by Jo Bannister
Byrfield gave a helpless shrug. “I can tell you who was living in the house if you can give me a date. But all sorts of people use the land, with and without permission. It’s not like it’s our garden—it’s rough grazing and woodland, we’ve never objected to local people coming here. You try to discourage poaching, but you can’t stop that, either, the best you can do is keep it manageable.
“There are four farms on the estate, so the families there and anyone working for them might pass through here. The local children play around the lake. Stockmen drive cattle across from one holding to another. Anyone mislaying a beast might come here looking for it. I’m sorry, Inspector, I can’t give you a list of people with a good reason to be here. People don’t need a good reason to be here.”
Norris breathed heavily at him. “Then can you tell me when you first noticed this mound?”
Byrfield did no better with that. “I never noticed it at all,” he admitted. “The whole area’s covered in lumps and bumps. David singled it out when he was field walking—surveying the land for possible archaeology. But that was less than a month ago, and you can tell from the turfs that it’s not been disturbed for years.”
Norris turned back to Sperrin. “What made you open this mound rather than any of the others?”
The archaeologist shrugged. “Instinct? Experience? It looked a bit more regular than some of them, it’s slightly separated from a lot of them, and when I stuck a ranging rod into the earth, I met stone. I didn’t know it was anything. I thought it was worth a look.” He grinned wolfishly. “You can’t say I was wrong.”
Norris squinted at him. “Sir—you are aware that we’re talking about the death of a child? I’m not sure your tone is altogether appropriate.”
Sperrin remained unconcerned. “Whatever happened here, it happened decades ago. Possibly before I was alive. Possibly before you were alive. It hasn’t been a tragedy for a very long time. Now it’s just a puzzle.”
The inspector continued to look at him just long enough to register his disapproval. Then he turned his gaze to Hazel. “Thank you for your help, Constable. We’ll get formal statements off everyone, but as Mr. Sperrin”—he pronounced the name carefully, the way you might handle something sticky—“points out, this isn’t a recent event, there’s no reason to connect it to any of you people. Even Lord Byrfield”—his lips formed a letter M before he remembered and corrected himself—“was probably a babe in arms when this happened. Not much point asking what you remember.”
Byrfield was looking thoughtful. “You could talk to my mother.”
Norris was taken aback, as if he thought earls arrived in the world in a different manner from normal folk. “She still lives here?”
Byrfield gave a slightly strained smile. “Oh yes. She has an apartment in the house. I’ll take you, if you like.”
The inspector considered. “Maybe later. No point troubling her until I know what questions to ask. Right now I don’t have even an approximate date of death. When I’ve had a preliminary report from Forensics, then I’m sure it would be helpful to talk to her. Er—I’m assuming she’s still—er…”
“In full possession of her faculties? Believe it,” said Pete Byrfield fervently.
After a moment Hazel touched his arm gently. “Come on, let’s leave them to it. There’s nothing we can do here except get in the way.”
He blinked, then gave her a grateful grin. As they walked back up the water meadow he said wistfully, “Isn’t it funny how the world changes? An hour ago, all I had to worry about was whether or not I’d got a Neolithic tomb on my land. Now it turns out that for most of my life there’s been a small child buried within sight of my house and nobody knew. I played down here when I was a boy. I don’t doubt I scrambled over that mound along with all the others. It makes you feel a bit … well, funny.”
“I think it’s rather nice,” said Hazel. “That even after he was dead, he still had other kids coming around to play.”
Byrfield smiled. He’d forgotten—or rather, not forgotten, just not thought about it recently—that she’d always had the ability to make him smile. They hadn’t been close friends when they were growing up—four years is a big age difference in your teens—but she’d always been somewhere on his radar, in the same way he’d always been somewhere on hers. He’d gone away to agricultural college, then she’d gone away to university, and it’s doubtful if either had given the other more than a passing thought in all the years since. But a link remained, and the link was Byrfield itself. Only in the most literal sense did Byrfield belong to Pete. In every other way Pete belonged to Byrfield, and so did the daughter of his handyman. Land has a grip like iron.
“I’m glad you were here,” said Byrfield. A thought occurred to him. “Does this mean you’ll be staying?”
Hazel hadn’t thought about it. She thought about it now. “We probably should, if only for a few days. Until Detective Inspector Norris says he’s finished with us. It’s not as if either Gabriel or I has anything to rush back to.”
“Good,” said Byrfield quietly.
CHAPTER 6
IN FACT, ASH had an appointment with his therapist on Tuesday, which he now doubted he’d be back in Norbold in time to keep. He excused himself as the party returned to the house and called her from the privacy of his room.
He wasn’t ashamed of having a therapist. Hazel knew anyway, and he suspected the others wouldn’t be surprised. But he was a private man. He avoided doing any personal business in public.
Laura Fry, after changing the bookings in her diary, showed an almost indelicate interest in the discovery by the lake. After Ash had told her all he knew, she was still asking for more details. “And are you all right?” she kept asking.
Ash, who hadn’t until then considered the possibility that he might not be, thought she was seeking an excuse to come and join in a real-life game of Cluedo. “Absolutely fine,” he said firmly.
“If you need to talk, call me.”
“I will.”
“Anytime.”
“Thank you. I will.”
He was heading back down when a door opened behind him and a woman said icily—he could almost hear the crackle of frost—“We don’t let the dogs upstairs.”
His first instinct was to apologize. For four years, almost the only intercourse Gabriel Ash had had with the world beyond his front door had been in the form of apologies. It had been his fallback position, as if by preemptively apologizing for anything and everything he’d ever done, including getting born, he could avoid engaging with other people.
But in the last few months things had begun to change. At Laura Fry’s suggestion he’d acquired the dog. Owning a dog had made him go out, and he’d crossed the paths of a lot of people who bore him no ill will. The apologies had started to feel misplaced. Then he’d met Hazel Best, and life had immediately become more complicated but also more rewarding. He hadn’t always been a shambling excuse for a man, and his heart held to the faint, stubborn hope that he wouldn’t always be one. He bit back the apology unspoken and turned to face his accuser.
“I’m Gabriel Ash, and this is Patience. We’re staying here.”
“Yes, I know.” She was a woman of about sixty, not tall but noticeably slim, with short, geometric ash-blond hair. The color may have come out of a bottle, but the cut was clearly, expensively, the real thing. Her arched, pencil-thin eyebrows and berry red lipstick were as flawless as a doll’s. She was wearing a pale linen jacket, a silk blouse, a tailored skirt, and pearl earrings. “We have no shortage of guest rooms. Nor, indeed, of sheds.”
Ash supposed he was talking with Byrfield’s mother. But the countess hadn’t introduced herself, and he saw no reason to guess. “We’ll try to stay out of your way. But neither of us will be sleeping in the shed.”
At the sound of voices, Pete Byrfield appeared at the foot of the stairs. He looked worried. More than that, he looked as if worried was his fallback position, at least when dealing with his moth
er. “There’s coffee and sandwiches in the kitchen, Ash, if you’re hungry. Mother, I need to talk to you. Something rather awful has happened.”
“I know,” said the countess, still looking at Ash. “Dogs. In the bedrooms.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Byrfield was climbing the stairs two at a time. “Patience isn’t a dog, she’s a guest. If she wants a long hot soak in Lady Anne’s marble bath, followed by a mani—a pedicure and a tea tray in the orangery, that’s exactly what she’ll get while it is in my power to provide it. Now, can we go to your room while I tell you what’s going on?”
Halfway down the curving staircase, Patience said smugly, I like that young man.
* * *
Edwin Norris began his career when the best chance of dating an illicit burial was if the murderer had wrapped the murder weapon in a copy of that morning’s newspaper and tossed it into the grave. It never failed to amaze him how accurate modern forensic science could be. The downside was how long you had to wait to be amazed. Medical examiners used to at least throw you a bone—“Hard to be sure, but death probably occurred between midnight and six on Friday morning”—to chew on until the autopsy was complete. These days about all they were willing to vouchsafe until the full results came back was that the victim was indeed dead.
A little boy, around ten years old, buried in a makeshift but carefully furnished grave on the Byrfield estate. Buried with toys and nicely dressed, laid out in what you might otherwise describe as a comfortable position. However he’d ended up dead and whoever was responsible, the person who had buried him had cared about him.
Norris had seen little graves like this before. Secret graves, usually quite tiny, for infants whose mothers had told no one of their pregnancy and meant to tell no one of their loss, but whose whole hearts went into the ground along with their child.
But the Byrfield boy had been ten years old. His hadn’t been a brief life known only to his mother—he must have had schoolfriends, teachers, neighbors, people who knew about him and missed him when he vanished. His birth must have been registered, and people must have asked questions when he disappeared. When Forensics finally came back with a time of death—to the nearest year would do—he could begin trawling through the records for missing children. Not just from this area. There was no knowing how far the child had traveled to his final rest in the peace of the Byrfield woods.
Norris was still pondering along these lines when his scenes of crime officer came in. As a mark of the years they’d worked together, he tapped on the detective inspector’s door after he’d opened it.
SOCOs always used to be policemen. Now they weren’t. But Kevin Green was one when Norris first knew him, so he sidestepped the whole staff-versus-agency issue and went on calling him Sergeant. “Any news for me, Sergeant?”
He was expecting the answer no. When Green nodded, his eyebrows climbed. “Oh? What?”
“Something … not very nice,” rumbled SOCO.
“As distinct from a ten-year-old child in a makeshift grave, you mean.”
SOCO sniffed. “You saw what I saw. You were thinking the same things. That someone had put that child to bed. That maybe they hadn’t done things properly but it was the best they could do in the circumstances. That they cared about him.”
Norris concurred. “So?”
“So why, if people cared so much about him, did he die of a shotgun blast to the face?”
* * *
Though lacking the same facts, Hazel was pondering the same contradiction. “Whoever made that tomb loved him. But they couldn’t keep him alive, and they felt they couldn’t report his death. Why not?”
“Something to hide or someone to protect,” said Ash immediately. Criminology had been part of what he’d been good at.
“You mean either one of his parents killed him in a fit of anger and then buried him in a state of remorse, or one of his parents killed him and the other buried him and kept the secret.”
“I suppose so. Anyone could have killed him, but then why would his parents keep quiet about it? It had to be a family affair. Nothing else makes sense.”
“It still doesn’t make sense.” Hazel was talking about it mainly because the alternative was sitting quietly and thinking about it. “Whoever loved him enough to bury him like that should have wanted justice for him. Even if it was their other half who killed him. You don’t go on loving someone who killed your child.”
“We don’t know yet what happened to him,” Ash reminded her. “It may have been an accident, but the circumstances were such that they were afraid they wouldn’t be believed. It may have been a momentary act of violence, or even carelessness. It doesn’t take much to end a child’s life. The one responsible may have been grief-stricken the moment it was too late. And the other one, who’d already lost their child, now faced losing their partner as well.
“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
WHEN ASH 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.”
