Perfect Sins (23 page)

Hazel didn't have to think long. “No, I don't.”

“That's two reasons to believe Diana's telling the truth.”

“But if she didn't kill Jamie, why won't she say what happened? Maybe it was nothing more than a terrible accident, but nobody's going to believe that while she refuses to explain.”

Patience reappeared from the shrubbery with white fluff caught in her jaws.

“Pete's solicitor will talk her around,” Hazel added in the hopeful tone of someone trying to sound surer than she feels. “He'll make her understand that the only way forward now is to tell the truth. To tell Norris exactly what happened, and throw herself on the mercy of the court.”

Ash remained doubtful. “Diana Sperrin is a strong woman. I don't think she'd have acted as she did if she wasn't sure she could see it through.”

“She may have thought she'd never be caught.”

Ash disagreed. “She must have known she might be. She's had thirty years to decide what to do if this moment came. And this is the best she could come up with? No comment?”

“It
can
be a pretty smart strategy,” Hazel felt bound to point out.

“If you're guilty. Not if you're innocent.”

“But she
isn't
innocent,” said Hazel reasonably. “She's committed at least one offense. She's admitted as much.”

“She's admitted to burying Jamie, not to killing him.”

“Maybe she doesn't know who killed him.”

Ash dismissed that immediately. “Of course she knows. If she didn't, she'd want us to find out. She'd have wanted that from the start. She's protecting someone.”

“Or someone's memory.” The circular nature of the debate had brought them back to Henry Byrfield again. “Maybe it really was an accident,” suggested Hazel, helpless to find another answer. “And rather than force Henry to explain to the police what happened, including his relationship with the dead child, she agreed to a clandestine burial. She'd invented Saul Sperrin ten years before, as a cover for her ongoing activities with the earl. The simplest thing was to invoke him again. To tell people he'd taken Jamie.”

“It's not impossible,” conceded Ash. “She's not a particularly conventional woman. A Christian burial and a stone in the churchyard may not have meant much to her. Granted that nothing was going to bring Jamie back, protecting her lover may have meant more.”

“And having launched the fiction that Jamie was abducted by her husband, it was easier to keep it going than to stop it. Hence the thirty years' worth of cards she sent herself.” Hazel frowned. “You can't call it outstanding police work, can you, when the forces of two countries are looking for a man who never existed. Did nobody think of checking the records for Saul Sperrin's birth certificate, or their marriage certificate?”

“It only seems obvious because of what we know,” said Ash. “If someone came to you tomorrow accusing her husband of child abduction, would you begin your inquiries with the Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths?”

Hazel glowered. “I would now.”

*   *   *

At least someone knew how to deal constructively with the new situation. Pete Byrfield made some phone calls, and in the late afternoon his sisters arrived, together, in Vivienne's car. He greeted them with a reassuring hug and ushered them upstairs to the countess's sitting room.

Hazel tried not to eavesdrop, but it wasn't easy. Byrfield was a small-enough house that a family row involving the countess and her three children would always rattle the stoppers in the crystal decanters. But only once were voices raised high enough to carry, and then they dropped quickly out of hearing again.

David Sperrin had never stood on ceremony at Byrfield. He'd traipsed in through whichever door was nearest and never minded the mud on his boots. Only now that it might seem he had a right to leave muddy footprints anywhere he wanted did he feel the need to ring the bell.

Byrfield met him with an impish grin. He'd known he was coming: He'd summoned him. He showed Sperrin upstairs, and pretended not to notice that Sperrin had showered and put on a clean shirt for the meeting.

“I like your friend Pete,” said Gabriel Ash, leafing through a catalog of farm machinery that might as well have been upside down and written in Sanskrit for all he was getting out of it.

Hazel smiled. “Me, too.”

*   *   *

The sound of loose ends flapping kept them all from sleep.

Edwin Norris conducted two interviews with Diana Sperrin. Although he was keen to resolve the matter—and perhaps even keener to understand it—he was punctilious about waiting for her solicitor to join them.

Because the Byrfield estate was a significant client, the senior Mr. Parsons took the duty on himself. But in fact, a newly qualified solicitor would have been more than equal to the task. Diana told him nothing she hadn't already told DI Norris, and proposed telling neither of them any more. It wasn't that she was difficult, or aggressive, or deceitful. She'd just said all that she intended to, ever.

Simple rage kept the countess awake. After everything—after everything she'd put up with, everything she'd done!—it was all going to come out anyway. People would know. People in Burford would know. Tradesmen would know. She'd be a laughingstock.

The four Byrfield siblings—it's probably the only way to describe them—sat up all night, replenishing the coffeepot and the whiskey decanter at intervals, getting to know one another all over again.

Hazel found herself thinking like a police officer. She lay in the dark, in the familiar comfort of her old bed in her old room, and marshaled all the facts she could be sure of, and all the inferences she could reasonably count on, and tried to see through the drama that had occurred center stage to glimpse what might have been going on in the wings.

Ash retired to his room to leave the Byrfields alone, but he didn't go to bed. He sat in the chair all night, doing pretty much what Hazel was doing down in the gate lodge, but with a different set of facts.

Patience took advantage of the unoccupied bed and snored her way through till morning.

 

CHAPTER 24

A
T HALF-PAST SEVEN
on Saturday morning they met on the midpoint of the gravel drive. Hazel had been on her way up to Byrfield, Ash hurrying down to the gate lodge. They gasped out, “I need to talk to you!” pretty much in unison.

Ash was less fit, but Hazel had been running, so she let him go first. Apart from anything else, he looked like he might explode if he didn't.

“I've been thinking about this all damn night,” he panted. “But I know who did it. At least I think I know who must have done it.”

Hazel nodded energetically, her fair hair dancing. She'd paused just long enough to drag a brush through it, but all she'd done after that was tie it out of her way with an elastic band. “Me, too. You want to see if we've come up with the same thing?”

“Of course we have,” said Ash dismissively, “it's the only thing that makes sense. If it wasn't Saul Sperrin shooting at us—for the very good reason that there is not now and never was a Saul Sperrin—then someone was trying to kill us for reasons entirely unconnected with Byrfield.”

He'd managed to surprise her. They hadn't been thinking the same thing after all. Hazel had been too wrapped up in the thirty-year-old tragedy to wonder who had run them off the road and why. “Okay,” she said, a little uncertainly.

“So what other cages have we been rattling?”

Hazel considered. “Most of the people I've annoyed recently are dead now. You?”

Ash blinked. But it was probably true. Until she'd met him she'd had no enemies. Now she hadn't again, but that was because Norbold's senior police officer and its last remaining gangster had both died in a closing act something like Hamlet's scant weeks before.

But if Hazel wasn't the target, Ash must be. He nodded slowly. “I think so, yes. I didn't at the time, but there's nobody else—nobody—who could still think I pose any kind of a threat. But he just might. And if he did, he might have arranged to have me followed. This week, that meant following both of us. And when he decided to remove the threat, that meant both of us, too. It was on the way back from the gypsy camp simply because that was the first time for days there hadn't been other people, potential witnesses, around.”

Hazel went over it again in her mind, word for word, and searched his dark, excited eyes for clues, but it didn't help. She had no idea what he was talking about. “He who?”

“Stephen Graves!” said Ash impatiently. “The man I called on coming down here. The CEO of Bertram Castings.”

Hazel still thought she must have misunderstood. “The bloke who lost his airplane?”

Ash nodded energetically. For a moment it looked like he wouldn't be able to stop. “In fact, he lost several. Yes, him.”

Hazel knew that several missing airplanes didn't provide a motive for something that one missing airplane hadn't. “Gabriel—what possible reason could he have for wanting to hurt you?”

To Ash it seemed as clear as day. “To stop me asking questions!”

Hazel shook her head, mystified. “That's not what I mean. I mean, what reason could
he
have? He's a victim, like you. Well—not like you, obviously,” she added quickly, “but someone who lost something to the same criminals who took your family. Why wouldn't he be cheering you on?”

“I thought he was. He gave me some more names to…” For the first time this side of midnight he was assailed by doubts. “Which he didn't have to do if he didn't want me going any further with this. So maybe it wasn't him. Maybe he called someone: ‘Don't be alarmed if some idiot in an ill-fitting suit wants to ask you about the piracy, he's been here and I think he's probably harmless.' Maybe he called all the people whose names he gave me. But one of them wasn't a victim—he was a conspirator.

“We knew someone in England was assisting them,” he hurried on. In fact, they had never known anything of the kind. It was one inference that could be put on something that a target criminal had possibly said to a corrupt policeman. Ash had clung to it like a life belt because he'd had nothing else to keep him afloat; and Hazel refrained from reminding him of this because he still hadn't. “Maybe one of those people, maybe just someone working in one of the offices. A dispatch clerk, someone whose job it was to get the permits together—someone like that.

“Whoever it was, he got worried that questions were being asked again. That I might pay him a visit next. He made some calls of his own, and they traced me to Byrfield and set someone to watching me. In all likelihood the decision had already been taken to shut me up, but the opportunity didn't present itself until we were driving around the back roads of Cambridgeshire in the middle of the night.” Ash looked at Hazel, white-faced. “I almost got you killed.”

“
You
did nothing of the kind,” Hazel retorted sharply. “You didn't put us off the road, and you didn't fire a shotgun at us. Gabriel, you may have done all sorts of wicked things in your life”—she didn't think so, but she hadn't known him long enough to be sure—“but you're no more responsible for what happened to us than for what happened to your family. Don't feel guilty over things that aren't your fault. It's unproductive and it's self-indulgent. We'll find whoever's to blame and we'll see him in jail. And if this
is
connected with the loss of your wife and sons, we'll find out. We'll learn everything he knows. Then we'll follow where the trail leads us.”

Ash was staring at her as if seeing her for the first time. Hazel didn't often take command like this—what her mother had called “Putting her foot down with a firm hand”—and when she did, people who'd thought her a nice, amiable, easygoing young woman tended to do a double take. Their startled expressions were an ongoing source of satisfaction to her. She said nothing, but watched with a degree of complacency as his mind struggled for a foothold on the suddenly shifting ground.

“Er—so I'm heading back there. To Bertram Castings. Find out who Graves talked to after I saw him.”

Now Hazel's expression turned cool. “What about the Byrfields? And Diana, and David? You're going to just walk away—leave them to sort their problems out themselves?”

Someone else might have reminded her that sometimes people are best left to sort their problems out for themselves, that the line between helping them and meddling is so thin you can get paper cuts from it. But Gabriel Ash had a life worth living for the first time in four years thanks to Hazel Best's compulsive helping disorder, so even if it was true, she wasn't going to hear it from him.

“What more can we do? The only one who can sort it out is Diana, and she doesn't want our help. Hazel, I have to follow this up! I can't just sit here when someone fifty miles away knows someone who knows something about my family! You must see that.”

It was impossible not to see, not to understand, how much this mattered to him. Only sometimes she thought it would be nice if he could acknowledge that other people's pain mattered as well. She cared about Pete Byrfield, had even come to care about David Sperrin, and their drama was onstage right now. She believed she could help here, even if all she was doing was making coffee at regular intervals.

On top of which, while Ash had been having insights into the attack on them, Hazel had been having insights into the death of Jamie Sperrin. Or at least the significant things that had and hadn't happened immediately afterward.

She took a step back and nodded. “All right, then. If you need to go, you need to go. I dare say Mrs. Morrison will have the number of a taxi firm.”

Ash stared at her in astonishment. “You aren't coming?”