Perfect Sins (26 page)

“A couple of pellets in his arm,” said Diana dismissively. “I helped him get them out.”

“Did neither of you think to call an ambulance?”

Anger kindled in the woman's eye. “You think there was some point? For a ten-year-old boy who'd taken a shotgun blast in the face? He was dead before all the bits hit the ground.”

It was undoubtedly true. But the brutality of the statement, coming from the child's mother, knocked the wind out of Edwin Norris like a knee in the gut. He cleared his throat. “Who decided that you should bury him yourselves and say he'd been abducted?”

“We both did.”

But Hazel didn't believe that. “No,” she said with conviction. “Henry Byrfield was a good man—a kind and decent man. He didn't blame a five-year-old boy for what had happened—he knew who was responsible. He wanted to go to the police. Didn't he?” When Diana refused to answer, she said it again. “Didn't he?”

“Yes!” snapped Diana Sperrin. “He thought it was the honorable thing to do.” She managed to make it sound like a weakness.

“But you didn't?” asked Norris.

“I didn't see what it would achieve,” Diana said through gritted teeth. “There was nothing we could do for Jamie. Except bury him with love, and we didn't need any help with that. If Henry had called the police, everything would have come out. Why was this middle-aged man playing with two little boys in a field? Because he was their father, of course. We'd have had to say so—anything else would have been worse.

“That would have been the end of his marriage. His wife would have left Byrfield, taking her daughters, her bump, and her money with her. I'd have had to leave, too. Small communities can be very intolerant of those who don't obey the rules. And David would have grown up notorious as the boy who blew his brother's head off. And for what? To put the record straight? It was too high a price to pay, for all of us.”

“So you buried Jamie by the lake.”

Diana nodded. “That night. Henry brought the paving stones from the farmyard in the bucket of the tractor. I got some things together for Jamie, to make him comfortable.” She glared at Hazel, daring her to comment. But Hazel said nothing.

“And after that you called the police and said Jamie had been abducted by his father,” said Norris.

“It seemed the easiest solution,” said Diana. By now she just sounded very tired. “I'd told people I was married, that the boys' father drifted in and out of our lives, and they believed me. They even thought they'd met him, some of them. Nobody, including the police, was surprised when you couldn't find him. A traveling man like that—where would you start looking? After six months I was the only one still pushing for him to be found, and I was only doing it to keep the police from wondering why I wasn't.”

“And you never told David?” Hazel's voice was low.

“That he'd murdered his brother? Of course not,” said Diana coldly. “At first he was too young to keep his mouth shut. By the time he was old enough to be trusted, he'd no recollection of what happened. He saw me opening the greetings cards, and he really thought they were from Jamie.”

“It wasn't murder,” said DI Norris. Maybe it was pedantic, but it was important to set the record straight. “A child that age is legally incapable of committing murder. We'd have prosecuted Byrfield, and you're right: It would all have come out then. David might have been taken into care for his own safety. Or maybe not. There's a presumption that children are better off with their mother unless there's a clear-cut reason to move them.”

“Would hatred be considered reason enough?” asked Hazel disingenuously.

Diana summoned up the strength to glare at her. “I have never laid a hand on either of my sons.”

Hazel's expression was uncharacteristically chilly. “No. You just made one of them pay every day for something he doesn't even remember doing. You forgave Byrfield, but you never forgave David for what happened. You didn't even tell him what it was he'd done that was so bad that his own mother could barely look at him. Don't you dare sit there and claim you were protecting David. You acted as you did to protect Byrfield, and yourself. But Henry Byrfield died nine years ago. You could have said something then, if only to your son. If only so he'd know why you resented him so.”

“I didn't…” Another of those sentences that Diana began and then abandoned.

Edwin Norris pressed her. “You didn't what?”

“I didn't want to resent him. To freeze him out,” said Diana Sperrin. For the first time Hazel thought she detected a trace of regret in her tone. “At first there were things to do, things to deal with, which meant keeping a lid on my feelings. Demanding that people go out looking for my missing son when I hoped they'd never find him. Insisting that he was alive in Ireland when I knew he was dead under the grass by the Byrfield lake. I told David the same thing as I told the police. I told him over and over again, and kept him from talking to anyone until I knew he had no recollection of anything else. Yes, I was hard on him. I had to be, for all our sakes.

“Later, when the search had been all but abandoned, when life was almost normal again, I could have reached out to him. Told him everything was all right—was going to be all right. Told him I l-loved him”—she stumbled on the word—“and we'd have to get each other through this because neither of us had anyone else. But it was too late. The anger I felt, the sheer bloody anger, had corroded my soul, and the scar tissue had come between us, thick and dense and impenetrable. Resentment doesn't cover it. You're right: I hated my son for what he'd done, and time did nothing to heal it, only set it hard. Why didn't I tell him when he was old enough? I think it was because I didn't feel he deserved to know.”

“Have you any idea how much you hurt him?”

“He hurt me!” cried Diana Sperrin, a wail of torment wrung from her, as if these events had happened just hours before.

“The difference is,” said Hazel through gritted teeth, “you were a grown woman and he was a little boy. A confused little boy who couldn't think why his mother had stopped loving him.”

“But he was the
wrong
little boy! I wanted Jamie. I wanted Jamie back. I only ever wanted my beautiful Jamie.”

*   *   *

“The people you meet when you haven't got your gun,” said Edwin Norris mildly as he walked Hazel back to her muddy car. “How is it that some people manage to get it
so
wrong? Are they actually trying?”

“Diana? I think she tried very hard,” said Hazel. “I think she tried so hard to be a good mother to Jamie that there was nothing left for David.” She met his gaze. “Will you tell him? I should really get on my way now.”

Norris nodded grimly. “How much does he know?”

“I don't know. He's almost as hard to read as his mother. I don't think he remembers any of this. But given the things I was asking him about, he must have his suspicions. We shouldn't leave him wondering.”

“I'll talk to him when I go back inside,” DI Norris promised. “I'll need to at some point, we might as well get it over with. And then he'll probably need to talk to a therapist.”

“I think they both will,” said Hazel ruefully. “
Separate
therapists. Who will then need to talk to
their
therapists.”

“Diana's will have to form an orderly queue behind me and her legal representatives,” said Norris grimly.

“You mean to charge her, then.”

“Of course I mean to charge her! Another day or two,” he muttered, “and I might have some idea what I mean to charge her with.”

“Well, don't annoy the shrink too much,” murmured Hazel. “
You
might need him, too, before you've finished with the Byrfield family.”

They shared a bleak chuckle as they crossed the car park.

Norris held the door for her while Hazel settled herself gingerly onto her damp car seat. He said, “Are you planning to go back to work in Norbold?”

Hazel nodded. “When I'm signed off fit.”

Norris blew a silent whistle. “So this was you off your game, was it?”

Hazel appreciated the compliment. But she wanted to be honest with him. “I know these people. I grew up among them. It gave me an advantage.”

“Yes,” agreed Norris, “and so did having a head on your shoulders. I was going to say, if you fancy a change of scene, I'd be glad to have you here.”

She hadn't expected that. But immediately she could see the advantages. Being closer to her father. Seeing more of Pete Byrfield. Getting out of a posting that would always have grim memories for her, and where she would always be as welcome as the specter at the feast.

And that was the problem. It would be the easiest, most comfortable solution. And once you start taking the easy way out, it gets harder and harder to do anything else.

“Thank you,” she said, and meant it. “I won't forget that offer. Someday I'll come back and see if it's still open. But the first thing I have to do is the last thing I want to do, which is go back to Meadowvale Police Station and pick up where I left off. Nothing that happened there was my fault. I won't have it look as if I have something to run away from.”

Edwin Norris clasped her hand warmly; and then, on an impulse, ducked his head through the open window and kissed her soundly on the cheek. It wasn't professional. It wasn't PC. But it was a gesture of friendship and support, and in a wicked world it's a brave soul who rejects either. Hazel grinned at him and nodded, and felt the pleasure of knowing she had an ally.

“Good enough,” he said, straightening up. “I'll be here. So where are you going now?”

Hazel sighed. “Grantham. I'll collect Ash from the armaments place. He only just had the taxi fare to get him there. Lord knows how he was thinking of getting home.”

 

CHAPTER 27

S
ATURDAY MORNING WAS
a good time to find Stephen Graves in his office. With the factory silent and the workers absent, it was his chance to catch up on paperwork.

He was surprised to see Ash again so quickly, but received him no less courteously than before. “Does this mean you're making some progress?”

“Perhaps,” said Ash carefully. Patience had curled at his feet in Graves's office but was refusing to look at him. He'd had to smuggle her onto the taxi bundled up in his coat, and she blamed him for the indignity.

He couldn't afford to worry about that. He needed to concentrate on his questions, and Graves's answers. “Who did you talk to after I left here?”

The CEO of Bertram Castings recoiled as if he'd been struck. “No one! Who would I have talked to? What do you think I am?”

“I think you're someone who knows this industry a lot better than I do,” said Ash honestly. “You gave me a list of names of other people I could talk to—people who'd had shipments hijacked, some of them since I lost touch with the situation. It occurred to me you might have called some of them to let them know I'd be in contact. Did you?”

Was that a flicker of relief at the back of the man's eyes? Was it the perfectly normal response of someone who thought he was being accused of something finding that he wasn't? Or just a glimmer of understanding where before there had been bewilderment?

“No,” said Stephen Graves.

“You didn't talk to any of them? Or to anyone in any of their offices?”

Graves thought a bit longer, then shook his head. “No. I thought you'd prefer it that way.”

Ash nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Why do you ask?”

Ash had debated with himself on the way over—he would have discussed it with Patience if the taxi driver had known he had two passengers—how much he should tell Graves. In the end he decided there was no reason to treat the man as any kind of a threat unless he gave some indication that he might be one. “Something happened not long after I left here. Someone ran me off the road and fired a gun at me.” He saw Graves's eyes flare wide and forestalled his next question. “No, nobody hurt. But it was a serious attempt on my life. And my social circle is so narrow these days that probably the only people who want me dead right now are the pirates who hijacked your arms shipments and kidnapped my family.”

He paused, but Graves made no attempt to respond, so Ash carried on. “Now, I don't think they're keeping tabs on me from the Horn of Africa. It means I was right: They have contacts very much closer to home. People feeding them information about what shipments to expect and where to look for them. Which explains how a Midlands drug baron could know something about my family's disappearance. And also how the kidnapping was arranged. It wasn't done over the phone from Somalia.”

He was still watching Graves carefully to see if any of this resonated with him. He was not blind to the possibility that the man in front of him was himself the spy. He'd been talking to Graves not long before Cathy and the boys vanished, and then again not long before someone put him in a ditch and shot at him. Set against that were the losses, in cash and in business confidence, sustained by Bertram Castings as a result of the pirates' activities. On the
other
other hand, whoever the local agent was, he might have made more out of selling his information than Bertrams or any of the targeted companies could have paid him in a month of Sundays.

Ash had that feeling between his shoulder blades that suggested he was at least thinking about this in the right way. That didn't mean that Graves, or anyone at Bertrams, was involved in the hijackings, just that someone like him, someone in the office of one of these companies, probably was.

In a perfect world, Stephen Graves would have clapped his palm to his forehead and remembered talking incautiously to a shifty-eyed competitor he'd never entirely trusted. Or else his own eyes would have gone shifty and avoided Ash's gaze, and that would have been significant, too. But life is never that simple. Graves looked shocked, but no more than anyone might who found himself surrounded by wicked criminality. He had a wife and children, would have been less than human had he not pictured himself in Ash's position. Of course Graves looked shocked. Poker players talk about “tells”—individual quirks by which opponents give away unconsciously the strength of their hand. Perhaps it holds for poker, but it doesn't in real life. The best investigator in the world cannot tell when a good liar is lying. The liar doesn't tend to look up to the left, or down to the right; he—or she, for lying is an equal-opportunity occupation—doesn't scratch his nose or play with his glasses. He may seem vague, but so may an honest witness struggling to recall details; he may pile on too much detail, but so may an honest witness with a good memory who thinks this is what will help crack the case. The only reliable way to detect a liar is to listen to the words. Because if the events he's recounting wouldn't have happened that way, they didn't happen that way.