Perfect Sins by Jo Bannister Read Free Book Online Page A

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?”
    â€œSomething … not very nice,” rumbled SOCO.
    â€œAs 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?”
    â€œSo 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?”
    â€œSomething to hide or someone to protect,” said Ash immediately. Criminology had been part of what he’d been good at.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œWe 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