UNLESS YOU COUNTED the dog, Hazel and Ash were alone in the dining room that evening. Sperrin didn’t appear at all. Byrfield appeared briefly, worried and apologetic, and filled a tray to take upstairs. “I have some fences to mend with my mother.”
Patience looked up sweetly. Anything to keep the old dear from wandering off, she said; and Ash, embarrassed because he always forgot other people couldn’t hear her, shushed urgently, and Hazel exchanged a long-suffering look for Byrfield’s puzzled one because neither of them knew why.
For a minute longer, like aristocracy in a play, they sat at either end of the long table. Then Hazel moved her meal up to Ash’s end and they ate for a while in silence, both occupied with their own thoughts.
Hazel was picking over her own contribution to the Byrfield family’s falling-out. She’d advised Pete to talk to his mother; he’d taken her advice, and this was the outcome. That didn’t make it bad advice, necessarily; but it did make Hazel wonder if she should be a little more circumspect about giving advice generally.
Finally, looking up with a rueful smile, Hazel said, “I’m sorry about all this. When I talked you into coming to visit my father, I never guessed we’d still be here six days later. Was there anything you were rushing back for?”
Even as she said it, she realized how silly it was. There was only one matter in Gabriel Ash’s life that was of any consequence at all, and there had been no news about his family since the day four years earlier that he’d got in from work and found them gone. Since Patience was with them, he had nothing to return to, much less to hurry for. There was probably no one else in England as amenable to being hijacked from his usual routine and kept almost under house arrest in a comfortable country mansion.
“Nothing,” he reassured her. “I wanted to see Stephen Graves and I’ve done that. He mentioned a couple of other people I could talk to, and I can do that from here if we’re going to be at Byrfield much longer. Not because there’s any urgency, just for something to do. Graves didn’t hold out much hope that any of them could help, and I don’t, either. You just feel”—he shrugged self-deprecatingly—“you have to explore every avenue. Then you don’t ask yourself later if you missed something, gave up too soon.”
“Gabriel,” Hazel said softly, “you’ve been at this for four years. Whatever you do next, you’ve left it too late to give up too soon.”
When he’d deciphered the syntax, he gave her a painful little smile. “It’s all right, you know. I’m really not holding my breath. I’m not going to fall apart again if I can’t work up a viable lead. It’s just that I’ve nothing better to do.”
That wasn’t entirely honest, and both of them knew it. For the rest of his life, or as long as he had the mental and physical strength, Ash was going to do anything he could, anything that occurred to him, to find out what became of his family. To track down the people responsible. But, realistically, he was aware that the chances of a breakthrough, of any kind of success, had diminished by now to almost nothing. They’d been at their best when he was living as a hermit on Orkney, desperate to convince the kidnappers he posed them no threat. If any hope survived that time, probably it vanished when he made a very public scene in the heart of London. It would be a miracle now if he picked up a trail leading anywhere. But that’s the thing about miracles: You can never quite dismiss the possibility.
“Actually,” said Hazel, wondering if it was impertinent but deciding to say it anyway, “there is something you should be doing.”
Trusting her, he failed to see the trap. “What?”
“You should be building a life for yourself.”
Ash continued regarding her over the corner of the massive table for a long time. She met his gaze and held it steady. She wasn’t going to apologize and change the subject. Maybe she had no right to tell him this, but someone needed to.
Finally he said, “I had the life I wanted.”
“Yes,” said Hazel. “And now you don’t. Gabriel, I don’t want you to stop missing your wife and sons. I don’t want you to stop looking for them. But I want you to have a life as well. The search can be the most important thing that you do without being the only thing that you do. I don’t want you to invest so much of yourself in it that there’s nothing left over.”
She meant if you fail, and Ash knew she meant that. He took a moment to marshal his thoughts. Then he said quietly, “You didn’t know me a year ago. In a way I wish you had. Not because that’s how I like to be remembered. And not because I think you could do with a shaking, although sometimes I do think that. But because then you’d know what a difference you’ve made to me. You, and Patience.
“I know that … how I am … exasperates you sometimes. It exasperates me. But I remember how I was a year ago, and I don’t think you have any idea. I have a life now. It may not be what I hoped for when I was at Oxford, but it’s worthwhile and even rewarding in a modest way, and when I think back to how I was before I knew you, I can’t believe how far I’ve come. It’s like I spent three years trying to drag my face out of the gutter, and now I’m walking on the pavement with the normal people—and you want to know why I’m not riding a skateboard!”
Hazel had been determined not to apologize for caring about him. But he’d shamed her into it. “Gabriel, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to belittle the progress you’ve made. I mean well, you know, even if it doesn’t always seem like it. What is it they say about good intentions?”
“That the road to hell is paved with them,” said Ash. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. Intention is the only difference between an accident and murder. Good intentions is about all we can promise one another. None of us knows how things will work out—all we can do is try to do what we think is right.
“I know you’re on my side. I know, and I don’t think you do, that if I’d never met you and someone else had taken Patience home from the animal shelter, I would still be facedown in the dirt. I wish I could explain to you how much richer my life is for having you in it.”
Warm with pleasure, on impulse she reached out and laid her hand over his wrist. Ash replied with his solemn, studious-child smile. Under the table she felt the soft rhythmic thump of the dog’s tail against her ankle. “If I need slapping down sometimes,” she said, “feel free to slap.”
“If I need a poke with a sharp stick,” said Ash, “poke away.”
From under the table Patience murmured hopefully, And if I need a nice bit of fried liver sometimes …
Hazel helped herself to fruit from the sideboard. She looked up at the ceiling. “I wonder how that’s going.”
Ash winced. “Not easily. I can’t see the countess throwing an arm around him and telling him it was a mistake anyone could make.”
“She never was an easy woman to get on with.”
“And by and large, people—unlike wine—don’t improve with age.”
The meal having been done as much justice as two people could do it, Hazel headed for the kitchen door. “Say good night to Pete for me, will you?”
Ash glanced at the shot-silk evening sky. “Can we walk with you? Patience likes a stroll before bedtime.”
At first they walked in a companionable silence. But Ash was still pondering the enigma of the Byrfield family dynamic. “Pete’s mother might not be the sweetest-natured woman in the world,” he said, worrying at it like a troublesome tooth, “but it’s a big step from being sharp with the staff to murdering your own child. What has she ever done to make Pete think she was capable of that?”
Hazel hadn’t told him about Byrfield’s fears, which had been shared with her as a confidence. She stopped, thunderstruck, and stared at him in the deepening twilight. “What … why … what makes you think…?”
Ash blinked at her. “I haven’t passed the last six days in a drug-induced coma! When David was so certain it couldn’t be his brother he’d dug up, and Norris said the child was disabled, Pete started to worry. Really worry. He called his sister up from London, and had a stand-up argument with his mother. Bits of which percolated through shut doors and plastered ceilings. There might be other explanations, but that seemed the likeliest one. Are you saying I got it wrong?”
“Well—no,” admitted Hazel. “But it was supposed to be a secret. I wouldn’t want Pete thinking I’d been gossiping about it.”
“Of course not.” It was one of the things he was good at: keeping his own counsel. And another was this: putting together snippets of overheard conversations and significant exchanges of looks, and the things people were about to say and then didn’t, and arriving at a conclusion that might have occurred to almost no one else. Sometimes he was wrong, but not often. Being right was the basis of both his careers, first as an insurance investigator, then as a security analyst. It was hard to keep secrets from him, even now.
Especially when it meant keeping them from Patience as well.
Hazel, recovering her composure, decided there was nothing to be lost now by answering his question. “I’ve never heard that she’s done anything dreadful. But then, I didn’t grow up in her house. Pete would have a better idea what she’s capable of than I would.”
“People seem to remember his father more fondly. You said he helped David get to university?”
She nodded. “It was the sort of thing he’d do from time to time—identify a need and step in. He didn’t have to. But he recognized that David had the brains to do well, and maybe needed to get away from Burford, but wouldn’t have made it on his own.”
“Diana couldn’t help?”
“Diana’s talented, but I don’t think she makes a lot of money from her painting.”
Again, Ash seemed to hear what she hadn’t said. “Do you suppose she’d have helped him if she could?”
Hazel had her mouth open to say “Of course she would,” then shut it again and thought. “I don’t know. That’s another family that doesn’t enjoy the easiest relationship.”
“David’s convinced his mother doesn’t like him. I wonder if he knows why.”
“Apart from him being a loudmouthed smart-arse, you mean?” In the dusk they smiled at each other. Hazel went on thoughtfully. “I suppose losing her elder son—I know she thought he was safe with his father, but she’d still lost him—was bound to affect how she related to the one she had left. She might have smothered him, kept him close for fear of losing him, too. Maybe what she did instead was put a distance between them so that if Saul came back for David, she wouldn’t be hurt as much. And once she started telling herself that losing her younger child would be less of a wrench, the rest followed. She convinced herself that Jamie was the precious one, the perfect one. David was an also-ran.”
“He didn’t know that his brother was disabled,” murmured Ash.
“I suppose he was too young to have noticed. And Diana may have edited her memory of him—really does remember him as perfect. Which is a lot easier to do with someone you’ve lost than someone you see every day.”
They’d nearly reached the gate lodge. A battered horse box rumbled past the end of the drive.
“I wonder what happened,” Hazel mused. “Saul Sperrin hardly went to the trouble of coming back here to murder his elder son. And then there’s that grave—that took time, and trouble, and love. He must have wanted Jamie with him. But something went wrong. Perhaps the child panicked, started yelling for his mother, and Saul tried to hush him and managed to suffocate him. Something like that?”
“It’s possible,” agreed Ash. “Jamie might have been his son, but he was breaking the law by abducting him. It would have been important to get away without causing a disturbance.”
“It’s the cards that break my heart,” admitted Hazel. “Thirty years’ worth of Christmas and birthday cards that he shopped for and sent, all the time knowing Jamie was buried a short walk from his mother’s house.”
“I suppose the search for a man who’d taken his own child back to his own country was never going to be as intense as a murder hunt. While Diana thought Jamie was safe, Saul was safe, too. At least”—he paused as another trailer rattled past—“safer than he would have been with the police forces of two countries hunting for him.”
“Well, they’ll be hunting for him now.”
“Do you suppose they’ll find him?”
“It’s not easy to disappear for good,” said Hazel. “So many things these days mean having to prove who you are—financial transactions, traveling, getting a child into school—and a flag comes up on a computer to say you’re being sought. It was easier thirty years ago.”
“Yes. But that applies more to people like us—the settled community.” Ash said it with hardly a trace of irony. “Travelers are still hard to keep tabs on. It’s the nature of their life—it suits them, and you have to conclude it suits the authorities, too. If Saul Sperrin hadn’t been a gypsy, he’d have been found years ago. But for someone wanting to assume a new identity, the traveling community is a good place to do it, and thirty years should be time enough.”
Though Hazel nodded, her attention was elsewhere. She was looking up the Burford road with a puzzled expression. “Isn’t it a bit late for people to be going to a horse show?”
“Er—I suppose.” Her ability to ride two trains of thought at the same time always unsettled Ash slightly.
“And here comes another,” said Hazel, stepping back to let the trailer pass and then craning on tiptoe. “And … yes, it’s another black-and-white one.”
Ash frowned. “The trailer?” He’d have put a fair bit of money behind his judgment that it was, although in need of painting, brown.
“The occupant of the trailer. In the three trailers that have passed us there were a total of five horses, and three of them were black and white. What does that tell you?” She looked at him expectantly.
Ash was slowly smiling. “Not a horse show—a fair. A gypsy horse fair. They’re going to park up somewhere overnight and trade tomorrow.”
“Exactly.” Hazel sounded like a schoolteacher who’s finally got one of her dimmer pupils to recognize the difference between there and their. “Now, if those trailers are passing every couple of minutes, it seems likely that the fairground isn’t too far from here. Come on, the car’s right here—let’s follow.”
“Now?” Ash had always been someone who planned ahead. Hazel’s impetuosity startled and often alarmed him.
“Of course now.” She had the gate lodge door open and was shouting to her father. “Why not—do you turn back into a pumpkin at midnight?”
“I just feel we ought to think this through.”
“I have,” she assured him. “I think those trailers are going to meet up with a whole lot of other trailers, and about half the people towing them are going to be related, one way or another, to Saul Sperrin. If they don’t know where he is, or even if he’s still alive, no one will.”
“You’re probably right,” conceded Ash. “But Saul Sperrin is now a murder suspect. Looking for him is the job of the police.”
“I am the police.”
He took in her determined expression and refrained from pointing out that she was a fairly recent component of the police and was currently on sick leave. “I mean Detective Inspector Norris won’t thank us for interfering in his investigation. If there are people at the fair who know where Sperrin is, he’ll want to be the one asking them.”
“But he isn’t here,” she explained, unnecessarily, “and we are. If we don’t follow these trailers, they’ll disappear into the countryside and Norris won’t know where to begin looking for them. Plus, even if he finds them, if the police show up at that fair tomorrow, no one will admit to knowing anything. Tonight, in the dark, with people arriving from all over England, with people unloading ponies and unhitching caravans, and everybody tired and wanting something to eat, it’ll be chaos. There’ll be lots of strange faces about. Anybody could wander around asking a few questions, as long as he doesn’t seem too pushy and doesn’t look like a policeman. Neither of us looks like a policeman. You look like a gypsy at the best of times. And Patience is the perfect dog for the job. No one who sees us walking our lurcher will challenge our right to be there.”
Ash was horribly afraid that she was right. Afraid, because he knew that what she was proposing was dangerous. He knew he couldn’t talk sense into her when Hazel was in this mood. He looked down at his shoes. All he could do was refuse to go, and if he did that, she would go alone. “I should let Pete know.…”
“We’ll phone him. You know—that little gismo I made you buy, that you’re supposed to carry with you but which, in fact, leaves home even less often than you do? It’s really clever. You tell it some numbers, and then you can talk to somebody even farther away than the end of the street. Get in.”
Hazel was already starting the engine. Ash let Patience onto the backseat and climbed in the front. “All right, so we’re going to a gypsy horse fair and we’re going to ask if anyone knows where Saul Sperrin is. Even if we ask someone who knows, do you really think he’s going to tell us?”
“Probably not,” she said ironically, “if I say he’s wanted for murder! I’m not stupid, Gabriel. I’ve no intentions of starting a fight. I’ll just say”—she slowed down, thinking it through as the words came—“I need to talk to him about a horse. I’ll say someone died and left him a horse, but if I can’t find him, it’ll go to someone else. The gypsy hasn’t been born who’d pass up the chance of a gift horse. Rather than let that happen, someone will remember where Saul Sperrin hangs out these days and how to get in touch with him.”
Ash was unconvinced. “He was Saul Sperrin thirty years ago. He may have been someone else for most of the time since.”
“He may have been someone else as far as the authorities are concerned. My bet is, among people who’ve known his people back to Finn MacCool, he’s still Saul Sperrin. Or at least they’ll know who I mean. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll be here. But if not, maybe someone will let him know he’s due a horse and he’ll come looking for me.”
“Hazel—are you sure you want him looking for you? This is a man who may well have killed his own ten-year-old son. Maybe it was an accident, but even so it’s the kind of accident that happens more to people who’re quicker with their fists than their brains. And he’s had thirty years to get over whatever guilt he felt, to get used to the idea that he got away with it. If some stranger starts asking questions about him, the prospect of a gift horse may not be enough to stop him wanting to shut you up.”
“Then aren’t I lucky to have someone to protect me?”
Ash felt himself flush. “Hazel, you know I’m not much good in a fight. I’ll do my best, but you really don’t want me to be the only thing standing between you and physical injury.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then she said cheerfully, “It won’t come to that. I’ll be careful.”
As they drove down the road, Ash heard a modest voice from the backseat saying, Actually, I think she meant me.