by Jo Bannister
“And you haven’t thought of anything that would help us find him?”
“Inspector Norris,” she said, her strong jaw coming up almost belligerently, “if I’d known how to find my husband, don’t you think I’d have done it when he took my son? Don’t you think I’d have done it at some point in the thirty years since?”
The detective nodded. “I’m sorry for what happened. Sooner or later, we will find him.”
“I dare say you will,” said Diana resentfully. “Now he’s taken a potshot at one of you.”
* * *
There was no way of keeping what had happened from Sperrin’s son, and Ash didn’t think it right to try. The man was entitled to know what was going on. It affected him more closely than any of them.
Or would have done if he’d believed it. “Whatever happened thirty years ago,” he said roughly, “what possible reason could my father have for shooting at you?”
“We gave him a reason,” Ash said quietly, “by going to that camp and asking about him. No one else had anything to gain by following us, let alone trying to kill us.”
David Sperrin stared pugnaciously at him. “If he did what he’s supposed to have done, why would he be within a hundred miles of this place? All he has to do is live in Ireland under an assumed name and he’s safe. If it’s worked for thirty years, why would he do anything different?”
Hazel had come up to the house when her father came to work. She poured herself a cup of coffee. “Maybe he thinks thirty years is long enough.”
Sperrin turned on her like a machine gunner. “So he chooses just now, when the body’s been found, to look up friends and family?”
“He may not have known we found Jamie,” said Hazel reasonably. “And the other thing is, he may have been back before. But nobody was looking for him, so nobody realized.”
“Do you look like him?” asked Ash. “Neither of us got a good look at the guy last night. But he wasn’t a big man, and he seemed fairly quick on his feet.”
I told you why that was, Patience said complacently.
“I don’t look much like Mum, so I suppose I must,” Sperrin admitted reluctantly.
Small and dark. All Hazel could have said about the man with the gun was that he was neither a midget nor a giant. He might have been David Sperrin’s double—he might have been David Sperrin—and she wouldn’t have known. It had been too dark, and there had been too much going on.
A little later Ash walked Patience as far as the shop in Burford. Byrfield’s housekeeper had given him a list of supplies that were running short now she was feeding the five thousand. She’d meant to drive into the village later, but she appreciated his offer and refrained from adding a stone of potatoes to the order.
News of the previous night’s events had already run around the village. Ash felt himself the object of curious looks. This was not, per se, a situation he was unfamiliar with, and at least the villagers didn’t shy beer cans after him.
They did shy questions. He offered as little information as he could consistent with common courtesy, citing the ongoing investigation. The shopkeeper, an elderly woman with a froth of white hair and the apple cheeks of the terminally jovial, was deliberately slow filling his order so she could keep chivying him for details. Partly in self-defense, he came back with some questions of his own. Then he and Patience walked home. Patience did not carry the newspaper. She was not that kind of dog.
“You were a while,” said Hazel, helping to put away the shopping.
“I got waylaid by the old lady in the shop.”
“Amelia Perkins,” sniffed the housekeeper, whose name was Mrs. Morrison, moving the bread from where Hazel kept it to where she kept it. “Known to one and all as Nosy Perkins.”
Ash chuckled. “I can’t imagine why.”
“Because she thinks owning the only shop is the same as owning the rights to know what everyone in the village is doing, has done, and is thinking of doing.” Mrs. Morrison spoke with the quiet steel of someone who didn’t like to have her activities observed.
“How long has she been here?” asked Hazel, absentmindedly putting the breakfast rolls into the cupboard from which Mrs. Morrison had just removed the bread. “Did she remember Saul Sperrin?”
“For a little over a hundred years,” said Ash, exaggerating slightly, but that was the impression she’d given. “And as a matter of fact, she did. She says David’s wrong, he doesn’t look like Saul at all. She says he was quite a tall man, with red hair.”
“Then her memory isn’t all she thinks it is,” snorted Mrs. Morrison, “because he had black hair. I wouldn’t have said he was tall, particularly, though he was well-enough built. Stout, even.”
“You’ve been here for thirty years?” asked Ash, his eyebrows expressing gallant surprise.
“Longer,” said Mrs. Morrison, not without some pride. “I came here as maid when I was sixteen. And that’s”—she did the sum, didn’t want to share the result—“long enough since.”
“Did Mr. Morrison work on the estate, too?” asked Ash.
She was a tall, rather angular woman with an austere expression that collapsed like a falling soufflé when she was amused, as now. “Bless us all, there is no Mr. Morrison, and never was. It’s a professional title. Cooks and housekeepers are always Mrs. It’s considered more respectable, particularly if the gentleman is unmarried. Of course, some people will always talk. And sometimes,” she confided, moving the breakfast rolls without comment, “there’s good reason to talk. Nothing like that here, of course. His lordship’s late father was a gentleman through and through.”
“I wish people wouldn’t keep saying that,” Hazel said later, when they were alone. “As if Pete’ll never be the earl his father was.”
“You told me what a decent man the”—Ash couldn’t remember the numbers—“last earl was.”
“I know I did. And it’s true. But every time one of us repeats it, somehow it belittles Pete. And Pete’s a good man, too. And his father’s been dead for nine years.”
“What was he like?” asked Ash. “Or rather, who was he like—Pete or Vivienne?” He hadn’t met the younger daughter.
“The girls. He was rather short and square, and very down-to-earth, and very kind. Imagine Viv in plus fours. I don’t know who Pete takes after. He has his dad’s personality—thank God he doesn’t have his mother’s!—but he’s much taller, and fairer. Maybe he’s a throwback to those early warrior earls. His dad was a farmer through and through. That’s where Pete got his love of the land.”
Ash smiled. “I take it you favor your mother.”
Hazel nodded. “She was from farming stock, too, though not in this part of the world. She came from Lancashire. In the wedding photos, she’s bent at the knees so she doesn’t loom over my dad. The funny thing is, I never thought of him as a small man until I realized I was looming over him as well. I don’t think any of his squaddies thought of him as a small man, either. At least they always decided they’d sooner face the enemy than turn around and face him.”
Ash chuckled. Hazel looked curiously at him. “What about you? Mummy’s boy?”
He laughed out loud. They’d reached that comfortable stage of friendship where they could say almost anything to each other and it wouldn’t cause offense if no offense was intended. “I think I’m more like my father. He was a tax inspector—a numbers man. I think that’s why I’m always trying to analyze things.”
I never knew my father, Patience said piously.
“You must have been a laugh a minute as a kid,” Hazel said with a grin.
Ash looked rueful. “I don’t think I was ever a kid. I was good at math. I found geography interesting. I was prone to panic attacks at the approach of any kind of ball, and for some reason winning the chess league three years running didn’t make me popular, either. I didn’t like being a child. I promised myself that when I had—”
And there he stopped. Stopped dead, as if his throat had been cut. Hazel knew what he�
��d been about to say, knew, too, that for just a moment he’d forgotten. Forgotten what he’d lost. It hardly seemed possible. For four years it probably hadn’t been. But life goes on, and normality tries to reestablish itself, however challenging the odds, and for Ash that meant forgetting, just for a moment, that he’d once had two sons and now they were gone.
Even six months ago the reality of that had been so overwhelming that it never left the forefront of his mind. And now, just for a moment, he’d forgotten. The guilt slid between his ribs like a knife. But it was progress of a kind.
Hazel watched him with compassion. “Gabriel—is this a good place for you to be? Would it be better if you took Patience home now?”
He managed a painful smile. “Because there, of course, nothing reminds me of my family.”
They sat in silence for some minutes. Hazel said nothing more, just sat with him, keeping him company. She hoped—she had no way of knowing for sure—that there was some comfort in that for him. She didn’t know what else to do.
And then she did. “Tell me about them,” she said. “Your sons. What they were like. What they did. Who they were.”
For a moment, as the expression froze on his face, she thought she’d hurt him terribly. But it was just astonishment. In four years almost no one had spoken of them in his presence. It was the place where angels feared to tread. For fear of twisting the knife in the wound, people had hurt him the other way, by almost pretending they’d never existed.
When the surprise passed and his expression softened, Hazel saw she’d guessed right. There was a warmth in his deep-set eyes. There would be tears there, too, soon, but that didn’t matter. If a man can’t cry for his lost children, what is the world worth?
“Gilbert’s the oldest. He’d be eight now. Would be—will be.” There was no point struggling with the tenses: Ash knew that Hazel understood that no one knew if those boys were dead or alive. “He takes after me. A lot goes on inside his head. He thinks things out, analyzes them, plans his moves. He likes finding things out. He was just learning to read when they disappeared. He was racing ahead, because he’d realized how much he could get from books once he could read them.”
He smiled. “A year before, his default position was ‘I’ll ask Daddy.’ Every time he needed an answer and either no one else knew or no one had the time to explain, he’d just nod wisely and say, ‘I’ll ask Daddy.’ Then, as he came to understand my limitations, it was ‘I’ll get Daddy to find out.’ But once he was reading, it was always ‘I’ll look it up.’ Why the moon changes shape, why things fall down, not up, why grass keeps growing if you cut it but daffodils don’t—‘I’ll look it up.’ He didn’t understand everything he read, but he was getting there. He was definitely going to be a scientist of some kind.
“Guy was different in every way. He’s much more like his mother—outgoing, gregarious, a people person. You could tell that while he was still in his pram. By the time he was two, he’d worked out that you catch more flies with sugar than vinegar. While other two-year-olds were throwing tantrums, mine was polishing his charm. And by God, it served him well! You couldn’t be angry with him. He’d look at you with those huge dark eyes, and you’d know he was laughing at you, and you couldn’t help laughing, too. I don’t know what Guy would have grown up to be. An entertainer, possibly. Or a politician. Something where the ability to tell barefaced lies is a major advantage.”
The tears were coming freely now. He dashed them away with his free hand. “Oh God, Hazel, I miss them. I miss them so much.”
She reached across the table to squeeze his hand. “Of course you do.” There were tears on her cheeks, too.
“I loved being a father. That came as a huge surprise to me. It was something I hadn’t expected. Not so much having children—that’s pretty natural, after all—but taking so much joy in them. It was as if I’d found the thing I was really good at, the thing I was put on earth to do. To be a father. To be the best father in the history of the world.” He managed a damp chuckle at her expression. “I know, the odds are I wasn’t any better at it than most men, but I felt I was. Those boys made sense of my existence in a way that even professional success hadn’t.
“And then they were gone. I wasn’t a father anymore. Or a husband, or a professional. I was none of the things that had shaped my life, given it substance and value. It really is no wonder that I fell apart, is it?”
“No, Gabriel,” whispered Hazel, “it isn’t.”
“Thank you,” he said. “For asking about them. You have no idea how good it feels to be able to talk about them. To feel that my head isn’t the only place where they still exist. That they haven’t been entirely obliterated by what happened.”
There was nothing Hazel could say to that. But then, there was nothing that needed saying.
* * *
The second batch of DNA results came in on Friday morning. DI Norris called Hazel as soon as he’d read the report. It didn’t take long to absorb its contents. It only confirmed what the first batch had established. “Your friend who shall remain nameless, though not necessarily untitled, is no relation to the child by the lake.”
Although Pete Byrfield had known he was off the hook, except possibly with his mother, for two days, Hazel appreciated the call. “Thank you. I’ll tell him.” She hesitated. She had no right to ask. But then, he was under no obligation to answer. “The tests on the child—he really did have Down syndrome?”
Strictly speaking, Norris should have wished her good day and hung up. Somehow it seemed a little late for that. “Yes. The DNA showed the extra gene.”
“But David said there was nothing wrong with his brother.”
She seemed to hear Norris shrugging. “He was five when the kid went missing. How much was he going to remember?”
Hazel remembered what she’d said to Ash, that she’d only realized her father was a small man when she found herself talking to his bald spot. “I suppose that’s true. Children take things pretty much at face value. It’s only later that we start wanting to classify them. Big, little, perfect, imperfect.”
“There’s that,” acknowledged the DI. “And then, kids’ memories work differently to those of adults. Small children can forget completely things that we as adults find hauntingly memorable. It’s why they make such difficult witnesses—not because they’re likely to lie, not even because they can’t cope with being questioned, but because they just don’t file memories in such a way that they can pull them out again.”
“I suppose sometimes that’s a good thing.” She was thinking of Ash’s sons. If against all the odds either of them had survived to be raised by another family somewhere, it was better, for them, that they didn’t know where they’d come from, about the trauma that had ripped their family apart.
Norris made no comment. “Are you going to be sticking around, Best?”
“Yes.” She didn’t elaborate, and Norris didn’t ask her to.
“In that case, do you want to make it official? I can get you a temporary transfer.”
That surprised her. It was an unexpected compliment, that he wanted her on his team. But after a moment she shook her head. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think I can. I need to be here, not in the inquiry room. Also, strictly speaking, I’m considered unfit for duty.”
“Mm.” Norris sounded unconvinced. He may have been thinking about the events of Wednesday night, and wondering what she got up to when she was fit for duty.
CHAPTER 19
DAVID SPERRIN DIDN’T know what to do with himself. An archaeologist prevented from digging is never a happy sight, but this one had more on his mind than rain, bank holidays, and problems with the paperwork. He should have been with his mother, but Wool Row was the last place he felt he’d be welcome. Instead he hung about Byrfield, unusually clean and drinking too much coffee.
And everyone else, in deference to his odd status as the newly bereaved brother of someone who had died thirty years before, was giving him too wide a b
erth. They meant it kindly. They thought he needed space. He didn’t; he needed company. He needed people to argue with.
Byrfield would probably have guessed this, and volunteered for the task. But Byrfield was out in the fields, catching up on work he’d neglected when he’d been preoccupied with his own dysfunctional family.
Once again, Hazel found herself rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. She made a jug of lemonade, took Sperrin out onto the lawn, and sat him down under one of the biggest surviving elms in England to drink it. “I can’t imagine how you’re feeling. I don’t suppose confused does more than scratch the surface.”
Sperrin snorted. Like the man himself, it was a sound angry on the outside and vulnerable underneath. He seemed almost grateful to have someone telling him where to go and what to do. “It doesn’t make any sense!”
“It doesn’t seem to make much, does it?” agreed Hazel. “Of course, it’ll make more when we know everything.”
“Why would my father kill Jamie? Why would he try to kill you?”
“The first may have been an accident,” she suggested. Until there was evidence to the contrary, it was the best thing for him to think. “The second an act of panic.”
“He had no reason to connect you with anything that happened here,” objected Sperrin. “You didn’t even live here when he left.”
“I wasn’t actually alive when he left,” murmured Hazel. “But you’re right, of course. And nothing I said at the horse fair should have warned him. I don’t know how he knew we were a threat to him.”
It wasn’t the only puzzle that was consuming Sperrin. “This is all wrong,” he muttered, no longer looking at her, but inside himself, sieving his memory, trying to reconcile what he thought he knew with what Detective Inspector Norris thought he knew. “How can it be Jamie that we found? He didn’t have Down syndrome. There was nothing wrong with him.”
“You were very young,” she reminded him gently. “Young enough that, to you, he was just your big brother. Would you have been aware if he had health problems?”
