Perfect Sins (24 page)

“No. Not this time, Gabriel. I need to talk to David again. And then the pair of us need to talk to Diana. It can't wait.”

His lips formed the word
But.
Some instinct warned him not to give it voice. Of course she hadn't the same sense of urgency about his quest. It was a kind of impertinence to assume that she would have. After four years of living in such isolation that, when he started taking Patience for walks, his neighbors thought he was a squatter, he'd allowed himself to become dependent on this young woman—too dependent. Of course she was going to resent it, sooner or later. He'd already wrecked her career; now he was monopolizing her time and imposing on her goodwill, to the point of telling her that what troubled her was less important than what troubled him. He, too, stepped back. There were now two good paces between them.

“You're right. I'm sorry.” His eyes were down around her feet somewhere. “Of course you ought to stay. But I have to go.”

“Then go.”

The housekeeper called for a taxi. But it was early in the day and they were a long way from anywhere—the soonest the cab firm could oblige was nine-thirty. Byrfield was a big house, but too small to avoid somebody's gaze for two hours, so he found Hazel and told her.

She breathed heavily at him. “Take my car, why don't you? Anywhere I need to go, someone can drive me.”

If she'd offered earlier, probably he'd have said yes. Now he was feeling too guilty. “I'll wait for the taxi. Have you seen David yet?”

Hazel shook her head. “He'll be down for breakfast soon.”

But Sperrin didn't appear for breakfast, and when, concerned for him, Hazel checked his room, he wasn't there, either.

Knowing Diana's cottage was currently empty, he might have gone there. But Hazel struck off through the farmyard and diagonally across the water meadow, and found him down by the lake. DI Norris still had the little grave cordoned off. Sperrin had found himself another grassy hump between the woods and the water, a natural one this time, and was sitting cross-legged on it like a slightly scruffy woodland sprite, staring across the lake with unseeing eyes.

He didn't hear her approach, started at the sound of her voice.

“It's a nice spot, isn't it?”

Sperrin's voice was low. “I used to think so.”

“You will again,” she predicted confidently. “It'll be the place you come to think about Jamie. Which is, after all, the role graveyards have always played.” She paused, watching him. “David, I can only imagine how much of a shock all this has been to you. And I'm sorry for your loss.”

Sperrin gave a sort of impatient snort. Hazel thought the object of his impatience was himself. “That's kind of the point, though, isn't it? I haven't actually lost anything. My brother's been dead for thirty years. I hardly remember him. Everything I think I remember, I heard from my mother, and we all know how reliable she turned out to be. I didn't even know he was … disabled.” Hazel had no doubt that, if this conversation had been about anyone else, he would have used a different word.

“I suppose that's what childhood is,” she said. “Taking things, and people, at face value. He was your big brother. You remember him as being pretty good at that. So perhaps he was.”

He cast her a glance with just a hint of gratitude in it. “Do you think she killed him?”

“Ash doesn't think so. He reckons she'd have said so if she had. That she'd have wanted to justify her actions rather than deny them.”

“Then why won't she tell us what happened?”

Hazel veered off at a tangent. “What do you remember of the day he disappeared?”

“Jesus—I was five years old!”

“Yes. But it was a big thing to happen, it must have made an impact. What's the first time you remember being aware that he wasn't around anymore?”

Sperrin thought back. And she was right, there was a memory. He remembered sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a blanket, instead of being put to bed. He remembered a male voice in the house. He wasn't used to the sound of men's voices.

“What's your last memory of Jamie?”

That was harder. Most of what he thought he remembered from his childhood were things that, in fact, he'd been told by his mother. But suddenly he had an image in his mind that he knew was a genuine memory. “Playing Frisbee.”

Hazel smiled, too. “You used to play Frisbee together. In the garden?”

“I suppose so.” He struggled to push out the parameters of his recollection. “It seemed bigger. Of course, I was small. And cowboys and Indians.” A grin spread slowly. “That required a certain amount of ingenuity, because Mum didn't approve of toy guns. Thought they might corrupt us or something. But it's amazing what you can do by pointing your finger and shouting ‘Bang' loudly enough.”

“I think,” Hazel said carefully, “your brother, Jamie, had a nice life. A short one, which ended far too soon, but still a nice life. I think he was loved by his mother and watched over by his father, and he had a little brother who played Frisbee and illicit cowboys and Indians with him. I think his life was probably pretty sunny.”

Sperrin went through one of those mercurial changes of mood that were characteristic of him, from sunshine to sudden deep shadow, from fond remembering to bitter recrimination. “And then someone blew his head off and shoveled him out of sight beside a pond.”

Hazel felt his hurt and sympathized. But it was important for him to recognize that some of what had been done had been done with love. She shook her head. “You saw the grave, David. You know the care that went into making it. When she buried Jamie, your mother loved him as much as she ever had. I think your father helped her. They loved and cared for him, and I think they tried to do their best for him in difficult circumstances.”

“But why?” he demanded. Behind the frustrated anger he wasn't far from tears. “Why”—an unsteady hand encompassed the lakeside scene—“
this
? A DIY burial.
Why
couldn't they tell people what had happened? Why is my mother still keeping it a secret?”

“I don't know,” said Hazel carefully, “but I think she's protecting someone.”

“Who? Saul Sperrin? Henry Byrfield? One of them never existed, and the other is past paying for anything he did! There's no one else she cares about enough to cross the road for, let alone to go to prison for.”

“I think there might be,” said Hazel.

 

CHAPTER 25

DI N
ORRIS HAD KNOWN
hardened criminals who couldn't hold their tongues like Diana Sperrin. She sat in his interview room, composed and smiling faintly, like a cross between the Mona Lisa and the sphinx, saying nothing.

No, that's not quite right. She wasn't afraid of speaking. She wasn't concerned that the policeman might trick her into saying something she didn't want to. She responded politely when he asked after her well-being; she engaged with him in a little casual conversation. She just didn't add anything—anything at all—to what she'd already said about losing her child. Norris knew that she wouldn't if they stayed in this room until one of them died.

Usually he was irritated by any interruptions to an interview. This time it came as a relief when someone tapped on the door and said there were people outside looking for him.

“Who?”

“David Sperrin. And Constable Best.”

He knew they hadn't just swung by to say hello. They must have a good reason for the desk sergeant to risk Norris's ire. “I'll see them in my office. Bring Ms. Sperrin a cup of tea, will you?”

“Coffee, please,” she said demurely.

The DI assumed that Sperrin had come to plead for his mother's release. Norris couldn't think what else he might have to say—unless it was that he'd known about the contents of the grassy mound all along, and Norris didn't believe that. He'd been too young when it all happened, and too shocked when it all came out.

But it seemed Sperrin wasn't here to intercede on his mother's behalf, either. He looked around warily but offered nothing by way of explanation for his presence. In fact, Norris quickly concluded that he wouldn't have been here at all but for Hazel Best.

He peered over his glasses at her. “Solved it then, have you, Constable?”

There was a glow in her face that told him she longed to say yes. But even twelve months as a probationary constable had taught her to take nothing for granted. “I wouldn't go that far, sir. But if she isn't cooperating…?” She raised a fair eyebrow.

Norris lowered both of his. “That's putting it mildly.”

“Then there may be nothing to lose and something to gain by letting me interview her.”

“Letting
you
interview her?” He could hardly have sounded more affronted if she'd asked him to sign over his pension as well.

“I
am
a serving police officer,” she reminded him reproachfully. “And I think Diana Sperrin may tell me what happened, although she's prepared to grow old and die before she'll tell you. Particularly…” She let the sentence trail away.

“Particularly?”

“If I can take David in there with me.”

That really was too much. Edwin Norris had been a policeman for too long to think that by the book was the only way of doing things, or even necessarily the best way. But he'd also seen a lot of good cases thrown out—by juries but still more often by the Crown Prosecution Service—because procedure had been short-circuited at a critical juncture. He could hear defense counsel now, quite possibly Mr. William Burbage, QC, with his kicked-spaniel eyes and his peculiarly irritating nasal twang, inquiring as he cast significant glances toward the jury box: “And was the purpose of this some kind of emotional blackmail, Detective Inspector Norris?”

“Over my dead body,” he snarled. “This is a murder investigation, Constable Best, it is not Amateur Night at the Flying Ferret. You, I can just about justify. He”—Norris glared at Sperrin as if it had been his suggestion—“sits out here with a cup of Sergeant Brooks's tea, unless and until I have something to ask him.”

“All right,” Hazel agreed. It was, she reflected privately, easy to seem accommodating when she'd already got everything she'd come in here with any hopes of getting.

Diana Sperrin looked surprised to see her. “Hazel?”

“This is Constable Best,” said Norris woodenly, more for the tape's benefit than for anyone else as he resumed the interview. Then he sat back and waited.

Hazel leaned forward. “I think I know what happened. I may be a bit sketchy on some of the details, but the important things—the things that made you do what you did, thirty years ago and since—those I'm pretty sure I have right. Do you want me to tell DI Norris, or will you?”

Diana didn't move. She hardly blinked. She regarded Hazel levelly, while behind her eyes the creative mind was whirring.
Did
she know? Little Hazel Best, daughter of Byrfield's handyman?
How
could she know? How much could she prove? Or was it already too late to be worrying about that? “You don't know what happened,” she said flatly. “You may think you do, but you don't.”

“You know,” said Hazel pointedly.

“Yes.”

“Henry Byrfield knew.”

A much longer pause. Then: “Yes.”

“And David knows.”

For a second Diana's eyes kindled. Hazel thought it was less because the secret she'd kept for three decades seemed under threat, more a conditioned reflex to the sound of his name. Then her lip curled dismissively. “David knows nothing. He was five years old.”

“Children see as much as adults,” said Hazel. “They don't seem to remember as much as adults because they file it differently. It's a bit like computers—it's all in there somewhere but you have to know which buttons to press to get it out.”

Diana's lips tightened to a hard line. Her eyes were defiant. She said nothing. Silence had served her for thirty years; it was always going to be her strategy of choice.

Hazel sighed. So she was going to have to do it, and take the risk that she was wrong. It wouldn't be the first time. Even complete humiliation wore off after a while.

She said, “Jamie was ten, wasn't he, and David was five. It was a nice time for all of you. Jamie's little brother was getting big enough to play Frisbee with him. And you finally felt you could afford to take your eye off them for more than a minute at a time. Jamie was older, but you'd been waiting for David to grow enough to keep him safe. I'm sure you gave them lots of instructions. ‘Don't play on the road. Don't go near the lake. Stay away from the tractors.' And then you let them head out and enjoy the freedom of the Byrfield estate. After all, they were entitled.”

Hazel paused, head on one side, waiting for a response, but Diana offered none. She hardly seemed to be listening. It may have been because she knew how the story ended, or because she could see that Hazel had already strayed from the one true path.

Edwin Norris was attending closely. But he offered no comment, either.

Hazel went on. “You must have wondered later if you'd loosened the apron strings too soon. David was a smart, self-reliant child, but five is still only five, too young to be held responsible for his own actions, let alone those of his vulnerable older brother. But Jamie was going to be vulnerable however long you waited, and sooner or later you were going to have to take the risk. They were getting bored with the confines of your back garden. When you judged the time was right, you let them out to play cowboys and Indians in the woods.”

“I didn't like them playing—” Diana stopped herself.

Hazel smiled. “With toy guns. I know—David remembers. I have news for you: They played cowboys and Indians anyway. And they played Frisbee. And they stayed off the road, and away from the lake, and didn't get in the way of the tractors, and you thought they were safe. I expect you checked them every ten minutes at first, then every half hour. Finally you started to worry only if they were late for meals.” She looked across the Formica table at the older woman. “What happened then?”