Read Online The English Boys by Julia Thomas - Free Book Online

couple of minutes set them on the corner of his desk. Nothing appeared to point to anyone as a murderer.
    â€œWhat 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