IT WAS IMMEDIATELY obvious to Ash that what was common gossip in the Spotted Pig came as lightning from a clear sky to David Sperrin. He had not considered, even momentarily, whether the sad little grave he’d opened might have anything to say to him personally rather than as an archaeologist. For long seconds after Ash broached the subject he continued to look careless and sardonic, an expression he used as a kind of shorthand for superiority. Only when Ash failed to respond to this lazy substitute for charm did some understanding of what he was being told start to percolate through into his eyes.
Predictably, his initial reaction was that he was being lied to. “You’re crazy,” he said flatly. The hooded amusement in his gaze had given way to a dangerous spark.
Ash had picked a moment when Pete Byrfield was otherwise occupied, updating the estate books at the kitchen table. Even so, across the room the man raised his head just slightly, and Ash thought, Yes—Hazel’s told you about me.
To Sperrin he said calmly, “Possibly, although my therapist says not. David, I’m not saying this to upset you. I’m saying it because I heard talk in the pub and thought you ought to know. To prepare your mother for what she might hear when she goes out tomorrow.”
Following as fast on understanding as the tender follows a steam train came anger. Sperrin’s voice had a hard, rough edge. “What did you hear? That my dad abandoned us and took my brother back to Ireland? So every family is not a happy family—so what? It’s all a very long time ago.”
“That grave has been there a very long time,” murmured Ash. “And people have been doing their sums, and thinking back, and maybe they’ve put two and two together and come up with seven, but being wrong won’t stop it from being hurtful if the first your mother hears of this is a nosy neighbor pressing her for information. Don’t you think you should have a word with her? Tonight?”
At least Sperrin glanced at his watch. “It’s gone eleven. She’ll be asleep.”
“You could wake her.”
“I could get my ears boxed!”
“She needs to know.”
Sperrin was looking at him as if he didn’t know quite what to make of Ash. As if he’d made a judgment when they first met but now Ash had jumped out of his pigeonhole and was roaming around unrestrained and Sperrin wasn’t sure what he was going to do or where he was going to settle. This was something Ash was familiar with. Disconcerting people. Alarming them, even. He didn’t do it deliberately. He didn’t usually know he was doing it until he noticed that characteristic expression in their eyes, wide and still and slightly glazed.
It was in Sperrin’s eyes now, and David Sperrin wasn’t a man who was easily alarmed. He cleared his throat, as if he might thereby clear his mind, too, and made one last attempt at laying the subject to rest. “That wasn’t my brother’s body we found.”
“You hear from him?”
“My mother does. He’s fine. He lives in Ireland.”
“Good,” said Ash, and meant it. He felt a sense of relief that, even if it was still somebody’s child who’d been moldering beside the lake for thirty years, at least it was no one whose name was known, who was remembered around here. It was no less sad, but it was less personal. “Then it’s just a question of warning your mother about the talk in the village.”
David Sperrin was not a big man. But you didn’t notice until he tried to look bigger. “When I see her, I’ll tell her about your … concern.” He invested the word with a wealth of scorn.
Ash nodded. He said nothing more, because he knew that if he told Sperrin to go immediately, he would refuse and nothing would persuade him then. But he was pleased to note that when Pete Byrfield made a last batch of coffee on the kitchen range, there were three mugs but only two of them to drink it.
* * *
The cottage where David Sperrin had grown up was at the Byrfield end of a terrace of farm laborers’ dwellings built by the estate in the mid-nineteenth century. They were all the same when they were built—kitchen and parlor downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs, outhouse in the backyard—but in the twentieth century they had been modernized and extended in as many different configurations as there were cottages, which was six. All now had internal plumbing and even central heating. One had a whole extra floor of bedrooms—a head stockman in the 1930s had bred almost as prolifically as his best bull—while another had acquired a tiny but beautifully designed conservatory, and Diana Sperrin’s had her studio tacked on the side.
No lights were burning in the studio as he turned in at the gate and under the shelter of the little wooden porch. Diana’s bedroom was at the back of the house. It was possible she was still awake, reading or sketching in the big oak bed he’d been born in. He gave the wrought-iron knocker a single sharp rap and called through the letter box.
“Mum—it’s David. Come down and let me in.”
He didn’t have a key anymore. She’d made an excuse to get it back after he left home and never provided him with another.
After a few moments he heard movement inside. The narrow stairs creaked whenever someone went up or down. An irritable voice demanded, “Whatever do you want at this time of night?”
“I need to talk to you. Let me in.”
For a long moment he thought she was going to refuse, that he was going to be left on her doorstep and have to return to Byrfield, his mission unaccomplished. Finally he was saved that humiliation by the sound of the iron key turning in the lock.
Diana Sperrin stood in the doorway, a coat over her nightclothes, her strong, intelligent face set in angry lines and framed by a froth of gray hair. “Good grief, David! Couldn’t you stagger another mile and wake Pete Byrfield?”
“I’ve just come from there,” he said, hanging on to his patience in a way he did for no one else, “and I’m not drunk. Something’s happened that I need to tell you about.”
“And it won’t wait till morning?” She still hadn’t let him in, barring the door with her strong, thick body.
“No, it won’t.” He advanced into the open doorway until, grudgingly, she stood back to admit him.
“I suppose you want coffee.”
It was such a small thing, and if she’d been asleep, she could be forgiven for resenting the disturbance. But she could just have put the kettle on without making him feel it was too much trouble. They didn’t talk much these days, and one reason was this: that she never failed to remind him how it had felt growing up with a mother who didn’t like him.
He answered in kind. “It wouldn’t hurt.”
In fact, she could hardly have been asleep—the water in the kettle was still hot, and it boiled again in seconds. She filled a mug for David but not for herself, stood over him, waiting with ill-disguised impatience. “Well? What is it that’s so urgent?”
Walking over here, he’d wondered how to broach the subject. In the event it proved easier than he’d imagined: already irritated with her, he no longer felt much of an urge to spare her feelings. “I was digging up at Byrfield this morning. I found a body. A child’s body. There’s talk in the village that it might be Jamie.”
That kicked the annoyance out of her face. He watched the color drain after it, leaving her white and slack-jawed, and he felt ashamed. Not even so much for hurting her, but because this was the kind of relationship they had. Ashamed that, although for most of his life he’d had only one parent, and for most of his life she’d been raising only one child, he still hadn’t been able to make her love him.
He would have died slowly over hot coals rather than admit that to anyone, including her.
He’d managed to surprise her. She hadn’t left the house all day, knew nothing of the discovery that had set the village to speculation. But she was a strong woman, and with a deep breath she took her feelings in an iron grip and forced them behind her. Her voice was rough. “What are you talking about, David? Of course it isn’t Jamie. Jamie’s in Ireland—you know that.”
“I know that,” echoed Sperrin in a low growl. “I didn’t say I thought it was Jamie. I said people in the village are saying it might be, and I thought you’d want to know. So it wouldn’t come as a shock.”
“Unlike being dragged from my bed in the middle of the night in order to be told nonsense, you mean.” She might have given him points for meaning well. But she’d never given him an inch, and that wouldn’t change now.
He had no idea what he’d done to deserve her dislike, or whether she was just entirely unsuited to the maternal state. Perhaps Saul Sperrin had known that when he took his elder son away. More than once, growing up, David had wished he’d taken his younger son, too. He’d probably be a tarmac contractor now instead of an archaeologist, but maybe he’d be a happier man.
Defeated by her hostility, as he always eventually was, he put down his cup and let himself out the way he’d come in. “I’m sorry I disturbed you. I thought it was for the best.”
“Thought?” she said. And: “You?” She could invest two words with more contempt than anyone he had ever known.