Blood Red Roses

by S. J. Coles

  He was heading out the door when Kim FaceTimed him. He, of course, was eye-achingly beautiful just in his plain polo shirt, with his hair mussed just so and his lopsided smile bright and warm. Still, Rick didn’t mind being told how amazing he looked or watching the desire fill his boyfriend’s eyes.

  Boyfriend?

  The thought shocked him.

  “You’ll be fine,” the younger man said, perhaps misinterpreting Rick’s expression. “It’s just a wedding, babe.”

  “Cecily Swanson’s wedding,” Rick replied, finally giving voice to the fear, “that I still haven’t figured out why I’m invited to.”

  “Relax. I’m sure she just wants to get into your pants in the vestry.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It’s a little funny.”

  “Besides, no vestry. It’s not a church wedding.”

  Kim shrugged. “Well, I’m sure she’ll think of something.”

  Rick wondered if his expression had hardened a fraction. “And what am I supposed to do if she does?”

  “You could try telling her the truth.”

  Rick gave him a look, which was returned with an impatient sigh.

  “Fine, maybe not. Look. I’m only kidding around. I’m sure she will be far too busy to even think of you…at least today. Just sit through what you have to and leave the minute it’s polite to do so. Piece of cake. Oh, speaking of which, see if you can swipe some, will you? The chef that made the wedding cake was reviewed in Vanity Fair last month, and I want to see if they’re up to the hype.”

  “Why? Are you planning to order a wedding cake sometime soon?” Rick chuckled, then froze, realising what he’d said.

  Kim blinked but then he grinned. “I think this wedding is enough to be dealing with for the time being, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, yeah okay,” Rick said, relieved but also surprised by a twist of disappointment. “But I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”

  “That’s a done deal. I’ll bring steak.”

  Rick allowed himself to spend the two-hour car ride to Hartsford Hall daydreaming about steak, red wine and Kim, aroused and willing, dragging him to bed after dinner…maybe before too. The pleasant thoughts were so diverting that it was only as he was handing Ella out of the chauffeured Jaguar in front of the towering Jacobean facade of the wedding venue that he fully took in his sister’s appearance.

  Her curved figure was clothed in figure-hugging silk the colour of a stormy sky, setting off her cocoa skin. She’d brushed her hair out into its natural ebony cloud, pinned on one side with a sliver butterfly he recognised as their mother’s. Silver and crystal sparkled at her neck, wrists and in her ears. She’d painted her lips a dusky pinky and swept some grey shadow over her eyelids. She stared at the colonnaded entrance of the hall, already crowded with exquisitely dressed people, even though, to Rick, she outshone them all.

  “You look amazing.”

  She blinked and her strained expression eased. “You think?”

  “Hell yeah,” he said. “You look incredible, seriously.”

  Warmth flushed her cheeks. “Yeah, well, when you gave me that ridiculous amount of money for a dress, I knew this was important to you. So I’ll play long, Ricky. For now.”

  He squeezed her hand, smiling to mask the thrumming of his nerves. “Thank you. Shall we?” He crooked his elbow. She smiled a more genuine smile, took his arm and they went inside.

  Ella did a credible impression of not being overwhelmed by the glittering splendour of Hartsford Hall. It put even The Savoy to shame. Crystal chandeliers sparkled overhead. Rococo and neoclassical paintings crowded the walls. The floors were either polished marble or spotless, monogrammed carpet. Waiting staff in stiff-collared shirts and bow ties drifted among the mingling guests with trays of champagne. Mindless chatter and the scent of Chanel mingled in the air with the soft music from the string quartet on the gallery over the cavernous entrance hall. Every gilded alcove contained a priceless china vase stuffed with a veritable forest of Sacred Heart roses. Their rich, raucous smell was almost overpowering, even in the airy vastness of the wood-panelled banqueting hall where the ceremony was to take place.

  An usher in white tailcoat led them to their seats in the middle row of scarlet velvet-cushioned chairs.

  “So this is your life now?” Ella said, staring at the women in priceless gowns, their diamonds glinting in the winter sunlight pouring through the bank of tall windows, and men in tailored dinner suits and designer ties, all smiling, nodding and laughing with each other like they’d never had to worry about anything in their lives.

  “No,” Rick murmured, crossing his legs and keeping his gaze ahead. Harry Gerrard-Hanson was stood on the rose-crowded platform at the front of the room, his round face red over his tight collar, bantering with his fleet of well-fed, well-dressed groomsmen with the air of one who had started on the champagne early. “No, this is no one’s life, really. It’s just a show.”

  The music built to a flourish and died as the last guests filtered into the hall. The musicians filed in and took their places on the platform. The air was buzzing with excited chatter. Gerrard-Hanson surveyed the room like someone contemplating a recently conquered battlefield.

  The last stragglers were just taking their seats when Valerie Stanhope appeared at his elbow. “Mr Bennett,” she said, smiling thinly. Rick blinked, something cold slithering through his chest. He stood to hide his reaction.

  “Ms Stanhope. Nice to see you again. You look wonderful today.”

  “Thank you,” she said flatly, straightening the fold of her couture gown. “I’m sorry to bring this up now, Mr Bennett, but we need to talk.”

  Rick went cold. “What about?”

  “There’s been a development.”

  He sensed Ella tense beside him Rick took a moment to find his voice. “What sort of development?”

  “We can’t talk here,” Stanhope, glancing over her shoulder at the musicians striking up the first notes of the Wedding March. “Meet me in the West Anteroom after the speeches.”

  “Can’t we meet sooner? After the ceremony?”

  She shook her head. “I’m on the head table. I can’t slip away. Meet me after they’re done. I’ll explain everything.”

  She eased her way to her seat near the front. Rick sat, his veins filling with ice water. Ella took his hand.

  Rick didn’t take in much of the ceremony. He was too busy trying to keep control of the nest of snakes that had hatched in his belly. Even when Cecily Swanson floated down the aisle in yards of silk and lace, her lips blood-red, mahogany hair studded with diamonds under a floor-length veil, he barely registered her presence.

  The registrar made her ponderous way through the vows and the exchange of rings. Rick was together enough to take in that both Cecily and Harry played their parts wonderfully. Even with the flashing cameras and air of pageantry, Rick was sure that if he didn’t know any better, he would be certain they were deeply and irretrievably in love. If the applause when they were pronounced husband and wife was anything to go by, the rest of the gathering had clearly enjoyed the show too.

  “Rick,” Cecily’s expression and voice were warm, maybe too warm, as he reached her in the welcome line for the crystal-and-silver stuffed ballroom for the wedding breakfast, “so wonderful to see you.”

  “Congratulations,” he said, generating passable sincerity from somewhere. She leant forward and kissed his cheek, sighing against his skin and lingering just a little too long.

  “I’ll find you later,” she whispered in his ear then he was being urged along the line.

  “Jesus Christ, Rick,” Ella murmured when they reached their table. “She couldn’t have made that more obvious if she’d mounted you right there.”

  There wasn’t enough space left in Rick’s mind to add the worry about whether anyone else had noted his exchange with the new bride. Instead he sat and reached for one of the many bottles of wine chilling in silver coolers in the centre of the rose
-strewn table.

  He drank. He made small talk with the uninteresting, blank-faced people around the table. He ate little of the meal, hardly tasting any of the five courses. The only thing that penetrated his consciousness was the wedding cake—a rich, chocolate sponge heavy with brandy and candied citrus peel. But the taste combined with the reminder of Kim just compounded his anguish. Ella watched him without speaking, her face taut, but he didn’t know how to reassure her.

  By the time the Master of Ceremonies tapped a spoon against a champagne glass to announce the beginning of the speeches, Rick was sweating into his new shirt and starting to realise that drinking so much wine without eating had probably been a mistake.

  He rose, wiping his hands on a napkin.

  “Where are you going?” Ella whispered.

  “Bathroom.” He hurried from the glittering room and, somehow, after many twists and turns, found the gents, an ostentatious room resplendent in green marble with gold fixtures gleaming in the light from the high windows. He drank greedily from the tap then splashed his face. The mirror reflected the haunted look in his hazel eyes, the sallowness of his skin, his tie loosened from nervous tugging. He caught himself with his phone in his hand, about to ring Kim. What, exactly was he going to say?

  He rubbed a hand over his face and took a deep breath. He could hear Kim’s voice in his head telling him he didn’t even know if there was anything to worry about yet. Sure, Stanhope had sounded ominous, but she always did. He took another breath, closed his eyes and let it out slowly. His thundering pulse eased but the tight muscles across his back and shoulders refused to loosen.

  He left feeling little better than when he’d gone in, then proceeded to get thoroughly lost trying to relocate the ballroom. By the time he found his way back, the speeches were done and half the guests had filtered out through the open windows onto a terrace above the sloping lawns, drinking yet more champagne as the room was cleared for dancing. He searched for Ella but couldn’t see her. Neither could he see Stanhope.

  He cursed and hurried back into the maze of corridors. He stopped a server to ask the way to the West Anteroom. The server pointed down another hall and Rick set off at a trot. He turned a corner, then another then finally found a door with a gold plaque identifying it as the one he was after. He glanced along the corridor but it was deserted and eerily quiet. He knocked. No answer. He took a breath and pushed the door open.

  The room beyond was dark. He fumbled for a light switch but couldn’t find one. He stepped farther in. The air was heavy with the cloying scent of roses. And something else, something also sweet and familiar in a way that made his spine prickle.

  “Ms Stanhope?” His voice fell dead in the close air. He took another step and stumbled on something hard lying on the floor. There was a small, dark object by his feet, almost invisible against the black tiles. He bent and picked it up, stepping back to the light to try to see what it was.

  “Rick!”

  He spun. Cecily Swanson—no, Cecily Gerrard-Hanson—stood outlined in the doorway, a vision in her long, white gown, her caramel skin glowing gold in the light from the corridor. Her eyes danced and her cheeks were flushed with champagne. “I’ve been looking all over for—”

  She reached out and turned on the light. She stopped talking. Her gaze moved from Rick’s face to the object in his hand and all the colour drained from her cheeks. Rick stared at it, not quite able to make sense of what he was seeing. Suddenly the smell that was almost, but not quiet, smothered by the smell from the dozens of vases of roses crowding a table against the wall jarred his memory.

  He turned, his muscles stiff. The tiles weren’t black. They were white. The pool of blood that darkened them had spread so far across the marble that he’d stepped right into it. The hem of Cecily’s gown had brushed against it, staining it red.

  Harry Gerrard-Hanson lay sprawled at Rick’s feet, his mouth and eyes wide, the gaping wounds in his neck and chest ragged, long and deep enough to reveal bone.

  It was only when Cecily screamed that he dropped the bloodied knife to the floor.

  Chapter Eight

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Rick said, his voice raw, staring hard at the table top in the now-horridly familiar interview room. “I went there to meet Ms Stanhope. I found him like that.”

  “Mrs Gerrard-Hanson found you with the knife in your hand, Mr Bennett.”

  “It was dark and I trod on it. I didn’t know what it was. Ask Ms Stanhope… She’ll tell you—”

  “We’ll get to Ms Stanhope.” Detective Nayar’s expression was grim, her eyes never leaving Rick’s face. DC Walsh watched with an faintly smug look on his face. “But first you need to start co-operating with us. You’re only making things worse for yourself by—”

  “I’m not talking without my lawyer.”

  “Ms Stanhope is a witness. She can no longer represent you. We can provide you with a new one, but that won’t be until the morning. You’ll save us all a lot of time by admitting—”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” Rick said, voice rising in volume. His head was aching. He was sore and hoarse from sitting in the plastic seat for hours, repeating the same things over and over, and the musty air was making the wine and wedding food turn sour in his gut, “not that ex-employee and not Harry Gerrard-Hanson. I didn’t even know them.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that.” Nayar’s eyes darkened behind her glasses. “Two violent stabbings, one in your flat, one at an event you were attending. Both with your knives. Both men who’d stood in your way.”

  “Stood…what?” He tried to sound angry but could only summon weary desperation.

  “Edgar Ropeman had that job you wanted—”

  “He resigned. And that was before I even knew about the job—”

  “He was suing S&G for wrongful termination.”

  “Again, nothing to do with me.”

  “Everything to do with Cecily Swanson, however.”

  “What?”

  “Several witnesses have reported the intimacy of the relationship you share with Miss Swanson…now Mrs Gerard-Hanson.”

  A chill spread through Rick’s chest. “They’re wrong.”

  “There are several witnesses,” Nayar said, leafing through her papers, “both from your office and from the wedding. In fact, several people heard the bride tell you that she would ‘find you later’—on her own wedding day.”

  Rick rubbed his aching temples. “I don’t know what you’re implying—”

  “I’m implying that you’re having an affair with Cecily Swanson. She arranged for you to get the job at Swanson and Gerrard so you could be together. When Ropeman started making noise, you killed him to protect what you had—”

  “No,” Rick said, but she carried on like he hadn’t spoken.

  “And now that the merger is signed and sealed and Cecily Swanson is the beneficiary of her husband’s will and he’s nicely out of the way, you two have everything.”

  “This is bullshit,” Rick said, half-standing. “You’ve made all this up. None of this is true.”

  “No?”

  “Jesus Christ, of course not,” Rick grated, pained to hear his northeast accent getting stronger.

  Nayar sighed. “We now know a lot about you, Rick. Forgive me for saying this, but you’re not an obvious choice for that position at Swanson and Gerrard.”

  “Just because I wasn’t fucking born with a silver spoon up my arse doesn’t mean I’m not a great analyst.”

  “True,” Nayar, unfazed, said, tapping her papers back together. “By all accounts you did a great job brokering that merger—better than many others with more experience and education would have done.” Rick started to protest, and she held up her hand. “But that doesn’t negate the fact that you should never have even gotten the chance to do so. I’ve dealt with enough financiers in my time to know it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And the only person you knew was Cecily Swanson.”

 
“But I didn’t know her,” he said, slumping back into his seat. “Not before the interview.”

  “We have eyewitness reports of a meeting at your sister’s cafe just before New Year’s—”

  “That was the first time I’d ever met her—”

  “Your phone records say different.”

  Rick blinked. “What?”

  She laid a piece of paper listing phone numbers, times and dates on the table. “You were talking and texting for weeks before the meeting at Koffee and Kicks.”

  Rick stared at the numbers until they came into focus. “This can’t be right. This…this isn’t real.”

  “Just like the wine merchant’s witness statement that you weren’t in her shop that night?”

  Rick couldn’t find an answer.

  Nayar withdrew the paper again. “You need to start telling us what really happened, Rick,” she said. “If Cecily Swanson put you up to this, that’s incitement. It means it wasn’t all your fault. If you testify against her, we can look at a deal—”

  “I didn’t do any of this,” Rick said, yet again. “And Cecily didn’t either. She screamed when she saw the body. She was the one who called the police.”

  “And the knife?”

  “You know one was taken from my flat. You searched the place yourself and couldn’t find it. The killer took it away with them. They obviously planned all this.”

  “Or you hid it somewhere else until the time was right,” Walsh drawled.

  “I can’t… I don’t…” His words dried up. Both the police officers were staring at him. He was both hot and cold. He was so tired. He closed his eyes. “I did not kill anyone, and I’m not having an affair with Cecily. I’m…” He swallowed his words and blinked his eyes open. They were still watching him closely. “I’m gay.”

  Nayar and Walsh exchanged glances.

  “It’s true.” His voice was shaking. “I’m seeing a guy. I have a deactivated profile on Grindr. I was… I was nice to Cecily because she gave me a chance. Maybe I led her on a bit…but nothing more.”