No Graves As Yet by Anne Perry Page B

what she wants.”
    “She always did what she wanted,” Matthew retorted. “Just as long as she understands the realities! The financial ones, I mean.” It was not what he meant, and both of them knew it. It was about far more than money. She needed purpose, something to manage grief.
    Joseph raised his eyebrows. “Is that a backward way of saying it is my responsibility to tell her that?” Of course it was his. He was the eldest, the one to take their father’s place, quite apart from the fact that he lived in Cambridge, only three or four miles away, and Matthew was in London. He resented it because he was unprepared. There was a well of anger inside him he dared not even touch, a hurt that frightened him.
    Matthew was grinning at him. “That’s right!” he agreed. Then his smile faded and the darkness in him came through. “But there’s something we have to do before you go. We should have done it before.”
    Joseph knew what he was going to say the instant before he did.
    “The accident.” Matthew used the word loosely. Half of his face was like bronze in the dying light, the other too shadowed to see. “I don’t know if we can tell anything now, but we need to try. There’s been no rain since it happened. Actually, it’s the best summer I can remember.”
    “Me too.” Joseph looked away. “Wimbledon finals were today. No interruptions for weather. Norman Brookes and Anthony Wilding.” He could think of nothing that mattered less, but it was easy to say, a skittering away from pain.
    “Shearing telephoned me,” Matthew answered. “He said Brookes won, and Dorothea Chambers won the women’s.”
    “Thought she would. Who’s Shearing?” He was trying to place a family friend, someone calling with apologies for not being here. He ran his hand gently over the dog’s head.
    “Calder Shearing,” Matthew replied. “My boss at Intelligence. Just condolences, and of course he needs to know when I’ll be back.”
    Joseph looked at him again. “And when will you?”
    Matthew’s eyes were steady. “Tomorrow, after we’ve been to the Hauxton Road. We can’t stay here indefinitely. We all have to go on, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be.”
    The thought of such violence being deliberate was horrible. He could not bear to imagine someone planning and carrying out the murder of his parents. Yet the alternative was that John Reavley’s sharp and logical mind had slipped out of his control and sent him running from a threat that was not real, dreaming up horrors. That was worse. Joseph refused to believe it.
    “And if it wasn’t an accident?” Why was it so difficult to say that?
    Matthew stared at the last light as the sun kindled fire in the clouds on the horizon, vermilion and amber, tree shadows elongated across the fields. The smell of the twilight wind was heavy with hay, dry earth, and the sweetness of mown grass. It was almost harvest time. There were a handful of scarlet poppies like a graze of blood through the darkening gold. The hawthorn petals were all blown from the hedgerows, and in a few months there would be berries.
    “I don’t know,” Matthew answered. “That’s the thing! There’s nobody to take it to, because we have no idea whom to trust. Father didn’t trust the police with this, or he wouldn’t have been bringing it to London. But I still have to look at it. Don’t you?”
    Joseph thought for a moment. “Yes,” he admitted. “Yes. I have to know.”
             
    The following afternoon, July 3, Matthew and Joseph stopped by the police station at Great Shelford again and asked if they could be shown on the map exactly where the accident had occurred. Reluctantly the sergeant told them.
    “You don’t want to go looking at that,” he said sadly. “Course you want to understand, but there ain’t nothing to see. Weren’t no one else there, no brangle, no buck-fisted young feller drunk too much an’ going faster than he ought. Let it go,