Perfect Sins

by Jo Bannister

  Alice Byrfield said, with all the hauteur of which she was capable, “There is no truth in any of this. Not in any of it.”

  They were the words her son longed to hear. It was their tragedy that he couldn’t believe them. Biting back tears, he said, “There is a way to be sure.”

  “Yes, there is,” agreed the countess. “You can believe what I’m telling you.”

  “But you’d tell us the same thing whether it was true or not,” said Viv, with devastating accuracy. “What way?”

  “DNA testing.”

  They thought Alice had been angry before. Now it was as if someone had found her fuse and lit it. Her voice rocketed; her face was incandescent with rage. “Peregrine Byrfield, you will do no such thing! If you speak of it again, I will disown you. I will leave here and I will never see you again.”

  “Mother…” By now he’d given up all attempts to contain the tears.

  Viv was a much tougher proposition. “And the downside of that is…?” She had a sharp intellect and a sharp tongue. Sometimes she was quick enough to think of the smart retort and too slow to realize it would be better left unsaid.

  There were no tears in Alice’s repertoire. But all her weapons were honed sharp. “Thank God your father didn’t live to see this! He’d never have believed you could treat me this way. After everything I’ve done for you—everything we both did. We lived our entire lives in a way we wouldn’t have chosen so that you could live yours exactly how you want. I never expected gratitude, not from either of you. But I didn’t expect to be accused of murder!

  “If you go on with this, you’ll bring the family down. Don’t you understand that? You’re not some small-town solicitor with doubts about his wife’s fidelity. You’re the twenty-eighth earl of Byrfield. You carry six hundred years of history on your shoulders, and the hopes of all the future generations. But if you get yourself tested, everyone will assume it’s because you’ve fathered a bastard. Now, I know you well enough to know that’s unlikely, but not everyone has my advantages. You turn up at some grubby little laboratory, and from that moment on the integrity of the Byrfield line will be in question. It wouldn’t be worth it if there was something much more important at stake than the identity of some child who died three decades ago!”

  “Some child? Or our brother? Mother, please,” begged Byrfield, “if you know the answer, tell us. It’s going to come out now, whether you want it to or not. For pity’s sake, don’t let us hear it from a policeman!”

  “What’s going to come out?” demanded Alice. “I’m not keeping anything from you! This … fantasy of yours is just that. Something you made up. Maybe it’s your own guilty conscience tormenting you. Because you haven’t been a resounding success as master of Byrfield, have you? There’s really only one thing that’s required of you, and thus far you’ve been a great disappointment!”

  “I think Pip’s shown remarkable foresight,” Viv shot back. “He’s clearly decided that if this is what the Byrfield family is reduced to, it’s probably time it was allowed to die out. Anyway, you’ve made one thing patently obvious. Since we can’t trust a word you say, DNA is the only way to resolve this. If Pip doesn’t want to do it, I will.”

  Byrfield was more touched than he could say. “Viv…”

  She laid her hand on his arm. “Let me do this,” she said quietly. “I’ve nothing to lose.”

  He cast her a grateful smile. “No, it’s my responsibility. It sort of goes with the title. But I could use some moral support, if you felt like going with me.”

  “It’s a date, little brother.” She squeezed his hand. “You do know I’m proud of you, don’t you?”

  CHAPTER 12

  DETECTIVE INSPECTOR NORRIS was not a happy man.

  He was old enough, just, to remember when detectives raced to the scene of a crime because such forensic evidence as they could collect would become harder to read with every hour that passed. Fingerprints and blood spots were about all the help you got with the typical inquiry. The job of finding out who did what to whom was down primarily to the man asking the questions. And he was in a hurry, too, because a lot of the people he wanted to question were just leaving on foreign holidays, and the rest were reminding other people how they’d spent the relevant hours with them, their gray-haired old mothers and if at all possible their parish priests. Speed was the essence of good police work.

  Now he seemed to spend most of those vital early hours, and often enough days, waiting for lab results to come back. Of course it was helpful, immensely helpful, to be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt who was present at the scene of an incident. All the pesky little fibers that flew up from a carpet when you stamped on someone’s head were as good as a witness. Better, because they couldn’t be intimidated. But it all took time. Edwin Norris couldn’t get his head around the fact that important work was being done, work that could convict the criminals, when he wasn’t doing it.

  Take the Byrfield business, for instance. Not even DI Norris could claim that time was of the essence when whatever happened had happened decades ago. But that sad little grave had gone unnoticed for all those years. Now it had been found, people who had thought themselves safe for a quarter of a century could be dusting off their suitcases and passports right now. He wanted to be rounding up anyone who might know anything—anyone, say, who was both alive and within twenty miles of Byrfield in the 1980s—and interrogating them under the full glare of an ecofriendly long-life ten-watt bulb. He wanted to be asking the good folk of Burford if they remembered a Down syndrome child living in or visiting the village thirty years ago.

  And he couldn’t, because he had to wait for the lab results. Asking the right person the wrong questions was worse than asking the wrong person the right questions. It told him you weren’t as clever as he was afraid you might be. It showed him your hand without requiring him to show you his. And it breached the first rule of successful detecting, which is always know the answer to a question before you ask it.

  Norris knew all this. He knew that when the results came in, he could have an identity for the dead boy, a cause of death, and a time window in which that death had occurred, and he wouldn’t have risked asking an innocent question of the one person in the district who was not an innocent person. The lab results would be objective, more reliable than people’s memories, and more detailed. They might identify the child for him; or if they couldn’t, they ought to be able to pinpoint the part of the country he came from, or if he’d moved around, what areas he’d moved through and even approximately when. The minerals laid down in his growing bones would be a log of his brief life. When they compared that log with the known history of the small company of children reported missing around that time, it should be possible to zero in on a probable identity and confirm it by DNA-testing the surviving relatives.

  Then he’d have to wait for the results to come back from the lab.

  He had not, of course, been entirely idle. He’d made contact with his opposite number in Dublin to inquire whether Saul Sperrin had come up on the Gardaí’s radar recently, or if they could place him at a definite location at any time in the last thirty years. He’d been through to the Police National Computer, to run the sparse early facts known about the Byrfield child against prepubescent boys reported missing anywhere in the UK in the relevant period. He’d set up an incident room and was putting together a murder board—a device almost as complex and stylized as the London Underground map—made up of colored felt-tip time lines, evidential photographs, and snippets of information as they came in, printed out on labels like luggage labels and pinned to a nexus where they seemed to make sense. Pinned, not glued, so they could be moved as more information, conflicting or confirming, came in and changed or strengthened the picture.

  He was told, by detectives of a younger generation, that a lot of this could be done more quickly on a computer screen. But to Norris a murder board was more than just a way of illustrating the state of play. It was an extension of his
own brain. In his more fanciful moments he felt it might keep working after he’d gone home, that one morning he’d come in and it would present him with the answer. It would then be promoted over him.

  Monday morning was still taking shape when one of his DCs stuck his head around the inspector’s door. “Miss Best’s here, sir.”

  “Constable Best,” Norris corrected him thoughtfully.

  The detective constable looked surprised. “Really?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Shall I show her in?”

  “I think you’d better,” Norris said. “The last senior officer who annoyed her ended up on a slab.”

  When Hazel had called him, Norris had been sufficiently intrigued to make inquiries about her background. What he learned startled him but seemed to have little relevance to the present case. The girl had grown up on the Byrfield estate; that was all. Her father still worked there. She’d been there when the dead boy was found but not when he went into the ground. She probably hadn’t been alive then. Norris agreed to see her mainly out of curiosity as to what she wanted to say.

  Hazel had done a lot of police interviews in her short career, not all of them from the right side of the table. She was no longer intimidated by the mere procedure. It didn’t matter what you were asked, only how you answered. To a larger extent than was widely recognized, the interviewee was in control of the session. If you kept calm, listened to the questions, answered concisely, and didn’t feel the need to fill every silence, you wouldn’t be tricked into saying anything more or other than you wanted to. This applied equally whether you were telling the truth or not.

  So she greeted DI Norris politely and took the chair he indicated, then took a moment to compose herself before starting to explain the purpose of her visit.

  Norris heard her out almost without interruption. He, too, had learned the power of silence, and it was hard to judge if he was surprised, or suspicious, or happy to consider an offer that might advance his inquiry but could do it no harm if it didn’t.

  He made notes as she talked, went back to check them when she’d finished. More silence as he struggled to read his shorthand. Hazel waited.

  Finally the DI looked up and smiled. “Let me see if I have this straight. You’re going to provide me with a DNA profile. It isn’t your profile. It’s the profile of a friend of yours who’d like to remain anonymous unless the results make that impossible by proving a relationship to the dead boy. Am I right so far?”

  Hazel indicated that he was.

  “Your friend, I presume, has concerns that he’s anxious to allay. He—”

  “Or she,” interjected Hazel, deadpan.

  “—Or, as you say, she thinks he—”

  “Or she.”

  “—May be related to this child and wants to know for sure. He or she hopes that a comparison of the two profiles will prove otherwise so he, she, or it can sleep nights again.” He sniffed. “Of course, far from allaying these fears, the lab work may confirm them. Your friend must be aware of this, and so must have decided that even bad news would be better than not knowing and always wondering. Still on track?”

  Hazel risked a little smile. “On track and on time.” She’d once dated a steam railway enthusiast.

  “This friend of yours is aware that if the results yield any pertinent information there can be no further question of anonymity? They’ll become part of the case whether they like it or not.”

  “We discussed this. It’s a chance they’re willing to take.” Like Norris, she opted for the ungrammatical rather than the endlessly pedantic.

  “I see.” The DI made another note. “And what do I get out of all this?”

  Hazel blinked. She’d been ready for questions, but not that one. “Sorry, sir?”

  “Well, your friend gets to know for sure about something that’s troubling him. Some possible blot on his family escutcheon that he hopes I’ll be able to remove. But what do I get? A potential witness, someone who might know something about a crime—and not just any crime but murder, the murder of a vulnerable little boy—doesn’t want to talk to me about it. Doesn’t want to tell me what he knows, or at least suspects. Doesn’t want me to know what grounds he may have for those suspicions. Doesn’t even want me knowing who he is. Where I come from, Constable Best”—he emphasized the word just enough to remind her both that she was still a police officer and that she wasn’t a very senior one—“we call that obstruction.”

  Hazel shook her head insistently. “That isn’t at all my friend’s intention. You get the same thing out of it that they do. Certainty. If there’s no connection, you won’t need to know who provided the sample because it will have ruled them out of the inquiry. But if it comes back positive, then what you have is someone ready to tell you everything they know. Which may not be much, but at least you’ll be barking up the right family tree. You stand to lose nothing, sir, and you could avoid a great deal of wasted time and effort.”

  Norris, still thinking, squinted at her. “And what do you get out of it?”

  Hazel beamed. “The warm glow of knowing I’ve helped a friend and the police.”

  “If—if—I agree, how does it work?”

  Hazel knew then that she’d succeeded. Whether, in the long run, that would be a good thing, only time would tell. “My friend will have the laboratory send you a copy of the profile, under my name. You’ll compare it with the DNA taken from the boy. Then you’ll call me. If they don’t match, I’ll set my friend’s mind at rest and you’ll keep looking for the boy’s real family. But if it shows my friend and the dead boy are related, I’ll bring him, or her”—she remembered just in time—“in and you can ask all the questions you need to.”

  “Your friend has agreed to this?”

  “Absolutely. They need to know. If the boy was part of their family, they’ll want to know how he died and who killed him.”

  “They may not want me to know how he died and who killed him.”

  “If that’s the way this goes, they won’t have a choice. They understand that.”

  “Understanding it now, and still understanding it when their family tragedy is about to go public, are two different things.”

  “I have their word.”

  “And that’s enough, is it?” He waited with lifted eyebrow, but Hazel made no response. “Well, since I’m prepared to take your word, I can hardly criticize you for taking your friend’s. But I want you to be very clear about where your priorities lie, Constable. My investigation takes precedence over your friendship. The moment you involved me in this, it stopped being a private concern and became a police matter. Even if you weren’t a serving officer, you would owe me the truth if it turns out that you have access to it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes sir,” he echoed woodenly. “Easy enough to say. But divided loyalties are about the most difficult test a police officer has to face.”

  “Oh, I know that, sir.” Hazel’s tone was heartfelt.

  “Yes, you do, don’t you?” he said softly. DI Norris reached a decision. “It’s not exactly by the book, but I can see that I stand to gain more than I stand to lose. All right, set it up. We’ll compare the profiles. If we learn nothing helpful, no one who doesn’t already know should learn it was ever done.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” She headed for his door, a lightness in her step from the sense of a difficult job well done.

  “Miss Best?”

  Hazel paused in the doorway and looked back. “Sir?”

  “You can tell Lord Byrfield I’ve no idea who this friend of yours is.”

  CHAPTER 13

  SOME SENSE OF Norris’s mounting frustration must have found its way to the forensic science laboratory, because the results he was waiting for started coming back on the Wednesday.

  Edwin Norris remembered when forensic results were delivered in person because the white-coated boffins who produced them didn’t trust the down-at-heel coppers who’d ordered them to understand wha
t they meant. Now everyone in a police station, including the tea lady, was expected to be able to read a DNA profile, and the results came by fax.

  The detective inspector spent half an hour studying the papers in front of him, making sure that he understood them, making sure that his reading was confirmed by the accompanying report. This wasn’t something you wanted to get wrong. He was about to tell a woman that the son she’d believed to be safe with his father in Ireland, who’d sent her Christmas cards and birthday cards as regular as clockwork, had been quietly moldering under a grassy mound within a mile of her home for thirty years, until his own brother dug him up. Norris didn’t want to have to go back to her tomorrow to say, “Well, actually, we may have got that wrong.…”

  But there was no room for doubt. The profile extracted from the sad remains in the little grave matched exactly the swab provided by David Sperrin. Same mother, same father. The grave was that of Jamie Sperrin, and Edwin Norris had the unenviable task of telling Diana.

  He wanted David there, too, to support his mother. Her world was about to be blown apart. The fact that it had been built on a false premise would be precious little comfort. So he drove first to Byrfield. When the twenty-eighth earl answered the door, Norris had to remember not to wink at him. The deal had required discretion unless something turned up that left him no discretion to use. Well, that wasn’t going to be a problem now.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Sperrin,” he said, his special policeman’s expression that was noncommittal to the point of stony cranked into place.

  They were in the library. There seemed to be some sort of a game going on. It involved the books that lined the walls to above head height, and occupied the two men who were scanning the spines intently, but not Hazel, who was sitting in a chair half turned away from them, leafing through a magazine and looking bored. Even the white dog seemed more interested in the game, gazing up at the shelves as if they had some meaning for her. But the dog was just looking where her owner was looking.