Perfect Sins

by Jo Bannister

  She shook her head apologetically. “He’ll need to collect it himself. The solicitors need him to sign for it. You don’t know how I could get hold of him?”

  “Saul Sperrin,” Swanleigh said again, thoughtfully. “Where was it I saw him last, now? Ireland, I think.”

  Hazel nodded. “His people were from Ireland.”

  “Yes, that’d be right.”

  “Recently?”

  “Oh, not very long at all. I’m sure we can get word to him. Who do you say he should call?”

  “Strictly speaking, the solicitors.” She gave the name of a firm in Norbold, which would, she felt sure, forgive her the liberty. “But ideally I’d have liked to get together with him, arrange for him to pick the thing up. I could leave you my number.” She scribbled it on a piece of paper.

  Swanleigh folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. “I’ll have him get back to you. Soon as I can get him word.”

  “Thanks,” said Hazel. “Have a good fair.”

  “Always!” said Swanleigh, beaming.

  * * *

  “How do you do that?” whispered Ash, still half holding his breath as Hazel drove unhurriedly away.

  “Do what?” she asked innocently. “Lie?”

  Ash shook his head. “I know about lying. I’ve met a lot of liars. It wasn’t the lie that swung it. It was the way you…” He couldn’t find the right words.

  “What?” asked Hazel. She was genuinely interested. She welcomed a compliment as well as the next person, but she was still learning her trade, and she valued the assessment of someone who’d been in the security business a lot longer than she had.

  “You belong,” said Ash carefully. “You generate an aura of belonging. People trust you because they think you’re one of them. Even when you’re nothing like them, somehow you talk to them for half a minute and they file you as us rather than them. You can’t teach technique like that. It’s more than a skill—it’s a kind of magic.”

  Hazel felt herself blushing, all the more because she knew it was not flattery, but an honest opinion. He was always honest. She wriggled her shoulders self-deprecatingly. “I just find it easy to get on with people. My mother was the same—she couldn’t stand in a bus queue without getting all the information on everybody’s children. Nobody thought she was nosy. They just recognized that she was interested in them, and on the whole people like that. Most people would rather be friendly than aggressive. Give them a chance and most people will be helpful rather than obstructive.”

  That hadn’t been Ash’s experience of the world. He envied her that it had been hers. “You must miss her,” he said quietly. “Your mother.”

  “Yes, of course,” she replied frankly. “For a long time I missed her every day. Now, I suppose I think about her less but get more pleasure from it when I do. I’ve reached the point where it’s the good things I remember rather than the terrible sadness of losing her.”

  “You were very young.”

  Hazel nodded. “Sixteen isn’t a child anymore, but it’s a time when you’ve nowhere near as much confidence as you want people to think you have, when you can really use someone in your corner who knows you well enough to understand that. My dad was brilliant—always was, still is. But it was different. I missed her. And I missed having someone to be soft and silly with. To talk about my day, not in terms of objectives achieved but who said what to who and who’s frankly deluded if they think they can wear green. You can’t talk like that with a man. No offense intended, but sometimes you just need another woman.”

  When he said nothing more, Hazel thought he’d lost interest, and she frowned at the dark road ahead, kicking herself for getting too personal, sharing too much. But hell, he’d asked.… Then the gleam of oncoming headlights—another horse box heading for the fair—picked up the glitter of tears on his cheeks, and Hazel felt a surge of remorse beneath her breasts.

  “Oh dear God, Gabriel, I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I’m telling you this stuff? You know.”

  He nodded, and blew his nose, and rubbed away the tears he hoped she hadn’t noticed with the back of his hand. “It’s all right,” he lied. “It’s just … it still hits me sometimes. That when I get home they won’t be there. Do you want to hear something awful? Sometimes I wish I knew that they were dead. If I knew for sure that my family were dead, I think I could do a better job of grieving for them.”

  She let go one side of the wheel long enough to squeeze his hand. “There’s no such thing as doing it better. Or worse. It’s not something we do—it’s something we are. We are in mourning. It’s a process we go through. Everyone has to find their own way, but it’s not something you can get right or wrong. All you can do is come out the other end.”

  It was four years since a woman had held his hand, even briefly, except to restrain him. There was something startling about it, as if he’d forgotten the sensation. It reminded him how he’d felt the first time Patience licked his hand—how surprised, and how comforted.

  Hazel saw him smile in the light from the dashboard and, puzzled but reassured, let go of his hand. After another mile she said hesitantly, “I never mean to hurt you. But I know I do sometimes. Forgive me.”

  He looked straight ahead. “There’s nothing to forgive. You—and Patience—brought me out of a dark place. I think, without you, my life would have been pretty well over. Don’t worry about my … heightened sensitivities. I’ll get better at handling them. If it isn’t too much to ask”—a faint grin lifted one corner of his mouth—“just treat me as normal.”

  Hazel grinned, too. “The moment I work out what that is, I will.”

  But normal was busy with other people that night. Another mile and she felt the atmosphere in the car change as Ash stiffened, adjusted the wing mirror, watched it steadily. Without turning in his seat, he said, “We’re being followed.”

  Hazel was aware of the car behind them. It had been sitting a hundred meters back for a few minutes now. She’d thought nothing of it. “What makes you think so?”

  “It’s gone midnight on a remote country road. Everyone else is heading for the fair.”

  “Except us,” she said reasonably.

  “My point exactly.”

  She flashed him a quick sideways look. “Sperrin?”

  “Maybe.”

  She began checking the road ahead for somewhere to pull in. “We should stop.”

  Ash’s hand caught hers as she reached for the indicator. “No. We shouldn’t.”

  She frowned. “But this is what we came for. To find Saul Sperrin. Well, he’s taken the bait.”

  “He doesn’t want to talk to us.”

  Hazel didn’t understand. “How do you know?”

  “If he wanted to talk to us,” said Ash, still watching the mirror, “he’d be on your bumper, flashing his headlights, not cruising far enough back that we mightn’t notice him. He doesn’t want to talk to us. He wants to see where we go.”

  “There’s a difference?” But of course there was, and she saw it, too, just a little more slowly. “You mean, he might have something in mind other than conversation. But why? If he believed what I told Swanleigh, he thinks he’s getting a horse. If he didn’t believe it, or didn’t care, why follow us at all?”

  “Because he knows something that Swanleigh didn’t. That thirty years ago he killed a child. For years and years he must have believed he’d got away with it. But he never forgot that if the police ever found Jamie and then found him, he was going down for murder. A man would be infinitely cautious in a situation like that. Anything strange or unexpected, anything that didn’t quite add up, that’s the first thing he’d think of. He wants to see where we’re going before he commits himself.”

  By now Hazel’s thinking was keeping pace with Ash’s. “So we’d better not head for Byrfield. That’s bound to set the alarm bells ringing. And I told Swanleigh I had this horse at my place, so it needs to be a stable or a farm or something. If we head for the nearest town with a poli
ce station, he’ll be gone.”

  “Call Norris,” Ash advised. “Tell him what’s happening—that Sperrin’s following us and we need to know where to take him so the police can have a welcoming committee waiting.”

  There they hit a problem. Hazel had DI Norris’s number on her phone. But Hazel was driving, and Ash still hadn’t mastered his own phone, which was of the simple, big-button variety designed for senile grannies. The chances of him negotiating his way through Hazel’s bells-and-whistles model was slightly lower than Patience winning Crufts. But Hazel had seen the consequences too often to use the phone while she was driving.

  “Okay,” she said. “You drive and I’ll call Norris. It’ll be interesting to see what Sperrin does when I pull over.”

  It took another minute to find a suitable spot. But then the car behind did the only thing it could without confirming their suspicions: It kept traveling, overtook them while they were switching places in a gateway, and drove on steadily until its lights disappeared around the next bend.

  “He won’t go far,” predicted Ash. “He’ll be waiting up the next farm lane, with his lights off. Give him five minutes and he’ll be on our tail again.”

  Ash still owned a car. It was locked in the garage behind his mother’s house in Norbold. He could have counted on his fingers the number of times he’d driven it since returning to the town where he was born. But he’d been a good driver once, and even in the dark he quickly familiarized himself with Hazel’s hatchback. Cars differ one from another less than phones do.

  Norris had given her his mobile number, so it was answered not by a police radio-room operator but by a tired, grumpy, and slightly disorientated detective inspector who’d finally gone to bed half an hour before and had just managed to get off to sleep. “What?” he demanded angrily.

  Hazel told him twice who she was, and gave him time to absorb the information. She heard his responses become more focused as his brain switched into work mode. Then she told him where she was and what she’d done. “I think it must be Sperrin following us. I can’t think who else it would be. Can you suggest somewhere we can meet you—well, not you,” she added hurriedly, “but a squad car—enough bodies to sit on him if he tries to run?”

  Norris didn’t have what he needed in front of him—a map, a record of where the area cars were tonight. “Give me five minutes and I’ll call you back. Head north when you get a chance—he won’t follow you to Byrfield for a whole herd of horses. I’ll call you back with a sat-nav reference.” Then he was gone, without a word of farewell, much less thanks.

  “You’re welcome, sir,” Hazel said pointedly to the dead phone.

  “Shall I keep driving?” asked Ash.

  “Yes. He’s calling me back. Take your time, though. The longer he has to get ready, the better.”

  Ash nodded. He found to his surprise that he was rather enjoying himself. He still found Hazel’s lightning-fast, intuition-guided decision-making process a little alarming, but he was learning to trust the answers she came up with. She wasn’t always right, but then the methodical, textbook approach didn’t always work, either. She was right more often than she was wrong. Ash was coming to understand that this was only partly due to good luck. Even when she was thinking quickly she was thinking clearly. And she was guided by a natural goodwill that meant that, though her decisions were occasionally questionable, her motives were always sound and the outcomes often better than could reasonably be expected.

  And it felt good to be doing something again. For four years he hadn’t done much of anything at all. The only movement in his life had come from the winds of chance buffeting him. Now, with Hazel, he felt as if he was achieving something again. Nothing dramatic—he wasn’t trying to persuade himself of that—but here and there he felt to be contributing a little know-how, a little intellectual spadework, that made him feel more alive than he had for years and might ultimately help someone.

  Baby steps, Laura Fry had said. He had to measure his progress in baby steps. Well, yes. For a long time any progress had seemed impossible. Baby steps had seemed the most he might manage. Now he was beginning to feel that one day—not now, maybe not even soon, but one day—he might be capable of walking, of living, of operating like a fully-fledged adult man again. In one way, it was a scary prospect. In another, it couldn’t come too soon.

  He said, “You know, when this is over—”

  The flash of lights killed the sentence in his mouth. Not from behind—from the side. Sperrin had waited up a farm lane for them, and now he was coming at them hard and fast. Not following at a distance, shadowing them discreetly, hoping to remain unnoticed until he knew more about them. They heard the roar of his engine as he drove straight at them, a couple of tons of steel accelerating hard from safe conveyance to lethal weapon.

  Momentarily his lights blinded them, filling their car. Ash swerved desperately—he might have been out of practice, but the instinct for self-preservation is the last one that you lose—then the other car’s grille hit them square in the side and kept coming, the engine note climbing, their own tires squealing a manic protest as sheer momentum forced them sideways across the road. Getting no response from the wheel, Ash just had time to reach back and grab Patience’s collar—he’d bought her a seat belt, but she’d refused to wear it—and to see Hazel’s mouth wide in indignant astonishment; then the nearside wheels hit the verge, plowed through a foot of soft earth, and disappeared into a deep ditch, tipping the car on its side.

  CHAPTER 16

  IT’S EASY GETTING INTO and out of cars. Most of us do it every day, and think so little of it that we can chat to our companions, talk on the phone, or finish our homework—or at least hone an excuse for not finishing our homework—at the same time. But that’s because everything is designed to make it easy. The car doors hang perpendicular. The seats are at the right height. Everything is familiar.

  Now try turning everything eighty degrees. The doors are no longer perpendicular, their weight carried by strong columns: One can hardly open before it runs into the ground; the other is almost too heavy to lift. The occupants are lying half suspended, possibly half strangled, in their seat belts, certainly stunned, probably concussed or injured. Even the car’s instruments are now in the wrong places, the hand brake and gearshift where you’re accustomed to finding the floor, the door and window buttons up around your right ear somewhere. Add to that the sudden ingress of cold, muddy water and it’s little wonder that people who survive an impact can find it impossible to escape their vehicle afterward and drown in half a meter of ditch water.

  Given time—to extricate himself from his seat belt, to drag his feet out from among the pedals and brace them against the dashboard, to make sure he wasn’t doing this while standing on Hazel’s face—Ash could probably have opened the driver’s door. He wasn’t, physically, the man he’d been four years ago, but he was well built, and in an emergency he could probably have found the strength necessary. But there was no time. He couldn’t see much except a long view up a ditch, brilliantly lit by his own headlights, but he heard the bang of the other car’s door as someone got out and the beat of urgent footsteps. People who’ve deliberately pushed you into a ditch don’t come to see if you’re all right: they come to finish you off. When a shadow crossed the side window above his head, and a bit of that shadow was long, thin, and straight, Ash wasn’t a bit surprised.

  He must have been afraid. He must have been. But all he was conscious of was anger. Not for himself—he hadn’t that much to live for, hadn’t had for a while—but for Hazel Best, who was twenty-six years old and had people who loved her and should live long enough to be a good police officer, a loving mother, and a doting grandma.

  It made no difference to the weight of the door. It was too great to throw up with one hand and scramble out faster than Saul Sperrin could fire a shotgun. About all Ash could do in the time he had left was fumble for the button to open the windows. In a parade-ground roar quite unlike his norma
l speaking voice, he rapped, “Turn around. Now. Before either of us sees your face.”

  There was a gasp beside him. “Gabriel…”

  Hazel wasn’t worrying about the shotgun. She hadn’t time to. It was taking all her energy to keep her face out of the muddy water pouring through her open window.

  Ash hadn’t thought of that. He threw off his seat belt and screwed his body around, holding her head with one hand, groping under the water for the catch that would free her with the other. But maybe that was wrong; maybe he should concentrate on getting the window shut. The water was still flooding in. If he couldn’t free her soon, she was going to drown in his arms.

  “Help me!” he yelled, his voice running up shrill, so distraught that he failed to see the inherent improbability of the man who’d run them into this ditch, who was pointing a shotgun at them, now abandoning his murderous agenda in order to help Ash save his friend. “You have to help me. She’s going to die!”

  “Yes.” It was all that Sperrin said. The only word Ash heard him speak from beginning to end, shocking in its very conciseness. He paused a fraction in his desperate fumbling, as if his brain couldn’t quite process what it had heard. Then, knowing with absolute certainty that he would get no help from that source, Ash turned his back on the gun, wiped it from his mind, and turned all his attention to Hazel and her plight.

  She’d been stunned by the impact, confused to find herself suddenly hanging sideways, with dark water pouring in around her, but she’d never lost consciousness and she, too, was trying desperately to free herself. Her hands slapping frantically for the seat belt release obstructed Ash’s attempts to thumb it. He needed her to sit still and do nothing for five seconds; that was all, but it was a lot to ask when those five seconds must have seemed to her like all the rest of her life that she could count on. He toyed briefly—very briefly—with the idea of decking her, decided that she’d probably deck him back and if she knocked him out, they’d both die. Instead he hissed, “Constable—freeze!”