by Julia Thomas
After the meal, Carey stood. “I’ll take care of the dishes, Mum,” she said.
Miranda Burke folded her napkin and set it on the table. “I could do with a lie-down,” she admitted. “I’ve got a bit of a headache, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve an errand to run, myself,” Owen Burke said, looking at his daughter. “Will you be all right with the dishes?”
Daniel knew he wasn’t talking about the dishes. “I’ll give her a hand. I always help my mum in the kitchen.”
To prove his point, he stood and began stacking plates. The elder Burkes left the room and Carey began clearing the table with a laser-like concentration she probably reserved for medical school. Daniel assessed the tasks, tucked a towel into the waistband of his trousers, and began to wash dishes while Carey put Brussels sprouts and potatoes into small plastic bowls. He needed time to think. He was glad he hadn’t raised his suspicions in front of the Burkes. Regardless of the talk at the table, they were brittle. He had seen it at Westminster Abbey, and it lurked just beneath the surface now. But had they removed the photos to protect someone? And if so, who? Ciaran Monaghan? If he and Tamsyn had been in some of the photographs together, it might cause them some distress, particularly if they suspected him of her murder. Or was there something from the past that they wanted to hide. A twin, perhaps? As shocking as that would be, he failed to see how it would be something to hide. He shut off the tap and scrubbed a plate.
Carey brushed crumbs from the tablecloth and then ran a cloth over the Aga, something he was certain she would normally never do. She was avoiding him, three feet away, and as he began to dry the old Grindley transferware, he tried to work out how best to approach it. He took a guess at which cupboard held cups, correctly, and was arrested by the assortment of mugs with sayings like Happy 50th and Princess and the logo from one of the CSI programs. Which, if any, had been Tamsyn’s?
On the top shelf, he saw what had to be Miranda’s special porcelain collection: stiff royal portraits painted on ceramics of QEII, Prince William and Kate Middleton’s engagement photo, and even one of Diana and Charles. He’d once asked Tamsyn her opinion of the royals, not because he cared but because he found her opinions so amusing.
Tamsyn had shrugged. “Dunno, especially,” she’d said, “but Princess Di was an angel.” His mum, though not particularly religious, had set up a photo of the late princess, ringed round with small candles for vigils of her own unmitigated grief. It hadn’t moved since 1997. He found it rather absurd.
“She was a man-stalking, colon-cleansing addict with a fetish for designer clothes and shoes,” he had answered.
“You’re a man. You couldn’t possibly understand.”
“How old were you when she died?”
“Too young to remember her properly, but everyone knew she was heartbroken in spite of the riches.”
He hadn’t argued, for that, of course, was indisputable.
“And what do you think of the Prime Minister?”
“What’s his name again?”
He hadn’t met a woman yet who could remember the name of anyone who’d held the office since Tony Blair. He supposed it was because they kept making movies about Blair standing up to the queen and trying to handle the looming threat of weapons of mass destruction or utter lack thereof. He’d been considered to play a young Tony Blair himself.
“Don’t trouble that pretty head of yours,” he’d said. “The kingdom will survive, whether or not you care about politics.”
“Most of the politics I care about are a little closer to home.”
“Such as?”
“Well, I protested at a rally in Wiltshire once when a field was going to be turned into a parking lot.”
“And a very good cause it was, I’m sure,” he’d said.
They’d bickered endlessly then, happy as otters on a sun-streaked beach. Now, he suddenly realized he was standing in front of the Burkes’ cupboard, cup in hand, staring into space like a complete idiot. He turned to see Carey watching him.
“You’re doing it too,” she murmured.
He set the cup on the shelf and closed the door. “It’s hard not to, isn’t it? Everything reminds me of her.”
“I know.”
She turned, placing the towel on a table, and walked out of the room. He had no choice but to follow. She grabbed her jacket from the coat rack in the hall and put it on, pocketing the keys that lay upon a side table. Without a word, she opened the door and stepped outside. He threw on his own coat and followed her, peeved about being ordered about, albeit in silence. She got into her parents’ Ford, which she started, and unlocked the passenger door for him to get in beside her.
“Where are we going?” he asked. He was half afraid she was going to deposit him at the train station and send him packing, his bag still parked in the Burkes’ front hall.
“To see the sights,” she replied.
Llandudno had not been a place with which he had been at all familiar, and yet from the moment he’d arrived, he was surprised by its beauty. The sky, thick with vapor, held a menacing gloom. Carey drove north of town and settled on Marine Drive, heading toward the north shore. They were parallel with Liverpool on the east and Dublin on the west, he figured, south of the Isle of Man. One had to have a particular reason to venture from a place like this, and he wondered how Tamsyn had ever wanted to leave it.
Carey pulled around a bend closer to the edge of the road than he would have liked, and the tall outline of a lighthouse came into view. They came to a stop by the side of the road a distance away and she got out of the car, walking toward it rapidly.
“Slow down,” he called, to no avail. He wasn’t certain she could hear him.
He watched as she ran ahead, her boots clicking on the stones underfoot. She stopped short of going into the building, leaning against the battlements of the stone wall. Daniel hated gothic-looking buildings, imagining torture chambers and oubliettes where prisoners were left to rot and die until all that was left of them were rat-gnawed bones. As he approached, he looked over the side of the wall. The lighthouse was perched on a cliff, and sea waves slapped against the rocks below.
“What are we doing here?” he asked. It certainly wasn’t a place she would turn to for comfort.
The mist had stopped, but the stones were slick and wet, and he had the feeling that if she were to lean over the battlements, they would both be pulled over. The morning deluge had left the sand clumpy and hard around the rocks, and the promontory jutting out broke the waves as they rushed onto shore. Gulls shrieked in the distance, swooping low over the shallow beach. It was no warmer than it had been that morning, and he zipped his jacket against the wind.
Carey turned and looked at him, strands of hair blowing across her face. She brushed them back. “Daniel, how well did you really know Tamsyn?”
He was taken aback by the question. “What do you mean?”
“Did she ever talk about her past?”
“She was too young for a past,” he said, thrusting his hands in his pockets. “And obviously, you came from a good home. I’ve been wondering why she wanted to leave a place like this at all.”
“I’m not surprised she didn’t talk about her life much,” Carey said, turning her collar up against the wind, which was whipping her hair into her eyes. “She never did before.”
“What’s your point, exactly?” he asked. “Are you trying to say we weren’t really friends? That she didn’t really care about me if she didn’t tell me every single detail of life in a sodding little village by the sea?”
She gave him a look so stinging he thought he’d go into anaphylactic shock.
“Tamsyn was raped when she was fifteen, just there.” She pointed toward the lighthouse. “Two young men dragged her into their car and drove her up here one night when she was walking home from the beach. She didn’t know them. She didn’t do anything wrong, b
ut she was raped, all the same.”
He was stunned into silence. He could imagine the look of fear on Tamsyn’s face, could almost hear her screams. The wind and the gulls, the waves of the Irish Sea beating against the rocks, would have muffled any cry. The thought of her innocence being wrenched from her made him feel as if he would be sick.
“What happened to the bastards?” he finally managed.
Carey turned away, staring out at the horizon. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“They were English boys here on holiday.” She gave a sharp laugh. “This is a popular place, didn’t you know? But they were never caught.”
“This is gruesome. It makes me want to kill someone.”
“Now you know how my parents feel.”
“Does that have something to do with the reason she moved to London?”
Carey didn’t answer.
He sighed. “You’d almost think it would have made her afraid to get out on her own instead of embracing it. But then, she had a way of doing the unexpected.”
“She didn’t leave home right away,” Carey said. “She was here for a while, and then went to an aunt’s in Birmingham before going on to London later.”
“Did it change her, that you can recall?”
“Of course it did, but probably not in the way you think.”
“What do you mean?”
“It means she got pregnant that night, Daniel. She was carrying a child from one of those boys. Can you imagine? I can’t even fathom coping with the rape, for one thing, but to get pregnant … It’s a living nightmare.”
“A child?” Daniel asked, shocked. “What happened? Did she miscarry? Abort it?”
“Now you’re being dense.”
He rubbed the stubble that was forming on his chin, shaking his head. “The photos.”
“That’s right. Mum had photos of Emma around the house. I called her from the train and she went around taking them down.”
“She’s raising the child, then?”
“Tamsyn didn’t want her to, but Mum wouldn’t let her give the baby away. It’s why she left Wales. She rarely came back for visits and had little to do with Emma.”
“Does the child know Tamsyn was her mother?”
“No.”
“She wasn’t at the funeral,” he said, after a moment.
“No. She wasn’t going to be at the wedding either. After ten years, my parents were tired of trying to push that relationship onto Tamsyn. They had to accept her as she was: someone who could never bond with the child she’d conceived during a rape.”
“And what of the child?”
“She believed Tamsyn was her eldest sister, the rebel who never came home. She didn’t even know about the wedding. A few days ago, Mum and Dad told her that Tamsyn has died. It didn’t mean very much to her, since they were never close.”
“What about you?” he asked.
“I’m close to her, of course. I was twelve when she was born. The first five years of her life, she came to me as much as Mum. We both adore her.”
“Was it ever reported to the police? The rape, I mean?”
“Of course. The police were called round to the house that night, and Tam was taken to the hospital. They had few details to go on: that there were two of them, both older teens, and they were English. But it was summer, you see. Half of Llandudno is tourists in the summer.”
“What about the car they drove? Were there any identifying features about it?”
Carey eyed him. “She couldn’t give any information about that either, apart from the fact that the vehicle was black. She was traumatized, and young. Not what you would call an expert witness.”
The last, he was certain, was not a criticism of her sister, but a mere rendering of facts. It had to have crippled the entire family to go through such an ordeal. He could picture Tamsyn’s slim figure, some of which he had seen up close and intimate, but he had never suspected that she’d been pregnant. Had Hugh known? he wondered. Wouldn’t there have been some sign, some remnant of physical evidence that he would have noticed?
“Did she ever talk about it?”
“Never. Not once after Emma was born.”
He felt in his pockets for cigarettes before remembering he’d decided to quit. “Fuck,” he said, irritated.
“Well, that’s one way to put it.”
“You didn’t hold it against her, did you? The way she rejected her own child?”
“I could always see it from her perspective, I suppose,” Carey admitted. “How was a sixteen-year-old to care for an infant? How could she be emotionally involved with a child, or separate it in her mind from what had happened to her?”
“You did, though, didn’t you?”
She looked back toward the sea, where the waves were lashing higher every minute. “Emma was an innocent child. She wasn’t anything to do with something so horrific. It’s the hardest part of living in London, being away from her.”
“What about your parents?”
“They both wanted to keep her. Mum especially, I suppose, though I doubt Dad could have allowed her to give Emma away. That’s what Tamsyn wanted, and that’s why she left home. She couldn’t be there if Emma was there to remind her day in and day out of the worst thing that had ever happened to her.”
“Where is she now?”
“Emma? At the moment, she’s at her friend Marina’s house. Marina’s mum had her when she was forty, so she was someone older who could go through this with Mum. The girls are best friends.”
Daniel paused. “I wonder how hard it must have been to trade your daughter for your grandchild.”
She looked up and studied the look on his face. “This is a terrible thing to admit, but I’ve often thought Tamsyn would have found another reason to leave, if not this.”
“You’re very philosophical.”
“I just don’t worry about things I can do nothing about. I couldn’t have made Tamsyn keep Emma and stay in Llandudno. Like everyone else, I had to let her go. Fortunately, she still loved me and kept me in her life. And I have Emma in my life, too, so I had the best of both worlds.”
“So your mother named her, then? Took charge from the moment they left the hospital?”
“No, actually, Tamsyn named her. She was insistent upon the name, for whatever reason. But yes, Mum took her home from the hospital.”
“This is a lot to take in,” he said, shoving his hands back into his pockets. He stared out onto the sea, anything but look at the lighthouse where Tamsyn had gone through so much. “Want to go for a coffee or something?”
“I have a better idea,” Carey said, looking up at him. He noticed for the first time the elfin shape of her ears poking through her blonde hair. “I think you should meet Emma for yourself.”
Twenty-Six
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Daniel said, drawing the seat belt across his chest.
Carey didn’t answer. As she extracted her mobile from her pocket and began punching numbers, he looked back at the lighthouse. Now that he knew the truth about Tamsyn, he was impatient to leave. There was nothing to be gained by prolonging this excursion into her tragic past. He wasn’t even sure what he’d hoped to discover. Not this, certainly, but even finding out about Tamsyn’s child, as shocking as it was, wouldn’t lead them to the murderer. They were amateurs playing at a dangerous game. Chief Inspector Murray didn’t appear to have made any inroads into the case, but it was his crime to solve, not theirs. As far as Daniel was concerned, the police didn’t need any more interference from him.
As much as he hated to admit it, Daniel knew he had idealized his relationship with Tamsyn. He had wanted her but never possessed her. It was difficult to imagine her pregnant. Of course, she would have been a mere teen, no doubt as reed thin as usual, her
protruding, pregnant belly unavoidably obvious no matter how she’d tried to hide it. And he was certain she had tried, at least for a while. He recalled an article he’d read that claimed nearly all crime was perpetrated by young, rogue males looking for a good time or to satisfy an immediate need. Knowing Tamsyn had been victimized by two of them made him furious.
He suddenly realized that Carey was speaking in a low voice to her mother. Without wanting to, he listened to snippets of her one-sided conversation.
“It’s all right, Mum. I told him … No, there’s no reason to think that … ” Her voice drifted away as he stared at the road. How stupid he had been to take Tamsyn to Brighton. No doubt it had reminded her of the worst time of her life.
Carey ended the call and looked at him.
“Is this necessary?” he asked. “I don’t want to cause any problem for her. She’s just a child.”
“You’re my friend. That’s all she needs to know.”
“I shouldn’t have come. I can be so bloody stubborn sometimes.”
“You wanted to know the truth. Now you do.”
He opened the window for air. “I didn’t expect anything like this.”
“You couldn’t have known. But now you see why it’s all so complicated.”
They drove back into the town, retracing their earlier route. Carey parked the car in front of a stone house with mullioned windows a few streets away from the Burkes’. A curtain fluttered in the window and a moment later, a woman opened the door. She was short and had an apron tied about her none-too-slim waist.
She ran a hand through her short brown hair and smiled at them. “Carey! How are you?”
Carey reached out and grasped the older woman’s hands between her own. “I’m fine, thank you, Karen,” she said.
She wasn’t fine, Daniel knew. She was trying not to shatter into pieces.
“This is my friend, Daniel. We wanted to see Emma for a minute.”
“Of course. She and Marina are out back. They found a turtle and were setting it free again.” Karen stepped inside and beckoned for them to follow. “Go on through. You know where it is. I have a cake in the oven.”