Perfect Sins (20 page)

“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.”

 

CHAPTER 20

“Y
OU'RE SURE ABOUT
this?” asked Hazel anxiously. But they were already walking back toward the cottage at the end of Wool Row.

“No, I'm not sure,” said Ash honestly. “You could be right, that there were a lot of men and Sperrin was just one of them. But that's not what people are saying. They're all saying they remember Saul Sperrin, but they're all describing him in radically different ways.”

“And that means he doesn't exist?”

“I don't know what it means,” confessed Ash. “But it isn't normal. Even after so long, you'd expect people to tell you more or less the same things. To remember the same significant events: the time he got drunk and smashed up the bar, the shillelagh he always produced on St. Patrick's Day, the time he turned up driving an ex-military half-track—something like that. But so far nobody's told me anything that anybody else has said. It's as if…” He closed down, continuing the sentence inside his head.

Hazel tired of waiting. “As if
what
, Gabriel?”

Ash said slowly, “As if they went to the Nuremberg rallies and missed hearing Hitler. They know he was there, they know
they
were there, they assume something must have distracted them at the critical moment, but the fact is they missed something they think everybody else saw. So each of them has put it together in his own head, from what he's been told, from what he thinks he knows, and each of them has created a memory that thirty years on he can't distinguish from the real thing. A false memory.

“They don't think they're lying. When I ask about Saul Sperrin, this is the picture they get and they think they're remembering him. But because the foundation for that memory is inside their own heads rather than something they actually witnessed, everybody's recollection of the man is different. Nobody claims to have known him well. I'm not sure any of them ever actually saw him.”

Hazel was staring at him, literally openmouthed. “Can that really happen?”

“Oh yes,” he replied without hesitation. “There's something in the human psyche that just longs to join in. The ‘Me, too' impulse. Tell someone half the town saw a UFO, and there's a good chance he'll say ‘Me, too.' He might have been inside bathing the dog, he might even have been in the garden and seen nothing, but if something that looks like a bandwagon goes rattling down the street, a lot of people feel the urge to jump on. They don't feel like they're lying. They think if a lot of people reported the UFO then there must have been a UFO, and if they were around that night they could have seen it, and if they
could
have seen it then it's almost as if they
did
see it. The more often they're asked to talk about it, the surer they become that they saw the same as everyone else.

“Only I think—I
think
—maybe
nobody
saw the UFO this time. That they're
all
saying ‘Me, too.' And this long after, they've no idea they're doing it.”

By an act of physical will, Hazel closed her mouth. She dragged her eyes away from his face long enough to look where they were going. Her voice, when it came, wasn't much more than a squeak. “And you're going to put this theory to Diana Sperrin?”

“At this point, it seems the logical thing to do,” said Ash, with that trademark quiet obstinacy that you could take for humility if you weren't concentrating. “She knows. Nobody else does.”

“But … but…” Hazel had to make herself focus on one problem at a time. “If it wasn't Saul Sperrin who shot at us…?”

“Who was it?” Ash nodded. “That's certainly a question we need an answer to. But it's not one Diana can help with.”

“No,” agreed Hazel weakly. “Then…?” And then she saw what he'd seen, and her eyes flew wide again. If there was no Saul Sperrin, he not only couldn't have run them off the road on their way home from the horse fair; he couldn't have killed his elder son, either. “You think
Diana
killed Jamie?”

“I don't know,” Ash said again. “That's what I want to ask her.”

If Hazel hadn't been so comprehensively floored by the direction his theory had taken them, she would have known that she had an absolute duty to stop him before he knocked on Diana Sperrin's door. The hypothesis might or might not have merit—knowing him as she was coming to, perhaps it did—but it was for the police to pursue. She should have swung him around by the arm immediately, marched him back to Byrfield, and, if necessary, sat on his head while she phoned DI Norris. She knew that. She just didn't have time to recognize that she knew it before Ash had let himself in at the gate and was knocking on the door.

David Sperrin opened it so quickly, he must have been about to leave. He looked pretty much the way Hazel felt. Ash steered him gently back inside. “I need to talk to you. Both of you.”

Diana put her head around the kitchen door. “Are you still…?” Then she saw the visitors. She froze, holding on to the door as if for support. Patience ambled calmly past her, immediately identified the most comfortable seat in the kitchen, and hopped up.

Diana was rallying fast. She fixed Ash with a hawkish eye. “I don't think I have to talk to you.”

“No, you don't,” he agreed without hesitation. “You
will
have to talk to Detective Inspector Norris.”

“I already did.”

“I know. But I don't think you've told him everything.”

It was hard to judge from her expression, her chin raised, her eye still imperious, whether she understood. But David didn't. He looked at his mother, then at Ash, then back at Diana, more puzzled each time. “Mum? Do you know what he's on about?”

“No,” she said shortly. But if it had been true, she'd have been curious, too.

Ash paused, as if unsure how to begin. Then he said, “Somebody tried to kill us last night. Me and Constable Best. She'd been asking some gypsies about Saul, and we assumed that he was the one who'd come after us.”

He was watching Diana's face. Hazel saw nothing there, a determined mass of nothing, but Ash had been doing this longer than she had and perhaps he had learned to read nothing.

He nodded. “I don't think that now. I've come to ask you because I know you know. Apart from the man who shot at us, you're the only one who does know for sure whether it was Saul.”

“I never left the house last night,” said Diana loftily. “And no one came here. How would I know who shot at you?”

“I don't think you do,” said Ash. “But I think you know it couldn't have been Saul Sperrin. Don't you?”

She shrugged negligently. “I've no idea where he is or what he gets up to.”

“That's not entirely true,” said Ash.

David Sperrin was moving quickly, and predictably, from confusion to anger. “What the hell is all this about? What are you accusing her of? You think
she
took a shot at you?”

Hazel shook her head. “No. It was definitely a man. We thought it was your father. Now Ash doesn't think it could have been.”

“Okay.” Sperrin considered. “Well—isn't that good?”

“Mrs. Sperrin,” said Ash, “do you have a passport?”

“What?” That surprised her. “No! Where would I go?”

“Or any official documents in that name?”

“
What
name?” demanded David, left behind again.

“Mrs. Saul Sperrin. A medical card? National Insurance number? A marriage certificate?”

Diana laughed out loud. “Good grief, is
that
what this is all about? You think you've caught me out in the terrible crime of being an unmarried mother? Of living in sin with a man I wasn't married to, thirty years ago? God bless us all, I'm astonished to learn that anybody still cares!”

David understood that well enough. He even managed to look affronted. “You were never married?” he demanded. “You mean to say I'm…”

“A bastard, dear? Yes indeed. Aren't you pleased? You've always worked so hard at it.”

“And Jamie?”

“A love child,” Diana said firmly. She made the distinction sound like a slap.

“Bugger me,” said David weakly, sinking onto the battered sofa. Patience moved over obligingly.

“Was that it?” Diana turned her pale searchlight gaze back to Ash. “Was that what you wanted to know? Can I go and do something useful now? Like arranging a proper funeral for my child.”

“Of course you must do that,” said Hazel firmly. “And if you want us to leave, we will. We have no authority here, either of us. It may not feel like it, but we really are only trying to help.”

“By pointing out that a man I haven't, in any event, seen for thirty years never bothered to marry me?”

Ash's tone remained polite. But it had developed a hard edge that Hazel had never heard there before. “Miss Best did not, in fact, say we're trying to help
you
. Miss Sperrin—that is your name, isn't it? The name you were born with?”

There was a fractional pause, then Diana nodded. “Yes. So?”

“You registered your sons in your name, not their father's.”

“Yes.”

“Who was their father?”

Her strong jaw came up again. “You know who. Saul…”

“Saul who? Not Sperrin—that really would be a coincidence. Or a problem.”

“And yet,” said Hazel, more to Ash than to Diana, “when I asked after Saul Sperrin at the gypsy camp, they seemed to know who I meant.”

Ash shook his head. “They were doing what everyone's been doing for more than thirty years—going along with a fiction. Swanleigh wanted to seem helpful while he worked out if there was some way of getting the horse for himself. He'd no idea who you were talking about. But if he'd said that, you'd have left and he'd have missed his chance.”

“But
somebody
followed us from the fair.”

“Somebody followed us,” agreed Ash. “We don't really know how long he'd been following us, so we don't really know where he followed us from.” He looked at Diana again. “The only thing I'm reasonably confident of is that it wasn't David's father. I don't know who the father of your sons was, Miss Sperrin, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't an Irish traveler called Saul.”

Tight-lipped, she said, “And I say it was.”

Ash shook his head again. He always looked in need of a haircut. “No. There's no evidence that Saul Sperrin or anyone like him ever existed. You invented him. People who think they remember him are just remembering things you've said to them. That he was a traveler. That he kept disappearing back to Ireland.” He drew a long breath. “That he kidnapped your son James.”

There are bombs now that will destroy every living thing without inflicting damage on the infrastructure. The buildings go on standing. The services go on serving. Only the people who created it all are dead. For a long moment it was as if Gabriel Ash had dropped that kind of a bombshell. Nobody moved. Almost it seemed that nobody breathed. The only sound was the low murmur of a kettle on the range.

“Miss Sperrin—did you bury Jamie up by the lake? Was it you who put together that little cist, with the paving slabs to protect him from the earth and his favorite toys around him? It had to be someone who loved him. Was it you?”

There was another long pause. Not because Diana Sperrin was preparing a lie—Hazel was sure of that. She'd done all the lying she was going to do. Many strange and unexpected emotions left their trails across her expression, but the strangest of all, and to Hazel the clearest, was satisfaction. She looked like a woman who knew she'd done the best with the hand she'd been dealt. It hadn't been a good hand, and the game had gone on far too long, but she had the satisfaction of knowing that she couldn't have done any better with what she'd had to work with, and neither could anyone else.