Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (2 page)

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.

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.

The Quantrills'large 1950s bungalow stood in half an acre of garden in one of the best residential parts of Breckham Market. The mortgage repayments were horrendous, but even so Quantrill had no regrets about the move. For the first time in his married life he had enough space round him, and the leafy garden gave him an illusion of privacy, almost of country living. Now, though, the storm had changed his outlook.

Before, the view from the south-facing window of the living-room had featured the handsome spread of the thirty-foot tree. It hadn't darkened the room because there was also a wide window in the west wall, but it had provided interesting patterns of light and shade, giving a particular form and substance to the furniture that the Quantrills had brought to Bramley Road from their previous house.

With the tree gone the room seemed cruelly bright, its worn furnishings exposed in all their shabbiness. And the view from the window didn't bear looking at. The tall Edwardian house next door had previously been hidden and now there it was, dominating the outlook with its purplish bricks and ugly down-pipes. It seemed to have a great many upstairs windows, all of them eyeing the Quantrills'every movement.

‘Doesn't it look terrible?' Douglas croaked to his wife.

But Molly, standing in the doorway of the living-room, sounded more relieved than dismayed. ‘That's what I've been telling you ever since we came here!' she said. ‘I've been really ashamed of that old three-piece suite. Now we shall have to buy a new one, whether you want to or not.'

On Sunday morning, scarfed and tweed-hatted against the cold wind, Quantrill ventured outside to mourn the fallen tree at close quarters.

The walnut lay horizontal, its base still partly anchored at the edge of a great hole in the lawn, its splintered branches tangled among crushed shrubs. In falling, the tree had wrenched out of the ground a massive pad of earth and fine roots, about ten feet across and three or four feet thick. Quantrill peered down into the hole, intrigued despite his regrets by the fact that the walnut, for all its size, appeared to have no large tap roots to anchor it deep in the earth. It astonished him that trees could ever withstand the wind for long enough to reach maturity.

‘Good thing it fell where it did, eh Dad?' called Peter as he walked slowly and uncomfortably across the lawn towards his father. ‘A bit more to the left and that'd have been the end of your workshop!'

Quantrill told himself that he probably suspected rather than heard a slightly malicious tone of regret in the boy's voice. Feeling in part responsible for the motor-cycle accident that had nearly killed his son, he expected Peter to take every opportunity to have a go at him.

It was fifteen months since the accident, and the boy had only recently been able to walk without crutches or a stick. The old Peter, his father couldn't help thinking, would have loved the fallen tree. He'd have jumped down into the hole, run the length of the trunk, clambered about in the branches. True, the new Peter was older: eighteen now, and beyond the stage of boyish running about. But Quantrill felt a constant guilt as he saw how cautiously his son walked, with trainers on his feet like any other teenager but on legs that had been reconstructed with metal bones and plastic joints. If Peter did take an occasional verbal poke at him, it was surely justified.

‘Damn shame about the tree,' Quantrill suggested, by way of conversation.

‘That's not what Mum thinks!' said Peter, who had enjoyed overhearing his mother win the long-running argument about the new furniture. ‘Gran'll be pleased, too, when she comes back from Aunt Mavis's,' he added provocatively. ‘Mum says she was always grumbling that the tree made her bedroom gloomy.'

Quantrill made an uncomplimentary remark about his mother-in-law, and vowed to plant a larger tree even nearer her window. Peter chuckled, and father and son walked more amicably along the length of the fallen tree.

‘Can I have some of the wood to season and take to college?' said Peter. His accident, and the operations that followed, had enabled him to do what he wanted and leave school without any of the academic qualifications his father had previously tried to insist on. His best subject at school had been woodwork, and he had now embarked on a craft design course at Yarchester City College. It wasn't what Quantrill had hoped for for his only son; but at least it kept the boy usefully occupied.

‘Have as much wood as you want,' he agreed. ‘The rest'll keep us in firewood for next winter. I'll hire a chainsaw and cut the tree up as soon as I'm fit again.'

‘No, I can do that!' said Peter eagerly. ‘Matthew Pike's Dad's got two or three chainsaws; I'm sure he'll lend me one. I can cut the tree up in the Easter holidays.'

‘You can
what
? spluttered Quantrill, so irritated that his chest tightened again and brought on a fit of coughing.

‘Well …' Peter's confidence wavered. ‘I can have a go at it, can't I? I can cut some of the wood, anyway? Just enough for what I need.'

‘Are you out of your mind, boy?' demanded his father hoarsely. ‘Of course you can't cut the tree up, not even part of it. Good grief, you've only just started walking without a stick!'

‘But I've got to be able to do
something
,' protested Peter. ‘Cutting's a standing-up job; I can do that just as well as anybody else.'

‘That just shows how little you know about chainsaws! Don't you realize they're dangerous? They're powerful things; you've got to be fit and strong to control them.'

‘I
am
fit. I've been doing my exercises, and I'll be perfectly firm on my feet by Easter.'

‘So I hope. But I am not letting you loose on this tree with a chainsaw – they're lethal in inexperienced hands.'

‘You're not experienced with them!' said Peter hotly. ‘I don't believe you've ever used one, any more than I have.'

‘Maybe not,' conceded Quantrill. ‘But I've seen the damage they can do, and I know better than to run any risks. Just stop arguing, you young idiot, and leave the tree to me.'

What Peter said about his father, as he stumped back towards the bungalow, was a great deal louder and ruder than what his father had said about his grandmother. But Quantrill, who had once seen a principal witness in a murder case kill himself with a chainsaw, felt completely justified and pretended not to hear.

What he heard when he returned to the house some minutes later gave him an unhoped-for pleasure. The front doorbell rang, Molly answered it, and the light clear voice he heard was Hilary Lloyd's.

‘Good morning, Mrs Quantrill. I thought it was time I enquired about your patient.'

He loved Hilary for the tactful way she always dealt with Molly, keeping herself at a friendly but deferential distance and never calling him Douglas in front of his wife.

‘Patient?' he heard Molly reply scornfully. ‘That's the last thing he is! I don't know when he's more difficult, when he's convinced he's dying or when he's getting better … He's just bawled out Peter, too. Come in, Hilary, and see if you can talk him into a more reasonable frame of mind.'