco adorned with weather-beaten green shutters and ivy, a crumbling, timeworn French maison. Sir John and his wife were perfect hosts. The food was excellent, their rooms comfortable, and there was no talk about films. As a matter of fact, a very satisfactory day passed without any mention of it at all, and when at last the subject did arise, it was more tempting than Daniel had expected.

  “I want to do Under the Greenwood Tree,” Sir John told them over a good Pinot Noir in his library.

  “Hardy,” Hugh said. “A vicar and a farmer vying for the same girl. Is that right?”