HAZEL BEST 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.”