THEY WERE WALKING back up the drive toward Byrfield. Patience disappeared into the rhododendrons, on the trail of a rabbit.
Ash was quiet. There was nothing unusual about this. But Hazel was learning to read his silences as you might read another man’s body language. Sometimes he was silent because he was thinking, sometimes because he didn’t want to think. Sometimes he was silent because there was nothing he wanted to say, and sometimes because there was nothing he could say.
This was a thinking silence. Hazel slowed her stride to match his. “You’re wondering what happened to Jamie.”
Ash nodded. “Yes.”
“Do you think Diana killed him?”
He didn’t answer immediately. Then he shook his head. “No. I think she’d have said so if she had. There’s a vein of adamancy in that woman. I don’t think her pride would allow her to hide behind a lie.
She probably doesn’t fancy doing time any more now than she did thirty years ago.”
“I don’t think that’s why she lied then. I think she was protecting someone else.”
“Henry?”
Ash nodded. “Maybe.”
“Henry’s been dead a long time now,” Hazel pointed out. “He doesn’t need protecting anymore.”
“True. But that also means there’s no one left to contradict anything she says. She could say Henry Byrfield shot Jamie, and it’s unlikely Inspector Norris could prove any different. That would be the safest lie to tell, if she was prepared to lie. If it is a lie.”
“You didn’t know him.” But Hazel no longer sounded as confident as she once had. It seemed none of them had known him as well as they thought they had. Except just possibly his wife. Everyone remembered the last earl fondly, and no one had a good word to say about the countess. But he’d had two children out of wedlock before she succumbed to the unknown Viking, and even then she may have been thinking more of the Byrfield title than of herself. One thing Hazel was sure of: Alice Byrfield had always been able to read a calendar. If there were reassessments to be done, maybe Pete’s mother was due an upgrade.
Ash, too, was doing mental arithmetic. “It took eleven paving slabs to make that little grave. The closest they were likely to be was in the yard at Home Farm, a quarter of a mile across the fields. She might have been able to lift two at a time, but I don’t think she carried them across rough ground. So if she was working alone, she made that trip thirteen times—with the slabs, with the tools, and with her child’s body. It’s just about possible she did all that in a single night without anybody noticing—and without anybody reporting the theft of eleven paving slabs in the morning—but it’s much more likely that she had help. Henry Byrfield could have had them put on a trailer and tractored them down to the lake in broad daylight without anyone asking questions. He’s about the only one who could.”
It made more sense than anything else. “You think he was covering for Diana?”
“I think he was helping Diana. They must have agreed it was the best thing to do in the circumstances—whatever those circumstances were. Either of them could have called the police, but neither of them chose to. Either they were both responsible for Jamie’s death or neither of them was.”
“Or it was Diana, but the old earl decided he had too much to lose by telling the police, and so the world, that he’d fathered her two illegitimate sons,” suggested Hazel. The rancor in her tone surprised her.
Ash half turned to look at her, one eyebrow canted quizzically. “Everyone says he was a good man. He was a good father to Pete, though he probably knew he wasn’t actually his son, and he made sure David got what he wanted. Do you think he’d have let Diana shoot his son, then help her cover up the crime for fear of embarrassment?”
Hazel didn’t have to think long. “No, I don’t.”
“That’s two reasons to believe Diana’s telling the truth.”
“But if she didn’t kill Jamie, why won’t she say what happened? Maybe it was nothing more than a terrible accident, but nobody’s going to believe that while she refuses to explain.”
Patience reappeared from the shrubbery with white fluff caught in her jaws.
“Pete’s solicitor will talk her around,” Hazel added in the hopeful tone of someone trying to sound surer than she feels. “He’ll make her understand that the only way forward now is to tell the truth. To tell Norris exactly what happened, and throw herself on the mercy of the court.”
Ash remained doubtful. “Diana Sperrin is a strong woman. I don’t think she’d have acted as she did if she wasn’t sure she could see it through.”
“She may have thought she’d never be caught.”
Ash disagreed. “She must have known she might be. She’s had thirty years to decide what to do if this moment came. And this is the best she could come up with? No comment?”
“It can be a pretty smart strategy,” Hazel felt bound to point out.
“If you’re guilty. Not if you’re innocent.”
“But she isn’t innocent,” said Hazel reasonably. “She’s committed at least one offense. She’s admitted as much.”
“She’s admitted to burying Jamie, not to killing him.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know who killed him.”
Ash dismissed that immediately. “Of course she knows. If she didn’t, she’d want us to find out. She’d have wanted that from the start. She’s protecting someone.”
“Or someone’s memory.” The circular nature of the debate had brought them back to Henry Byrfield again. “Maybe it really was an accident,” suggested Hazel, helpless to find another answer. “And rather than force Henry to explain to the police what happened, including his relationship with the dead child, she agreed to a clandestine burial. She’d invented Saul Sperrin ten years before, as a cover for her ongoing activities with the earl. The simplest thing was to invoke him again. To tell people he’d taken Jamie.”
“It’s not impossible,” conceded Ash. “She’s not a particularly conventional woman. A Christian burial and a stone in the churchyard may not have meant much to her. Granted that nothing was going to bring Jamie back, protecting her lover may have meant more.”
“And having launched the fiction that Jamie was abducted by her husband, it was easier to keep it going than to stop it. Hence the thirty years’ worth of cards she sent herself.” Hazel frowned. “You can’t call it outstanding police work, can you, when the forces of two countries are looking for a man who never existed. Did nobody think of checking the records for Saul Sperrin’s birth certificate, or their marriage certificate?”
“It only seems obvious because of what we know,” said Ash. “If someone came to you tomorrow accusing her husband of child abduction, would you begin your inquiries with the Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths?”
Hazel glowered. “I would now.”
* * *
At least someone knew how to deal constructively with the new situation. Pete Byrfield made some phone calls, and in the late afternoon his sisters arrived, together, in Vivienne’s car. He greeted them with a reassuring hug and ushered them upstairs to the countess’s sitting room.
Hazel tried not to eavesdrop, but it wasn’t easy. Byrfield was a small-enough house that a family row involving the countess and her three children would always rattle the stoppers in the crystal decanters. But only once were voices raised high enough to carry, and then they dropped quickly out of hearing again.
David Sperrin had never stood on ceremony at Byrfield. He’d traipsed in through whichever door was nearest and never minded the mud on his boots. Only now that it might seem he had a right to leave muddy footprints anywhere he wanted did he feel the need to ring the bell.
Byrfield met him with an impish grin. He’d known he was coming: He’d summoned him. He showed Sperrin upstairs, and pretended not to notice that Sperrin had showered and put on a clean shirt for the meeting.
“I like your friend Pete,” said Gabriel Ash, leafing through a catalog of farm machinery that might as well have been upside down and written in Sanskrit for all he was getting out of it.
Hazel smiled. “Me, too.”
* * *
The sound of loose ends flapping kept them all from sleep.
Edwin Norris conducted two interviews with Diana Sperrin. Although he was keen to resolve the matter—and perhaps even keener to understand it—he was punctilious about waiting for her solicitor to join them.
Because the Byrfield estate was a significant client, the senior Mr. Parsons took the duty on himself. But in fact, a newly qualified solicitor would have been more than equal to the task. Diana told him nothing she hadn’t already told DI Norris, and proposed telling neither of them any more. It wasn’t that she was difficult, or aggressive, or deceitful. She’d just said all that she intended to, ever.
Simple rage kept the countess awake. After everything—after everything she’d put up with, everything she’d done!—it was all going to come out anyway. People would know. People in Burford would know. Tradesmen would know. She’d be a laughingstock.
The four Byrfield siblings—it’s probably the only way to describe them—sat up all night, replenishing the coffeepot and the whiskey decanter at intervals, getting to know one another all over again.
Hazel found herself thinking like a police officer. She lay in the dark, in the familiar comfort of her old bed in her old room, and marshaled all the facts she could be sure of, and all the inferences she could reasonably count on, and tried to see through the drama that had occurred center stage to glimpse what might have been going on in the wings.
Ash retired to his room to leave the Byrfields alone, but he didn’t go to bed. He sat in the chair all night, doing pretty much what Hazel was doing down in the gate lodge, but with a different set of facts.
Patience took advantage of the unoccupied bed and snored her way through till morning.