Perfect Sins (2 page)

Graves pulled over a notebook and wrote some names and numbers from memory. “Talk to Bob Simpson at Gaskins. I know they lost a shipment of assault rifles not long ago. And Sandy Pierson at Viking. That's Ms. Pierson, incidentally,” he added with a nervous grin, “don't get off on the wrong foot by asking for Mr. Pierson. They've both become involved since you…” Another unfinished sentence. This time the missing words were
Went doolally.

Ash nodded his thanks and folded the paper carefully into his breast pocket. “I suppose it's a pretty small world, arms manufacture—that you all know one another?”

“In some ways,” agreed Graves. “In others, of course, it's global. But anyone in the industry will help you if they can. We need to get on top of these hijackings. Somali pirates are making a quarter of the world almost a no-go area for weapons exports.”

“Which begs the question why you continue selling a sensitive product to such a volatile region.”

Graves shrugged. “Because it's our business. Because volatile regions are where arms are needed. We couldn't stay solvent by selling what we make to the Isle of Man. And then, don't we have an obligation to support Third World countries that are trying to make a go of the democratic model? They wouldn't get far if all the demagogues and tyrants around them could march over their undefended borders.”

It was a valid point. Besides, Ash wasn't here to do battle with the arms industry. His mission was much more tightly focused than that. “I need to be candid with you, Mr. Graves. Tackling piracy against British citizens, British carriers, and British goods is the job of the British government. It used to be my job, but it isn't anymore. My only interest now is in finding out what happened to my wife and my sons.

“They disappeared because, when I
was
part of the government investigation, I got close enough to the pirates to worry them.” Ash's deep, dark eyes were hot with the memory: at how clever he'd been, and how stupid. “For four years I believed my family were dead. Now there seems just a small chance that they aren't—that if I can work it out, I can find them. I may be fooling myself. But I don't want to mislead you. If finding my family means destroying these people—in Somalia, in England, wherever they are—then I will if I can. But that's not my priority. If you help me, you have to understand that I may not be able to help you much in return. If the pirates offer to buy my silence with the only currency I'm interested in, nothing—not honor, not duty,
nothing
—will stop me from taking it. Nothing matters to me as much as finding my wife and sons.”

“I understand that,” said Graves, rising and offering his hand. “Bertrams will help in any way we can.”

 

CHAPTER 2

T
HERE WERE
two people waiting outside for him. Using the term liberally. Hazel Best was behind the wheel of what was, after all, her car. The white dog beside her moved obligingly into the backseat when Ash returned.

“Any luck?” Hazel glanced at him and then quickly away again. It was plain from his face that he'd learned nothing. She wouldn't have dreamed of saying “I told you so,” and he knew her better by now than to expect it. But she didn't want him thinking she was thinking it, either.

“He said he'd give it some more thought, get in touch if anything occurred to him. He gave me a couple more names—firms that have been hit while I was off the scene.” He looked at her. “He thinks I'm on a fool's mission.”

Hazel gave a tiny nod. She was a lot younger than Ash, and she wasn't his girlfriend, but she was honest with him. “You always knew the odds were against you. You knew before we came here. It was just something to try. It might have led somewhere. It still might.”

“But probably not,” admitted Ash.

He made an effort to put the disappointment behind him. It wasn't that he'd been expecting a miracle. Most crimes get solved within the first forty-eight hours or not at all. This one was four years old. In his heart, where he didn't allow himself the comfort of irrational hope, he knew it was too long. That anything Chief Superintendent Fountain had known—if he'd known anything, if he wasn't just dangling bait—had died with him. Cathy and the boys were gone, and there was no longer a trail to take him to their killers. But that was also true yesterday. Today's failure added little to the sum of his unhappiness.

He looked at his watch. “Almost twelve. Do you want to stop for lunch, or shall we press on and take your dad out for a late one?”

Hazel had called her father while she was waiting for Ash. “He's got something in the oven for us. Don't get your hopes up—he's not much of a cook. All I can promise is that it'll be nice and brown.”

Ash managed a smile. He hadn't done much cooking recently, either. “A bit of gravy covers a multitude of sins.” Two months ago he hadn't even done much eating. Now he found himself sufficiently cheered by the prospect of a proper sit-down meal at his friend's home to be tolerant of a piece of overdone meat.

“Not on fish, it doesn't,” said Hazel grimly, starting the car.

*   *   *

Alfred Best had been a color sergeant in the British army, and the ability to make tomato water lilies is not a significant survival skill. Such cooking as he had done in those days was of the one pot, open fire, “If it doesn't kill you, it was a success” variety. And then, Hazel's mother had been a good cook. It was only since her death that he'd had to teach himself about such things as oven temperatures and timings. Anyway, he'd always rather liked food that bit back.

As Hazel turned through the wrought-iron gates and he glimpsed Byrfield House down the avenue of sycamores, Ash wondered if there was something she hadn't told him. He tried to remember what she
had
told him. Her father was in the army—she'd grown up in the country—she'd had a pony and dogs and climbed trees.… She
hadn't
said she was a daughter of the aristocracy, but perhaps that was more a second date sort of conversation.

But then he saw the man standing at the open door of the gate lodge, wearing an apron that bore the legend
Soldiers do it AGAIN and AGAIN until they GET IT RIGHT,
and the world settled quietly back into place. There was nothing wrong with being a daughter of the nobility. But if she had been and hadn't said, he'd have wondered why not.

And that was silly, too, because they hadn't known each other very long and they didn't know each other very well. She'd saved his life a couple of times, but apart from that … She didn't owe him any confidences. The fact that he'd had to share most of his life story with her, including—no, especially—the grim bits, didn't put her under the obligation to reciprocate.

The man in the apron raised a hand, and as soon as Hazel had parked she was out of the car and throwing her arms around him. He wasn't a big man—Hazel was taller—and where she was fair, he was faintly ginger. But he radiated that quiet capability that doesn't need to be shouted about. There are two kinds of soldier: those who yell “Charge!” and those who say “Follow me.” Alfred Best was the latter kind.

Hazel disengaged from the hug and introduced them. The two men shook hands. “Come inside,” said Best, “have a beer while dinner's finishing off.”

Hazel went to the cupboard under the stairs. “Home brew or the real stuff?” she asked Ash.

Gabriel Ash wasn't a serious drinker, but he knew there was only one answer to that which wouldn't make a man an implacable enemy. “Can I try your home brew?”

During lunch—the cod, despite Hazel's misgivings, had developed only a thin layer of crackling—Best asked how long the drive had taken. Hazel flicked Ash a glance before answering. “We came the scenic route. Gabriel had some business in Grantham.”

Best was too straightforward a man to pretend not to know what she was talking about. Of course Hazel had told her father about the events of the last two months. Of course both Gabriel Ash's part in them and the history it sprang from were known to him.

He regarded Ash levelly. “I was sorry to hear about your family, Mr. Ash,” he said somberly. “Are you getting anywhere with your inquiries?”

Before he met Hazel, for years the only one who had spoken to Ash about his tragedy was his therapist. It still felt strange to have it discussed in the course of a normal conversation. Strange, but better.

“Thank you,” he said. “No, I don't really think so. I'm not sure there's anything new to find. I thought so—at least I thought there was a chance—but the harder I look, the more I feel Hazel was probably right. That what I thought was a clue was only a diversion, something to channel me in a way that suited the man who dropped it. I'm going through the motions mainly so that I don't wonder later if I missed something.”

“If that's all that comes of it,” said Best, “it'll have been worth your time.”

Over what Ash thought was crème brûlée but turned out to be blancmange, Best said to his daughter, “Pete says will you drop by his place before you leave. I told him you were coming. He's been digging again—got something to show you.”

Hazel saw the slightly puzzled look on Ash's face and grinned. “Not vegetables—archaeology. He's putting together a history of the big house.”

“Pete is,” Ash said carefully.

“Lord Byrfield. But if your name was Peregrine,” said Hazel, “wouldn't you try to keep it a secret?”

“Nearly as much as if it was Gabriel,” said Ash glumly.

They walked up the long drive after lunch. In the June sunshine the white lurcher flashed among the giant trees like a ghost on speed.

“It's the rabbits,” explained Ash. “It's in her blood.”

As she passed them, the dog paused just long enough to give Hazel a slightly embarrassed look, as if she knew chasing rabbits was less than cool but she just couldn't resist.

Ash said, “I hope your father doesn't mind having me and Patience to stay. It's asking a lot, when your daughter turns up for a visit with not only a strange man but also his dog in tow.”

Hazel chuckled. She was wearing her thick fair hair in a loose ponytail, which together with the jeans and oversized shirt gave her a casual look, in marked contrast to the police uniform she'd been wearing when they first met. He thought she was also more relaxed than she had been. She'd had a rough time. It had ended with her shooting someone dead. You don't put that behind you with a stiff drink and an early night. But Ash thought she was finding her balance again. He was relieved. He'd felt guilty for what he'd involved her in. It hadn't been his fault, but that hadn't stopped him from feeling guilty. Guilty was his default position.

“He's used to it. Not strange men so much,” she added hastily, “but friends staying over. When you live miles from anywhere and there's no last bus for people to catch, you're used to making up a spare bed on the sofa. I think the record was seven twenty-year-old undergraduates. There were bodies everywhere—on the kitchen table, in the bath, and two of them slept in the greenhouse.”

A bend in the drive brought the building Ash had glimpsed from the gate lodge into full view. The beauty of it made him catch his breath. Hazel, covertly watching for his reaction, gave a faint, satisfied smile.

It wasn't what most people mean by a stately home. It was too small, too—if it isn't an absurd way to describe a house with nine bedrooms—homely. It would be more helpful to think of it as a manor house, a two-story, plus attics, stone building, the severity of its classical Georgian lines softened by Virginia creeper. The stones glowed with two hundred sunny summers, the sixteen-pane windows sparkled because none of the glass squares lined up precisely with any of its neighbors, and at the top of a modest fan of stone steps one of the heavy double doors stood open because a man in washing-up gloves was polishing the brass knocker.

Hazel shouted, “Hi, Pete!” and Lord Byrfield shaded his eyes with one yellow hand and waved.

“Hi, Hazel. Come to help?”

“You think I don't have brass work at home I could polish?” she said, grinning as they met. “If the urge took me. Pete, I want you to meet a friend of mine. Gabriel Ash, Peregrine Byrfield. And this is Patience.”

The earl and the lurcher regarded one another solemnly for a moment. “Delighted, I'm sure,” said Byrfield, and Patience waved her tail.

Ash saw a man taller than himself, and narrower, and maybe ten years younger; unremarkable-looking, with fair hair and blue-gray eyes and a rather weak chin. A man you could have ridden the 8:10 to Paddington with every weekday for a year and not recognized if you'd seen him in the supermarket on a Saturday. But he did have a nice smile. “Gabriel, hm?”

Ash nodded long-sufferingly. “Peregrine?”

“I know.” Byrfield sighed. “Still, I suppose there are worse things to be called after than either an angel or a hawk. I'd hate to be called after a nut.”

Hazel thumped his arm hard enough to make him wince.

Byrfield left the brasses half polished and took them inside.

As with most houses, big and small, life at Byrfield revolved around the kitchen. There was a collection of leather armchairs and an overstuffed sofa arranged around a low oak table, an oak dresser black with age, and a television on a chest in a corner. Hazel flung herself into one of the armchairs as if she'd been coming here all her life. Ash took the sofa, and hoped Byrfield wouldn't notice that Patience had jumped up beside him, so that they were now sitting side by side like a married couple.

“Dad says you're digging again.”

Byrfield brought the coffee over. You could tell he was aristocracy by the plainness of the biscuits. “David Sperrin's working on the far side of the lake. You remember David? His mother's the artist, she lives at Wool Row. He left for university while you were still a child, but he's been back at intervals.”