Cross My Heart and Hope to Die
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Sheila Radley
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The Drop In
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Sheila Radley
Cross My Heart and Hope to Die
Sheila Radley
Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.
She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.
Dedication
FOR DOROTHY
Chapter One
Their surname wasn’t really Crackjaw of course. According to their pension books, the old couple were Zygmunt and Gladys Krzecszczuk. But the derisory nickname, with its rural disregard for the feelings of a foreigner, had been bestowed on Ziggy so long ago that most people in the village assumed that it was his real name.
Even those who knew better, including the sub-postmistress who paid the pensions, found it simplest to pretend that they thought Crackjaw an acceptable pronunciation of Krzecszczuk; and the police, when they were called in, were glad to do the same. After all, neither Ziggy nor Gladys was likely to complain, because they had both disappeared.
Their disappearance caused very little concern among the inhabitants of the Suffolk village of Byland. The Crackjaws lived in isolation at Longmire End, a mile out of the village by road and then another half mile up an unmetalled lane. Ziggy had worked for thirty-seven years at Longmire Farm, and he and his wife lived in one half of a red-brick double-dweller that had been built near the farm in the nineteenth century to accommodate two labourers and their families.
When the Crackjaws first lived there, all three houses at Longmire End had been occupied. Eventually, the tenant farmer had retired and moved away. The Longmire land was now cultivated by a farmer from the next village, and the big old timber-framed farmhouse was empty; so was the other half of the double-dweller. The Crackjaws’numerous children had dispersed and the old couple lived entirely alone, without a telephone, out of sight and for the most part out of mind.
Though Gladys Crackjaw, née Goffin, was Byland born and bred, none of her relatives now lived in the village. Her marriage to a foreign farm-labourer who spoke only a few words of English, most of them not nice, had deprived her of the only friends she had once had, the girls she had grown up with.
‘Poor Gladys,’ was how they had referred to her at first, with amused contempt. Later – more kindly, taking into account her pinched, anxious face, the clinging toddlers, the many pregnancies: ‘Poor old Glad.’
But over the years Gladys’s weary expeditions to the village on foot became so infrequent that she slipped from people’s memories. Byland grew, and changed. Some of her contemporaries moved elsewhere, some died. By the time the survivors reached their mid-seventies, they had forgotten Gladys so comprehensively that she might as well have been dead too.
Her husband had always been the more visible of the couple. Throughout his working life Ziggy Crackjaw had been a familiar sight in Byland, a rough man in a greasy cap, with broad cheek-bones and thick black eyebrows that met across his nose. Every day after work, and twice on Saturdays and Sundays, he had been seen cycling through the village on his way to the White Horse, and wobbling precariously homewards again when he’d either had a skinful or run out of money.
Ziggy had been tolerated at the White Horse, but never liked or befriended. He was sullen when sober, argumentative when he was drunk, and incomprehensible most of the time. But soon after he reached pensionable age the White Horse changed hands, and Ziggy was forced to change his habits.
The new landlord and his wife, urban refugees, knew exactly what kind of country pub they wanted to run. It looked, in their dreams, exactly like the thatched and heavily beamed Byland White Horse, but cleaned up and renovated, and with the addition of a restaurant. The customers of their dreams were mostly other urban refugees, cheerfully free-spending but rarely drunk and never nasty with it.
Very few of the White Horse’s usual customers measured up to the new landlord’s standards. The pub was closed for two months while it was being transformed, and afterwards some of the more hygienic regulars were permitted to return in order to provide a little local colour, but Ziggy Crackjaw was not among them.
Too old to cycle to a pub elsewhere, Ziggy took to visiting the village once a week and buying drink for consumption at home. There were two general stores in Byland, one primarily a sub-post office, the other – standing on a rise and therefore known as the top shop – a newsagent and off-licence. Every Thursday, pension day, Ziggy would cycle down through the village to the post office to collect the pensions for himself and his wife, and then return home by way of the top shop where he bought his weekly provisions. These included two litre bottles of vodka, and as many cans of beer as he could pack into the wooden box that he had fastened to the carrier of his bicycle with orange binder twine.
Ziggy continued this practice for some ten years. His shoulders became hunched and stiff, his old legs took longer to push the pedals round, but whatever his health or the weather he made his Thursday morning shopping trip to Byland without fail. And Maureen Norris, joint owner with her husband of the top shop, always had Ziggy’s regular purchases – the drink, plus two large wrapped sliced loaves of bread, two large packs of pork sausages, seven large cans of baked beans, half a pound of butter, half a pound of tea and two pounds of sugar – ready and waiting for him.
Then, one Thursday in late March, Ziggy Crackjaw failed to collect his provisions.
It had been a month of gales, and this week was the worst. Winds in Eastern England had been blowing at gale force, on
one occasion gusting up to ninety miles an hour. By Thursday the winds had moderated, but they were still sufficiently strong to make Maureen think that the old man must have decided for once to postpone his shopping trip. But although Friday was a relatively calm day, Ziggy still didn’t appear.
Saturday was the shop’s half day. When Ziggy had not come by closing time, Maureen Norris – as kind-hearted as she was generously built – grew concerned. She and her husband weren’t local people, but they’d lived in the village for seventeen years and she knew that Ziggy was married even though she’d never set eyes on his wife. Worried that the old couple might be ill, Maureen – who couldn’t drive – urged her husband Vic to go out to Longmire End and see whether anything was amiss.
Vic Norris, a permanently harassed man, refused. It was pouring with rain, and he’d had a hell of a week. Bad enough in fine weather to have to get up every morning at five to sort and deliver newspapers, but wild weather made the job an endurance test.
This week, for four days in succession, he’d driven through winds so strong that they’d sometimes rocked his van, threatening to overturn it. Branches torn from trees had thumped down on the metal roof and he’d felt sure that if the wind didn’t get him one of the bigger branches would, crushing him, van and all. It wouldn’t be so bad if the customers appreciated what he went through to deliver their papers, but no, they took him for granted. Some of them even had the nerve to moan because he was late!
And now that he’d finished the day’s deliveries and thankfully garaged the van until tomorrow morning (Sunday, always the worst day for newspapers, with all those blasted supplements; people didn’t read half of’em, but soon complained if he forgot to deliver a single one) he had no intention of getting it out again.
Besides, he didn’t give a damn about Ziggy Crackjaw.
The surly old bastard never paid his shop bill in full, always asking for cigarettes and other things as if as an afterthought, and then saying that he’d pay for them ‘next time’. And Maureen was soft, she had let the old man run up an account that began to look as though it never would be paid. No, Vic was hanged if he was going to spend a wet Saturday afternoon delivering to the Crackjaws out at Longmire End.
He went eventually, of course. Maureen kept on about ‘the poor old couple’and Vic knew there’d be no peace until he did as she wanted. Grumbling furiously, he put on his wet-weather gear again, loaded up the food and drink, and set off.
It was years since Vic Norris had driven up Longmire Lane – not since his early days as a newsagent, when Longmire Farm was occupied and he’d been so eager for custom that he’d been prepared to jolt all the way up there and back seven days a week just to deliver the Telegraph and Farmers’ Weekly. He must have been mad, wasting all that time and petrol, not to mention the wear and tear on the van …
The narrow lane had changed during the intervening years. Then it had been bordered by hedges and ditches and overhung by trees, its surface rutted by the passage of farm vehicles in bad weather. But at least the resident farmer had always filled in the worst of the potholes for the sake of his own car.
Since then the hedges and most of the trees had been removed and the ditches filled in so that the fields could be enlarged. The surface of the lane had been churned to battlefield consistency by heavy modern machinery, without regard for any other users. Swearing with vexation, Vic lurched along through mud and rain, his windscreen wipers clacking at full speed.
Ahead, fringing one side of the lane, were the remains of what he could remember as a wood. Some of the trees had been pushed askew by the gales, and broken branches littered the ground, crunching under his wheels. Vic strained forward, watching out for worse obstacles. It’d be just his luck to run into a branch big enough to damage the van –
What he almost ran into, instead, was a whole tree. He rounded a bend in the lane and immediately stood on his brakes because there it was, an ivy-festooned tree-trunk as high as the van, lying slap in his way. Juggling with the steering wheel, skidding on the mud, he managed to stop the van with its offside front wing buried in ivy, just inches away from the barrier of solid oak.
Vic gave a snort of relief, switched off his engine and just sat. His hands were shaking and he needed a few moments to get over the shock. What he felt, though, was doubly thankful. For one thing, he and the van had escaped unharmed; for another, the fallen tree had conveniently put a stop to the whole expedition.
One of his reasons for not wanting to come – though of course he wouldn’t admit it to his wife – was that he knew he was no good in emergencies. If he found one of the old Crackjaws ill or injured, he wouldn’t know what to do. He was afraid he might panic. But now he had a perfect excuse for not going any further.
Longmire Lane was blocked and there wasn’t a thing, Vic told himself, that he could do about it. He didn’t know whose job it was to shift the tree, but it certainly wasn’t his. He’d more than done his bit. What he intended to do now – when he managed to turn the van – was to go straight back home. If his wife was so keen on helping the Crackjaws, it would be up to her to get the lane unblocked.
Maureen’s opinion, when her husband returned and told her what had happened, was that he might at least have tried to get through to the Crackjaws on foot. But she knew she’d be wasting her breath to say so. She had no idea whose job it was to move fallen trees either, but she was an enterprising woman and so she seized the telephone directory.
She began by ringing the District Council offices, but there was no reply. Well, of course, there wouldn’t be, on a Saturday afternoon. The directory offered several emergency Council numbers … but did she want the Environmental Health Department, or the District Surveyor? And supposing she was asked to leave an answerphone message – what good would that do when two old people were known to be stuck in Longmire End, certainly hungry, possibly ill, possibly injured during the gales? Concerned as she was, Maureen decided that the best thing to do would be to ring the nearest police station at Breckham Market.
Had Vic Norris been a different man, prompted either by compassion or by a sense of responsibility to trudge through the rain and find out what had happened to the Crackjaws, he would have discovered that Maureen’s anxieties were unfounded. Had he reported back to his wife that they were no longer at home and that their house was locked up, Maureen would have been happy to assume that the old couple had been fetched by one or other of their family. She certainly wouldn’t have bothered to ring the police just to say that the lane was blocked.
But the police, having been called in, were not content to make assumptions. They decided, in view of the advanced ages of the couple and the fact that the Norrises had never known them to leave the village, that it would be advisable to establish their exact whereabouts. And when this proved difficult, a detective went to Byland and began to make further enquiries.
Chapter Two
The oak in Longmire Lane, Byland, was one of many trees in the Breckham Market area that were felled in the March gales. Only the week before, the town itself had lost two great lime trees from the churchyard at the top of the market place. The sudden disappearance of such prominent vertical features had altered the look of the town centre entirely, to the vexation of its more conservative inhabitants.
Among the vexed, those who deeply resented the arbitrary rearrangement of their personal landscape, was Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill, head of Breckham Market CID. But his annoyance came later. At the height of that week’s storm, when the roaring wind brought down a mature walnut tree in his garden, Quantrill had in fact been in no fit state to notice. A large and healthy man, he himself had been laid low for the first time in his life by an attack of bronchitis.
When he first complained of an aching head and sinuses, and tightness in his chest, his wife Molly had tried to persuade him to go to the doctor. Convinced that he was indispensable, he had as usual ignored her and attempted to carry on working. Predictably – though he wouldn�
��t have listened to anyone who had tried to tell him so – this had had the effect of fogging his memory, distorting his judgement and shortening his temper.
It was only when his sergeant, Hilary Lloyd, took the initiative and drove him to the doctor’s door that he had finally submitted. Hilary told him that what he did to his health was his own affair, but that she wasn’t going to put up with him shedding his viruses all over the office and making everyone’s life a misery into the bargain; and he had listened to her because her good opinion mattered to him more than anyone else’s.
His former infatuation with her – he sometimes went hot and cold when he thought what a fool he must have made of himself – had been replaced by a slightly rueful affection. His admiration for his sergeant’s professional ability had never stopped him from arguing with her about the cases they had worked on, but his personal admiration was boundless. He didn’t even think of arguing with her about the doctor. Besides, by that time he felt so unwell that he took the prescribed antibiotics and retired to bed, convinced he was going to die.
When his wife told him, on the Thursday morning, that the walnut tree had been uprooted during the night, Quantrill hadn’t been able to take it in. On Thursday evening he had mumbled an enquiry about structural damage to their bungalow, groaned thankfully when he heard there was none, and pulled the sheets over his head. On the Friday he had got up and wandered about in his dressing-gown for a bit, but he was still muzzy-headed and bleary-eyed. Everything in the living-room looked so unfamiliar at first glance that he retreated to the kitchen, drank a little soup, and went back to bed to await the expected relapse.
It wasn’t until Saturday, when the antibiotics took effect and his temperature dropped, that he decided he was going to live after all. That was when, shaky but fully dressed, he realized with shock and indignation that the loss of the walnut tree had made a permanent difference to the appearance of the living-room.