by Jo Bannister
“Maybe not,” he retorted, “but my mother would. You’re not telling me that for more than thirty years she’s never thought to mention that he had Down’s? That would be … bizarre! He was her golden boy—the clever one, the good one, the one who’d have made her proud if our dad hadn’t whisked him off to the travelers in Ireland. Astrophysicist, brain surgeon, something like that. All my life, Jamie’s been the example I’ve failed to live up to. And you’re telling me he was some kind of a simpleton?”
“Not the words I’d have chosen,” said Hazel sharply. “He had an extra gene on one chromosome. It gave him a disability. It didn’t stop him from being a loving son and a fun-to-be-with older brother.”
“But the things she said!”
“David”—she sighed—“there are no baby books that tell you how to feel when the child you’ve been waiting nine months for turns out to be different to other people’s. It’s a shock. Overnight, your expectations have to change. That unspoken contract, that we look after our kids when they’re young and hope they’ll look after us when we’re old, goes out the window. A disabled child is likely to need care for the rest of his life, and that may mean the rest of yours.
“People react in different ways. Some people—surprisingly few, when you consider what it’s going to mean—decide they can’t cope and walk away. Some go to the other extreme—put all the love they’re capable of into this damaged scrap of humanity, as if trying to compensate for that first devastating bit of bad luck.
“That’s how your mother reacted. She was left to raise a disabled child alone—she had to love him, or the resentment would have destroyed her. So she poured everything into him. And yes, maybe that left less than there should have been for you. And maybe, in loving him despite his imperfections, she effectively blinded herself to them. After he was gone, of course, it was easy to remember only the best bits. Easier than it would have been if she’d still been caring for him. I’m sorry if it meant you had a difficult childhood, David. But think what she went through, and get over it.”
She’d done it again: left someone with the sensation of having been savaged by a hamster. Sperrin stared at her, literally openmouthed, for half a minute, which is a long time for the universe to hold its breath. Then his jaw clamped shut like a steel trap and he was on his feet and striding down the drive toward Burford before Hazel got over the shock of what she’d just said and hurried after him.
“Where are you going?” she demanded breathlessly when she caught up.
“Where do you think?” His face was dark with anger and set in hard lines; there was something urgent and mechanical about his pace, like a toy soldier marching to war.
“Don’t have this out with Diana just now! Not when you’re angry and upset. Calm down first. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.”
For another hundred yards she thought he was going to ignore her. Then, just short of the gate lodge, his pace began to slacken, his determination to waver. He finally came to an uncertain halt at Fred Best’s front door. “Jamie’s dead? That really was him we found?”
Hazel nodded. “Yes. There’s no room for doubt.”
“And he’s been dead for thirty years.” Sperrin stared at her as if he believed she was keeping something from him, something that might finally make sense of this. But she couldn’t help. All she could do was stand beside him as gradually he came to terms with it. “Thirty years,” he said again in a kind of wonder; and she knew that the absence of tears on his cheeks didn’t mean he wasn’t crying.
* * *
Hazel saw David Sperrin as far as his mother’s house, but she didn’t go inside. There were things he needed to say to Diana, and perhaps things she ought to say to him, and neither of them needed an audience. Hazel could only hope Sperrin would leave the cottage in Wool Row with some kind of understanding, not even so much for his mother’s sake as for his own.
Across the road and a little farther into Burford, a white dog was sitting on the pavement outside the Spotted Pig. Hazel waited a moment and Ash came across to her, Patience trotting at his heel.
“What are you up to?”
“Nothing.” But they’d known each other for a couple of months now, and he didn’t really expect that to satisfy her. When her gaze didn’t flicker and her eyebrows showed no signs of descending, he sighed and explained. “It’s just … there’s something odd here. Nobody’s seen Saul Sperrin for thirty years, but the moment you start asking about him he’s right there, armed and ready to kill. It just doesn’t seem that likely.”
Hazel shrugged. “It was a horse fair. One of the few places in England there was a decent chance of running into him.”
“It was a horse fair ten miles from a place where people knew him. Not other travelers, but people who owed him no favors. The last time he was in Burford, he kidnapped his son and the child ended up dead. David’s right: Why would he risk coming back here? You can’t buy horses in Ireland anymore?”
The fair brows finally lowered and knit thoughtfully as Hazel considered this. “Well, somebody ran us off the road and shot at us. I can’t think of anyone it’s more likely to have been. Can you?”
He didn’t answer that. He was thinking aloud. “And then, why come after us with a shotgun? If he didn’t buy your story about the horse, why not just disappear? He’s stayed off the radar for thirty years; he could do it again. And if he thought maybe there was a horse and he’d follow us to find out, why try to kill us before we got wherever it was we were going? And did he just happen to have a shotgun in his car? I mean, at what point did he think he was going to need that?”
And now Hazel had no answers. These events had seemed to follow a certain logic as they were happening. But they didn’t stand up to analysis. He was right: There was something else going on. Or something different.
“What were you doing in the pub?”
“I’ve been trying to get a picture of Saul Sperrin from people who were around thirty years ago. People who’d have met him, or at least seen him in the village, and formed some kind of an impression of him.”
“And some of the regulars must have been here forever,” Hazel agreed. “Did they remember him?”
“Oh yes.”
“And what did they say about him?” This was just a little like pulling teeth.
“It wasn’t what they said, exactly,” said Ash, frowning. “Or it was, but that wasn’t the significant thing.”
“Gabriel,” exclaimed Hazel impatiently, “will you for pity’s sake spit it out!”
He nodded, aware he was making a mess of this. “What Mrs. Perkins in the shop remembers, and what Mrs. Morrison the housekeeper remembers, and what the old men in the pub remember are all different. They’re describing different men.”
Hazel shrugged, obscurely disappointed. “You always get that with eyewitnesses. They remember different aspects of what they’ve seen—different things that made an impression on them. You have to put the various accounts together and look for common threads. Always—not just after thirty years.” She sniffed. “I’d have thought you’d know that.”
“I do know that.” Ash hid a tiny smile. It amused him when she talked as if she’d been doing the job for years. “And that’s what I thought it was, to start with. Some people remembered Sperrin as being taller or fatter, or having or not having red hair. But no two people remember any two things the same. The more people I talk to, the more descriptions I get of him. No one human being could match all of them.”
Hazel was beginning to share his puzzlement. She knew he wasn’t making this up. He didn’t invent things—he hadn’t that kind of imagination. He could be putting two and two together and getting eight. Or the people he’d spoken to might have been teasing him—he hadn’t the imagination to notice that always. Or maybe it meant something.
“So what are you thinking? That some of them are remembering someone else?” Inspiration glimmered. “Maybe Diana had other men friends. She’d only have been around th
irty then. Maybe when Saul let her down, she looked for company elsewhere, and some of the neighbors are remembering those men rather than Sperrin.”
“That’s possible,” agreed Ash. “By everyone’s account, Sperrin was never around much. I don’t think he ever really lived in the village. Maybe people just assumed the man coming out of Diana’s front door was her husband, when sometimes it wasn’t.”
Hazel waited, but he volunteered nothing more. She breathed heavily at him. “But that isn’t what you’re thinking, is it?”
“Well—no,” he admitted.
“And is it a secret, or are you going to tell me?”
“It’s going to sound pretty crazy,” Ash warned her.
Nobody she knew—nobody she cared for—came so close so often to getting a slap. “Gabriel, ever since we met you’ve been saying pretty crazy things to me! And the craziest thing of all is how many of them have turned out to be true. So yes, I might think you’ve finally lost your marbles, but I’m going to listen anyway. So talk.”
He bit his lip. He nodded. Then drew a deep breath and said, “I’m beginning to wonder if Saul Sperrin is a real person at all.”
CHAPTER 20
“YOU’RE SURE ABOUT this?” asked Hazel anxiously. But they were already walking back toward the cottage at the end of Wool Row.
“No, I’m not sure,” said Ash honestly. “You could be right, that there were a lot of men and Sperrin was just one of them. But that’s not what people are saying. They’re all saying they remember Saul Sperrin, but they’re all describing him in radically different ways.”
“And that means he doesn’t exist?”
“I don’t know what it means,” confessed Ash. “But it isn’t normal. Even after so long, you’d expect people to tell you more or less the same things. To remember the same significant events: the time he got drunk and smashed up the bar, the shillelagh he always produced on St. Patrick’s Day, the time he turned up driving an ex-military half-track—something like that. But so far nobody’s told me anything that anybody else has said. It’s as if…” He closed down, continuing the sentence inside his head.
Hazel tired of waiting. “As if what, Gabriel?”
Ash said slowly, “As if they went to the Nuremberg rallies and missed hearing Hitler. They know he was there, they know they were there, they assume something must have distracted them at the critical moment, but the fact is they missed something they think everybody else saw. So each of them has put it together in his own head, from what he’s been told, from what he thinks he knows, and each of them has created a memory that thirty years on he can’t distinguish from the real thing. A false memory.
“They don’t think they’re lying. When I ask about Saul Sperrin, this is the picture they get and they think they’re remembering him. But because the foundation for that memory is inside their own heads rather than something they actually witnessed, everybody’s recollection of the man is different. Nobody claims to have known him well. I’m not sure any of them ever actually saw him.”
Hazel was staring at him, literally openmouthed. “Can that really happen?”
“Oh yes,” he replied without hesitation. “There’s something in the human psyche that just longs to join in. The ‘Me, too’ impulse. Tell someone half the town saw a UFO, and there’s a good chance he’ll say ‘Me, too.’ He might have been inside bathing the dog, he might even have been in the garden and seen nothing, but if something that looks like a bandwagon goes rattling down the street, a lot of people feel the urge to jump on. They don’t feel like they’re lying. They think if a lot of people reported the UFO then there must have been a UFO, and if they were around that night they could have seen it, and if they could have seen it then it’s almost as if they did see it. The more often they’re asked to talk about it, the surer they become that they saw the same as everyone else.
“Only I think—I think—maybe nobody saw the UFO this time. That they’re all saying ‘Me, too.’ And this long after, they’ve no idea they’re doing it.”
By an act of physical will, Hazel closed her mouth. She dragged her eyes away from his face long enough to look where they were going. Her voice, when it came, wasn’t much more than a squeak. “And you’re going to put this theory to Diana Sperrin?”
“At this point, it seems the logical thing to do,” said Ash, with that trademark quiet obstinacy that you could take for humility if you weren’t concentrating. “She knows. Nobody else does.”
“But … but…” Hazel had to make herself focus on one problem at a time. “If it wasn’t Saul Sperrin who shot at us…?”
“Who was it?” Ash nodded. “That’s certainly a question we need an answer to. But it’s not one Diana can help with.”
“No,” agreed Hazel weakly. “Then…?” And then she saw what he’d seen, and her eyes flew wide again. If there was no Saul Sperrin, he not only couldn’t have run them off the road on their way home from the horse fair; he couldn’t have killed his elder son, either. “You think Diana killed Jamie?”
“I don’t know,” Ash said again. “That’s what I want to ask her.”
If Hazel hadn’t been so comprehensively floored by the direction his theory had taken them, she would have known that she had an absolute duty to stop him before he knocked on Diana Sperrin’s door. The hypothesis might or might not have merit—knowing him as she was coming to, perhaps it did—but it was for the police to pursue. She should have swung him around by the arm immediately, marched him back to Byrfield, and, if necessary, sat on his head while she phoned DI Norris. She knew that. She just didn’t have time to recognize that she knew it before Ash had let himself in at the gate and was knocking on the door.
David Sperrin opened it so quickly, he must have been about to leave. He looked pretty much the way Hazel felt. Ash steered him gently back inside. “I need to talk to you. Both of you.”
Diana put her head around the kitchen door. “Are you still…?” Then she saw the visitors. She froze, holding on to the door as if for support. Patience ambled calmly past her, immediately identified the most comfortable seat in the kitchen, and hopped up.
Diana was rallying fast. She fixed Ash with a hawkish eye. “I don’t think I have to talk to you.”
“No, you don’t,” he agreed without hesitation. “You will have to talk to Detective Inspector Norris.”
“I already did.”
“I know. But I don’t think you’ve told him everything.”
It was hard to judge from her expression, her chin raised, her eye still imperious, whether she understood. But David didn’t. He looked at his mother, then at Ash, then back at Diana, more puzzled each time. “Mum? Do you know what he’s on about?”
“No,” she said shortly. But if it had been true, she’d have been curious, too.
Ash paused, as if unsure how to begin. Then he said, “Somebody tried to kill us last night. Me and Constable Best. She’d been asking some gypsies about Saul, and we assumed that he was the one who’d come after us.”
He was watching Diana’s face. Hazel saw nothing there, a determined mass of nothing, but Ash had been doing this longer than she had and perhaps he had learned to read nothing.
He nodded. “I don’t think that now. I’ve come to ask you because I know you know. Apart from the man who shot at us, you’re the only one who does know for sure whether it was Saul.”
“I never left the house last night,” said Diana loftily. “And no one came here. How would I know who shot at you?”
“I don’t think you do,” said Ash. “But I think you know it couldn’t have been Saul Sperrin. Don’t you?”
She shrugged negligently. “I’ve no idea where he is or what he gets up to.”
“That’s not entirely true,” said Ash.
David Sperrin was moving quickly, and predictably, from confusion to anger. “What the hell is all this about? What are you accusing her of? You think she took a shot at you?”
Hazel shook her head. “No. It was de
finitely a man. We thought it was your father. Now Ash doesn’t think it could have been.”
“Okay.” Sperrin considered. “Well—isn’t that good?”
“Mrs. Sperrin,” said Ash, “do you have a passport?”
“What?” That surprised her. “No! Where would I go?”
“Or any official documents in that name?”
“What name?” demanded David, left behind again.
“Mrs. Saul Sperrin. A medical card? National Insurance number? A marriage certificate?”
Diana laughed out loud. “Good grief, is that what this is all about? You think you’ve caught me out in the terrible crime of being an unmarried mother? Of living in sin with a man I wasn’t married to, thirty years ago? God bless us all, I’m astonished to learn that anybody still cares!”
David understood that well enough. He even managed to look affronted. “You were never married?” he demanded. “You mean to say I’m…”
“A bastard, dear? Yes indeed. Aren’t you pleased? You’ve always worked so hard at it.”
“And Jamie?”
“A love child,” Diana said firmly. She made the distinction sound like a slap.
“Bugger me,” said David weakly, sinking onto the battered sofa. Patience moved over obligingly.
“Was that it?” Diana turned her pale searchlight gaze back to Ash. “Was that what you wanted to know? Can I go and do something useful now? Like arranging a proper funeral for my child.”
“Of course you must do that,” said Hazel firmly. “And if you want us to leave, we will. We have no authority here, either of us. It may not feel like it, but we really are only trying to help.”
“By pointing out that a man I haven’t, in any event, seen for thirty years never bothered to marry me?”
Ash’s tone remained polite. But it had developed a hard edge that Hazel had never heard there before. “Miss Best did not, in fact, say we’re trying to help you. Miss Sperrin—that is your name, isn’t it? The name you were born with?”
There was a fractional pause, then Diana nodded. “Yes. So?”
