Perfect Sins

by Jo Bannister

  Hazel stared at him, wondering—not for the first time—how an intelligent man could be so dense. “She saw a title and a historic house. He saw enough money to help him keep them together.”

  Ash couldn’t help feeling a little shocked. And yet, that was the reality—that something like Byrfield was always going to need more income than it was capable of generating. An heiress every few generations was probably as vital to its survival as the phone number of a good woodworm operative. He shrugged helplessly. “I suppose, if they were both satisfied with the arrangement…”

  “They both did what was required of them, anyway. They preserved Byrfield, and they produced an heir. Eventually.”

  “What was he like?” asked Ash. “Pete’s dad. The … somethingth earl?”

  “Twenty-seventh,” said Hazel with a smile. “Pete’s the twenty-eighth. He was very like Pete. Not to look at—he was short and tubby—but in personality. He was a very kind man. He put a value on people, and if he could help them, he did. Like David Sperrin. The old earl helped him get to university. He was a good man, and a good earl. No one around here has a bad word to say about him.”

  Ash glanced back, but they’d walked far enough from the house not to be overheard. “But people aren’t as fond of the countess?”

  “Let’s just say she never courted popularity,” said Hazel. “People whose families had farmed the estate for generations objected to the way she behaved as if she owned the place.” She caught his expression and laughed. “Yes, I know—technically speaking, she did. But her father was a supermarket magnate, and there’s nothing that the ancient poor like less than the new rich. So the tenant farmers and their laborers gathered in the saloon bar of the Spotted Pig in Burford to scowl into their beer and ask one another, ‘Whom do her think she is? Her’s nobbut a grocer’s daughter.’”

  Ash laughed out loud. “Funnily enough, Patience”—Hazel’s curious eyebrow warned him just in time that he’d strayed onto shaky ground, and he edited as he went along—“looked as if she was thinking much the same.”

  * * *

  The Spotted Pig in Burford village was the center of social life on and around the estate. The oak bar, so blackened by generations of cigarette smoke that it was probably carcinogenic in its own right, rumbled with the conversation of the locals, punctuated by the click of snooker balls in the adjoining room and the thud and occasional “Ow!” of a darts match. The landlord was also a surprisingly good cook, and the six-table restaurant did a thriving trade even midweek. On a Saturday night, Ash was lucky to get a cancellation.

  When he invited Hazel and her father out for supper, he wasn’t sure they’d want to go. It hadn’t been the sort of day to warrant celebrating. But if he and Hazel spent the evening at Byrfield, they’d go on doing what they’d been doing all day—staring at the same few faces, struggling to make conversation, trying not to dwell on what they’d found and succeeding hardly if at all.

  Rather to Ash’s surprise, Hazel thought the Spotted Pig an excellent idea. “It’ll cheer us up.”

  “Should I ask Pete and David?”

  She shook her head decisively. “They can cheer each other up.”

  Alfred Best wasn’t entirely sure what to make of his daughter’s friendship with this man. She told him, and he believed she believed it was true, that friendship was all it was. That Ash was not only still legally married but also still in love with his wife, and that wouldn’t change if they found proof tomorrow that she’d been dead for four years. And he didn’t blame Ash for the difficulties Hazel had found herself in, or even the dangers she’d faced, though he knew she would have met with none of it if she’d never met Ash. He understood that Ash was a victim of events as much as his daughter was.

  None of which would have got in the way of a thorough dislike if Gabriel Ash had been the sort of man you could dislike. Fred Best was ready to dislike him. He thought Hazel would have been better off if they’d never met, if she’d been on the day shift the night Ash was mugged in the park, if someone else had stumbled on the mechanism by which crime in Norbold was kept at record-breaking lows. But Best was also a realist. That wasn’t what had happened. Given the circumstances, Hazel had done what she had to, done what honor demanded, and done it with courage; and actually, so had Ash. Perhaps there was nothing in their friendship to regret.

  So he accepted Ash’s invitation as he had accepted the man into his home, with good grace for the sake of his daughter.

  Poking around in her old wardrobe, Hazel had managed to find a dress that still fit—she was both slimmer and more muscular than in her teaching days—which together with a locket from her mother’s jewelry box made acceptable eating-out attire. Ash put his suit on and looked as if he was making an effort, even though it only fit where it touched. Fred Best brought out his regimental tie. Thus caparisoned, and leaving Patience to guard the gate lodge from the comfort of the sofa, they walked the half mile into Burford.

  There wasn’t a cook among them, but they were all capable of appreciating good cooking, and good cooking was what they got—good food well prepared and plenty of it. Away from Byrfield, Ash felt himself relaxing. “What a day.”

  By now Fred Best knew as much about the discovery as those who’d been at the lake. In fact, he may have known more. “How did young Davy take it?”

  Hazel frowned. “David Sperrin? About how you’d expect—as if it was a bit of a lark. As if it was a scientific conundrum he’d come across, not somebody’s ten-year-old son.”

  Ash was watching the older man carefully. “Mr. Best—why Sperrin? Why do you ask about him rather than Byrfield?”

  Best hesitated. His gaze traveled between them, settling on Hazel. “Surely you know? You must.”

  “Know what?”

  And when he did the math, there was no reason she should know. It had happened not only before the Bests came to Byrfield but before Hazel was born. It was common knowledge in the village, but perhaps not among the children, and she hadn’t been much more than a child when she left here. “About Davy’s brother. Diana Sperrin’s elder son.”

  Hazel was staring at him as if she thought he was making it up. “What elder son? There were only ever the two of them—Diana and David. After he left for Reading, there was only her.”

  “In your time,” agreed Best. “But she had two sons. The older one was taken back to Ireland by his father thirty years ago. At least that’s what everyone thought. What Diana believed.”

  Hazel stared at her father. Ash, too polite to do the same, was making connections in his head. “You think that’s who we found? David Sperrin’s brother?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Fred Best immediately. “But it was the first thing that came into my head when I heard what you’d found, and it seems I’m not the only one. There’s a fair bit of gossip going around the village. People who lived here at the time, before we came to Byrfield, are scratching their memories for what they actually know as distinct from what they’ve been told and what’s always been assumed.

  “And what everyone seems agreed on is that although Diana has always believed that her boy was taken to Ireland by his father, there’s no actual evidence of that. He’d be a man of forty now. You’d think that somewhere in the last twenty-odd years he’d have popped over to see his mother. But if he did, nobody else saw him. And now people are thinking that maybe there’s a good reason for that.”

  “They think…” Hazel heard her voice soaring and started again, more discreetly. “They think Diana’s husband abducted his own son, then killed him and buried him at Byrfield?”

  Best shrugged. “Something like that. Apparently he took the child from Diana’s house in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep. It was assumed that he’d taken him back to Ireland. The police tried to find him, but they didn’t get far. Again, maybe that’s why.”

  “But why would he kill the child? Why take him if he didn’t want him?”

  “Who knows? Maybe something went
wrong. Or maybe it isn’t the Sperrin child at all,” said Fred Best. “I’m just saying, that’s the word around the village.” He looked across the table at Ash. “This is a small community. A lot of the people here—a lot of the people in this pub—were here when it happened. They remember the child being taken. It might have been thirty years ago, but a stolen child is a stolen child. Nobody forgets in a hurry. Half an hour after you opened that grave by the lake, Burford had pretty well decided who was in it.”

  “What happened?” asked Hazel quietly. “Or what’s supposed to have happened?”

  “I only know what I was told,” Best said again. “This was ten years before we came here. But everyone tells you the same thing. The family lived in that same cottage Diana’s in now. Her husband, Saul, was an Irish traveler—sometimes he was around, sometimes he wasn’t. They had two sons, James and David, about five years apart. Diana was the breadwinner—she sold enough paintings to keep them fed and clothed, without much help from her husband. Then one day he came back from his travels, collected the older boy, and vanished again.”

  “And she never got him back?” whispered Hazel, horrified.

  Best shook his head. “No one knew where they’d gone. It was assumed that Saul had gone back to Ireland, and our police asked the Gardaí to watch out for him. But either the Gardaí didn’t look very hard or he hid out among people who kept his secret, or maybe he never went back to Ireland at all. Anyway, he never showed his face in Burford again.”

  “Oh hell.” Hazel puffed her cheeks out. There was a certain schoolgirl element to her repertoire of gestures. Of course, she’d gone straight from studying to teaching to law enforcement. She’d seen things and done things most people wouldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, in a lifetime. But she’d always worked within the kind of structure that limits personal expression, and sometimes hers seemed limited to that of a fourteen-year-old hockey player. “Do you suppose David knows?”

  “If he doesn’t,” said Ash in a low voice, “he will soon. We should warn him what people are saying. Before he hears it on the street.”

  “You don’t think we should leave it to DI Norris?” To Hazel it seemed a matter of professional courtesy.

  Inevitably, Ash saw it from the family’s point of view. “It could be a week before Inspector Norris knows anything more. And it’s not just David—there’s his mother to think of. We shouldn’t let her hear the rumors tomorrow in the grocer’s.”

  A shade reluctantly, Hazel nodded. “All right. Have a word with him when you get back to Byrfield. He can go see his mum tonight, before the gossip reaches her some other way.”

  Best agreed. It was the only humane way to proceed. But, unlike his daughter and her friend, he’d lived in this tiny community for twenty years. He knew how fast the bush telegraph worked. “She may already have heard.”

  “All the more reason David should go and see her.” Ash was paying the bill before the coffee was even poured. “Come on—we should get back.”

  CHAPTER 8

  IT WAS IMMEDIATELY obvious to Ash that what was common gossip in the Spotted Pig came as lightning from a clear sky to David Sperrin. He had not considered, even momentarily, whether the sad little grave he’d opened might have anything to say to him personally rather than as an archaeologist. For long seconds after Ash broached the subject he continued to look careless and sardonic, an expression he used as a kind of shorthand for superiority. Only when Ash failed to respond to this lazy substitute for charm did some understanding of what he was being told start to percolate through into his eyes.

  Predictably, his initial reaction was that he was being lied to. “You’re crazy,” he said flatly. The hooded amusement in his gaze had given way to a dangerous spark.

  Ash had picked a moment when Pete Byrfield was otherwise occupied, updating the estate books at the kitchen table. Even so, across the room the man raised his head just slightly, and Ash thought, Yes—Hazel’s told you about me.

  To Sperrin he said calmly, “Possibly, although my therapist says not. David, I’m not saying this to upset you. I’m saying it because I heard talk in the pub and thought you ought to know. To prepare your mother for what she might hear when she goes out tomorrow.”

  Following as fast on understanding as the tender follows a steam train came anger. Sperrin’s voice had a hard, rough edge. “What did you hear? That my dad abandoned us and took my brother back to Ireland? So every family is not a happy family—so what? It’s all a very long time ago.”

  “That grave has been there a very long time,” murmured Ash. “And people have been doing their sums, and thinking back, and maybe they’ve put two and two together and come up with seven, but being wrong won’t stop it from being hurtful if the first your mother hears of this is a nosy neighbor pressing her for information. Don’t you think you should have a word with her? Tonight?”

  At least Sperrin glanced at his watch. “It’s gone eleven. She’ll be asleep.”

  “You could wake her.”

  “I could get my ears boxed!”

  “She needs to know.”

  Sperrin was looking at him as if he didn’t know quite what to make of Ash. As if he’d made a judgment when they first met but now Ash had jumped out of his pigeonhole and was roaming around unrestrained and Sperrin wasn’t sure what he was going to do or where he was going to settle. This was something Ash was familiar with. Disconcerting people. Alarming them, even. He didn’t do it deliberately. He didn’t usually know he was doing it until he noticed that characteristic expression in their eyes, wide and still and slightly glazed.

  It was in Sperrin’s eyes now, and David Sperrin wasn’t a man who was easily alarmed. He cleared his throat, as if he might thereby clear his mind, too, and made one last attempt at laying the subject to rest. “That wasn’t my brother’s body we found.”

  “You hear from him?”

  “My mother does. He’s fine. He lives in Ireland.”

  “Good,” said Ash, and meant it. He felt a sense of relief that, even if it was still somebody’s child who’d been moldering beside the lake for thirty years, at least it was no one whose name was known, who was remembered around here. It was no less sad, but it was less personal. “Then it’s just a question of warning your mother about the talk in the village.”

  David Sperrin was not a big man. But you didn’t notice until he tried to look bigger. “When I see her, I’ll tell her about your … concern.” He invested the word with a wealth of scorn.

  Ash nodded. He said nothing more, because he knew that if he told Sperrin to go immediately, he would refuse and nothing would persuade him then. But he was pleased to note that when Pete Byrfield made a last batch of coffee on the kitchen range, there were three mugs but only two of them to drink it.

  * * *

  The cottage where David Sperrin had grown up was at the Byrfield end of a terrace of farm laborers’ dwellings built by the estate in the mid-nineteenth century. They were all the same when they were built—kitchen and parlor downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs, outhouse in the backyard—but in the twentieth century they had been modernized and extended in as many different configurations as there were cottages, which was six. All now had internal plumbing and even central heating. One had a whole extra floor of bedrooms—a head stockman in the 1930s had bred almost as prolifically as his best bull—while another had acquired a tiny but beautifully designed conservatory, and Diana Sperrin’s had her studio tacked on the side.

  No lights were burning in the studio as he turned in at the gate and under the shelter of the little wooden porch. Diana’s bedroom was at the back of the house. It was possible she was still awake, reading or sketching in the big oak bed he’d been born in. He gave the wrought-iron knocker a single sharp rap and called through the letter box.

  “Mum—it’s David. Come down and let me in.”

  He didn’t have a key anymore. She’d made an excuse to get it back after he left home and never provided him with another.

>   After a few moments he heard movement inside. The narrow stairs creaked whenever someone went up or down. An irritable voice demanded, “Whatever do you want at this time of night?”

  “I need to talk to you. Let me in.”

  For a long moment he thought she was going to refuse, that he was going to be left on her doorstep and have to return to Byrfield, his mission unaccomplished. Finally he was saved that humiliation by the sound of the iron key turning in the lock.

  Diana Sperrin stood in the doorway, a coat over her nightclothes, her strong, intelligent face set in angry lines and framed by a froth of gray hair. “Good grief, David! Couldn’t you stagger another mile and wake Pete Byrfield?”

  “I’ve just come from there,” he said, hanging on to his patience in a way he did for no one else, “and I’m not drunk. Something’s happened that I need to tell you about.”

  “And it won’t wait till morning?” She still hadn’t let him in, barring the door with her strong, thick body.

  “No, it won’t.” He advanced into the open doorway until, grudgingly, she stood back to admit him.

  “I suppose you want coffee.”

  It was such a small thing, and if she’d been asleep, she could be forgiven for resenting the disturbance. But she could just have put the kettle on without making him feel it was too much trouble. They didn’t talk much these days, and one reason was this: that she never failed to remind him how it had felt growing up with a mother who didn’t like him.

  He answered in kind. “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  In fact, she could hardly have been asleep—the water in the kettle was still hot, and it boiled again in seconds. She filled a mug for David but not for herself, stood over him, waiting with ill-disguised impatience. “Well? What is it that’s so urgent?”

  Walking over here, he’d wondered how to broach the subject. In the event it proved easier than he’d imagined: already irritated with her, he no longer felt much of an urge to spare her feelings. “I was digging up at Byrfield this morning. I found a body. A child’s body. There’s talk in the village that it might be Jamie.”