Perfect Sins (17 page)

But you don't just wait. Even when living is no longer an option, there may be some choice about how you die. Hazel didn't want to die stuck in this window like a rat up a drainpipe, like an unfortunate lover surprised by the untimely return of the husband. She kicked and wriggled hard and—like a baby struggling to be born—got first her shoulders and then her hips through the narrow gap, and then there was nothing to stop her. She rolled across the verge, kept rolling across the gritty road, and flung herself into the deep shadow of the opposite hedge. The tangled overgrowth wouldn't stop a blast from a shotgun, but it might prevent the gunman from seeing her clearly enough to shoot.

She got her knees underneath her—everything seemed to be in working order—and turned back toward the car to meet the next assault. But there was no more gunfire, and after a moment she realized why. The footsteps were retreating. Silhouetted by the headlights of his own car, the man was dad-dancing and swinging his weapon like a club. Hazel heard him yelping.

A shotgun is useful for many things. Defending yourself against a close-quarters attack isn't one of them. The lurcher was too close and too fast; the best he could do was swing the stock at her, and she had no difficulty diving under the blows, fangs-first. Another moment and the car door slammed shut; then the engine roared and Saul Sperrin was fleeing the scene, unsure how much he'd achieved but unwilling to hang around any longer to find out.

Hazel staggered to her feet and just stood in the road, panting, for a moment. But he wasn't coming back—she heard the car accelerate until the distance swallowed its voice. She'd survived—not quite unhurt but substantially uninjured. The dog, too, up on her back legs against Hazel's car, seemed to have given better than she got.

Which left Ash. Hazel hurried to the car, already groping in her pocket for her phone. People do survive shotgun wounds. If she could get an ambulance here quickly enough …

He was sitting sideways, with his feet in the water, by the time she got there. “Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes,” she said. “You?”

“I think so.”

Hazel reached for the interior light, but it seemed to be true. Like her, he'd collected a few stray pellets but nothing that couldn't be dealt with by means of tweezers and a bit of local anesthetic.

“Patience?”

“She's fine, Gabriel. I don't think he touched her. She drove him off.” She barked a sudden laugh that was more than half hysteria. “We owe our lives to a dog!”

Ash smiled and reached through the open window to fondle Patience's ears. Happy now, the dog responded with a wave of her long white tail. “Why do you think I brought her?”

 

CHAPTER 17

H
AZEL HAD ONE PELLET
in her left cheek, two in her upper left arm, one in her other left cheek. None of them had gone deep enough to warrant even a local anesthetic. She lay facedown and gritted her teeth as they came out.

Ash was suffering similar ministrations in another cubicle. Detective Inspector Norris was waiting for them in the corridor, along with Patience. The A&E charge nurse had tried to stop him bringing a dog into the department, but Norris waved away her objections imperiously. “It's a guide dog.”

She stared at him in patent disbelief. “That
isn't
a Labrador.”

“What are you, some kind of a racist?” The policeman held her eye until she gave up. At his side, Patience put her nose momentarily into his hand before curling up at his feet.

Ash emerged first, Hazel moments later, both of them walking with the particular care of people whose battle scars would be displayed only to the closest of friends. Norris supplied each of them with a cardboard cup of strong coffee and sat them down. Though he made no comment, he noticed that Hazel was sitting on only one half of her chair, Ash only on the other half of his. “All right. What happened?”

They told him. It didn't take long. The facts were simple enough. They ran into difficulties only when he started asking why.

“
Why
?” he demanded of Hazel. “Why in the name of all that's holy would you do such a stupid thing? You're a trained police officer. All right, you're still a probationer, but you've been doing this job long enough—and, I was told, well enough—to know we don't base our standard operating procedure on the Disney Channel! If
nothing
had gone wrong—if you hadn't ended up in a ditch with someone firing a shotgun at you—it would still have been an incredibly stupid thing to do, to march into a gypsy camp in the middle of the night and start asking questions about someone we think is a killer. I mean, Constable, whatever made you
think
that was a good idea?”

Hazel blushed to the roots of her hair. When he put it that way—and in all fairness it was a good way of putting it—she knew he was right. Only inexperience and the desperate bravado that comes of feeling you've been sitting on your hands for too long could explain it. She'd embarked on an unnecessarily bravura course of action without consulting the senior investigating officer, or even telling him what she proposed until she was already committed. That fact that they'd both—no, all three of them—walked away pretty much unscathed could only be attributed to overtime on the part of that special angel who watches over children and idiots. She hadn't a single thing to say in her own defense.

But Norris had asked her a question, and she reckoned she owed him an answer. “I thought it was a chance that would pass if I didn't grab it. I didn't expect to find Saul Sperrin; I hoped to find someone who'd seen him recently, who could tell us what part of the country he was in. I thought if we turned up in squad cars, nobody would talk to us, but if I just wandered around chatting to people, someone might. I thought it was one of those occasions when being in the right place at the right time counted for more than careful planning.” She raised her head to look at him. “And that was naïve, wasn't it? I'm sorry, sir. I thought I could help. I'm sorry if I've compromised your investigation.”

“And so you should be.” But his tone was mollified. Of course it had been naïve. Of course it had been wrong. But he seemed to remember a situation not so very different that had confronted a young copper at Tilbury docks maybe twenty years ago, and how he'd chosen to respond; and he'd been wrong, too, but his superiors—after giving him a right royal ear bashing—had hinted that they'd rather have a young officer with too much zeal, too much willingness to get stuck in, than one habitually hiding in the bunker when the balloon went up.

“And the other thing I don't understand,” he went on, “is why, having run you off the road and fired a shotgun at you, Sperrin didn't stick around long enough to finish the job.”

“I don't understand any of it,” said Hazel. “Why he'd come after us when it would have been so much safer to stay away. Why he put us in the ditch when it would have made more sense to follow us, find out who we were. And why he thought it was a good idea to shoot us. Whoever we were, whatever we knew, he was always going to be safer putting distance between us than taking us on. Caution served him well enough for thirty years, so why suddenly go on the offensive? If his son's body had turned up, he couldn't have thought we were the only ones who knew about it. And if it hadn't, then why feel so threatened?”

The DI nodded. Hazel had summarized his own puzzlement pretty accurately. “Mr. Ash?”

“I know why he didn't finish the job,” said Ash. “My dog went for him.”

“Your dog.” Norris looked at Patience; Patience looked at Norris. “Well, maybe,” he said diplomatically. “But if I'd steeled myself to commit a double murder, and the shotgun was in my hands, I'm not sure I'd be put off by the prospect of being nipped by a dog.”

Nipped? echoed Patience indignantly.
Nipped?
Do I
look
like a Pekingese?

“That's easy to say when she's sitting quietly at your feet getting her ears stroked,” said Ash. “Ask the guys in your Dog Branch how many hardened criminals stand their ground with one of their dogs hurtling toward them.”

“It's a bit different,” suggested Norris. “Those are trained dogs, and the ungodly know it. You can't fire a gun with forty kilos of German shepherd hanging off your arm.”

That's true, said Patience sweetly. It's pretty hard to concentrate with twenty kilos of lurcher swinging on your nuts as well.

“Well, for whatever reason,” said Hazel, “he cut and ran. Where would he go? Not back to the fair—he knows we'll look for him there.”

“He knows
I'll
look for him there,” said Norris pointedly. “And I know I won't find him, and I won't find anyone who's seen him, and I probably won't find anyone who knows him. If he's any sense, he'll be on his way back to Ireland to disappear again.”

“Or,” said Ash pensively, “he might think that while you're busy watching the road to Holyhead there's a window of opportunity to find out how much trouble he's actually in. What we know, what's happening at Byrfield. He might decide to sneak in for a closer look.”

Hazel felt a small anxious buzz behind her breastbone. She hadn't thought of that—that Sperrin might follow them back to base. She'd thought they were safe when he drove away. But Ash was right. What concerned Sperrin was the discovery of his son's body, and that could only happen at Byrfield. If he didn't run, Byrfield was where he'd go instead.

Norris nodded slowly. He'd heard two opinions of Gabriel Ash. He was beginning to recognize which was right. “You ought to get back to Norbold now. You've contributed as much as you usefully can, and maybe”—another pointed look at Hazel—“a little more. I'd be happier with you off the scene now. If anything comes up, I know where to find you.”

But it wasn't that simple, not for Hazel. It wasn't that she thought Ash was overstating the danger, and it wasn't that she doubted DI Norris's ability to solve the sad little mystery of the grave by the lake. And if Sperrin went to Byrfield, they shouldn't be there when he arrived. But the plain fact was, while Ash could leave now, Hazel couldn't.

“I can't do a runner and leave my father alone in the gate lodge. If Sperrin goes there looking for a couple in a bent and muddy hatchback, the first person he asks will send him to my dad's home.”

“Would Mr. Best tell Sperrin where to find you?”

Hazel had to smother an astonished laugh. Of course, Norris's only experience of Fred Best was as a small older man carrying gardening tools or a ladder. “Of course not! That's not what worries me. What worries me is that he could get hurt
not
telling Sperrin where to find me.”

Ash said, “Could we persuade him to come for a few weeks' holiday in the Midlands? He's very welcome to my guest room.”

Hazel had seen Ash's guest room. In fact, she'd stayed in it for a week, and rendered it quite comfortable by the time she was leaving. It was now the only part of the big house in Highfield Road that didn't seem to be stuck in a time warp. But she also knew her father.

“I can ask him,” she said doubtfully. “I don't think he'll come. It would seem to him like running away.”

They all thought about that for a moment. Ash hadn't known Best very long, but he couldn't see him doing something that seemed like running away, either. “She's right,” he told DI Norris. “We can't leave now.”

The policeman knew when he was beaten. “Then be careful until we track Sperrin down. Don't go out alone at night. In fact, don't go out alone at all. Call me if you even
think
there's someone nosing around.”

“Keep Patience with you,” Ash said to Hazel. “She'll raise the alarm long before you know there's anyone there.”

Hazel nodded. Privately she thought Ash held a generous view of his dog's abilities, but any dog is worth having if you're worried about intruders. And, given the way they'd parted, Sperrin might indeed be unwilling to tangle with this one again.

The promise of dawn was paling the sky by the time Hazel's car had been towed out of the ditch and nursed, rancid and cantankerous, back to Byrfield. Hazel wouldn't wake her father with this; she crept upstairs for a couple of hours in her bed. Ash meant to walk up the drive to Byrfield, then thought better of it. It was a bit soon to be doing exactly what the detective inspector had told him not to do. Instead he kicked off his muddy shoes, put a towel under his damp posterior, and did his best to get comfortable on the cottage-size sofa—a task in which he was not aided by a white lurcher having no trouble at all getting comfortable on him.

 

CHAPTER 18

F
RED
B
EST HEARD
the story over an early breakfast. Even before that, he realized there'd been trouble when he had to slide sideways into the bathroom past a rack of wet clothes.

He didn't comment on the wisdom of his daughter's actions, although one of his eyebrows did. When Hazel tried to suggest he should leave Byrfield for a while, the other rose to join it. She let the suggestion die half born.

Instead she said, “Norris needs a description of Saul Sperrin. We were no use at all—I never saw him clearly enough, neither did Gabriel. Do you remember him?”

Fred Best shook his head. “No, he was long gone before we moved here. I suppose we know now why he stayed away. There will be people in Burford who remember him, but he'd be better talking to Diana. Maybe she has a photograph.”

The same idea occurred to Edwin Norris. At just about this time he was knocking on Diana Sperrin's door.

He didn't mean to tell her everything that had happened. But it occurred to him that she, too, could be in danger, and she needed to know that. Perhaps she would take the opportunity to go away for a fortnight. So he described the events of the previous night.