Perfect Sins (11 page)

She glanced at Viv. “Do you think you should go up?”

Viv was already on her way, taking the broad steps two at a time. “Probably not,” she cast back over her shoulder, “but I will anyway.”

Even without the voices to guide her, she'd have headed directly to her mother's rooms. In this house, disputes had almost always revolved around Alice. She tapped—no, rapped—on the door as she went in, but the absence of an invitation did not deter or even delay her. With no children of her own, Vivienne Byrfield had always felt keenly protective of her younger brother.

Before the door shut, Hazel heard the words “And now we've got the Last Tycoon sticking his oar in!”—delivered not, as they might have been, in good-natured exasperation or even irony, but with a hard-edged deliberation designed to hurt. Then the thick timber lodged against its equally substantial jamb, and the rest of the exchange was muffled to mere rumbling.

Viv Byrfield clenched her jaw on all the sharp, angry, telling retorts trying to fight their way out, knowing that another argument with her mother about her own way of life could only distract from whatever business her brother had here. That had to be serious, because nothing avoidable would have made him confront the countess, or stay if he found himself confronted. There had been a time when she'd envied Pip his inheritance, resenting the absurd rule of primogeniture that gave the title and the estate to the younger child when she knew that she herself would have done a better job. She didn't envy him anymore. If his inheritance included sharing the house with their mother till death should part them, he could keep it.

She said, tight-lipped, “Would one of you care to explain this …
performance
?”

Alice swiveled, her haughty gaze coming around like the beam of a lighthouse. “Since this is my
home,
” she declared imperiously, “I think I'm the one entitled to an explanation.”

Viv tried her brother. “Pip?”

He passed a hand across his mouth as if to stop himself from screaming. Then he turned to face her. “You've heard about the child?” Viv nodded wordlessly. “They can't be precise, but he's probably been there about thirty years. You'd have been five or six when he died. Viv—have you any recollection, from when you were small, of another child in this house? An older child?”

When she realized what he was asking, her eyes flew wide. She tried hard to remember. “I don't think so. I remember the cousins coming and sometimes staying. There were parties here—children's parties. But that's not what you mean, is it? You mean another child who lived here. Our … brother?” While she was still reeling from the implications of that, she thought she spotted the flaw in his reasoning and relief flooded in. “But Pip—if we had an older brother, he'd be the earl, not you.”

“If he'd lived,” said Byrfield in a low voice.

“Well yes, if he'd lived. What I'm saying is, if they had a son before me, they'd have been over the moon. Everyone would have known about it. There'd have been announcements in the London papers, for heaven's sake! And almost certainly no more children.”

“He wasn't … normal,” mumbled Byrfield. “The medical examiner thinks he had Down syndrome. A son, but not a very satisfactory heir. I want to know if…” And there he ran out of words.

“
If?
” demanded Alice harshly.

Byrfield's sister pressed him, gently, as well. “Pip? What is it? What is it you're thinking?”

There was no alternative. He had to say it. He had to say it, and risk his mother's fury and his sister's disbelief. He had to say it if the sky should fall. “I want to know if they had a disabled son and kept quiet about him in the hope of producing something better. I want to know if they got rid of him when I came along.”

The silence that followed was like an animal in the room with them, huge and dark and dangerous, the stench of its breath burning the air. They were transfixed by the certain knowledge that if any of them spoke again or moved, it would strike.

Predictably, it was Alice who broke the spell. For something over forty years she'd been confident in the knowledge that the most dangerous animal in any room was probably her, and even an accusation of murder wasn't going to intimidate her for long. “You”—she spun the word out while she looked for something substantial enough to follow it—“pup! How
dare
you say that to me? I am your
mother
. You owe everything to me. I will have your respect.”

Byrfield's voice came from somewhere in the toes of his boots. “Then tell me I'm wrong.”

“Wrong?” Her voice rang with soaring contempt. “You're not just wrong, you're insane! If we were trying to improve the Byrfield stock, whatever makes you think we'd have settled for
you
?”

Byrfield flinched as if she'd slapped him. Viv shouldered between them as if she, too, anticipated violence. “Stop this, both of you! Are you mad? Pip, you can't really think…?” But it was clear from his face that nothing he'd said had been thoughtless, or casual, or merely for effect. He looked as if he'd dragged the words up from inside his bones and they'd left bleeding, open wounds. Viv turned a quadrant. “Mother? Is this making
any
sense to you?”

Alice fixed her with a cold glare. “You have to ask? Ask
him
what evidence he has. Or if it's just another opportunity to hurt me. I know none of you can ever resist the chance.”

“That is
so
unfair,” whined Byrfield, and Viv nodded fierce agreement.

“Don't let's open the book on who hurt who most, Mother,” she said tersely, “it really doesn't show you in your best light.”

“I haven't had a civil word from any of you since the day your father died!”

“Pip has shown you every courtesy! Which is a great deal more than you ever showed him, or any of us!” She turned back to her brother. “I wouldn't put it past her. But is it even feasible? If they had a child before me, even if he wasn't perfect, it would be a matter of public record. I don't see how they could have kept him secret for ten years.”

“The miscarriage,” mumbled Byrfield wretchedly.

“
What?
” Alice's voice climbed to a crescendo of furious disbelief.

Viv was watching her brother intently. “Mother's first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. I know.”

“Abroad. Italy, wasn't it?”

“On a yacht in the Adriatic, so I was told.” She glanced at her mother for confirmation, but the countess just stared bitterly over her shoulder. Viv shrugged and carried on. “A last chance for a holiday before parenthood hit them. But how does that help?”

Byrfield looked utterly miserable. “What if she didn't lose the baby? What if he was born alive but”—he, too, glanced at his mother—“unsatisfactory? There was time for them to decide what to do. What to tell people. If they said she'd miscarried, people would sympathize and wish her better luck next time. And there was no reason to suppose their next two children would be girls.”

Lady Vivienne Byrfield had built a successful career on two things: dropping the title, which suggested to the business world that she might be better at opening factories than buying and selling them, and seeing the whole picture—the broad outline
and
the fine detail. She could look at a proposal and see, almost instantly, if it was a goer and where the problems would lie. That's what she was doing now. “If they were prepared to kill their first child, why would they go to the trouble of smuggling him back into England—back to Byrfield? God knows, a yacht in the Adriatic was a pretty good place to dispose of an unwanted baby!”

“But they needed to be sure they could do better.” Pete Byrfield could hardly believe he was saying these things out loud. But he had to if they were going to be dealt with. And he was damned if he was going to back down now and never know, one way or the other. “If they had another son, they could afford to dispose of Mark One. But if they had only daughters, then it was important to have a male child—any male child—to keep the estate in the immediate family for as long as possible. If Dad died first, Mother would be able to stay here if she could produce—like a rabbit from a hat—a legitimate heir. For as long as
he
lived, she was secure.”

Viv said nothing, trying very hard to see where his reasoning had broken down. But all she could see were minor procedural difficulties, hardly an obstacle to a determined woman like her mother.

Alice Byrfield said, with all the hauteur of which she was capable, “There is no truth in any of this. Not in any of it.”

They were the words her son longed to hear. It was their tragedy that he couldn't believe them. Biting back tears, he said, “There is a way to be sure.”

“Yes, there is,” agreed the countess. “You can believe what I'm telling you.”

“But you'd tell us the same thing whether it was true or not,” said Viv, with devastating accuracy. “What way?”

“DNA testing.”

They thought Alice had been angry before. Now it was as if someone had found her fuse and lit it. Her voice rocketed; her face was incandescent with rage. “Peregrine Byrfield, you will do no such thing! If you speak of it again, I will disown you. I will leave here and I will never see you again.”

“Mother…” By now he'd given up all attempts to contain the tears.

Viv was a much tougher proposition. “And the downside of that is…?” She had a sharp intellect and a sharp tongue. Sometimes she was quick enough to think of the smart retort and too slow to realize it would be better left unsaid.

There were no tears in Alice's repertoire. But all her weapons were honed sharp. “Thank God your father didn't live to see this! He'd never have believed you could treat me this way. After everything I've done for you—everything we both did. We lived our entire lives in a way we wouldn't have chosen so that you could live yours exactly how you want. I never expected gratitude, not from either of you. But I didn't expect to be accused of murder!

“If you go on with this, you'll bring the family down. Don't you understand that? You're not some small-town solicitor with doubts about his wife's fidelity. You're the twenty-eighth earl of Byrfield. You carry six hundred years of history on your shoulders, and the hopes of all the future generations. But if you get yourself tested, everyone will assume it's because you've fathered a bastard. Now, I know you well enough to know that's unlikely, but not everyone has my advantages. You turn up at some grubby little laboratory, and from that moment on the integrity of the Byrfield line will be in question. It wouldn't be worth it if there was something much more important at stake than the identity of some child who died three decades ago!”

“Some child? Or our brother? Mother, please,” begged Byrfield, “if you know the answer, tell us. It's going to come out now, whether you want it to or not. For pity's sake, don't let us hear it from a policeman!”

“
What's
going to come out?” demanded Alice. “I'm not keeping anything from you! This …
fantasy
of yours is just that. Something you made up. Maybe it's your own guilty conscience tormenting you. Because you haven't been a resounding success as master of Byrfield, have you? There's really only one thing that's required of you, and thus far you've been a great disappointment!”

“I think Pip's shown remarkable foresight,” Viv shot back. “He's clearly decided that if this is what the Byrfield family is reduced to, it's probably time it was allowed to die out. Anyway, you've made one thing patently obvious. Since we can't trust a word you say, DNA is the only way to resolve this. If Pip doesn't want to do it, I will.”

Byrfield was more touched than he could say. “Viv…”

She laid her hand on his arm. “Let me do this,” she said quietly. “I've nothing to lose.”

He cast her a grateful smile. “No, it's my responsibility. It sort of goes with the title. But I could use some moral support, if you felt like going with me.”

“It's a date, little brother.” She squeezed his hand. “You do know I'm proud of you, don't you?”

 

CHAPTER 12

D
ETECTIVE
I
NSPECTOR
N
ORRIS
was not a happy man.

He was old enough, just, to remember when detectives raced to the scene of a crime because such forensic evidence as they could collect would become harder to read with every hour that passed. Fingerprints and blood spots were about all the help you got with the typical inquiry. The job of finding out who did what to whom was down primarily to the man asking the questions. And he was in a hurry, too, because a lot of the people he wanted to question were just leaving on foreign holidays, and the rest were reminding other people how they'd spent the relevant hours with them, their gray-haired old mothers and if at all possible their parish priests. Speed was the essence of good police work.

Now he seemed to spend most of those vital early hours, and often enough days, waiting for lab results to come back. Of course it was helpful, immensely helpful, to be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt who was present at the scene of an incident. All the pesky little fibers that flew up from a carpet when you stamped on someone's head were as good as a witness. Better, because they couldn't be intimidated. But it all took time. Edwin Norris couldn't get his head around the fact that important work was being done, work that could convict the criminals, when he wasn't doing it.

Take the Byrfield business, for instance. Not even DI Norris could claim that time was of the essence when whatever happened had happened decades ago. But that sad little grave had gone unnoticed for all those years. Now it had been found, people who had thought themselves safe for a quarter of a century could be dusting off their suitcases and passports right now. He wanted to be rounding up anyone who might know anything—anyone, say, who was both alive and within twenty miles of Byrfield in the 1980s—and interrogating them under the full glare of an ecofriendly long-life ten-watt bulb. He wanted to be asking the good folk of Burford if they remembered a Down syndrome child living in or visiting the village thirty years ago.