Perfect Sins (21 page)

“Yes,” she said simply.

 

CHAPTER 21

H
AZEL
B
EST HAD SEEN
corpses with more color than David Sperrin. She had no doubt that if he'd tried to stand up, he'd have fallen.

This might have been what Ash had been expecting. It might have been what Diana had expected, sooner or later. Even she herself had had a few minutes to come to terms with the idea. But Sperrin had seen none of it coming. A few days ago he'd been a man with two parents and a brother, even if two of them didn't see him and the one who did didn't like him much. Now he was a man who'd been an only child for thirty years, who'd never—except in the biological sense—had a father, and whose sole remaining family had just admitted to … what, exactly?

“Mum—what are you
saying
?” Something of the frightened child was audible in his deep man's voice. “That
you
killed Jamie?”

His mother regarded him with disdain. “Of course I didn't kill Jamie. I loved him. I would never have hurt a hair on his head.”

“Then …
how
did he die? An accident?”

Diana delayed answering for so long that Hazel thought she was refusing to. Then she said, “That's right—an accident.”

“Then … why did you
bury
him? Why this
pretense
of the last thirty years?” He remembered the cards on the mantelpiece. “You
knew
he wasn't writing to you! You sent birthday cards to
yourself
?”

Hazel got in first. “Diana, you need to talk to DI Norris, and even before that you need to talk to a solicitor. I don't think you should say anything more until you have.”

Diana Sperrin shrugged haughtily. “It doesn't matter. I have nothing more to say. Inspector Norris can talk till he's blue in the face, but there's nothing more I wish to tell him. And for that I don't need a solicitor.”

It wasn't a good decision, but it was hers to make. Hazel nodded and went outside to make the call.

David Sperrin's voice was low with shock and what sounded almost like resentment. “You never told me he was defective.”

That stirred his mother to fury in a way that even Ash's meddling had not. “Jamie was
not
defective! He was perfect. From the day he was born to the day he died, he was the perfect child—loving, giving, sunny as a summer afternoon. So it took him longer than most to learn to tie his shoelaces—so what?
You
couldn't tell the time until I got you a digital watch!”

*   *   *

When DI Norris got back to his desk on Friday afternoon, following a court appearance that should have taken ten minutes but in fact took forty-five because, inexplicably, the magistrates wanted to hear the accused's apology for a defense, he found that his in-box had—as it so often did during even brief absences—replenished itself in the manner of the widow's cruse. He lifted out the top three items. Experience had taught him that this was the maximum he was likely to deal with at one go, and taking any more would only discourage him.

One of them puzzled him, so he tackled it first. He recognized the logo because he'd had a fax from the same source earlier in the day, but he hadn't been expecting another. He read the covering note, then studied the data it covered. Then he read it all again.

By now a glimmer of understanding was beginning to dawn. He wasn't sure if the information advanced or was even relevant to his case, but it certainly lifted the corner of a curtain.

He sat back in his chair, mulling over the fax, and a slow smile began to spread across his face. “Well now,” he observed to himself with a certain complacency. “Who's been a naughty little aristocrat?”

That was when his phone rang. He heard Hazel out in a silence that somehow grew deeper the longer it persisted.

Finally he said, “All right, I'm on my way. Keep them all there till I arrive.”

*   *   *

Before DI Norris arrived at the cottage, Pete Byrfield did. Hazel, who'd answered the door, stared at him in astonishment. “What are you doing here?”

“Damned if I know,” said Byrfield. “Inspector Norris just phoned, asked me to meet him here.” He seemed genuinely mystified but not—now that he knew the dead boy was no brother of his—worried. “What are
you
doing here?”

She did a bit of condensing. “I came with Ash. He worked out who it was who buried Jamie by the lake. It was his mother.”

The twenty-eighth earl looked as if she'd hit him about the head with a sockful of wet sand. “She … Diana?
Diana
killed her son?”

“I don't know,” said Hazel. “She says not. But she won't say what happened, except that she was the one who buried him.”

“She told you that?” Byrfield sounded stunned.

“Gabriel put it to her straight, and she was too proud to lie. So I called DI Norris.”

“And he called me. But why?”

Hazel shrugged. By the standards of this week it was a comparatively minor mystery. “He'll be here soon. He'll explain then.”

“How's David?”

“Shell-shocked.”

DI Norris didn't come alone. There were three of them, including a uniformed woman constable, in two cars. He cautioned Diana immediately and took her out to the squad car. Waiting uneasily in Diana's front room, after perhaps fifteen minutes the others heard the car drive away and then Norris returned.

He glanced around as if to check that he'd got everyone he wanted. Then he waved a generous hand to invite them all to sit. There was a shortage of chairs. Hazel ended up perched on the arm of Ash's chair. Patience ended up on the floor.

The detective inspector began. “I've come by some information that I feel I should pass on to you. It most directly concerns you, Mr. Sperrin, and Lord Byrfield. It also, because of the way I came by this information, concerns Constable Best. And since I know that anything I tell her is going to reach Mr. Ash, I propose to share it with the four of you. It isn't evidence of a crime, only a misdemeanor.”

He paused a moment to arrange his thoughts. “Lord Byrfield, I've been a CID detective for many years. But actually, our tea lady could have worked out who supplied the DNA sample that arrived under the name of Best. Constable Best tried to be discreet, but it was pretty obvious that the only real candidate was you. It had to be someone who didn't know who the boy was, who was afraid he might be a relation, and who stood to lose or gain something significant if he was.”

Byrfield swallowed. “But he wasn't my brother—he was David's. Wasn't he?” Confusion was making him doubt what he'd been told.

“Yes, he was,” confirmed DI Norris. “But tell me this. That day you went to the laboratory. Your sister drove you?”

That surprised all of them. All Byrfield could do was answer. “My sister Vivienne went with me. In fact, I drove.”

“She gave a sample as well.”

“Yes. The lab technician suggested it would—I don't know—help with the baseline something or other.…”

“That's right,” said Norris, the calm in his voice somehow reassuring, though what he was saying was still far from clear. “So they analyzed the two samples. They were only supposed to send your results to me. And when I got them, and they showed no blood relationship between you and the dead boy, I had no further interest in you, and I told Constable Best as much.”

“Yes. Then…?”

“Then someone at the lab made a mistake. They thought that the two samples that had been taken together should have been sent to the same place, and when they saw this hadn't been done, they thought they were rectifying an error. This morning I got the results of your sister's test.”

“And?” Other ghosts were creeping in around the corners of Pete Byrfield's eyes. “What did they find? Is she ill? Should she be here, too?”

“Lord Byrfield—she isn't your sister. She's Mr. Sperrin's sister. And Jamie's.”

 

CHAPTER 22

T
HE DETECTIVE INSPECTOR
had imparted much worse news in his time and he breezed on, largely unconcerned. “Now, this is only of interest to me insofar as it affects my investigation. At first I thought it didn't, and I wasn't going to tell you. Now I think maybe it does, and anyway, maybe you're entitled to know.”

Pete Byrfield looked, Hazel thought, pretty much how Mrs. Lot must have looked after she glanced back to the cities of the plain: white and rigid. Behind the kind eyes his brain was whirring—so fast, bits were going to start coming off. Even so, he couldn't make any sense of it. What he was being told didn't add up. His voice, when it finally came, was a fragile plaint. “What are you saying? That Viv's … That my mother …
Her and Saul Sperrin?
”

“No, Lord Byrfield,” said Edwin Norris patiently. “There is not now and never was a Saul Sperrin. He was a convenient fiction. And the reason Ms. Sperrin needed a convenient fiction was that she didn't want to say who
was
the father of her sons.”

He waited and watched, and sure enough, after perhaps half a minute an answer began filtering down through Byrfield's expression. “You mean—Diana and my
father
…”

Norris sucked his teeth. “Well, yes,” he said carefully, “and no.”

“But…” Byrfield finally unfroze enough to shake his head, the light hair flicking in his eyes. “That can't be right. If David and I were half brothers, it would have showed up in the DNA.”

Hazel had been doing the math, too, and got the answer first. Or perhaps Ash did, hence his sudden urge to lean forward and stroke his dog's ears, but Hazel was the one who accepted the need—the obligation—to explain.

“Pete,” she said gently, “there's a reason DI Norris wanted to talk to you and didn't ask Viv to be here, too. This doesn't concern Viv and Posy.”

The twenty-eighth earl was thoroughly confused again. “But he said…”

“You said it yourself,” sighed Hazel, “your parents didn't have the happiest home life. But both of them desperately wanted a son. Viv and Posy are your father's children. So is David, and so was Jamie. And, in the strictly biological sense, you're not.”

It's a wise child that knows his own father. But Pete didn't just have it in writing: He had it in stone and in land, and there was the dusty chest in the box room where he kept the ermine.… He
knew
who he was. He had always known. “What?”

Hazel smiled. “You don't even look like the rest of them. Viv and Posy and David all look the same—short, strong, and dark. Like your father. And you're a fair-skinned beanpole. Did it never occur to you to wonder why?”

Byrfield shrugged, too, helplessly. “Some kind of a throwback…”

“Of course,” she agreed. “That happens all the time. It can happen much more dramatically than that—black parents suddenly producing an apparently white child, or the other way around. Two half-forgotten genes meet and the results are … surprising. But that's not the likeliest explanation. The easiest way of introducing new characteristics into a family is by introducing new genes. And that's what the DNA says, isn't it?” She appealed to Norris, who nodded. “The last earl wasn't your father. Your mother brought you home as a souvenir from an away day.”

Byrfield made a funny burbling noise that was more than half a laugh.

And Ash thought that the magic was at work again. Nobody else could have got away with it. Nobody else could have said that without causing deep offense. But Hazel Best wore the goodness of her heart on her sleeve, and people recognized and responded to her good intentions even in the most trying of circumstances.

“You're not saying they adopted me.” Hazel shook her head. “Then … who
was
my dad?”

“Oh, that's easy.” Hazel beamed. “The last earl. He gave you everything
but
his genes. He loved you every day of your life, and he went to his rest content that you were his son and heir in every way that mattered. If you mean who was your biological father, I don't know. It could have been anyone. You might even have come out of a test tube. Ask your mother, if you think you can trust the answer. But if I were you, I wouldn't get too hung up on it. Your dad considered you his son. Isn't that enough?”

“Hang on. Hang on,” interjected David Sperrin. “Are you saying … Are you saying
I'm
the rightful earl of Byrfield?” The look of horror on his face was the exact antithesis of hope.

“I don't think so,” said Hazel tactfully. “I think only legitimate children inherit. You could always take it up with the heraldic King of Arms or whoever.”

“Good God, no,” grunted Sperrin, subsiding in relief.

“But … but…” Pete Byrfield had the strong feeling he'd done somebody out of something. “So Dad and Diana had Jamie, and four years later Mother and Dad had Viv. Then Dad and Diana had David, and he and Mother had Posy. Then Mother and this two-meter Viking with the weak chin had me. Is that it?”

Norris nodded. “Looks like it.”

“Good grief.” But something like a smile was taking over his unimpressive features. “And you think you know people…” He looked helplessly at Sperrin. “I don't think we're related, are we? But you're my half sisters' half brother. You've got to be entitled to something.”

Sperrin considered. “You could buy me that magnetometer.”

“You really think that's a good idea?” said Byrfield. “Seeing how much trouble you can cause with just a shovel?”

They traded a grin, two men who had always liked each other enough to face in good faith whatever problems these revelations would bring.