Perfect Sins

by Jo Bannister

  Diana didn’t move. She hardly blinked. She regarded Hazel levelly, while behind her eyes the creative mind was whirring. Did she know? Little Hazel Best, daughter of Byrfield’s handyman? How could she know? How much could she prove? Or was it already too late to be worrying about that? “You don’t know what happened,” she said flatly. “You may think you do, but you don’t.”

  “You know,” said Hazel pointedly.

  “Yes.”

  “Henry Byrfield knew.”

  A much longer pause. Then: “Yes.”

  “And David knows.”

  For a second Diana’s eyes kindled. Hazel thought it was less because the secret she’d kept for three decades seemed under threat, more a conditioned reflex to the sound of his name. Then her lip curled dismissively. “David knows nothing. He was five years old.”

  “Children see as much as adults,” said Hazel. “They don’t seem to remember as much as adults because they file it differently. It’s a bit like computers—it’s all in there somewhere but you have to know which buttons to press to get it out.”

  Diana’s lips tightened to a hard line. Her eyes were defiant. She said nothing. Silence had served her for thirty years; it was always going to be her strategy of choice.

  Hazel sighed. So she was going to have to do it, and take the risk that she was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. Even complete humiliation wore off after a while.

  She said, “Jamie was ten, wasn’t he, and David was five. It was a nice time for all of you. Jamie’s little brother was getting big enough to play Frisbee with him. And you finally felt you could afford to take your eye off them for more than a minute at a time. Jamie was older, but you’d been waiting for David to grow enough to keep him safe. I’m sure you gave them lots of instructions. ‘Don’t play on the road. Don’t go near the lake. Stay away from the tractors.’ And then you let them head out and enjoy the freedom of the Byrfield estate. After all, they were entitled.”

  Hazel paused, head on one side, waiting for a response, but Diana offered none. She hardly seemed to be listening. It may have been because she knew how the story ended, or because she could see that Hazel had already strayed from the one true path.

  Edwin Norris was attending closely. But he offered no comment, either.

  Hazel went on. “You must have wondered later if you’d loosened the apron strings too soon. David was a smart, self-reliant child, but five is still only five, too young to be held responsible for his own actions, let alone those of his vulnerable older brother. But Jamie was going to be vulnerable however long you waited, and sooner or later you were going to have to take the risk. They were getting bored with the confines of your back garden. When you judged the time was right, you let them out to play cowboys and Indians in the woods.”

  “I didn’t like them playing—” Diana stopped herself.

  Hazel smiled. “With toy guns. I know—David remembers. I have news for you: They played cowboys and Indians anyway. And they played Frisbee. And they stayed off the road, and away from the lake, and didn’t get in the way of the tractors, and you thought they were safe. I expect you checked them every ten minutes at first, then every half hour. Finally you started to worry only if they were late for meals.” She looked across the Formica table at the older woman. “What happened then?”

  Diana Sperrin’s determined chin came up. “You said you knew.”

  “I know what the outcome was,” said Hazel quietly. “I know who you blamed. In spite of that, I know what you did to protect him. You denied your older son a proper funeral so that your younger son wouldn’t grow up labeled as the boy who shot his brother.”

  DI Norris sat up straight, like a puppet whose strings have been jerked. “David? David killed Jamie?”

  “He pulled the trigger,” said Hazel wearily. “But he was five years old—years below the age of criminal responsibility, years too young to have been anywhere near a shotgun, and years too young to have been entrusted with the care of another child. Any child, much less a disabled one. No one would have blamed David. The responsibility lay with his parents.”

  Diana stiffened, too, the power of resentment like a rod straightening her spine. But the anger didn’t flush in her face. Her cheeks paled to the color of stone. “Oh, you smug, self-righteous little prig! What can you possibly know about it? Do you have children?” Hazel shook her head. “Then wait till you have before you criticize me. Wait till you have two of them, and one has the sweetest nature in the world and no common sense, and the other always wants to be doing, doing, doing. Wait till you haven’t had a proper night’s sleep for ten years. And you can’t go out unless you take them with you, and if you take them, you need eyes in the back of your head because one of them’s going to run off at every opportunity and the other is going to make friends with the most shifty-looking wastrel he can find.

  “And you can’t get away from it even for a weekend. Their father can’t take them—his wife doesn’t know they’re his. You have no family of your own, and even if you had the kind of friends who’d be willing to keep a challenging child overnight, it’s just too difficult. Would they forget he can have sweets one at a time but not a whole bag at once because he’ll keep stuffing them in his mouth until he chokes? Would they understand when he picks every flower in their garden because he wants to give them a bouquet? When he draws them a picture in felt-tip pen on their new flock wallpaper?

  “Jamie was a lovely, lovely little boy. But to keep him safe and out of trouble, the state would have needed a team of five carers. I had to do it alone. Because he was still a child, and you’re expected to look after your children, I didn’t qualify for much help. It was like running a marathon every day. Like running a marathon with a boulder in your arms.”

  It was more that she’d run out of breath than of things she wanted to say. Norris took advantage of the pause. “Ms. Sperrin—are you saying that’s why Jamie died? Because you were exhausted? Because there weren’t enough hours in the day, and you thought David was old enough to keep Jamie out of trouble for a bit, and it turned out you were wrong?”

  Diana composed herself first, then nodded. “Yes.” Her voice was distant.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Hazel softly.

  Diana was looking at her as if she was the enemy. “I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t there.”

  “David was there,” said Hazel. A hardness was creeping into her tone. “David will remember, if we force him to. Is that what you want? For some therapist to dig down through thirty years of scar tissue to the moment when a five-year-old boy caused his brother’s death? Something that simple self-preservation required him to forget, so he never knew why his own mother despised him. You tried to protect him from that once—now you want to dump it on him? You haven’t punished him enough?”

  “It was his fault!” The words seemed wrung from Diana Sperrin as if she’d been racked.

  “He was five years old! Nothing is anybody’s fault when they’re five years old!”

  “He pointed…” But she’d fought too hard to keep it, even now she couldn’t bring herself to share the secret.

  “What?” asked DI Norris sharply. “He pointed the gun at Jamie? What gun—where did it come from? Who gave him the gun, Ms. Sperrin?”

  * * *

  Two little boys, in shorts and torn T-shirts and scabby knees, playing in the golden light of a rural English summer, bathed in birdsong and the smell of cut grass. Byrfield was making hay all along the top meadows, the rumble of the tractors a distant backdrop to their game. Rooks in the high elms kept up a constant mocking commentary.

  The Frisbee was looking a little the worse for wear. Just counting today, it had been stuck in a tree and brought down by a well-aimed stone, recovered from a cowpat and washed off in a ditch. The rim was starting to break up, and it no longer flew as true as it once had.

  Which did nothing to spoil its owners’ pl
easure. You could have heard them from two fields away. People who think that squealing is the prerogative of little girls never heard these two. They played like the day would never end but minutes were going out of fashion.

  As the hay making moved on from one field to the next, leaving little tepees of bales to catch the drying wind, the rabbits chased away by all the activity ventured out of the headlands. In the wake of the rabbits came a man with a gun.

  Henry Byrfield looked at the sons he could not acknowledge and the heart broke within him. He knew he’d married the wrong woman. He’d done what his family expected, what his position required, but the money she’d brought with her, welcome as it was to ensure the liquidity of an estate that was asset-rich but income-poor, did not then, had not since, and never would make up for the tyranny of a loveless marriage. She had given him two daughters he loved; she might even give Byrfield an heir this time. She was pregnant again, doggedly determined despite the previous disappointments; although the twenty-seventh earl entertained unspoken, unspeakable doubts about his own role in the forthcoming happy event.

  What she had never given him was any sense of being wanted or needed at his own fireside. Almost before the wedding cake was eaten he’d known she was never going to be what he longed for: a companion, a comforter, someone to care for him and be in his corner. He was still a comparatively young man: he wanted some fun out of life. Unable to find it at home, he’d gone elsewhere.

  He wasn’t proud of that. He knew he’d behaved badly. He hoped and believed it was desperation rather than wickedness that turned him down a route he would not willingly have chosen. But Diana Sperrin was fun to be with—artistically unpredictable, stimulating intellectually, exciting in bed, a friend by the fireside. And in due course the mother of his first and second sons.

  All right, even a doting father would admit that Jamie wasn’t an unqualified success. But he was sweet and charming, and Byrfield never saw him bumbling happily hand in hand with his mother around the village without experiencing a pang of love. And David, when he arrived, quickly established himself as a presence to be reckoned with, and Henry Byrfield thought he hadn’t done so badly after all.

  This summer he’d started seeing them about the fields and along the edge of the wood, their mother lengthening the reins as they managed to stay out of trouble. It provided Byrfield with opportunities to see them that he’d never had before.

  Of course he’d visited the cottage, discreetly, by the back way after dark; and in daylight he’d made a point of finding business in the village when Diana was shopping, or painting in her front garden. He would pause by the gate, or in the shop doorway, and raise his hat politely and pass the time of day—not too much of it, not enough to be remarked upon—while his eyes drank in the contents of the pram or pushchair.

  And he’d never known, never been sure, if his wife suspected or not. He’d done everything he could think of, short of ending it, to keep the affair from her. But Alice was an intelligent woman. And sometimes the way she looked at him …

  Here and now, though, there was the chance to spend time with his sons. Show them the squirrels in the wood. Show them the many birds of Byrfield, and where each nested, and tell them which song belonged to which. Any landowner might do the same for a couple of village children who loved the hedges and fields as much as he did.

  Today he had come out for rabbits, but he was also watching for the boys, and his heart skipped to see them. They were playing with the Frisbee, the older boy running clumsily and dropping it more often than he caught it, the younger making up for his lack of stride with sheer determination.

  The gun was broken over Byrfield’s arm and he had a brace of rabbits tied at his waist. The boys came over to see them, stroking the soft fur. Henry Byrfield remembered going out with his own father thirty years before—the fields had seemed bigger then, the rabbits bigger and without number—and the thrilling day the gun was put for the first time into his nine-year-old hands. “Time you were doing this, old man.…”

  Most of the arguments still put forward against evolution are so blatantly spurious, so intellectually bankrupt, that they don’t warrant the time of intelligent human beings in refuting them. There’s one exception: that if nature truly favored the proliferation of the most suitably equipped, women would have four arms by now, and eyes dotted around their heads like a spider. They already have a keen sense, which no man can match, of when something is a really bad idea.

  Henry Byrfield was not a stupid man. He was not a rash or careless man. He weighed the wisdom of what he was proposing to do before starting. He knew that James, although physically a year older, was mentally much younger than he himself had been on that magical day. But he also knew the child was good at doing what he was told. And he believed that while many things that growing boys and young men do would not be available to him, the richest life that could be provided for the child would be one that was as normal as possible. He thought he could give Jamie a taste of shooting without putting him or anyone else at risk.

  He leaned forward and said gently, “Would you like to have a go, Jamie?”

  The boy’s face shone like a sunflower and he nodded.

  Predictably, David interjected, “Me, too!”

  But his father was having none of it. “You’re too young. I’ll show you when you’re older. Now, stay behind us.” The younger boy scowled and thumped down on the grass, picking sulkily at the broken edge of the Frisbee.

  Byrfield cradled his arms round Jamie, holding his hands on stock and barrel. He held the child tightly against him to absorb the recoil. “You’ll have a big bruise on your shoulder tomorrow!” When he was satisfied, he loaded two cartridges, picked out a likely tussock on the hillside, and guided Jamie’s finger to the trigger. “Squeeze gently.”

  It was the loudest noise either of the boys had heard up close. David jumped up from the grass and craned around his father’s legs to see the result. Jamie started to cry.

  Concern verged on panic in the twenty-seventh earl’s eyes. Wailing children had never been his area of expertise. “It’s all right, Jamie—it just makes a big bang. Did it startle you? You’ll get used to it. Look, let’s do it again.…”

  But Jamie Sperrin had had enough. His shoulder hurt and his ears rang, and he wanted his mother and the safety of his home. He tried to pull away from the man’s grasp.

  Byrfield held on to him—partly because he didn’t want to have to explain the child’s distress to his mother, partly because he really didn’t want them to part like this, with Jamie frightened of him. Then he became aware of how this would look to a chance observer: a grown man forcibly detaining a wailing child. Someone else’s child …

  “All right, all right,” he said hurriedly, “we won’t do it again. Look, I’ll put it down.…” He broke the shotgun and laid it on the grass.

  Jamie was still sobbing and sniffling, but the thing that had frightened him was on the ground, and he allowed himself to be comforted against the man’s waistcoat. His fingers found the fur of the dead rabbits, caressing their silky coolness.

  In tending to his older son’s distress, Henry Byrfield had allowed himself to forget that there were two children with him. And that the younger one was not known for biddability and obedience. He only remembered when he heard the unmistakable snap of the gun closing, the distinctive though not particularly loud sound that turned an awkward burden into a lethal weapon.

  * * *

  “David shot Jamie?” DI Norris’s gaze on the woman across the table was intense. “Is that what you’re telling me? That your five-year-old son picked up Henry Byrfield’s gun and shot his ten-year-old brother?”

  Diana Sperrin had aged years in the telling. “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 26

  HAZEL WANTED TO SLAP her as she’d rarely wanted to slap anyone before, even Ash. “And you’ve never forgiven him. A five-year-old child, who picked up a shotgun someone was stupid enough to leave lying around. Who didn’t
understand the difference between real guns and pretend ones, and pointed it the way he and Jamie pointed their fingers and said ‘Bang!’ It wasn’t his fault.”

  “That’s what Henry said…” And there Diana’s voice trailed off.

  “What did he say?” asked Norris.

  “That David was pointing the gun right at Jamie’s face. That he was grinning. That he said ‘Bang!’ and pulled the trigger.”

  Hazel’s heart turned over inside her. What do little boys play? Soldiers, cowboys and Indians, aliens and starship troopers. They point their fingers in one another’s faces and say “Bang!” Then they fall over and lie still for a moment. But then—and this is important—they get up again. The five-year-old David had thought it was the same with the real gun, except that the bang was louder. He’d had no idea—how could he?—how much damage it would do.

  Norris said, “Was Henry Byrfield hurt?”

  “A couple of pellets in his arm,” said Diana dismissively. “I helped him get them out.”

  “Did neither of you think to call an ambulance?”

  Anger kindled in the woman’s eye. “You think there was some point? For a ten-year-old boy who’d taken a shotgun blast in the face? He was dead before all the bits hit the ground.”

  It was undoubtedly true. But the brutality of the statement, coming from the child’s mother, knocked the wind out of Edwin Norris like a knee in the gut. He cleared his throat. “Who decided that you should bury him yourselves and say he’d been abducted?”

  “We both did.”

  But Hazel didn’t believe that. “No,” she said with conviction. “Henry Byrfield was a good man—a kind and decent man. He didn’t blame a five-year-old boy for what had happened—he knew who was responsible. He wanted to go to the police. Didn’t he?” When Diana refused to answer, she said it again. “Didn’t he?”

  “Yes!” snapped Diana Sperrin. “He thought it was the honorable thing to do.” She managed to make it sound like a weakness.

  “But you didn’t?” asked Norris.