by Jo Bannister
“I didn’t see what it would achieve,” Diana said through gritted teeth. “There was nothing we could do for Jamie. Except bury him with love, and we didn’t need any help with that. If Henry had called the police, everything would have come out. Why was this middle-aged man playing with two little boys in a field? Because he was their father, of course. We’d have had to say so—anything else would have been worse.
“That would have been the end of his marriage. His wife would have left Byrfield, taking her daughters, her bump, and her money with her. I’d have had to leave, too. Small communities can be very intolerant of those who don’t obey the rules. And David would have grown up notorious as the boy who blew his brother’s head off. And for what? To put the record straight? It was too high a price to pay, for all of us.”
“So you buried Jamie by the lake.”
Diana nodded. “That night. Henry brought the paving stones from the farmyard in the bucket of the tractor. I got some things together for Jamie, to make him comfortable.” She glared at Hazel, daring her to comment. But Hazel said nothing.
“And after that you called the police and said Jamie had been abducted by his father,” said Norris.
“It seemed the easiest solution,” said Diana. By now she just sounded very tired. “I’d told people I was married, that the boys’ father drifted in and out of our lives, and they believed me. They even thought they’d met him, some of them. Nobody, including the police, was surprised when you couldn’t find him. A traveling man like that—where would you start looking? After six months I was the only one still pushing for him to be found, and I was only doing it to keep the police from wondering why I wasn’t.”
“And you never told David?” Hazel’s voice was low.
“That he’d murdered his brother? Of course not,” said Diana coldly. “At first he was too young to keep his mouth shut. By the time he was old enough to be trusted, he’d no recollection of what happened. He saw me opening the greetings cards, and he really thought they were from Jamie.”
“It wasn’t murder,” said DI Norris. Maybe it was pedantic, but it was important to set the record straight. “A child that age is legally incapable of committing murder. We’d have prosecuted Byrfield, and you’re right: It would all have come out then. David might have been taken into care for his own safety. Or maybe not. There’s a presumption that children are better off with their mother unless there’s a clear-cut reason to move them.”
“Would hatred be considered reason enough?” asked Hazel disingenuously.
Diana summoned up the strength to glare at her. “I have never laid a hand on either of my sons.”
Hazel’s expression was uncharacteristically chilly. “No. You just made one of them pay every day for something he doesn’t even remember doing. You forgave Byrfield, but you never forgave David for what happened. You didn’t even tell him what it was he’d done that was so bad that his own mother could barely look at him. Don’t you dare sit there and claim you were protecting David. You acted as you did to protect Byrfield, and yourself. But Henry Byrfield died nine years ago. You could have said something then, if only to your son. If only so he’d know why you resented him so.”
“I didn’t…” Another of those sentences that Diana began and then abandoned.
Edwin Norris pressed her. “You didn’t what?”
“I didn’t want to resent him. To freeze him out,” said Diana Sperrin. For the first time Hazel thought she detected a trace of regret in her tone. “At first there were things to do, things to deal with, which meant keeping a lid on my feelings. Demanding that people go out looking for my missing son when I hoped they’d never find him. Insisting that he was alive in Ireland when I knew he was dead under the grass by the Byrfield lake. I told David the same thing as I told the police. I told him over and over again, and kept him from talking to anyone until I knew he had no recollection of anything else. Yes, I was hard on him. I had to be, for all our sakes.
“Later, when the search had been all but abandoned, when life was almost normal again, I could have reached out to him. Told him everything was all right—was going to be all right. Told him I l-loved him”—she stumbled on the word—“and we’d have to get each other through this because neither of us had anyone else. But it was too late. The anger I felt, the sheer bloody anger, had corroded my soul, and the scar tissue had come between us, thick and dense and impenetrable. Resentment doesn’t cover it. You’re right: I hated my son for what he’d done, and time did nothing to heal it, only set it hard. Why didn’t I tell him when he was old enough? I think it was because I didn’t feel he deserved to know.”
“Have you any idea how much you hurt him?”
“He hurt me!” cried Diana Sperrin, a wail of torment wrung from her, as if these events had happened just hours before.
“The difference is,” said Hazel through gritted teeth, “you were a grown woman and he was a little boy. A confused little boy who couldn’t think why his mother had stopped loving him.”
“But he was the wrong little boy! I wanted Jamie. I wanted Jamie back. I only ever wanted my beautiful Jamie.”
* * *
“The people you meet when you haven’t got your gun,” said Edwin Norris mildly as he walked Hazel back to her muddy car. “How is it that some people manage to get it so wrong? Are they actually trying?”
“Diana? I think she tried very hard,” said Hazel. “I think she tried so hard to be a good mother to Jamie that there was nothing left for David.” She met his gaze. “Will you tell him? I should really get on my way now.”
Norris nodded grimly. “How much does he know?”
“I don’t know. He’s almost as hard to read as his mother. I don’t think he remembers any of this. But given the things I was asking him about, he must have his suspicions. We shouldn’t leave him wondering.”
“I’ll talk to him when I go back inside,” DI Norris promised. “I’ll need to at some point, we might as well get it over with. And then he’ll probably need to talk to a therapist.”
“I think they both will,” said Hazel ruefully. “Separate therapists. Who will then need to talk to their therapists.”
“Diana’s will have to form an orderly queue behind me and her legal representatives,” said Norris grimly.
“You mean to charge her, then.”
“Of course I mean to charge her! Another day or two,” he muttered, “and I might have some idea what I mean to charge her with.”
“Well, don’t annoy the shrink too much,” murmured Hazel. “You might need him, too, before you’ve finished with the Byrfield family.”
They shared a bleak chuckle as they crossed the car park.
Norris held the door for her while Hazel settled herself gingerly onto her damp car seat. He said, “Are you planning to go back to work in Norbold?”
Hazel nodded. “When I’m signed off fit.”
Norris blew a silent whistle. “So this was you off your game, was it?”
Hazel appreciated the compliment. But she wanted to be honest with him. “I know these people. I grew up among them. It gave me an advantage.”
“Yes,” agreed Norris, “and so did having a head on your shoulders. I was going to say, if you fancy a change of scene, I’d be glad to have you here.”
She hadn’t expected that. But immediately she could see the advantages. Being closer to her father. Seeing more of Pete Byrfield. Getting out of a posting that would always have grim memories for her, and where she would always be as welcome as the specter at the feast.
And that was the problem. It would be the easiest, most comfortable solution. And once you start taking the easy way out, it gets harder and harder to do anything else.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it. “I won’t forget that offer. Someday I’ll come back and see if it’s still open. But the first thing I have to do is the last thing I want to do, which is go back to Meadowvale Police Station and pick up where I left off. Nothing that happened there w
as my fault. I won’t have it look as if I have something to run away from.”
Edwin Norris clasped her hand warmly; and then, on an impulse, ducked his head through the open window and kissed her soundly on the cheek. It wasn’t professional. It wasn’t PC. But it was a gesture of friendship and support, and in a wicked world it’s a brave soul who rejects either. Hazel grinned at him and nodded, and felt the pleasure of knowing she had an ally.
“Good enough,” he said, straightening up. “I’ll be here. So where are you going now?”
Hazel sighed. “Grantham. I’ll collect Ash from the armaments place. He only just had the taxi fare to get him there. Lord knows how he was thinking of getting home.”
CHAPTER 27
SATURDAY MORNING WAS a good time to find Stephen Graves in his office. With the factory silent and the workers absent, it was his chance to catch up on paperwork.
He was surprised to see Ash again so quickly, but received him no less courteously than before. “Does this mean you’re making some progress?”
“Perhaps,” said Ash carefully. Patience had curled at his feet in Graves’s office but was refusing to look at him. He’d had to smuggle her onto the taxi bundled up in his coat, and she blamed him for the indignity.
He couldn’t afford to worry about that. He needed to concentrate on his questions, and Graves’s answers. “Who did you talk to after I left here?”
The CEO of Bertram Castings recoiled as if he’d been struck. “No one! Who would I have talked to? What do you think I am?”
“I think you’re someone who knows this industry a lot better than I do,” said Ash honestly. “You gave me a list of names of other people I could talk to—people who’d had shipments hijacked, some of them since I lost touch with the situation. It occurred to me you might have called some of them to let them know I’d be in contact. Did you?”
Was that a flicker of relief at the back of the man’s eyes? Was it the perfectly normal response of someone who thought he was being accused of something finding that he wasn’t? Or just a glimmer of understanding where before there had been bewilderment?
“No,” said Stephen Graves.
“You didn’t talk to any of them? Or to anyone in any of their offices?”
Graves thought a bit longer, then shook his head. “No. I thought you’d prefer it that way.”
Ash nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Why do you ask?”
Ash had debated with himself on the way over—he would have discussed it with Patience if the taxi driver had known he had two passengers—how much he should tell Graves. In the end he decided there was no reason to treat the man as any kind of a threat unless he gave some indication that he might be one. “Something happened not long after I left here. Someone ran me off the road and fired a gun at me.” He saw Graves’s eyes flare wide and forestalled his next question. “No, nobody hurt. But it was a serious attempt on my life. And my social circle is so narrow these days that probably the only people who want me dead right now are the pirates who hijacked your arms shipments and kidnapped my family.”
He paused, but Graves made no attempt to respond, so Ash carried on. “Now, I don’t think they’re keeping tabs on me from the Horn of Africa. It means I was right: They have contacts very much closer to home. People feeding them information about what shipments to expect and where to look for them. Which explains how a Midlands drug baron could know something about my family’s disappearance. And also how the kidnapping was arranged. It wasn’t done over the phone from Somalia.”
He was still watching Graves carefully to see if any of this resonated with him. He was not blind to the possibility that the man in front of him was himself the spy. He’d been talking to Graves not long before Cathy and the boys vanished, and then again not long before someone put him in a ditch and shot at him. Set against that were the losses, in cash and in business confidence, sustained by Bertram Castings as a result of the pirates’ activities. On the other other hand, whoever the local agent was, he might have made more out of selling his information than Bertrams or any of the targeted companies could have paid him in a month of Sundays.
Ash had that feeling between his shoulder blades that suggested he was at least thinking about this in the right way. That didn’t mean that Graves, or anyone at Bertrams, was involved in the hijackings, just that someone like him, someone in the office of one of these companies, probably was.
In a perfect world, Stephen Graves would have clapped his palm to his forehead and remembered talking incautiously to a shifty-eyed competitor he’d never entirely trusted. Or else his own eyes would have gone shifty and avoided Ash’s gaze, and that would have been significant, too. But life is never that simple. Graves looked shocked, but no more than anyone might who found himself surrounded by wicked criminality. He had a wife and children, would have been less than human had he not pictured himself in Ash’s position. Of course Graves looked shocked. Poker players talk about “tells”—individual quirks by which opponents give away unconsciously the strength of their hand. Perhaps it holds for poker, but it doesn’t in real life. The best investigator in the world cannot tell when a good liar is lying. The liar doesn’t tend to look up to the left, or down to the right; he—or she, for lying is an equal-opportunity occupation—doesn’t scratch his nose or play with his glasses. He may seem vague, but so may an honest witness struggling to recall details; he may pile on too much detail, but so may an honest witness with a good memory who thinks this is what will help crack the case. The only reliable way to detect a liar is to listen to the words. Because if the events he’s recounting wouldn’t have happened that way, they didn’t happen that way.
So while Ash was watching Graves’s face for reactions, he was also listening intently for the words that would give him away. And he didn’t hear any. This may have been because, so far, Ash had done most of the talking. It may have been because Graves knew that the less he said, the less he would have to explain. Or it may simply have been that the man was as stunned by developments as he appeared to be. With all his experience, Ash couldn’t tell. He needed Graves to open up. What he talked about hardly mattered as long as he started talking. There are people who can’t find a gap in the conversation without trying to fill it. Such people are an interrogator’s dream: They can’t keep a secret to save their lives. If you ever want to rob a bank, don’t do it with someone who finishes your sentences. You’ll definitely go down, and no one will help you finish your sentence then.
“Mr. Graves,” said Ash, “I need you to help me here. I think we’re within striking distance of the truth. I think what’s happened proves it. Someone you know, or who knows someone you know, is passing back intelligence that makes it possible for African pirates to keep hijacking British arms shipments and to keep getting away with it. I think it possible, likely even, that you know something that would tell us who. Maybe you don’t know that you know, and I don’t know what questions to ask.
“So will you just talk to me? Tell me about the industry. Tell me how it all works—the difficult bits, the tedious bits, how much government interference you have to put up with, if there are ways of getting around it. I swear to God, I am not interested in your VAT returns. But I need more background information. I’m sure I asked you a lot of this four years ago, you and the other people who’d been targeted, but a lot’s happened since then and I may have forgotten some of it. Will you humor me? Will you talk to me as if I was writing an article for Big Guns or whatever your industry magazine is called?”
“Big Guns?” said Stephen Graves faintly.
“It’s not called that?” Graves shook his head. “Whatever.”
So, overcoming an initial hesitation, Graves talked and Ash listened. He talked Ash through the events that had led to their first meeting. He described three further lost shipments in the intervening years, in forensic detail that suggested he’d spent many a sleepless night going over what he might have done, or not done, or done differently to
make things turn out otherwise. He described all the losses in the British arms industry that had been or could be attributed to these pirates, going back some six years and including several Ash was unaware of. He described the makeup of his own company, starting with his professional background and concluding with the service history of the night watchman.
Then he did the same, in almost as much detail, for his competitors’ companies. It was a small, tight-knit world in which, despite strenuous efforts to protect commercial secrets, everyone knew everyone else’s business.
He talked for an hour, almost without prompting. At the end of that time, Ash didn’t believe he’d caught him out in an untruth. Stephen Graves was either an honest man or a skillful liar.
Left with nothing more to ask, all Ash could do was thank him for his time, wake Patience, and leave.
* * *
A familiar and still muddy car was waiting in the Bertrams car park—in, Ash couldn’t help but notice, the space reserved for the company chairman. Hazel didn’t get out or even wave; she just sat waiting for him. Watching to see what he would do. As if he had options. He swallowed the last of his pride and walked toward her. “Car for Ash?” he mumbled with a faint, ingratiating grin.
“Actually, no,” said Hazel coolly. “I thought Patience might like a lift.”
The dog waved her scimitar tail in agreement. Or perhaps just at the sound of her name.
Ash considered. “How about if I sit on the floor and promise not to shed or chew the upholstery?”
Staying angry with him would be like holding a grudge against a child. She popped the lock on the passenger side. “Get in.” And when he had, and Patience was sprawled gracefully on the backseat, Hazel said, “Well? Did you get what you came for?”
Ash considered. “I don’t know.”
One day, she thought, I’ll actually do it. I’ll deck him. “Is there someone we could ask? Perhaps Mr. Graves could tell us.”
Ash gave a little muffled chuckle. “That’s pretty much what I’ve been wondering. If there’s something Mr. Graves could tell me and isn’t doing. He’s told me all there is to know about the arms industry—manufacturing, sales, regulations, loopholes in the regulations, the makers, the sellers, the buyers. I’m not sure he’s told me anything useful. And I don’t know if that’s because he doesn’t know anything about the pirates or because he knows enough not to let me know how much he knows.”
