IN FACT, ASH had an appointment with his therapist on Tuesday, which he now doubted he’d be back in Norbold in time to keep. He excused himself as the party returned to the house and called her from the privacy of his room.
He wasn’t ashamed of having a therapist. Hazel knew anyway, and he suspected the others wouldn’t be surprised. But he was a private man. He avoided doing any personal business in public.
Laura Fry, after changing the bookings in her diary, showed an almost indelicate interest in the discovery by the lake. After Ash had told her all he knew, she was still asking for more details. “And are you all right?” she kept asking.
Ash, who hadn’t until then considered the possibility that he might not be, thought she was seeking an excuse to come and join in a real-life game of Cluedo. “Absolutely fine,” he said firmly.
“If you need to talk, call me.”
“I will.”
“Anytime.”
“Thank you. I will.”
He was heading back down when a door opened behind him and a woman said icily—he could almost hear the crackle of frost—“We don’t let the dogs upstairs.”
His first instinct was to apologize. For four years, almost the only intercourse Gabriel Ash had had with the world beyond his front door had been in the form of apologies. It had been his fallback position, as if by preemptively apologizing for anything and everything he’d ever done, including getting born, he could avoid engaging with other people.
But in the last few months things had begun to change. At Laura Fry’s suggestion he’d acquired the dog. Owning a dog had made him go out, and he’d crossed the paths of a lot of people who bore him no ill will. The apologies had started to feel misplaced. Then he’d met Hazel Best, and life had immediately become more complicated but also more rewarding. He hadn’t always been a shambling excuse for a man, and his heart held to the faint, stubborn hope that he wouldn’t always be one. He bit back the apology unspoken and turned to face his accuser.
“I’m Gabriel Ash, and this is Patience. We’re staying here.”
“Yes, I know.” She was a woman of about sixty, not tall but noticeably slim, with short, geometric ash-blond hair. The color may have come out of a bottle, but the cut was clearly, expensively, the real thing. Her arched, pencil-thin eyebrows and berry red lipstick were as flawless as a doll’s. She was wearing a pale linen jacket, a silk blouse, a tailored skirt, and pearl earrings. “We have no shortage of guest rooms. Nor, indeed, of sheds.”
Ash supposed he was talking with Byrfield’s mother. But the countess hadn’t introduced herself, and he saw no reason to guess. “We’ll try to stay out of your way. But neither of us will be sleeping in the shed.”
At the sound of voices, Pete Byrfield appeared at the foot of the stairs. He looked worried. More than that, he looked as if worried was his fallback position, at least when dealing with his mother. “There’s coffee and sandwiches in the kitchen, Ash, if you’re hungry. Mother, I need to talk to you. Something rather awful has happened.”
“I know,” said the countess, still looking at Ash. “Dogs. In the bedrooms.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Byrfield was climbing the stairs two at a time. “Patience isn’t a dog, she’s a guest. If she wants a long hot soak in Lady Anne’s marble bath, followed by a mani—a pedicure and a tea tray in the orangery, that’s exactly what she’ll get while it is in my power to provide it. Now, can we go to your room while I tell you what’s going on?”
Halfway down the curving staircase, Patience said smugly, I like that young man.
* * *
Edwin Norris began his career when the best chance of dating an illicit burial was if the murderer had wrapped the murder weapon in a copy of that morning’s newspaper and tossed it into the grave. It never failed to amaze him how accurate modern forensic science could be. The downside was how long you had to wait to be amazed. Medical examiners used to at least throw you a bone—“Hard to be sure, but death probably occurred between midnight and six on Friday morning”—to chew on until the autopsy was complete. These days about all they were willing to vouchsafe until the full results came back was that the victim was indeed dead.
A little boy, around ten years old, buried in a makeshift but carefully furnished grave on the Byrfield estate. Buried with toys and nicely dressed, laid out in what you might otherwise describe as a comfortable position. However he’d ended up dead and whoever was responsible, the person who had buried him had cared about him.
Norris had seen little graves like this before. Secret graves, usually quite tiny, for infants whose mothers had told no one of their pregnancy and meant to tell no one of their loss, but whose whole hearts went into the ground along with their child.
But the Byrfield boy had been ten years old. His hadn’t been a brief life known only to his mother—he must have had schoolfriends, teachers, neighbors, people who knew about him and missed him when he vanished. His birth must have been registered, and people must have asked questions when he disappeared. When Forensics finally came back with a time of death—to the nearest year would do—he could begin trawling through the records for missing children. Not just from this area. There was no knowing how far the child had traveled to his final rest in the peace of the Byrfield woods.
Norris was still pondering along these lines when his scenes of crime officer came in. As a mark of the years they’d worked together, he tapped on the detective inspector’s door after he’d opened it.
SOCOs always used to be policemen. Now they weren’t. But Kevin Green was one when Norris first knew him, so he sidestepped the whole staff-versus-agency issue and went on calling him Sergeant. “Any news for me, Sergeant?”
He was expecting the answer no. When Green nodded, his eyebrows climbed. “Oh? What?”
“Something … not very nice,” rumbled SOCO.
“As distinct from a ten-year-old child in a makeshift grave, you mean.”
SOCO sniffed. “You saw what I saw. You were thinking the same things. That someone had put that child to bed. That maybe they hadn’t done things properly but it was the best they could do in the circumstances. That they cared about him.”
Norris concurred. “So?”
“So why, if people cared so much about him, did he die of a shotgun blast to the face?”
* * *
Though lacking the same facts, Hazel was pondering the same contradiction. “Whoever made that tomb loved him. But they couldn’t keep him alive, and they felt they couldn’t report his death. Why not?”
“Something to hide or someone to protect,” said Ash immediately. Criminology had been part of what he’d been good at.
“You mean either one of his parents killed him in a fit of anger and then buried him in a state of remorse, or one of his parents killed him and the other buried him and kept the secret.”
“I suppose so. Anyone could have killed him, but then why would his parents keep quiet about it? It had to be a family affair. Nothing else makes sense.”
“It still doesn’t make sense.” Hazel was talking about it mainly because the alternative was sitting quietly and thinking about it. “Whoever loved him enough to bury him like that should have wanted justice for him. Even if it was their other half who killed him. You don’t go on loving someone who killed your child.”
“We don’t know yet what happened to him,” Ash reminded her. “It may have been an accident, but the circumstances were such that they were afraid they wouldn’t be believed. It may have been a momentary act of violence, or even carelessness. It doesn’t take much to end a child’s life. The one responsible may have been grief-stricken the moment it was too late. And the other one, who’d already lost their child, now faced losing their partner as well.
“Maybe, in that situation, you could imagine keeping quiet. Telling the neighbors your son had gone to stay with his grandparents, and later telling them he was doing so well there he was going to stay. Telling his school the same story. It might be challenged, but the odds are it wouldn’t be. In these days of pick-and-mix families, children are a bit of a movable feast.” There was a wistfulness in his tone that, of those present, only Hazel understood.
“Or, of course,” said David Sperrin, a man who may have had finer feelings but didn’t give them much exercise, “some perv may have grabbed him, had his bit of fun, and buried him there when he was finished. Byrfield isn’t exactly Area Fifty-One—it’s not difficult to get in and out unobserved.”
Pete Byrfield regarded him with disapproval bordering on dislike. “Thanks for that, David. I was just about coming to terms with the idea of a family tragedy. Now, every time I see someone crossing the estate I’m going to wonder what unspeakable mischief they’ve been up to.”
Sperrin shrugged, untroubled.
Hazel shook her head with conviction. “This wasn’t the work of a pedophile. The murder, if it was murder, might have been, but not the burial. By the time a pedophile gets around to burying his victim, he isn’t concerned with making him comfortable, only with disposing of the evidence. No way would he build a DIY mausoleum out of paving slabs. He might have wrapped the body in a blanket, he’d have brought a spade to get it underground, and the minute that was done he’d have been away.
“Pedophiles might think—some of them—that they love their victims, but they don’t really. They’re playing at it, like playing with dolls. And what do you do with a broken doll? You throw it away. A man like that wouldn’t have risked discovery to create what we saw.”
Byrfield nodded, a little comforted. But not much. “But doesn’t that mean it was someone local? You don’t drive a hundred miles with a dead body and a dozen paving slabs in your car! It must have been someone with an excuse to be down there with a Land Rover or a tractor or something.”
Hazel thought about it and nodded. She’d have liked to tell him no, that it was probably a stranger, but the situation was upsetting enough without confusing one another with lies. “A hole in the ground and a blanket, that could be anybody. The slabs make it look like someone who knows the estate. And is probably therefore known on the estate.”
“Or was known here, years ago,” said Sperrin. “That’s not a recent grave. Forensics will get closer, but it has to be twenty years old and could be a lot older. Whoever was responsible is probably long gone, and quite possibly dead by now anyway.”
“I hope so,” murmured Byrfield.
“You might as well think so,” said Sperrin cheerfully. “We’re never likely to learn the truth now.”