Perfect Sins

by Jo Bannister

  It took Hazel longer to understand that than it had taken Ash to say it, but she got there in the end. “So what do you want to do now? Go home?”

  “You’re not going back to Byrfield?”

  Hazel shook her head. “All done, for good and ill. I will go back, before very long, to see how everyone’s coping with the new situation, but there’s nothing more I can do there right now. These people need to talk to one another. I’d just be in the way.”

  “How did it all end?”

  Hazel yawned. “Can I tell you later? I am ready for home.”

  Ash bit his lip. “Actually, could we stay here a little longer? Half an hour—an hour at most?”

  Hazel looked surprised. “We could. Why would we want to?”

  “I’d like to see what Stephen Graves does next.”

  “Why should he do anything?”

  “He may not. Or he may want to tell someone I’ve been back to see him.”

  Hazel looked around her. “I suspect they have telephones in Grantham.”

  “Telephones can be hacked. Telephone calls can be overheard. If you had something to discuss urgently with someone, and absolute discretion was the only way to ensure you stayed out of jail, I don’t think you’d want to phone at all. But if you had to, you wouldn’t use your office phone, your home phone, or your mobile. I want to see if Mr. Graves wants to talk to someone so discreetly that he feels the need for special measures.”

  “Such as?

  “If he goes out to buy a new phone. If he goes to an Internet café, or a public phone, or a house that isn’t his to make the call.”

  “How will you know?”

  “I know where he lives.”

  Most of the time it was easy to forget that Gabriel Ash was an intelligent, astute man who had once been highly regarded in national security circles. Then he said something like that, and a little shiver traveled down Hazel’s back. I know where you live: the oldest, and still the most chilling, threat in the book.

  Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, then twenty. Relenting, Hazel told Ash what had happened at the police station.

  He seemed less surprised than she had expected. “How did David take it?”

  “I don’t know. DI Norris was going to tell him after I left.”

  “It’s a hard thing to hear.”

  Hazel nodded somberly. “And yet, at some level, he already knew. Norris isn’t so much telling him what happened as reminding him. Anyway, he was five years old. He must know it wasn’t his fault.”

  “He shot his brother dead. I’m not sure common sense will be much comfort to him,” said Ash. “His whole world’s gone to hell in a handcart in the last few days. Let’s just hope that, when the dust has settled, he’ll get more support from his new family than he got from his old one.”

  “I’m sure he will,” said Hazel, who’d known the Byrfields most of her life. “Pete and the girls will see him right. They’re decent people. They’ll make sure he gets everything he’s entitled to, and everything he needs.” There was a long pause while she thought. Finally she said, “You know, Pete wasn’t far from right after all.”

  Ash nodded slowly. “He was afraid his parents had killed his older brother. And it turned out one of them was indeed responsible.”

  “Yes,” agreed Hazel. “But that isn’t quite what I meant. He thought the child died to protect Byrfield—the estate, the land—and he was right. Keeping Byrfield safe for the next generation was the only reason the twenty-seventh earl wasn’t with the woman he loved and the mother of his sons. If he had been, Diana would never have allowed him to take a gun anywhere near them.” She shivered, as if a cold breeze had crossed the car. “Pete said that land holds you in an iron fist. Henry Byrfield lost his son because of the compromise he made to keep his land.”

  Ash said nothing. Perhaps his thoughts were somewhere else. Patience got up, turned around, lay down again.

  Then she sat up, gazing across the car park. The front door of Bertram Castings opened and Stephen Graves came out, locking up behind him, and walked quickly to his car.

  Hazel glanced at her watch. “Late for lunch? Or has somebody dropped a match in a bucket of detonators?”

  “Can we follow him?” asked Ash, watching intently.

  The beckoning mirage of putting her feet up with a trashy magazine at home receded into the desert of duty. “Of course we can.”

  The car ahead made for the center of Grantham. “He isn’t going home,” observed Ash.

  “Where does he live?”

  “A little green-belt village to the west of town.” Graves was leading them in the opposite direction, more or less back the way they’d come.

  “It could still be a late lunch,” said Hazel. “Or maybe he wants to use a cash machine.”

  “Maybe,” said Ash diplomatically.

  But he wasn’t surprised, and actually neither was Hazel, when the car in front passed through the center of Grantham and out the far side. The signs indicated destinations to the south and east—Peterborough, Norwich, Cambridge. Graves picked up the A1 and they followed.

  Ash risked a sideways glance at Hazel. “Are you all right with this? I mean, I’ve no idea how long it’s going to take. But we aren’t going to be home for tea.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She looked at him and she was smiling. “Gabriel, it doesn’t matter. Neither of us has anything to rush back to. We’ll go where he goes. If you think he can cast some light on what happened to your family, we’ll follow him to Hull, hell, or Halifax. But if it turns out it’s his day to visit his maiden aunt in Saffron Walden, you can buy me dinner before we head back.”

  He nodded gratefully. Out of the corner of her eye Hazel saw him mentally patting his pockets. “Only…”

  “Ah, yes. You spent all your money on the taxi, and you can’t go to an ATM because you don’t know the pin for your credit card.” Ash had the grace to look embarrassed. “We have got to reintegrate you into the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, I’ll buy us dinner before we head back, but you’re going to owe me big-time.”

  “I already do,” mumbled Ash.

  “Bigger than that.”

  On the open road, Hazel left two cars between her own and Graves’s, confident she wouldn’t lose him if he pulled off or pulled over. And indeed, when he signaled approaching Peterborough, thinking journey’s end was in sight, Hazel did the same. But Graves just wanted petrol. Not knowing how much farther they were going, Hazel filled up as well. In the shop, she also bought milk, sausage rolls, and chocolate—emergency supplies in case the pursuit went on into the evening. As an afterthought, she picked up a box of dog biscuits as well.

  She was paying when Stephen Graves came into the shop. Under the pretense of checking her change, she watched to see what he would buy. But apparently he wasn’t intending to be on the road all night: all he bought apart from his fuel was cigarettes.

  Hazel let him leave before her, to give him no reason to notice her or see who was waiting in her car. Only as he drove off did she hurry the last few paces and jump behind the wheel, with Ash muttering, “We’re going to lose him” in an anxious whine.

  “It’s a dual carriageway,” retorted Hazel briskly, “we’re not going to lose him because he has a hundred meters’ head start.” With no appearance of haste, she nevertheless closed the distance back to the two cars it had been before.

  Signs invited them to consider the possibilities offered by Huntingdon and St. Neots. But Graves stayed on the main road to Cambridge, so Hazel did, too. Spires began to appear among the trees. “You know,” she said lightly, “we’re going to feel pretty foolish if he’s playing silly beggars with a twenty-year-old undergraduate at Queens’ College.”

  “It’s a long way to come for a mistress,” remarked Ash. “I’m fairly sure you can get one closer than”—he craned to look at the mileage—“seventy miles from home.”

  “Who knows what a man will do when he thinks he’s in love?” Hazel chuckled. And
even the silence that followed didn’t warn her she’d strayed onto dangerous ground.

  It took Ash a couple more miles to respond. “Is that what you think I’m doing?” he asked in a low voice. “Acting like an idiot because I think I’m still in love?”

  His reaction to her throw-away humor jolted Hazel to the core. Every time she thought she was getting to know this man, one or the other of them did or said something to highlight a chasm of understanding that yawned as wide as and perhaps even deeper than ever. She had never meant to hurt him. Once again, however, she’d managed to do it anyway. Was the fault hers? Was Ash unduly sensitive—and if so, was it something he could, or could be expected to, help? He was as he was, a product of his history. She didn’t need to be sitting here beside him. Perhaps it would be better to leave him to find his own way to salvation. She didn’t think so. But perhaps she was wrong, and always had been.

  “Gabriel,” she managed to say, “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean anything like that. Because (a) we weren’t discussing you, we were discussing Stephen Graves. And (b) even if he has a mistress in Cambridge, what has that got to do with your search for your wife? He has a bit on the side, you have a family. There’s no point of comparison, and it never occurred to me to try to make one.”

  He seemed not to believe her. “But it’s a valid question, isn’t it? Am I chasing phantoms? And if so, is there a right time to stop? Will I know if that time comes? Has it already come, and gone?” There was a barred note of challenge in his voice, as if he wanted her to say yes so he could shout her down.

  Hazel shook her head. “No one can answer that but you. If you want my opinion, it’s that an hour and a half into a pursuit across the east of England is not a good time to be wondering. When we left Grantham, you thought there was something to be learned from following this man. Nothing has changed: If there was then, there still is. We’ve come this far, let’s see where he takes us. If you’re serious about maybe calling it a day, we can talk about it after we get home.”

  It was an eminently sensible response from an eminently sensible young woman, and it deprived Ash of the argument he had been working himself up for. He didn’t know why he was angry with her. He wasn’t even sure it was her he was angry with. But he knew that he was angry. And that was new, too, and if it took Hazel by surprise, it astonished Ash. It was years since he’d dared to feel angry.

  There was something liberating about it. He’d every reason to shout and even scream. If his therapist had been here, she’d have reminded Ash that if he hadn’t done it before and he wanted to do it now, that was because he was finally feeling safe enough to let his emotions off the leash. Safe in himself, safe with those he was with. But Laura Fry wasn’t here; she was in her office in Norbold. And this wasn’t something that could wait until his next appointment.

  “Stop being so damned reasonable!” he snarled. “I asked what you think—not what you think I want to think you think!”

  Reasonable was Hazel’s middle name. It was what made her good at her job. It was, she believed, a big part of what made her a valuable human being, and she was damned if she was going to apologize for it. But her tone hardened just enough that it should have rung warning bells. “Gabriel, what’s this all about? I am not your enemy. I’ve tried hard—bloody hard, at times—to be a good friend. I wasn’t criticizing what you’re doing. If I had anything to say about that, I’d come straight out and say it, not pretend I was talking about something else. I thought we knew each other well enough that you’d know that.”

  He did. At least the rational core of him did. The intelligent, intuitive part of him, which had made him good at his job, knew she’d been more than a friend to him; she’d been an anchor, a candle in the dark. It knew she bore him nothing but goodwill, and that he didn’t want to shout at her. That side of him wanted to stop, right now, and throw itself on her mercy once again, and hope that once again she’d touch his hand and quietly talk him out of the dark place.

  But the liberated, angry part was reckless and stormed on. “We don’t know each other! You don’t know anything about me. You think I’m crazy, wasting my life chasing a dead woman and two dead boys. You thought I was crazy the day we met, and nothing that’s happened since has made you revise that opinion.”

  “I never thought you were crazy,” said Hazel, with a sort of forced calm and a certain economy truthwise.

  “Of course you did! You all did, everyone at Meadowvale. You called me ‘Rambles With Dogs’!”

  She had to admit that much was true. Most of Norbold’s police force didn’t know his real name and wouldn’t have thought to ask. “Well … you know … You do talk to Patience the way most people talk to other human beings.”

  He couldn’t deny it. He didn’t try to deny it. “What you don’t know,” he retorted triumphantly, “is that she talks back!”

  On the backseat the white lurcher rolled her toffee-colored eyes. Ooooh shit, she murmured, you’ve done it now.

  Afterward Hazel tried to convince herself that he’d been joking. He’d picked a fight with her for no better reason than that he was tired and discouraged and thought he was on a fool’s errand, and then he’d tried to defuse it with a silly joke. It hadn’t come out as a joke because he hadn’t been getting much practice. But right now, and also later, if she was honest with herself, she knew that he meant it. He talked to his dog, and he thought she talked back.

  What she might have done next is anybody’s guess. The sensible thing would have been to ask her sat nav to find the nearest hospital with an emergency psychiatric unit. Or at least to have performed a 180 at the next roundabout and taken him home. But she didn’t, and the reason she didn’t was that before she could reach even that obvious a conclusion, two cars ahead of her Stephen Graves indicated left and turned toward Cambridge.

  Two car lengths isn’t long enough to come up with a whole new strategy. She did what she’d come here to do. She followed him.

  CHAPTER 28

  “HE’S HEADING FOR Midsummer Common.”

  Hazel looked at Ash in surprise. It was the first thing either of them had said since he dropped his bombshell, and he spoke as if the last five minutes simply hadn’t happened. As if he hadn’t lost control and ranted at her as if he hated her, and then knocked her sideways by admitting that he heard voices. Only it hadn’t been an admission, exactly. There was nothing guilty or confessional about it. He’d thrown it in front of her as a challenge. As if it was a trump card, daring her to better it.

  She couldn’t—couldn’t—reopen that conversation. Better to go on with this one. “Er—you know Cambridge?”

  “Cathy was at Clare.”

  “What did she read?”

  “Economics.”

  For some reason that surprised Hazel. All she’d known of Cathy Ash till now was as a wife and mother, and victim. Somehow she hadn’t pictured her as a high-achiever as well.

  Ash didn’t notice her blink. Perhaps he was too busy looking for the fence-repair kit. “What about you?”

  “BSc with qualified teacher status,” she said, expressionless. “And then police studies at Liverpool.”

  “He’s turning.”

  Graves was turning into one of the prime bits of real estate in Cambridge, an area of modern apartments with views over both the Common and the Cam, a short walk from the city center. Hazel stayed on the main road when the car ahead pulled into a residents’ car park.

  “Let me out,” said Ash urgently. “You can’t stop here, and I don’t want to lose him.”

  “You keep your eye on him,” said Hazel tersely, “and let me worry about parking.” She pulled into a residential parking bay on the opposite side and fifty meters farther up. She pulled something out of her glove compartment and wedged it against the windscreen.

  Ash peered at it as he got out. It was a printed card: Doctor on call. “But you’re not…”

  She looked at him exactly the way Patience might, and he didn’t finish
the sentence.

  “Which building?”

  Graves was still climbing the steps as they crossed the road. The glass doors swung closed behind him.

  Beside her, Hazel felt Ash gathering himself to run; she held him with a touch. “Let him get out of sight.”

  “We’ll lose him!”

  “We’ll find him again.” As the elevator swallowed the businessman, Hazel walked briskly into the lobby and fixed the concierge with an authoritative eye. “Constable Hazel Best, Norbold Police. Give me the number, please, of the apartment where Mr. Graves is heading.”

  Even an active member of the police in a distant town would have had limited powers in Cambridge; and what she produced in support of her authority was not, in fact, her warrant card, but her pass to use police sports facilities. But it had the badge on it and it had her name on it, and most members of the public don’t see enough police documentation to discriminate between one thing and another, particularly when someone is standing over them radiating the right to be there.

  The concierge was a responsible middle-aged man who took his duties seriously; and one of those duties was to help the police to protect his residents. Graves was known to him as a visitor, but he was not a resident, so the question of divided loyalties did not arise. He barely hesitated before answering. “Ms. Regan’s apartment—four oh five.”

  “Is Ms. Regan in?”

  “I don’t believe so, no. She moved out a week ago. Mr. Graves has a key. Er…” He was still trying to be helpful. “Shall I phone ahead?”

  “On no account.” Hazel tempered the admonition with a quick smile; then she headed into the second elevator, dragging Ash along with her. “See? Now we know where he’s going, we don’t have to get close enough for him to see us.”