China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  ‘All right,’ nodded Gorman. Breaking bad news wasn’t anyone’s favourite job. ‘See if they know what he was doing here. You’re sure he wasn’t looking for you?’

  ‘I can’t imagine why he would be.’

  ‘Well, he must have had some reason to come to Norbold. You can get beaten up quite satisfactorily without leaving Cambridgeshire.’

  ‘We’ll ask him when he wakes up.’

  ‘Hm.’ DCI Gorman was looking at the photographs again. He didn’t say, If he wakes up. But Hazel heard it just the same.

  TWO

  The 28th Earl of Byrfield had no idea what his brother was doing in Norbold. He hadn’t seen him for several days; in fact, he hadn’t seen much of him for some weeks. He understood he’d been working on a dig in Lincolnshire, or possibly Leicestershire. Roman – or was it Norman …? They didn’t have a great deal in common – not in interests, not in appearance, not even in the single parent the wider community believed they shared. As David Sperrin was the result of the 27th earl’s wanderlust, so Peregrine Byrfield was the product of an indiscretion by the countess.

  What they did share, with one another and their two sisters, was a kind of wry, amused, clannish affection, a tolerance of one another’s weaknesses and an appreciation of one another’s strengths. It didn’t strike Hazel as significant that Pete Byrfield – he resolutely refused to answer to his given name – was so vague about his brother’s recent activities. Possibly David hadn’t told him; possibly Pete had been reading Farmers Weekly when he did.

  ‘How bad is he, Hazel? Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly, Pete, we don’t know. He has a couple of broken bones, but nothing that won’t mend over the next few weeks. The only real concern is the concussion. He’s been out cold for several hours now – we’re not sure how long – and he’s not ready to surface yet. Until he does, until the doctors can talk to him and see how he responds, there’s always the chance that he’s sustained some lasting damage. Probably not – I don’t want to alarm you, Pete, I just want to put you in the picture. So far as I understand it, there’s no reason to get seriously worried unless a few hours turn into two or three days. Even after that, lots of people suddenly sit up and ask for a cup of tea, and go on with their lives as if nothing had happened. But I’ll be glad when David’s back to being his old snide unlovable self again.’

  ‘And you don’t know who attacked him? Or why?’

  ‘We’re working on it. I’m working on it – I’m trawling CCTV footage, looking for some sort of clue. Siding Street, where he was found, isn’t much more than a back alley, there are no cameras there, but there’s a pub round the corner: we’ve got the computer geek trying to enhance their footage. Brighten the image, cut out some of the shadows, improve the contrast, that kind of thing. It may tell us something. If we can identify David, we’ll know which direction he was coming from. We’ll know if he was alone, and if anyone was following him.’

  ‘It won’t tell you why someone beat the crap out of him.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Hazel. ‘But David will. Hold onto that thought, Pete. David will tell us what happened.’

  ‘I’ll come over,’ decided Byrfield. ‘I can be there in an hour forty-five.’

  ‘Not legally you can’t,’ said Detective Constable Best sternly. ‘Anyway, there’s no rush. If he wakes up before you get here, that’s a good thing. Feed your cows or whatever it is you do at this time on a Tuesday morning, have a cup of coffee and then come. If there’s any change in the meantime, I’ll let you know.’

  Leaving the CCTV footage with Melvin the geek, she made the short trip from Meadowvale to check that she hadn’t overlooked other, potentially more helpful cameras positioned to give a better view up Siding Street. But there were none. It wasn’t that sort of street. There were no banks, no building societies, no department stores or hotels, only some lock-up garages at one end and a huddle of two-up, two-down terraced houses at the other. There had once been more, but first they’d fallen vacant and then they’d fallen down. Beyond the high brick wall on the other side of the street there were in fact cameras, but they were turned the other way, monitoring activity in the railway yard.

  Finishing in Siding Street, disappointed but not surprised to have learnt nothing new, Hazel took the scenic route back to Meadowvale via Rambles With Books. It was a busy morning in Ash’s second-hand bookshop: he had two customers at the same time. One was Miss Hornblower, who spent almost as much time there as the proprietor did; the other was a young man with a nose stud. Ash was serving up coffee and biscuits. When he saw Hazel parking outside, he went back into the little kitchen for another mug.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, handing it to her steaming, ‘you don’t have to keep checking on me. Scrapping my car hasn’t left me suicidal.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Hazel.

  Her tone stopped him in his tracks. A brief study of her face and he steered her into a quiet corner – the whole shop was quiet, but the quietest corner – and sat her down. ‘What’s happened?’

  So she told him.

  Ash’s acquaintance with the family was much more recent than Hazel’s, but he had been involved in the discovery of the little grave beside the Byrfield lake and everything that followed from it. He liked Pete Byrfield, which wasn’t difficult, and also rather liked David Sperrin, which was.

  ‘And how is he now?’ he asked after Hazel had finished.

  She gave a helpless shrug. ‘No one’s willing to commit themselves. He could wake up in time for lunch, or next week, or next month, or never. He could wake up with nothing worse than a headache, or with alphabet soup for a brain. No one knows.’

  ‘Laura Fry’ – Ash’s therapist – ‘told me once that no brain injury is so trivial that it should be dismissed or so serious it should be despaired of. Most people who suffer concussion make a perfectly good recovery. It’s certainly too early to start assuming the worst.’

  Ash had a way of sounding like an expert even on subjects he knew very little about. Sometimes that irritated Hazel; today it was a comfort. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’

  ‘Did you know he was coming to Norbold?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. What possible reason could David have for coming here? Our Roman villa, our Iron Age hill forts, our mediaeval cathedral?’

  Ash looked at her doubtfully. ‘We don’t have any of those things.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Ash pondered how to put this. ‘So the only thing in Norbold which might be on David’s radar is you.’

  ‘If he thought really hard, he might remember what town I live in. He could probably get my address, either from Pete or from my dad. But why would he want to? And if he did want to see me, why come here without a word of warning? He’d phone first. That’s the normal thing to do.’

  ‘This is David we’re talking about,’ murmured Ash.

  She ignored that. ‘Even if he did decide to come on spec, what the hell happened to him between turning off the motorway and ending up in ICU? Dave Gorman isn’t buying it as a mugging. He thinks whoever did that much damage didn’t just want his valuables, he wanted to hurt him. But why? What did David ever do to earn that much enmity?’

  ‘This is still David Sperrin we’re talking about, right?’ murmured Ash.

  Hazel scowled at him. ‘I know what you’re saying: he’s never set out to win popularity contests. I know he’s rude, and arrogant, and clever enough to get right under people’s skin and too stupid to stop himself. I know all that. But Gabriel, someone damn near beat him to death. Why? And why here?’

  But Ash couldn’t even make a guess.

  ‘Listen, I’d better get back to Meadowvale,’ said Hazel. ‘Pete’s on his way, I’ll go back to the hospital with him. If he wants to stay over until we know what’s happening, he can have Saturday’s room.’ Hazel would always think of the tiny back bedroom at her house in Railway Street as Saturday’s room, although the waif who once occupied it was now a young man with a
good job and his own flat in London.

  ‘If there’s anything I can do, you will let me know?’ said Ash.

  ‘Right now, I’m not sure there’s much more any of us can do.’

  The 28th Earl of Byrfield came armed with a plastic shopping bag advertising his local supermarket. ‘I brought him some clothes. I didn’t know what he’d need.’

  ‘Everything,’ said Hazel, glancing at the contents with approval. ‘His own were’ – how to put this tactfully? – ‘pretty well trashed, and anyway we’ve bagged them as evidence. When he comes round, he’ll probably be in bed for another day or two, but then he’ll be wanting to get up and dressed.’

  Pete Byrfield looked nothing like David Sperrin, a fact that caused no surprise among casual acquaintances who didn’t know they were supposed to be half-brothers, or really close friends who knew that actually they weren’t. He was tall and narrow, with a long mild face and fair hair, already growing somewhat sparse. Their personalities were diametrically different too. Despite the ermine and strawberry leaves, Pete was essentially a farmer, a gentle, methodical man. David, inheriting nothing except his father’s stature and his mother’s powerful will, had proved ambitious, quick-witted and determined, and had quickly developed a scientist’s disdain for the less intellectually gifted.

  ‘He will be all right, won’t he?’ said Byrfield unhappily as the lift bore them upwards; and Hazel provided the reassurance he sought even though she had no more information now than Pete had.

  ‘I’m sure he will. Concussion always has to be taken seriously, but most people make a complete recovery. Gabriel said so.’ She was aware as she said it that Ash was no more a doctor than she was. He’d been an insurance investigator, a security analyst and a second-hand bookseller, but he’d never been a brain surgeon and his knowledge of head injuries was derived from what he’d read and what he’d been told. Only his knowledge of mental illness was rooted in personal experience.

  But Byrfield took comfort from his assessment just the same.

  The next thing he said was what they were all wondering. ‘What was he doing here, Hazel? Had he been in touch with you?’

  Hazel shook her head. ‘The last time I saw David was at your wedding, and I haven’t talked to him since. There’s been no reason to. And I wouldn’t have thought he could find Norbold on a map.’

  They stood looking down at the still form in the hospital bed, white-faced, his left arm in plaster, the palette of bruises growing increasingly lurid. There was still no sign of returning consciousness that Hazel could see, although one of the ICU nurses, passing by, gave her a smile and said, ‘I think he’s looking a little brighter.’

  ‘And who the hell did this to him?’ demanded Byrfield thickly. ‘And why?’

  ‘We don’t know that either,’ admitted Hazel. ‘Pete, we are trying to make sense of it, but …’ She shook her head, bewildered. ‘And we still haven’t found his car. We are looking for the right one, aren’t we? He hasn’t swapped it for a family hatchback?’

  ‘Good God, no. He’ll keep that Land Rover until the scrap-metal police prise the keys from his cold dead hand …’ Realising what he’d said, Byrfield fell abruptly silent.

  Kindly, Hazel diverted his thoughts. ‘Gabriel’s looking for a new car. That old Volvo of his mother’s has wheezed its last. I thought he was going to ask me to arrange a funeral for it.’

  Byrfield managed a dutiful smile. But it didn’t last. ‘What if he doesn’t recover?’ he wondered in a low voice. ‘What if he’s never the same again?’

  She knew what he was asking. ‘Then we’ll look after him,’ she said quietly. ‘We’ll find out what he needs, and we’ll look after him. But it won’t come to that. He will recover. It may take a little time, but time is on his side. If you believe nothing else, believe that.’

  She offered him the back bedroom at Railway Street, but Byrfield declined. ‘I have to get back. As luck would have it, we’re TB testing tomorrow – it’s an all-hands-on-deck job. I’ll come back as soon as we’re through. Will you call me tonight, let me know how he’s doing?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ promised Hazel. ‘There’ll be better news by tomorrow, I’m sure of it.’

  He ran a hand distractedly through his pale hair. ‘I feel like I’m abandoning him.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’m here. Gabriel will look in on him, too. There’s nothing you could do that we can’t. And no way can you leave Tracy to TB test three hundred cows on her own.’

  ‘Three hundred and twenty-two,’ murmured Byrfield with a hint of pride. ‘I know, you’re right. I just … I hate leaving him like this.’

  ‘Try not to worry too much,’ said Hazel.

  She was with Gorman when the call came in.

  The DCI had wanted to know why, eight hours after Sperrin was found, his car was still missing. ‘It’s not as if it would be hard to spot,’ he growled. ‘It’s a Land Rover. It’s green with one orange door. It’s not going to be hiding in plain sight, is it?’

  Hazel wasn’t sure why he was blaming her for the shortcomings of the whole of Meadowvale Police Station, and she was fairly sure that if she challenged him he wouldn’t know either. She took it philosophically. If he needed someone to shout at, that was the least she owed him.

  But it did make her think. ‘Maybe we can’t find it because it isn’t here. Maybe that’s not how he got to Norbold.’ Her fair brows knitted in a pensive frown. ‘Maybe this isn’t where he was attacked.’

  Gorman stared at her. ‘You mean, he couldn’t drive because of his broken wrist, so he got on a train to come and tell you all about it?’

  When he put it like that … ‘It doesn’t sound very likely, does it?’ she admitted. ‘But then, whatever happened to him was pretty unlikely, almost by definition.’

  ‘Did you track down who he was working for? If we can’t figure out what he’s doing here, can we at least find out where he was supposed to be instead?’

  Hazel consulted her notes. ‘He was working as a consultant – a sort of Have Trowel, Will Travel arrangement – for the Anglia Archaeology Trust. The last job they had for him was in the Leicester area. But they wrapped that up ten days ago, and David said he was taking a break before he started on anything else. No one at Anglia knows if he was planning a holiday, or had a paper to write or what.’

  ‘He writes for a newspaper?’

  ‘No, a scientific paper. It’s what scientists do – they set out their findings in a paper that’ll be read by an average of one and a half other people. It’s really just a way of putting information into the public domain. I doubt if it’s why someone set about him with a baseball bat.’

  ‘It wasn’t a baseball bat,’ said Gorman, ‘it was a monkey wrench. Some kind of tool, anyway. There was machine oil on his clothes.’

  It wasn’t helpful. ‘If he’d come to blows with another archaeologist over carbon-dating methodology,’ said Hazel, ‘it would have been mud.’

  That was when the call from the hospital came in. DCI Gorman gestured Hazel to stay. Her stomach knotted briefly, but she quickly gathered it was good news rather than bad.

  Gorman put the phone down. ‘They say he’s showing signs of waking up. They say it’ll be a while before he can answer questions, but if we want to send someone to sit with him he might say something halfway sensible, and it wouldn’t do any harm.’

  ‘Can I go? It’ll be easier for him, waking up to a familiar face. And I’d like to be able to tell his brother I was with him.’

  ‘Yes, all right.’ Gorman had never considered sending anyone else. ‘Don’t pester him. But – you know – if he is making any kind of sense, anything he can tell us would be useful. Starting with where that bloody Land Rover is!’

  THREE

  She called at the florist’s in Windham Lane on her way, not because she thought David Sperrin would appreciate the gesture but because it would make his cubicle look more cheerful – more hopeful – when his brother made the long journe
y back from Cambridgeshire the next day.

  Mrs Kiang tried to sell her roses. ‘Beautiful roses – Banksiana roses, very fine – all the way from China. Beautiful lady must have beautiful China roses. Very good price.’

  But the flowers were for a friend, not a lover, and beautiful China roses would not have been appropriate. Hazel picked out some carnations. ‘Mrs Kiang, can I ask you something?’

  The little florist put her hands together and bowed acceptance.

  ‘Weren’t you born in England? And isn’t your husband’s name William King?’

  From under the greying fringe, the black eyes shot her an astute glance. ‘So?’

  ‘So why the Widow Twanky act?’

  Mrs Kiang straightened up abruptly. ‘It sells flowers,’ she said shortly, in an accent indistinguishable from any other on the streets of Norbold that afternoon. ‘Now was there something else, or will you bugger off before you frighten the paying customers?’

  Trying not to smile, Hazel held up the carnations. ‘I paid, Mrs Kiang.’

  ‘Not enough,’ said Mrs Kiang darkly.

  They’d moved Sperrin from ICU to an observation ward. One of the nurses brought a vase for the flowers. ‘Don’t be concerned if he seems disorientated. It’s to be expected. Talk quietly to him, and when he’s ready he’ll start talking back.’

  He wasn’t ready yet. His eyes weren’t open except for the thinnest of white lines under each bruised lid. But his fingers were moving on the bedclothes, plucking vaguely at the fold where the sheet was turned back, and his broken lips were twitching, and a sound that was half a murmur and half a grunt came intermittently down his nose. Wherever he’d been to, he was on his way back. At least, someone was.

  Hazel drew water from a handy tap and stood the carnations in the vase. She had no talent for flower arranging, and she didn’t think David Sperrin would care if she’d brought him flowers or not. Having satisfied her modest expectations, she hooked a chair towards her with her foot and sat down beside him.