Perfect Sins

by Jo Bannister

  Ash was less fit, but Hazel had been running, so she let him go first. Apart from anything else, he looked like he might explode if he didn’t.

  “I’ve been thinking about this all damn night,” he panted. “But I know who did it. At least I think I know who must have done it.”

  Hazel nodded energetically, her fair hair dancing. She’d paused just long enough to drag a brush through it, but all she’d done after that was tie it out of her way with an elastic band. “Me, too. You want to see if we’ve come up with the same thing?”

  “Of course we have,” said Ash dismissively, “it’s the only thing that makes sense. If it wasn’t Saul Sperrin shooting at us—for the very good reason that there is not now and never was a Saul Sperrin—then someone was trying to kill us for reasons entirely unconnected with Byrfield.”

  He’d managed to surprise her. They hadn’t been thinking the same thing after all. Hazel had been too wrapped up in the thirty-year-old tragedy to wonder who had run them off the road and why. “Okay,” she said, a little uncertainly.

  “So what other cages have we been rattling?”

  Hazel considered. “Most of the people I’ve annoyed recently are dead now. You?”

  Ash blinked. But it was probably true. Until she’d met him she’d had no enemies. Now she hadn’t again, but that was because Norbold’s senior police officer and its last remaining gangster had both died in a closing act something like Hamlet’s scant weeks before.

  But if Hazel wasn’t the target, Ash must be. He nodded slowly. “I think so, yes. I didn’t at the time, but there’s nobody else—nobody—who could still think I pose any kind of a threat. But he just might. And if he did, he might have arranged to have me followed. This week, that meant following both of us. And when he decided to remove the threat, that meant both of us, too. It was on the way back from the gypsy camp simply because that was the first time for days there hadn’t been other people, potential witnesses, around.”

  Hazel went over it again in her mind, word for word, and searched his dark, excited eyes for clues, but it didn’t help. She had no idea what he was talking about. “He who?”

  “Stephen Graves!” said Ash impatiently. “The man I called on coming down here. The CEO of Bertram Castings.”

  Hazel still thought she must have misunderstood. “The bloke who lost his airplane?”

  Ash nodded energetically. For a moment it looked like he wouldn’t be able to stop. “In fact, he lost several. Yes, him.”

  Hazel knew that several missing airplanes didn’t provide a motive for something that one missing airplane hadn’t. “Gabriel—what possible reason could he have for wanting to hurt you?”

  To Ash it seemed as clear as day. “To stop me asking questions!”

  Hazel shook her head, mystified. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, what reason could he have? He’s a victim, like you. Well—not like you, obviously,” she added quickly, “but someone who lost something to the same criminals who took your family. Why wouldn’t he be cheering you on?”

  “I thought he was. He gave me some more names to…” For the first time this side of midnight he was assailed by doubts. “Which he didn’t have to do if he didn’t want me going any further with this. So maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he called someone: ‘Don’t be alarmed if some idiot in an ill-fitting suit wants to ask you about the piracy, he’s been here and I think he’s probably harmless.’ Maybe he called all the people whose names he gave me. But one of them wasn’t a victim—he was a conspirator.

  “We knew someone in England was assisting them,” he hurried on. In fact, they had never known anything of the kind. It was one inference that could be put on something that a target criminal had possibly said to a corrupt policeman. Ash had clung to it like a life belt because he’d had nothing else to keep him afloat; and Hazel refrained from reminding him of this because he still hadn’t. “Maybe one of those people, maybe just someone working in one of the offices. A dispatch clerk, someone whose job it was to get the permits together—someone like that.

  “Whoever it was, he got worried that questions were being asked again. That I might pay him a visit next. He made some calls of his own, and they traced me to Byrfield and set someone to watching me. In all likelihood the decision had already been taken to shut me up, but the opportunity didn’t present itself until we were driving around the back roads of Cambridgeshire in the middle of the night.” Ash looked at Hazel, white-faced. “I almost got you killed.”

  “You did nothing of the kind,” Hazel retorted sharply. “You didn’t put us off the road, and you didn’t fire a shotgun at us. Gabriel, you may have done all sorts of wicked things in your life”—she didn’t think so, but she hadn’t known him long enough to be sure—“but you’re no more responsible for what happened to us than for what happened to your family. Don’t feel guilty over things that aren’t your fault. It’s unproductive and it’s self-indulgent. We’ll find whoever’s to blame and we’ll see him in jail. And if this is connected with the loss of your wife and sons, we’ll find out. We’ll learn everything he knows. Then we’ll follow where the trail leads us.”

  Ash was staring at her as if seeing her for the first time. Hazel didn’t often take command like this—what her mother had called “Putting her foot down with a firm hand”—and when she did, people who’d thought her a nice, amiable, easygoing young woman tended to do a double take. Their startled expressions were an ongoing source of satisfaction to her. She said nothing, but watched with a degree of complacency as his mind struggled for a foothold on the suddenly shifting ground.

  “Er—so I’m heading back there. To Bertram Castings. Find out who Graves talked to after I saw him.”

  Now Hazel’s expression turned cool. “What about the Byrfields? And Diana, and David? You’re going to just walk away—leave them to sort their problems out themselves?”

  Someone else might have reminded her that sometimes people are best left to sort their problems out for themselves, that the line between helping them and meddling is so thin you can get paper cuts from it. But Gabriel Ash had a life worth living for the first time in four years thanks to Hazel Best’s compulsive helping disorder, so even if it was true, she wasn’t going to hear it from him.

  “What more can we do? The only one who can sort it out is Diana, and she doesn’t want our help. Hazel, I have to follow this up! I can’t just sit here when someone fifty miles away knows someone who knows something about my family! You must see that.”

  It was impossible not to see, not to understand, how much this mattered to him. Only sometimes she thought it would be nice if he could acknowledge that other people’s pain mattered as well. She cared about Pete Byrfield, had even come to care about David Sperrin, and their drama was onstage right now. She believed she could help here, even if all she was doing was making coffee at regular intervals.

  On top of which, while Ash had been having insights into the attack on them, Hazel had been having insights into the death of Jamie Sperrin. Or at least the significant things that had and hadn’t happened immediately afterward.

  She took a step back and nodded. “All right, then. If you need to go, you need to go. I dare say Mrs. Morrison will have the number of a taxi firm.”

  Ash stared at her in astonishment. “You aren’t coming?”

  “No. Not this time, Gabriel. I need to talk to David again. And then the pair of us need to talk to Diana. It can’t wait.”

  His lips formed the word But. Some instinct warned him not to give it voice. Of course she hadn’t the same sense of urgency about his quest. It was a kind of impertinence to assume that she would have. After four years of living in such isolation that, when he started taking Patience for walks, his neighbors thought he was a squatter, he’d allowed himself to become dependent on this young woman—too dependent. Of course she was going to resent it, sooner or later. He’d already wrecked her career; now he was monopolizing her time and imposing on her goodwill, to the point of telling
her that what troubled her was less important than what troubled him. He, too, stepped back. There were now two good paces between them.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.” His eyes were down around her feet somewhere. “Of course you ought to stay. But I have to go.”

  “Then go.”

  The housekeeper called for a taxi. But it was early in the day and they were a long way from anywhere—the soonest the cab firm could oblige was nine-thirty. Byrfield was a big house, but too small to avoid somebody’s gaze for two hours, so he found Hazel and told her.

  She breathed heavily at him. “Take my car, why don’t you? Anywhere I need to go, someone can drive me.”

  If she’d offered earlier, probably he’d have said yes. Now he was feeling too guilty. “I’ll wait for the taxi. Have you seen David yet?”

  Hazel shook her head. “He’ll be down for breakfast soon.”

  But Sperrin didn’t appear for breakfast, and when, concerned for him, Hazel checked his room, he wasn’t there, either.

  Knowing Diana’s cottage was currently empty, he might have gone there. But Hazel struck off through the farmyard and diagonally across the water meadow, and found him down by the lake. DI Norris still had the little grave cordoned off. Sperrin had found himself another grassy hump between the woods and the water, a natural one this time, and was sitting cross-legged on it like a slightly scruffy woodland sprite, staring across the lake with unseeing eyes.

  He didn’t hear her approach, started at the sound of her voice.

  “It’s a nice spot, isn’t it?”

  Sperrin’s voice was low. “I used to think so.”

  “You will again,” she predicted confidently. “It’ll be the place you come to think about Jamie. Which is, after all, the role graveyards have always played.” She paused, watching him. “David, I can only imagine how much of a shock all this has been to you. And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Sperrin gave a sort of impatient snort. Hazel thought the object of his impatience was himself. “That’s kind of the point, though, isn’t it? I haven’t actually lost anything. My brother’s been dead for thirty years. I hardly remember him. Everything I think I remember, I heard from my mother, and we all know how reliable she turned out to be. I didn’t even know he was … disabled.” Hazel had no doubt that, if this conversation had been about anyone else, he would have used a different word.

  “I suppose that’s what childhood is,” she said. “Taking things, and people, at face value. He was your big brother. You remember him as being pretty good at that. So perhaps he was.”

  He cast her a glance with just a hint of gratitude in it. “Do you think she killed him?”

  “Ash doesn’t think so. He reckons she’d have said so if she had. That she’d have wanted to justify her actions rather than deny them.”

  “Then why won’t she tell us what happened?”

  Hazel veered off at a tangent. “What do you remember of the day he disappeared?”

  “Jesus—I was five years old!”

  “Yes. But it was a big thing to happen, it must have made an impact. What’s the first time you remember being aware that he wasn’t around anymore?”

  Sperrin thought back. And she was right, there was a memory. He remembered sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a blanket, instead of being put to bed. He remembered a male voice in the house. He wasn’t used to the sound of men’s voices.

  “What’s your last memory of Jamie?”

  That was harder. Most of what he thought he remembered from his childhood were things that, in fact, he’d been told by his mother. But suddenly he had an image in his mind that he knew was a genuine memory. “Playing Frisbee.”

  Hazel smiled, too. “You used to play Frisbee together. In the garden?”

  “I suppose so.” He struggled to push out the parameters of his recollection. “It seemed bigger. Of course, I was small. And cowboys and Indians.” A grin spread slowly. “That required a certain amount of ingenuity, because Mum didn’t approve of toy guns. Thought they might corrupt us or something. But it’s amazing what you can do by pointing your finger and shouting ‘Bang’ loudly enough.”

  “I think,” Hazel said carefully, “your brother, Jamie, had a nice life. A short one, which ended far too soon, but still a nice life. I think he was loved by his mother and watched over by his father, and he had a little brother who played Frisbee and illicit cowboys and Indians with him. I think his life was probably pretty sunny.”

  Sperrin went through one of those mercurial changes of mood that were characteristic of him, from sunshine to sudden deep shadow, from fond remembering to bitter recrimination. “And then someone blew his head off and shoveled him out of sight beside a pond.”

  Hazel felt his hurt and sympathized. But it was important for him to recognize that some of what had been done had been done with love. She shook her head. “You saw the grave, David. You know the care that went into making it. When she buried Jamie, your mother loved him as much as she ever had. I think your father helped her. They loved and cared for him, and I think they tried to do their best for him in difficult circumstances.”

  “But why?” he demanded. Behind the frustrated anger he wasn’t far from tears. “Why”—an unsteady hand encompassed the lakeside scene—“this? A DIY burial. Why couldn’t they tell people what had happened? Why is my mother still keeping it a secret?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hazel carefully, “but I think she’s protecting someone.”

  “Who? Saul Sperrin? Henry Byrfield? One of them never existed, and the other is past paying for anything he did! There’s no one else she cares about enough to cross the road for, let alone to go to prison for.”

  “I think there might be,” said Hazel.

  CHAPTER 25

  DI NORRIS HAD KNOWN hardened criminals who couldn’t hold their tongues like Diana Sperrin. She sat in his interview room, composed and smiling faintly, like a cross between the Mona Lisa and the sphinx, saying nothing.

  No, that’s not quite right. She wasn’t afraid of speaking. She wasn’t concerned that the policeman might trick her into saying something she didn’t want to. She responded politely when he asked after her well-being; she engaged with him in a little casual conversation. She just didn’t add anything—anything at all—to what she’d already said about losing her child. Norris knew that she wouldn’t if they stayed in this room until one of them died.

  Usually he was irritated by any interruptions to an interview. This time it came as a relief when someone tapped on the door and said there were people outside looking for him.

  “Who?”

  “David Sperrin. And Constable Best.”

  He knew they hadn’t just swung by to say hello. They must have a good reason for the desk sergeant to risk Norris’s ire. “I’ll see them in my office. Bring Ms. Sperrin a cup of tea, will you?”

  “Coffee, please,” she said demurely.

  The DI assumed that Sperrin had come to plead for his mother’s release. Norris couldn’t think what else he might have to say—unless it was that he’d known about the contents of the grassy mound all along, and Norris didn’t believe that. He’d been too young when it all happened, and too shocked when it all came out.

  But it seemed Sperrin wasn’t here to intercede on his mother’s behalf, either. He looked around warily but offered nothing by way of explanation for his presence. In fact, Norris quickly concluded that he wouldn’t have been here at all but for Hazel Best.

  He peered over his glasses at her. “Solved it then, have you, Constable?”

  There was a glow in her face that told him she longed to say yes. But even twelve months as a probationary constable had taught her to take nothing for granted. “I wouldn’t go that far, sir. But if she isn’t cooperating…?” She raised a fair eyebrow.

  Norris lowered both of his. “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “Then there may be nothing to lose and something to gain by letting me interview her.”

&nbs
p; “Letting you interview her?” He could hardly have sounded more affronted if she’d asked him to sign over his pension as well.

  “I am a serving police officer,” she reminded him reproachfully. “And I think Diana Sperrin may tell me what happened, although she’s prepared to grow old and die before she’ll tell you. Particularly…” She let the sentence trail away.

  “Particularly?”

  “If I can take David in there with me.”

  That really was too much. Edwin Norris had been a policeman for too long to think that by the book was the only way of doing things, or even necessarily the best way. But he’d also seen a lot of good cases thrown out—by juries but still more often by the Crown Prosecution Service—because procedure had been short-circuited at a critical juncture. He could hear defense counsel now, quite possibly Mr. William Burbage, QC, with his kicked-spaniel eyes and his peculiarly irritating nasal twang, inquiring as he cast significant glances toward the jury box: “And was the purpose of this some kind of emotional blackmail, Detective Inspector Norris?”

  “Over my dead body,” he snarled. “This is a murder investigation, Constable Best, it is not Amateur Night at the Flying Ferret. You, I can just about justify. He”—Norris glared at Sperrin as if it had been his suggestion—“sits out here with a cup of Sergeant Brooks’s tea, unless and until I have something to ask him.”

  “All right,” Hazel agreed. It was, she reflected privately, easy to seem accommodating when she’d already got everything she’d come in here with any hopes of getting.

  Diana Sperrin looked surprised to see her. “Hazel?”

  “This is Constable Best,” said Norris woodenly, more for the tape’s benefit than for anyone else as he resumed the interview. Then he sat back and waited.

  Hazel leaned forward. “I think I know what happened. I may be a bit sketchy on some of the details, but the important things—the things that made you do what you did, thirty years ago and since—those I’m pretty sure I have right. Do you want me to tell DI Norris, or will you?”