Perfect Sins (22 page)

Ash was looking at Norris. “What changed your mind?”

“About what?”

“You said you were going to keep this to yourself. Then you thought it might have a bearing on your investigation. What bearing?”

He probably had no right to ask. Certainly DI Norris didn't have to tell him. Except that someone had shot at Ash because of these people and their complicated home lives. Except that, actually, that probably wasn't the case.… Norris gave up trying to work it out and just told him. “Motive,” he said simply. “Could any of this have provided someone with a motive for murder?”

David Sperrin swallowed hard. “Do you think my mother killed Jamie?”

“She says not.”

“What does she say happened?”

“Right now she's saying very little,” grunted Norris. “That may change when we do a formal interview back at the station, though I'm not confident. She says she buried Jamie, and I believe her. She says she didn't kill him, and I'm inclined to believe that, too. But right now, that's all she's saying. I don't know what the circumstances were. I don't know who shot him, or why. I don't know if Ms. Sperrin was there when it happened or not. Of course I'll ask her all these things again, maybe several times, but I can't make her answer if she doesn't want to.” He looked hard at David. “What about you, Mr. Sperrin?”

“I was five years old, Inspector! I don't remember a thing about it. I've always believed what I was told—that my father was a traveler and he took Jamie back to Ireland.”

“That's not what I meant. I mean, do you think she'd tell you something she wouldn't tell me?”

Sperrin bristled. The shock had subsided enough now for his normal prickly personality to surface. “Even if she did, do you think I'd tell you something she didn't want you to know?”

“Not doing might be considered obstruction.”

“I think I might tell you where to put your obstruction.”

“Boys, boys,” said Hazel, trying hard to mollify. “David—
is
there a realistic chance that your mother might confide in you?”

“In me?” The soar of his voice contained the answer. “Why would she start now? She doesn't even like me.”

“So the question is academic,” said Hazel. “Diana isn't going to talk to David, so he isn't going to be able to withhold material information. You talked about a motive?”

DI Norris sniffed. She was right, but that didn't mean he had to like Sperrin's attitude. “Thirty years ago, when that little boy died, his mother had something to hide. If she hadn't, she'd have called us and called for an ambulance, and Jamie would have got his Christian burial and we'd have known how and why he died, and if anyone was to blame.

“If Diana's telling the truth, she denied us that opportunity when she buried him secretly at Byrfield. Your father…” He glanced at the twenty-eighth earl, then at Sperrin, then gave up entirely. “The last earl would have been master of Byrfield then, so it's possible they did it together. But either of them would have been free to come to me—well, my predecessor—if they blamed the other for what happened. To that extent we have to consider it a conspiracy.”

A lot had been thrown at Pete Byrfield today. He'd been told that his father wasn't his father, his sisters weren't his full sisters, and even he wasn't who he'd always believed he was. Much of it had amazed, puzzled, even amused him, but none of it had angered him. But this did. Sparks crackled in his pale Viking eyes. “You didn't know my father, Inspector. For that reason, and that reason only, I'm prepared to forgive you that suggestion. But talk to anyone in the village. Talk to anyone who knew him—anyone who had dealings with him. Tell them you think he conspired to cover up the death of one of his children. They'll laugh in your face.”

DI Norris made no reply. He swiveled on his heel until he was looking at David. “Mr. Sperrin?”

David swallowed. “I hardly knew him.”

“I understand he helped you get to university. Why did you suppose that was?”

Sperrin looked bewildered. “I just thought he was a kind man. That he took his duties as lord of the manor more seriously than most, and he helped me because he could.”

“Did he send any of the other village children to university?”

Byrfield's tongue hadn't lost its irascible edge. “Inspector, you
know
why he helped David. He was David's father. There's nothing sinister about it. He had a son he felt he couldn't acknowledge, but he could support him. What are you suggesting? That David should have known? That he
did
know?”

Norris was still looking at the archaeologist. “Did you?”

David Sperrin passed a weary hand across his face. “I never suspected. Not for a moment.”

“A lot seems to have passed you by,” observed DI Norris critically. “Your brother's medical condition. His death. The fact that your supposed father was a figment of your mother's imagination, and that the kind man who lived in the big house was your real father. Are you always this”—he wanted to say
dim
—“gullible?”

“He was only five when Jamie died,” Hazel pointed out, pursing her lips in discreet disapproval.

“Yes. And how old were you the last time your mother put a card on the mantelpiece and said, ‘That's from your brother James'? I mean, didn't you recognize her handwriting?”

Sperrin shook his head in a kind of wonder. “Inspector, I can't help you. Maybe you're right—maybe I was very, very stupid. But I never suspected anything. She told me our father had taken Jamie, and I believed her. And I never thought to have a graphologist analyze the Christmas cards.”

They regarded each other levelly for half a minute more. Then Norris didn't so much blink as turn a page. “Okay. Well, I don't think there's anything else you can tell me at the moment, is there? I'll probably want to talk to all of you again at some point, so I'd be obliged if anyone planning a foreign holiday would put it on hold. Except maybe you two”—his gaze traveled between Hazel and Gabriel Ash—“for whom it might be a very good idea.”

“We can't do that, Inspector,” said Hazel. One elevated eyebrow asked her why not. “Patience hasn't had her rabies shots.”

“And that,” said Norris with conviction, “might explain a very great deal.”

“I don't know why he thinks
we're
mad,” said Byrfield plaintively after the policeman had gone. “It's not like any of this was our doing. We're hardly to blame for the actions of our parents!”

“Whoever they were,” muttered Sperrin.

Byrfield was watching him with concern. The nice thing about Pete Byrfield, Hazel thought, is that although he worries a lot, mostly what he worries about are other people. “We need to talk to a solicitor. If you like, we can talk to separate solicitors.”

Sperrin peered at him uncertainly. “Why would we want to do that?”

“Because you need someone looking after your interests who isn't also looking after the Byrfield family interests.” He drew himself up straight. “But the first thing is to get someone down to the police station to look after Diana. Whatever she does or doesn't want to tell Inspector Norris, she needs someone by her side, guiding her through. Our solicitor can do that.” He glanced at Hazel, who nodded approval.

Byrfield turned his attention back to Sperrin. “Once that's in hand, though, you need to think about what this means to you. And you'll need someone by
your
side, guiding you, who hasn't been in my family's employ for the last thirty years. I can't imagine there'll be a conflict of interests. I'm determined there won't be. But I also don't want either of us wondering, further down the line, if we resolved matters appropriately. If you got everything you're entitled to.”

“Like what?”

As far as Hazel could judge, Sperrin's astonishment was genuine.

“Like I don't exactly know,” said Byrfield impatiently. “But you're my father's son, and I don't propose to see you excluded from the advantages that ought to bring.”

David laughed out loud. “Pete, I'm a bastard! I thought I was the son of a feckless Irish traveler, it turns out I'm the by-blow of an English gentleman. That's interesting, but I don't think it'll have a material effect on my way of life! Look. He did all right by me. He got me to university when there was no other way I could have gone. He gave me pretty much everything I've got, and though it might not be what you'd have chosen, it
is
what I chose. I
like
rolling the turf back to see how people did things a thousand years ago. I have absolutely no interest in cows. You couldn't pay me enough to take over the running of Byrfield. Each to his own, my friend, and let's leave the lawyers to make money out of mugs.”

Pete stood looking at him, as if wondering how much of it he meant, or would go on meaning, for some moments. Then he turned and headed for home. “We'll talk again, when the dust's settled. In the meantime, I'll get Parsons, or possibly Parsons, or, failing him, Parsons, to run over and see Diana.” The front door of the cottage closed behind him.

After he'd gone, Hazel turned to David. “Are you all right?”

Impossible to tell if he was nodding or shaking his head. “I don't know what that means anymore. My brother's dead. And it seems stupid to start grieving now, because he's
been
dead for most of my life. And my mother knew. Knew?… She buried him! My father may have helped. Of course, my father isn't the man I thought he was…” He blew out a gusty sigh. “All right? I'm going with probably not.”

“On the bright side,” suggested Hazel, “you've got two half sisters you didn't know about.”

“Yeah,” he growled. “They're going to be thrilled about that.” A thought struck him with sudden horror. “This doesn't mean I'm related to Pete's mother, does it?”

 

CHAPTER 23

T
HEY WERE WALKING
back up the drive toward Byrfield. Patience disappeared into the rhododendrons, on the trail of a rabbit.

Ash was quiet. There was nothing unusual about this. But Hazel was learning to read his silences as you might read another man's body language. Sometimes he was silent because he was thinking, sometimes because he didn't want to think. Sometimes he was silent because there was nothing he wanted to say, and sometimes because there was nothing he
could
say.

This was a thinking silence. Hazel slowed her stride to match his. “You're wondering what happened to Jamie.”

Ash nodded. “Yes.”

“Do you think Diana killed him?”

He didn't answer immediately. Then he shook his head. “No. I think she'd have said so if she had. There's a vein of adamancy in that woman. I don't think her pride would allow her to hide behind a lie.

She probably doesn't fancy doing time any more now than she did thirty years ago.”

“I don't think that's why she lied then. I think she was protecting someone else.”

“Henry?”

Ash nodded. “Maybe.”

“Henry's been dead a long time now,” Hazel pointed out. “He doesn't need protecting anymore.”

“True. But that also means there's no one left to contradict anything she says. She could say Henry Byrfield shot Jamie, and it's unlikely Inspector Norris could prove any different. That would be the safest lie to tell, if she was prepared to lie. If it
is
a lie.”

“You didn't know him.” But Hazel no longer sounded as confident as she once had. It seemed none of them had known him as well as they thought they had. Except just possibly his wife. Everyone remembered the last earl fondly, and no one had a good word to say about the countess. But he'd had two children out of wedlock before she succumbed to the unknown Viking, and even then she may have been thinking more of the Byrfield title than of herself. One thing Hazel was sure of: Alice Byrfield had always been able to read a calendar. If there were reassessments to be done, maybe Pete's mother was due an upgrade.

Ash, too, was doing mental arithmetic. “It took eleven paving slabs to make that little grave. The closest they were likely to be was in the yard at Home Farm, a quarter of a mile across the fields. She might have been able to lift two at a time, but I don't think she carried them across rough ground. So if she was working alone, she made that trip thirteen times—with the slabs, with the tools, and with her child's body. It's just about possible she did all that in a single night without anybody noticing—and without anybody reporting the theft of eleven paving slabs in the morning—but it's much more likely that she had help. Henry Byrfield could have had them put on a trailer and tractored them down to the lake in broad daylight without anyone asking questions. He's about the only one who could.”

It made more sense than anything else. “You think he was covering for Diana?”

“I think he was
helping
Diana. They must have agreed it was the best thing to do in the circumstances—whatever those circumstances were. Either of them could have called the police, but neither of them chose to. Either they were both responsible for Jamie's death or neither of them was.”

“Or it
was
Diana, but the old earl decided he had too much to lose by telling the police, and so the world, that he'd fathered her two illegitimate sons,” suggested Hazel. The rancor in her tone surprised her.

Ash half turned to look at her, one eyebrow canted quizzically. “Everyone says he was a good man. He was a good father to Pete, though he probably knew he wasn't actually his son, and he made sure David got what he wanted. Do you think he'd have let Diana shoot his son, then help her cover up the crime for fear of embarrassment?”