DAVID SPERRIN DIDN’T know what to do with himself. An archaeologist prevented from digging is never a happy sight, but this one had more on his mind than rain, bank holidays, and problems with the paperwork. He should have been with his mother, but Wool Row was the last place he felt he’d be welcome. Instead he hung about Byrfield, unusually clean and drinking too much coffee.
And everyone else, in deference to his odd status as the newly bereaved brother of someone who had died thirty years before, was giving him too wide a berth. They meant it kindly. They thought he needed space. He didn’t; he needed company. He needed people to argue with.
Byrfield would probably have guessed this, and volunteered for the task. But Byrfield was out in the fields, catching up on work he’d neglected when he’d been preoccupied with his own dysfunctional family.
Once again, Hazel found herself rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. She made a jug of lemonade, took Sperrin out onto the lawn, and sat him down under one of the biggest surviving elms in England to drink it. “I can’t imagine how you’re feeling. I don’t suppose confused does more than scratch the surface.”
Sperrin snorted. Like the man himself, it was a sound angry on the outside and vulnerable underneath. He seemed almost grateful to have someone telling him where to go and what to do. “It doesn’t make any sense!”
“It doesn’t seem to make much, does it?” agreed Hazel. “Of course, it’ll make more when we know everything.”
“Why would my father kill Jamie? Why would he try to kill you?”
“The first may have been an accident,” she suggested. Until there was evidence to the contrary, it was the best thing for him to think. “The second an act of panic.”
“He had no reason to connect you with anything that happened here,” objected Sperrin. “You didn’t even live here when he left.”
“I wasn’t actually alive when he left,” murmured Hazel. “But you’re right, of course. And nothing I said at the horse fair should have warned him. I don’t know how he knew we were a threat to him.”
It wasn’t the only puzzle that was consuming Sperrin. “This is all wrong,” he muttered, no longer looking at her, but inside himself, sieving his memory, trying to reconcile what he thought he knew with what Detective Inspector Norris thought he knew. “How can it be Jamie that we found? He didn’t have Down syndrome. There was nothing wrong with him.”
“You were very young,” she reminded him gently. “Young enough that, to you, he was just your big brother. Would you have been aware if he had health problems?”
“Maybe not,” he retorted, “but my mother would. You’re not telling me that for more than thirty years she’s never thought to mention that he had Down’s? That would be … bizarre! He was her golden boy—the clever one, the good one, the one who’d have made her proud if our dad hadn’t whisked him off to the travelers in Ireland. Astrophysicist, brain surgeon, something like that. All my life, Jamie’s been the example I’ve failed to live up to. And you’re telling me he was some kind of a simpleton?”
“Not the words I’d have chosen,” said Hazel sharply. “He had an extra gene on one chromosome. It gave him a disability. It didn’t stop him from being a loving son and a fun-to-be-with older brother.”
“But the things she said!”
“David”—she sighed—“there are no baby books that tell you how to feel when the child you’ve been waiting nine months for turns out to be different to other people’s. It’s a shock. Overnight, your expectations have to change. That unspoken contract, that we look after our kids when they’re young and hope they’ll look after us when we’re old, goes out the window. A disabled child is likely to need care for the rest of his life, and that may mean the rest of yours.
“People react in different ways. Some people—surprisingly few, when you consider what it’s going to mean—decide they can’t cope and walk away. Some go to the other extreme—put all the love they’re capable of into this damaged scrap of humanity, as if trying to compensate for that first devastating bit of bad luck.
“That’s how your mother reacted. She was left to raise a disabled child alone—she had to love him, or the resentment would have destroyed her. So she poured everything into him. And yes, maybe that left less than there should have been for you. And maybe, in loving him despite his imperfections, she effectively blinded herself to them. After he was gone, of course, it was easy to remember only the best bits. Easier than it would have been if she’d still been caring for him. I’m sorry if it meant you had a difficult childhood, David. But think what she went through, and get over it.”
She’d done it again: left someone with the sensation of having been savaged by a hamster. Sperrin stared at her, literally openmouthed, for half a minute, which is a long time for the universe to hold its breath. Then his jaw clamped shut like a steel trap and he was on his feet and striding down the drive toward Burford before Hazel got over the shock of what she’d just said and hurried after him.
“Where are you going?” she demanded breathlessly when she caught up.
“Where do you think?” His face was dark with anger and set in hard lines; there was something urgent and mechanical about his pace, like a toy soldier marching to war.
“Don’t have this out with Diana just now! Not when you’re angry and upset. Calm down first. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.”
For another hundred yards she thought he was going to ignore her. Then, just short of the gate lodge, his pace began to slacken, his determination to waver. He finally came to an uncertain halt at Fred Best’s front door. “Jamie’s dead? That really was him we found?”
Hazel nodded. “Yes. There’s no room for doubt.”
“And he’s been dead for thirty years.” Sperrin stared at her as if he believed she was keeping something from him, something that might finally make sense of this. But she couldn’t help. All she could do was stand beside him as gradually he came to terms with it. “Thirty years,” he said again in a kind of wonder; and she knew that the absence of tears on his cheeks didn’t mean he wasn’t crying.
* * *
Hazel saw David Sperrin as far as his mother’s house, but she didn’t go inside. There were things he needed to say to Diana, and perhaps things she ought to say to him, and neither of them needed an audience. Hazel could only hope Sperrin would leave the cottage in Wool Row with some kind of understanding, not even so much for his mother’s sake as for his own.
Across the road and a little farther into Burford, a white dog was sitting on the pavement outside the Spotted Pig. Hazel waited a moment and Ash came across to her, Patience trotting at his heel.
“What are you up to?”
“Nothing.” But they’d known each other for a couple of months now, and he didn’t really expect that to satisfy her. When her gaze didn’t flicker and her eyebrows showed no signs of descending, he sighed and explained. “It’s just … there’s something odd here. Nobody’s seen Saul Sperrin for thirty years, but the moment you start asking about him he’s right there, armed and ready to kill. It just doesn’t seem that likely.”
Hazel shrugged. “It was a horse fair. One of the few places in England there was a decent chance of running into him.”
“It was a horse fair ten miles from a place where people knew him. Not other travelers, but people who owed him no favors. The last time he was in Burford, he kidnapped his son and the child ended up dead. David’s right: Why would he risk coming back here? You can’t buy horses in Ireland anymore?”
The fair brows finally lowered and knit thoughtfully as Hazel considered this. “Well, somebody ran us off the road and shot at us. I can’t think of anyone it’s more likely to have been. Can you?”
He didn’t answer that. He was thinking aloud. “And then, why come after us with a shotgun? If he didn’t buy your story about the horse, why not just disappear? He’s stayed off the radar for thirty years; he could do it again. And if he thought maybe there was a horse and he’d follow us to find out, why try to kill us before we got wherever it was we were going? And did he just happen to have a shotgun in his car? I mean, at what point did he think he was going to need that?”
And now Hazel had no answers. These events had seemed to follow a certain logic as they were happening. But they didn’t stand up to analysis. He was right: There was something else going on. Or something different.
“What were you doing in the pub?”
“I’ve been trying to get a picture of Saul Sperrin from people who were around thirty years ago. People who’d have met him, or at least seen him in the village, and formed some kind of an impression of him.”
“And some of the regulars must have been here forever,” Hazel agreed. “Did they remember him?”
“Oh yes.”
“And what did they say about him?” This was just a little like pulling teeth.
“It wasn’t what they said, exactly,” said Ash, frowning. “Or it was, but that wasn’t the significant thing.”
“Gabriel,” exclaimed Hazel impatiently, “will you for pity’s sake spit it out!”
He nodded, aware he was making a mess of this. “What Mrs. Perkins in the shop remembers, and what Mrs. Morrison the housekeeper remembers, and what the old men in the pub remember are all different. They’re describing different men.”
Hazel shrugged, obscurely disappointed. “You always get that with eyewitnesses. They remember different aspects of what they’ve seen—different things that made an impression on them. You have to put the various accounts together and look for common threads. Always—not just after thirty years.” She sniffed. “I’d have thought you’d know that.”
“I do know that.” Ash hid a tiny smile. It amused him when she talked as if she’d been doing the job for years. “And that’s what I thought it was, to start with. Some people remembered Sperrin as being taller or fatter, or having or not having red hair. But no two people remember any two things the same. The more people I talk to, the more descriptions I get of him. No one human being could match all of them.”
Hazel was beginning to share his puzzlement. She knew he wasn’t making this up. He didn’t invent things—he hadn’t that kind of imagination. He could be putting two and two together and getting eight. Or the people he’d spoken to might have been teasing him—he hadn’t the imagination to notice that always. Or maybe it meant something.
“So what are you thinking? That some of them are remembering someone else?” Inspiration glimmered. “Maybe Diana had other men friends. She’d only have been around thirty then. Maybe when Saul let her down, she looked for company elsewhere, and some of the neighbors are remembering those men rather than Sperrin.”
“That’s possible,” agreed Ash. “By everyone’s account, Sperrin was never around much. I don’t think he ever really lived in the village. Maybe people just assumed the man coming out of Diana’s front door was her husband, when sometimes it wasn’t.”
Hazel waited, but he volunteered nothing more. She breathed heavily at him. “But that isn’t what you’re thinking, is it?”
“Well—no,” he admitted.
“And is it a secret, or are you going to tell me?”
“It’s going to sound pretty crazy,” Ash warned her.
Nobody she knew—nobody she cared for—came so close so often to getting a slap. “Gabriel, ever since we met you’ve been saying pretty crazy things to me! And the craziest thing of all is how many of them have turned out to be true. So yes, I might think you’ve finally lost your marbles, but I’m going to listen anyway. So talk.”
He bit his lip. He nodded. Then drew a deep breath and said, “I’m beginning to wonder if Saul Sperrin is a real person at all.”