Perfect Sins (9 page)

Hazel looked at him and saw the commitment shining in his eyes, and her smile was warm. “You're right. This is worth preserving, even if it takes a little inequality to do it. I inherited my mother's jewelry and a half share in a small rental property in Basingstoke, you inherited Byrfield and its title. There might be a difference in scale, but it's the same principle.”

“The title
does
bother me, sometimes,” admitted Byrfield. “I can be worthy of the estate by working it well, and using it to give other people employment. The title's different. It says I'm different to other people for no better reason than that a distant ancestor, hundreds of years ago, was better, or braver, or maybe just sneakier than the people around him. And it goes on saying that, however little I contribute to the family's prestige. All that's required of me is to produce a son before I die, and if I can manage that challenging task, the title goes on.

“And if I can't, the title will go elsewhere and take Byrfield with it. It's ridiculous, when you think about it. In theory, my mother could be walking the streets if I don't do my duty by her! And some second cousin whose real talent lies in making violins or translating Sanskrit could be the next earl, with all of this to manage.”

“Who is the next in line, anyway?” asked Hazel. She wondered if he'd even know.

The promptness of his answer told her, more than anything he'd said, that the future of Byrfield was never more than a thought from his mind. “My father's younger brother's second son, Rodney. The older son died in a car crash when he was twenty.”

“And does cousin Rodney want to be earl?”

“Not as far as I know. Doesn't come into it—you don't get a choice. You can't pass a title on to a good home, as if it was an unwanted puppy. You can get rid of it—drown it, effectively—if you feel strongly enough, but it's quite an undertaking, and your descendants can't get it back if they feel differently.”

“What about daughters?” asked Hazel mischievously. “Viv would have made a good earl.”

“There
are
titles that can travel down the distaff line,” Byrfield acknowledged, a shade loftily, as if it was a little infra dig, “but ours isn't one of them. Even if I hadn't come along, the only way my sister could be Countess Byrfield would be if she married cousin Rodney. Which used to happen quite a bit, of course. It explains why the children of the nobility tend to have teeth like a row of gravestones but no chins.”

Hazel laughed again and linked her arm companionably through his.

They followed the plodding cows in silence for a minute. Then Byrfield said, with some reticence, “Can
I
ask something personal?”

“Always,” said Hazel. She meant it, but before Byrfield had time to take up the invitation, she'd already jumped in with the answer. “Ah—me and Gabriel. Yes?”

“Well—yes,” admitted Byrfield.

“David wanted to know the same thing.”

“Did he indeed?” If Hazel saw him glower, she thought nothing of it. “What did you tell him?”

“The truth. That we're friends—nothing more, nothing less. He's married. At least…” And then she had no option but to fill in some of the details. “He doesn't know if his wife is still alive,” she finished. “He works on the assumption that she might be. I don't think he's ever going to know for sure.”

“He could—” Byrfield stopped there, aware that he risked impertinence.

“Have her declared dead? Yes, he could, eventually,” said Hazel. “But you see, that's not what he wants. All that keeps him going is the remote possibility that she might be alive somewhere. Or if not Cathy, then his sons. If he knew for sure they were gone…” She shrugged unhappily.

“What?”

“He says he'd find the people responsible and kill them, or die trying.”

It's just a cliché when someone says it on a TV show. It's different when it's for real, and it's someone you know. Despite the warmth of the sun, Byrfield felt chills running under his skin. “He doesn't seem the violent type.”

“He isn't,” Hazel said fervently. “In spite of which, I think he means every word.”

 

CHAPTER 10

DNA
SAMPLES
are taken by swabbing the inside of the cheek. It requires a few moments and no privacy. Hazel, this early in her career, had already seen it done too often to find it interesting, but Pete Byrfield watched intently.

By the time the technician arrived to map David Sperrin's entire family history from a few cells of mucous membrane, the cows had been moved and the cowherds had returned. Sperrin had brought them up-to-date with every appearance of satisfaction, as if he thought the conversation with DI Norris had proved something.

Perhaps Byrfield thought so, too. As the day wore on, Hazel noticed him becoming more and more quiet, looking more and more troubled, until—anxious about him—she cornered him on the stairs and asked plainly what the problem was.

“Problem?” he echoed, prevaricating weakly.

“Pete, you look like you lost a twenty-pound note and found a euro! What's happened? Did David tell you something he didn't tell us?”

“No, of course not. It's just…” The words dwindled and died.

Hazel took a lot more putting off than that. “Yes? What?”

Byrfield swallowed. “David seems pretty sure that wasn't his brother we found.”

“Yes, he does. Well, people try to believe what suits them. Unless you've some reason to think he's wrong?”

“No—no,” he said quickly. He looked around, although there was no one else within sight or earshot. “But if it wasn't Jamie Sperrin, who was it?”

Hazel didn't understand his concern. “If it wasn't Jamie, it probably wasn't anyone you'd know. No other local children went missing about that time, did they? So he was brought here. Not a nice thought, I know, but better than the alternative. Norris will have to go back to the PNC—national records—and see what he can turn up around that time. Assuming David's test proves what he thinks it will.”

“I'm afraid it will,” mumbled Byrfield.

She couldn't ignore that. Even without a police officer's instincts she would have known that wasn't just careless speaking—something coming out other than how he meant. Hazel took a deep breath. “Now, what exactly do you mean by that?”

He'd said it precisely because he needed to talk, to her or to someone. He just didn't know how to start. He'd been dwelling on a notion for hours now, and far from laying it to rest, he'd invested it with more and more credibility the longer he'd worried at it. By now it had assumed the proportions of a mountain ready to fall on him.

The first step was to get out of this house that he loved and that burdened him. They walked out into the empty courtyard. Then Byrfield said tentatively, “This all happened about thirty years ago.”

“Apparently.”

“I'm thirty years old.”

“Yes?” And then, because he seemed to be waiting for something, she said, “I'm twenty-six.”

Byrfield shut his eyes for a moment and tried to compose himself, to put his thoughts—his fears—into some sort of coherent sequence. Then he started again.

“My parents were married”—he did the sums—“forty-two years ago. My sister Viv is thirty-six. Two years later they had Posy. Finally, to sighs of relief all around, they produced a son.”

“Okay,” said Hazel, still waiting.

Byrfield raised his haunted gaze to her face. “Suppose I wasn't the first son? Suppose their first child was also a son?”

Now he'd lost her. “You think Vivienne was born a boy?” She supposed it wasn't entirely impossible—stranger things make the front of the Sunday tabloids.…

“No, of course not.” His tone was impatient, but in the hollows of his eyes was the despair that he was going to have to spell it out—that she couldn't guess what was troubling him. “Hazel, you've known us long enough—known Byrfield long enough—to know how families like ours operate. The title's like an hereditary disease, passed down the male line until the line runs out. Girls don't inherit. Viv doesn't resent that—it's been a fundamental part of her life, of her understanding of how the world works, since she was a tiny child.

“But what if the firstborn son can't do the job, either? Because there's something wrong with him—something he was born with, something that's never going to change, something that means he'll never be able to run a place like Byrfield or produce a suitable heir in his turn? What would a family like mine—parents like mine—do then?”

Hazel didn't know, either. “It must happen sometimes. I suppose someone else runs the family business during his lifetime and the title moves on when he dies without issue.”

“Yes,” agreed Byrfield. “The immediate line ends there. Which any titled family is going to see as a disaster, personally and financially. Don't underestimate what it meant to my parents to produce a viable male heir. Particularly, perhaps, to my mother. If she'd outlived my father and not had sons, she'd have lost Byrfield. If she'd outlived her only son and he'd died without children, she'd have lost Byrfield.”

Mentally, Hazel held that up against what she knew of the countess. “She wouldn't have been a happy bunny.”

Despite his deep anxiety, the understatement made Byrfield choke on a laugh. “No, she wouldn't. You know my mother: Can you see her taking it lying down? Accepting it as the luck of the draw and putting a brave face on it?”

Hazel could not.

Byrfield went on. These were hard things for him to say, but getting them said was helping him to deal with them. “Even thirty years ago, it would have been obvious pretty well immediately if their first son was born with Down syndrome. The implications would have been pretty obvious, too. That a time might come when they'd wish he'd never been born at all.”

Hazel was shocked. But it didn't stop her thinking. “But surely any son is better than no son?”

Byrfield nodded. “That's the other side of the coin. If they have another son, it's better if he's the heir. But if they don't, at least they can hold everything together for one more generation. That was the dilemma.”

“You think … what? That they kept his birth a secret? Until they knew if they could have another child?”

“Not another child—another son. They gave it another shot, and came up with Viv. Then they had Posy. And then finally—
finally
—they had me.” He swallowed. “So what would they do then?”

Hazel stared at him. “What do
you
think they did then?”

“I don't know. But what I'm afraid of—Hazel, what I'm mortally afraid of—is that they waited for a dark night and got rid of the spare they'd been keeping in the attic.”

Hazel paled. Her voice seemed to come from a very long way away. “Pete, that's crazy talk! You think you had an older brother, and your parents
killed
him—put him down like culling a defective puppy—when a better candidate for the title came along? You
can't
think that! You can't believe that of your own family.”

Byrfield put both hands to his face, spoke through the gap between them. His voice was thin and he picked his words carefully. “I wouldn't believe it of
your
family. I wouldn't believe it of most people's families. But the more I think about it, the more I believe it
is
something my family could do. In the interests of the title and the estate. Thinking they were doing the right thing.”

“To murder a helpless child? Their own child?” Her tone was outraged.

“You have to try to see it through their eyes,” he said, pleading in his voice. “The world looks different if you're a Byrfield. You aren't just an individual with an individual's rights and responsibilities. You're the guardian of six hundred years of history. Byrfields come and go, but Byrfield has been going for nearly six centuries and should last as long again if everyone does his duty. Marries when he's required to, marries money if it's running short, and produces a male heir before time's winged chariot runs him down.”

He lowered his hands, flicked her a tiny, fragile smile. “When you were a little kid, what were your mum and dad's expectations? That you'd work hard at school? That you'd be a loving child, a kind friend, and an honest member of society? Byrfields don't give a toss about any of that. From as far back as I can remember, the only thing that was required of me was that I'd father a son. That's it. It's not a lot to expect, is it? Most people manage it without even being asked. But you see, when it's
all
that's asked of you, it starts to assume more importance than it should.

“My parents had two terrific daughters, and they were desperately disappointed in both of them. They were inordinately proud of me. As if they'd bred a prizewinning bull. But what if I hadn't lived up to expectations? What if it had been clear from the start that I wouldn't? Would they have taken the view that the Byrfield title was more important than any single incumbent? I think they might have done. I think, if they believed they could get away with it, they might have quietly smothered me and made me a comfortable little grave down by the lake, and kept trying.”

“You're serious? You think you had an older brother?”

“Hazel, I don't know,” he cried in anguish. “But if that's what happened—if their first child was a son but he was disabled—God help me, I am terribly afraid that could be how they dealt with the situation. Because they thought it was their duty to protect Byrfield. The title, the house, and the land.”

He shuddered. “People think we own the land, but we don't. It owns us. It gets its claws into us and won't let go until we're dead. People think it's just marrying our cousins that makes us crazy, but I don't. I think it's the land. We love it too much—me as much as anyone. We love it, and it uses us. It looks soft and green and gentle, but that's just the velvet glove. Underneath it's rock-hard, and it doesn't care who it hurts. It grabs us in its iron fist, and it never lets us go.”