Perfect Sins (6 page)

“Maybe, in that situation, you could imagine keeping quiet. Telling the neighbors your son had gone to stay with his grandparents, and later telling them he was doing so well there he was going to stay. Telling his school the same story. It might be challenged, but the odds are it wouldn't be. In these days of pick-and-mix families, children are a bit of a movable feast.” There was a wistfulness in his tone that, of those present, only Hazel understood.

“Or, of course,” said David Sperrin, a man who may have had finer feelings but didn't give them much exercise, “some perv may have grabbed him, had his bit of fun, and buried him there when he was finished. Byrfield isn't exactly Area Fifty-One—it's not difficult to get in and out unobserved.”

Pete Byrfield regarded him with disapproval bordering on dislike. “Thanks for that, David. I was just about coming to terms with the idea of a family tragedy. Now, every time I see someone crossing the estate I'm going to wonder what unspeakable mischief they've been up to.”

Sperrin shrugged, untroubled.

Hazel shook her head with conviction. “This wasn't the work of a pedophile. The murder, if it was murder, might have been, but not the burial. By the time a pedophile gets around to burying his victim, he isn't concerned with making him comfortable, only with disposing of the evidence. No way would he build a DIY mausoleum out of paving slabs. He might have wrapped the body in a blanket, he'd have brought a spade to get it underground, and the minute that was done he'd have been away.

“Pedophiles might think—some of them—that they love their victims, but they don't really. They're playing at it, like playing with dolls. And what do you do with a broken doll? You throw it away. A man like that wouldn't have risked discovery to create what we saw.”

Byrfield nodded, a little comforted. But not much. “But doesn't that mean it was someone local? You don't drive a hundred miles with a dead body
and
a dozen paving slabs in your car! It must have been someone with an excuse to be down there with a Land Rover or a tractor or something.”

Hazel thought about it and nodded. She'd have liked to tell him no, that it was probably a stranger, but the situation was upsetting enough without confusing one another with lies. “A hole in the ground and a blanket, that could be anybody. The slabs make it look like someone who knows the estate. And is probably therefore known on the estate.”

“Or
was
known here, years ago,” said Sperrin. “That's not a recent grave. Forensics will get closer, but it has to be twenty years old and could be a lot older. Whoever was responsible is probably long gone, and quite possibly dead by now anyway.”

“I hope so,” murmured Byrfield.

“You might as well think so,” said Sperrin cheerfully. “We're never likely to learn the truth now.”

 

CHAPTER 7

W
HEN
A
SH TOOK
Patience for a walk, Hazel went after them, jogging to catch up. She fell into step beside her friend.

“Are you all right?”

The same question that had tasked his therapist. “Yes, of course.”

“Don't say it if it isn't true. This has been a difficult day for everybody. For you, it must have been awful.”

He made a gesture with one hand. “No different for me.”

“Of course it's different for you,” Hazel said sharply. “This isn't personal for us the way it is for you. We can imagine what it's like to lose a child. You know.”

“Yes,” Ash said softly.

“If you want to leave here, we can go now.”

“I think Pete wants you to stay.”

“Yes?” She considered that, then shook her head. “It doesn't matter. He might think he needs his hand held, but he doesn't really.”

“And I do.” It was half a question, half a statement.

“You've more reason. Anyway,” she added briskly, “Pete's got his mum for moral support. She can hold his hand.”

Ash remembered the encounter on the landing. “Only if he scrubs it first,” he muttered, and Hazel laughed. Ash grinned, a little shame-faced. “I'm fine. Really. I think we should stay, at least for a day or two. We shouldn't leave Pete to deal with this on his own while he's still in shock. I don't think either his mother or Sperrin is likely to be much help to him.”

Hazel agreed. “What did you make of our countess, then?” Ash thought from the sly tone of her voice she was hoping for an indiscretion.

“Isn't she a dowager countess? Since her husband's dead?”

“No, she's the countess until Pete marries. Then she becomes the dowager, to avoid confusion.”

Ash didn't want to give offense. He knew Hazel had connections with these people that could not be explained in practical modern terms. And, so far as he could see, she counted the earl a genuine friend. But she had asked. “She doesn't seem an easy woman to like.”

Hazel wasn't offended. “That's because she isn't. She and the old earl were like chalk and cheese. He loved Byrfield, loved everything and everyone about it. She's always thought of it as a rather big piece of jewelry, something to flash and make the other countesses jealous.”

“It makes you wonder what they saw in each other.”

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.”