by Jo Bannister
“I think I might tell you where to put your obstruction.”
“Boys, boys,” said Hazel, trying hard to mollify. “David—is there a realistic chance that your mother might confide in you?”
“In me?” The soar of his voice contained the answer. “Why would she start now? She doesn’t even like me.”
“So the question is academic,” said Hazel. “Diana isn’t going to talk to David, so he isn’t going to be able to withhold material information. You talked about a motive?”
DI Norris sniffed. She was right, but that didn’t mean he had to like Sperrin’s attitude. “Thirty years ago, when that little boy died, his mother had something to hide. If she hadn’t, she’d have called us and called for an ambulance, and Jamie would have got his Christian burial and we’d have known how and why he died, and if anyone was to blame.
“If Diana’s telling the truth, she denied us that opportunity when she buried him secretly at Byrfield. Your father…” He glanced at the twenty-eighth earl, then at Sperrin, then gave up entirely. “The last earl would have been master of Byrfield then, so it’s possible they did it together. But either of them would have been free to come to me—well, my predecessor—if they blamed the other for what happened. To that extent we have to consider it a conspiracy.”
A lot had been thrown at Pete Byrfield today. He’d been told that his father wasn’t his father, his sisters weren’t his full sisters, and even he wasn’t who he’d always believed he was. Much of it had amazed, puzzled, even amused him, but none of it had angered him. But this did. Sparks crackled in his pale Viking eyes. “You didn’t know my father, Inspector. For that reason, and that reason only, I’m prepared to forgive you that suggestion. But talk to anyone in the village. Talk to anyone who knew him—anyone who had dealings with him. Tell them you think he conspired to cover up the death of one of his children. They’ll laugh in your face.”
DI Norris made no reply. He swiveled on his heel until he was looking at David. “Mr. Sperrin?”
David swallowed. “I hardly knew him.”
“I understand he helped you get to university. Why did you suppose that was?”
Sperrin looked bewildered. “I just thought he was a kind man. That he took his duties as lord of the manor more seriously than most, and he helped me because he could.”
“Did he send any of the other village children to university?”
Byrfield’s tongue hadn’t lost its irascible edge. “Inspector, you know why he helped David. He was David’s father. There’s nothing sinister about it. He had a son he felt he couldn’t acknowledge, but he could support him. What are you suggesting? That David should have known? That he did know?”
Norris was still looking at the archaeologist. “Did you?”
David Sperrin passed a weary hand across his face. “I never suspected. Not for a moment.”
“A lot seems to have passed you by,” observed DI Norris critically. “Your brother’s medical condition. His death. The fact that your supposed father was a figment of your mother’s imagination, and that the kind man who lived in the big house was your real father. Are you always this”—he wanted to say dim—“gullible?”
“He was only five when Jamie died,” Hazel pointed out, pursing her lips in discreet disapproval.
“Yes. And how old were you the last time your mother put a card on the mantelpiece and said, ‘That’s from your brother James’? I mean, didn’t you recognize her handwriting?”
Sperrin shook his head in a kind of wonder. “Inspector, I can’t help you. Maybe you’re right—maybe I was very, very stupid. But I never suspected anything. She told me our father had taken Jamie, and I believed her. And I never thought to have a graphologist analyze the Christmas cards.”
They regarded each other levelly for half a minute more. Then Norris didn’t so much blink as turn a page. “Okay. Well, I don’t think there’s anything else you can tell me at the moment, is there? I’ll probably want to talk to all of you again at some point, so I’d be obliged if anyone planning a foreign holiday would put it on hold. Except maybe you two”—his gaze traveled between Hazel and Gabriel Ash—“for whom it might be a very good idea.”
“We can’t do that, Inspector,” said Hazel. One elevated eyebrow asked her why not. “Patience hasn’t had her rabies shots.”
“And that,” said Norris with conviction, “might explain a very great deal.”
“I don’t know why he thinks we’re mad,” said Byrfield plaintively after the policeman had gone. “It’s not like any of this was our doing. We’re hardly to blame for the actions of our parents!”
“Whoever they were,” muttered Sperrin.
Byrfield was watching him with concern. The nice thing about Pete Byrfield, Hazel thought, is that although he worries a lot, mostly what he worries about are other people. “We need to talk to a solicitor. If you like, we can talk to separate solicitors.”
Sperrin peered at him uncertainly. “Why would we want to do that?”
“Because you need someone looking after your interests who isn’t also looking after the Byrfield family interests.” He drew himself up straight. “But the first thing is to get someone down to the police station to look after Diana. Whatever she does or doesn’t want to tell Inspector Norris, she needs someone by her side, guiding her through. Our solicitor can do that.” He glanced at Hazel, who nodded approval.
Byrfield turned his attention back to Sperrin. “Once that’s in hand, though, you need to think about what this means to you. And you’ll need someone by your side, guiding you, who hasn’t been in my family’s employ for the last thirty years. I can’t imagine there’ll be a conflict of interests. I’m determined there won’t be. But I also don’t want either of us wondering, further down the line, if we resolved matters appropriately. If you got everything you’re entitled to.”
“Like what?”
As far as Hazel could judge, Sperrin’s astonishment was genuine.
“Like I don’t exactly know,” said Byrfield impatiently. “But you’re my father’s son, and I don’t propose to see you excluded from the advantages that ought to bring.”
David laughed out loud. “Pete, I’m a bastard! I thought I was the son of a feckless Irish traveler, it turns out I’m the by-blow of an English gentleman. That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’ll have a material effect on my way of life! Look. He did all right by me. He got me to university when there was no other way I could have gone. He gave me pretty much everything I’ve got, and though it might not be what you’d have chosen, it is what I chose. I like rolling the turf back to see how people did things a thousand years ago. I have absolutely no interest in cows. You couldn’t pay me enough to take over the running of Byrfield. Each to his own, my friend, and let’s leave the lawyers to make money out of mugs.”
Pete stood looking at him, as if wondering how much of it he meant, or would go on meaning, for some moments. Then he turned and headed for home. “We’ll talk again, when the dust’s settled. In the meantime, I’ll get Parsons, or possibly Parsons, or, failing him, Parsons, to run over and see Diana.” The front door of the cottage closed behind him.
After he’d gone, Hazel turned to David. “Are you all right?”
Impossible to tell if he was nodding or shaking his head. “I don’t know what that means anymore. My brother’s dead. And it seems stupid to start grieving now, because he’s been dead for most of my life. And my mother knew. Knew?… She buried him! My father may have helped. Of course, my father isn’t the man I thought he was…” He blew out a gusty sigh. “All right? I’m going with probably not.”
“On the bright side,” suggested Hazel, “you’ve got two half sisters you didn’t know about.”
“Yeah,” he growled. “They’re going to be thrilled about that.” A thought struck him with sudden horror. “This doesn’t mean I’m related to Pete’s mother, does it?”
CHAPTER 23
THEY WERE WALKING back up the drive toward By
rfield. Patience disappeared into the rhododendrons, on the trail of a rabbit.
Ash was quiet. There was nothing unusual about this. But Hazel was learning to read his silences as you might read another man’s body language. Sometimes he was silent because he was thinking, sometimes because he didn’t want to think. Sometimes he was silent because there was nothing he wanted to say, and sometimes because there was nothing he could say.
This was a thinking silence. Hazel slowed her stride to match his. “You’re wondering what happened to Jamie.”
Ash nodded. “Yes.”
“Do you think Diana killed him?”
He didn’t answer immediately. Then he shook his head. “No. I think she’d have said so if she had. There’s a vein of adamancy in that woman. I don’t think her pride would allow her to hide behind a lie.
She probably doesn’t fancy doing time any more now than she did thirty years ago.”
“I don’t think that’s why she lied then. I think she was protecting someone else.”
“Henry?”
Ash nodded. “Maybe.”
“Henry’s been dead a long time now,” Hazel pointed out. “He doesn’t need protecting anymore.”
“True. But that also means there’s no one left to contradict anything she says. She could say Henry Byrfield shot Jamie, and it’s unlikely Inspector Norris could prove any different. That would be the safest lie to tell, if she was prepared to lie. If it is a lie.”
“You didn’t know him.” But Hazel no longer sounded as confident as she once had. It seemed none of them had known him as well as they thought they had. Except just possibly his wife. Everyone remembered the last earl fondly, and no one had a good word to say about the countess. But he’d had two children out of wedlock before she succumbed to the unknown Viking, and even then she may have been thinking more of the Byrfield title than of herself. One thing Hazel was sure of: Alice Byrfield had always been able to read a calendar. If there were reassessments to be done, maybe Pete’s mother was due an upgrade.
Ash, too, was doing mental arithmetic. “It took eleven paving slabs to make that little grave. The closest they were likely to be was in the yard at Home Farm, a quarter of a mile across the fields. She might have been able to lift two at a time, but I don’t think she carried them across rough ground. So if she was working alone, she made that trip thirteen times—with the slabs, with the tools, and with her child’s body. It’s just about possible she did all that in a single night without anybody noticing—and without anybody reporting the theft of eleven paving slabs in the morning—but it’s much more likely that she had help. Henry Byrfield could have had them put on a trailer and tractored them down to the lake in broad daylight without anyone asking questions. He’s about the only one who could.”
It made more sense than anything else. “You think he was covering for Diana?”
“I think he was helping Diana. They must have agreed it was the best thing to do in the circumstances—whatever those circumstances were. Either of them could have called the police, but neither of them chose to. Either they were both responsible for Jamie’s death or neither of them was.”
“Or it was Diana, but the old earl decided he had too much to lose by telling the police, and so the world, that he’d fathered her two illegitimate sons,” suggested Hazel. The rancor in her tone surprised her.
Ash half turned to look at her, one eyebrow canted quizzically. “Everyone says he was a good man. He was a good father to Pete, though he probably knew he wasn’t actually his son, and he made sure David got what he wanted. Do you think he’d have let Diana shoot his son, then help her cover up the crime for fear of embarrassment?”
Hazel didn’t have to think long. “No, I don’t.”
“That’s two reasons to believe Diana’s telling the truth.”
“But if she didn’t kill Jamie, why won’t she say what happened? Maybe it was nothing more than a terrible accident, but nobody’s going to believe that while she refuses to explain.”
Patience reappeared from the shrubbery with white fluff caught in her jaws.
“Pete’s solicitor will talk her around,” Hazel added in the hopeful tone of someone trying to sound surer than she feels. “He’ll make her understand that the only way forward now is to tell the truth. To tell Norris exactly what happened, and throw herself on the mercy of the court.”
Ash remained doubtful. “Diana Sperrin is a strong woman. I don’t think she’d have acted as she did if she wasn’t sure she could see it through.”
“She may have thought she’d never be caught.”
Ash disagreed. “She must have known she might be. She’s had thirty years to decide what to do if this moment came. And this is the best she could come up with? No comment?”
“It can be a pretty smart strategy,” Hazel felt bound to point out.
“If you’re guilty. Not if you’re innocent.”
“But she isn’t innocent,” said Hazel reasonably. “She’s committed at least one offense. She’s admitted as much.”
“She’s admitted to burying Jamie, not to killing him.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know who killed him.”
Ash dismissed that immediately. “Of course she knows. If she didn’t, she’d want us to find out. She’d have wanted that from the start. She’s protecting someone.”
“Or someone’s memory.” The circular nature of the debate had brought them back to Henry Byrfield again. “Maybe it really was an accident,” suggested Hazel, helpless to find another answer. “And rather than force Henry to explain to the police what happened, including his relationship with the dead child, she agreed to a clandestine burial. She’d invented Saul Sperrin ten years before, as a cover for her ongoing activities with the earl. The simplest thing was to invoke him again. To tell people he’d taken Jamie.”
“It’s not impossible,” conceded Ash. “She’s not a particularly conventional woman. A Christian burial and a stone in the churchyard may not have meant much to her. Granted that nothing was going to bring Jamie back, protecting her lover may have meant more.”
“And having launched the fiction that Jamie was abducted by her husband, it was easier to keep it going than to stop it. Hence the thirty years’ worth of cards she sent herself.” Hazel frowned. “You can’t call it outstanding police work, can you, when the forces of two countries are looking for a man who never existed. Did nobody think of checking the records for Saul Sperrin’s birth certificate, or their marriage certificate?”
“It only seems obvious because of what we know,” said Ash. “If someone came to you tomorrow accusing her husband of child abduction, would you begin your inquiries with the Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths?”
Hazel glowered. “I would now.”
* * *
At least someone knew how to deal constructively with the new situation. Pete Byrfield made some phone calls, and in the late afternoon his sisters arrived, together, in Vivienne’s car. He greeted them with a reassuring hug and ushered them upstairs to the countess’s sitting room.
Hazel tried not to eavesdrop, but it wasn’t easy. Byrfield was a small-enough house that a family row involving the countess and her three children would always rattle the stoppers in the crystal decanters. But only once were voices raised high enough to carry, and then they dropped quickly out of hearing again.
David Sperrin had never stood on ceremony at Byrfield. He’d traipsed in through whichever door was nearest and never minded the mud on his boots. Only now that it might seem he had a right to leave muddy footprints anywhere he wanted did he feel the need to ring the bell.
Byrfield met him with an impish grin. He’d known he was coming: He’d summoned him. He showed Sperrin upstairs, and pretended not to notice that Sperrin had showered and put on a clean shirt for the meeting.
“I like your friend Pete,” said Gabriel Ash, leafing through a catalog of farm machinery that might as well have been upside down and written in Sanskrit for all he was ge
tting out of it.
Hazel smiled. “Me, too.”
* * *
The sound of loose ends flapping kept them all from sleep.
Edwin Norris conducted two interviews with Diana Sperrin. Although he was keen to resolve the matter—and perhaps even keener to understand it—he was punctilious about waiting for her solicitor to join them.
Because the Byrfield estate was a significant client, the senior Mr. Parsons took the duty on himself. But in fact, a newly qualified solicitor would have been more than equal to the task. Diana told him nothing she hadn’t already told DI Norris, and proposed telling neither of them any more. It wasn’t that she was difficult, or aggressive, or deceitful. She’d just said all that she intended to, ever.
Simple rage kept the countess awake. After everything—after everything she’d put up with, everything she’d done!—it was all going to come out anyway. People would know. People in Burford would know. Tradesmen would know. She’d be a laughingstock.
The four Byrfield siblings—it’s probably the only way to describe them—sat up all night, replenishing the coffeepot and the whiskey decanter at intervals, getting to know one another all over again.
Hazel found herself thinking like a police officer. She lay in the dark, in the familiar comfort of her old bed in her old room, and marshaled all the facts she could be sure of, and all the inferences she could reasonably count on, and tried to see through the drama that had occurred center stage to glimpse what might have been going on in the wings.
Ash retired to his room to leave the Byrfields alone, but he didn’t go to bed. He sat in the chair all night, doing pretty much what Hazel was doing down in the gate lodge, but with a different set of facts.
Patience took advantage of the unoccupied bed and snored her way through till morning.
CHAPTER 24
AT HALF-PAST SEVEN on Saturday morning they met on the midpoint of the gravel drive. Hazel had been on her way up to Byrfield, Ash hurrying down to the gate lodge. They gasped out, “I need to talk to you!” pretty much in unison.
