Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (6 page)

Hilary took the hint, picked up her briefcase and went.

There was rain overnight, and the lane outside the Crackjaws' house at Longmire End was soon churned to a brown porridge by the vehicles of the scenes-of-crime team. Among them was Chief Inspector Quantrill's large Rover.

When Sergeant Lloyd arrived, the noise and activity from the empty half of the double-dweller – the Thackers'former home – suggested that its rotten woodwork was being taken apart. Hilary changed from driving shoes to wellies, turned up the collar of her trench coat, hoisted her golf umbrella against the residual drizzle and went in search of the chief inspector.

She found him beside the big apple tree that had been blown at an angle by the gales, surveying what had once been the gardens of the double-dweller. He was impervious to the weather in a waxed waterproof, a fishing hat and outsize wellington boots, but with a woollen scarf by way of acknowledgement that he'd just recovered from bronchitis.

He greeted his sergeant with even more appreciation than usual.

‘You were absolutely right about that washed patch on the Crackjaws'living-room floor,' he said. ‘The lads have found a smear of blood. There was more on the iron fender in front of the fireplace, and a few grey hairs as well, so it looks as though the old lady might have hit her head in falling. How she came to fall is another matter, but we're working on the likelihood that she's dead.'

‘No sign of the body, though?'

‘Not so far. It's not in their own house, and it doesn't look as though it's going to be found next door. It's not in any of the old sheds, or the privies, and it can't be buried out here because the ground hasn't been disturbed for years. I've walked all over it. It's matted with weeds and couch grass, there's no newly dug earth anywhere.'

Quantrill kicked at the base of the leaning apple tree, where some of its roots had been partly heaved up out of the soil. It was the only sign of disturbance in the whole garden, and attributable solely to the force of the wind.

‘Anyway,' he concluded, ‘Ziggy's an old man, he wouldn't attempt to dig a grave. I reckon he's much more likely to have dumped the body somewhere.'

‘He couldn't have carried her far,' said Hilary. ‘Andrew told us his mother was slight, but even so –'

‘You know what I think?' Quantrill took the handle of her umbrella so that they could walk together to her car, and never mind what interpretation the nosy scenes-of-crime team would put on it. ‘Ziggy could have moved her by putting her over the cross-bar of his bike and wheeling her up to the old farm. He's bound to know the best hiding-places among the barns and sheds. If we draw a blank here, I reckon that's the next place to search.'

‘But meanwhile', said Hilary, ‘where's Ziggy himself?'

‘Ah, yes. That's more difficult. He didn't leave here on his bike, that's still in the shed. If he'd walked to the village to catch a bus, we'd have heard about it. So he must have hitched a lift, which means he could be anywhere.'

‘Another Press appeal?' suggested Hilary. ‘This time national, and for Ziggy on his own?'

‘Yes – nothing to cause alarm, we just want to talk to him.'

They sploshed up to Hilary's car, and Quantrill sheltered her with the umbrella while she changed out of her muddy wellies.

‘Did you see the postmistress yesterday?' he asked. ‘Did you find out why she wouldn't tell you anything about the Crackjaws?'

Hilary laughed. ‘Yes, I saw Janet Thacker, but I got nothing out of her. I didn't expect to. So I helped myself to the information I wanted – literally helped myself, I mean. I walked out of her office with the typescript of her autobiography in my briefcase.'

‘Without her knowledge? You've got a nerve!'

‘Of course without her knowledge. It was no use asking her to lend it to me, was it?'

‘Depends what's in it, I suppose –'

‘I've already flicked through it,' said Hilary, ‘so I've a good idea. It tells us a lot more than Janet was prepared to say about the entire Crackjaw family. Also, Andrew's name seems to crop up quite often. By the time we've read the book, I think we may take an entirely different view of the old couple's disappearance.'

‘Teacher's favourite … get you after school!'

But I knew better than to hang about waiting to be got. As always, I legged it for home.

Bolt out of the playground and down the long hot road, summer sandals tacky on melting tar. Off the road and along our lane, slipping now on winter mud while brambles trip and clutch me. Quick look back and here they come, Andy Crackjaw leading; I try to run faster but my feet are clogged with great boots of wet clay and I flounder past Spirkett's Wood, slowing, slowing. ‘Gotcha,' jeers Andy, making a grab, but I can see the roof of our house through the trees and I yell, ‘Dad, Dad, Dad!' and fight off the brambles and the boys as they pull me down in the mud until Dad from miles away says, ‘It's all right, my lovey, you're dreaming that's all,' and he strokes my head with his long cool fingers and soothes and murmurs me awake.

‘What were you dreaming about, Janet?'

‘I forget.'

‘Don't you ever have nightmares, Dad?' I once asked.

‘Not me,' he said, ‘mine are all daymares.' And he laughed so I thought he was joking, but now I'm not so sure.

‘Don't waste time brooding over anything that happened in the past,' he told me when I was a teenager. ‘And don't think you'll always be stuck with things as they are, either. Your life's going to be different, our Janet. You've got prospects for the future. You can do anything you put your mind to, and you must make the most of your chances.' And then he'd talk about the time when I'd have finished my education, and I could leave our isolated little house in the middle of sugar-beet country and get a well-paid job in a town where there were people to make friends with and no end of interesting things to do, where there would be hot water on tap and telephones and public transport, and I'd at last be able to join the twentieth century.

I don't know why my nightmares about being chased by Andy Crackjaw went on for so long after I left the village school. So long after that now, nearly nineteen as I sit here writing this down to get it out of my system, I can't even remember whether Andy ever did chase me all the way home or whether my dreams were just the result of his classroom threats: ‘Get you at playtime!' ‘Get you after school!'

It wasn't my fault either, it was old Miss Griggs's. She was the head teacher, very strict and old-fashioned, with stiff white whiskers on her chin and hands as hard as bread boards. If you played her up she'd set about slapping, not on your palms but on the soft inside of your wrists. It hurt. Even the big boys, the elevens, sometimes cried.

I didn't get slapped more than once. It wasn't that I liked her, or wanted to be her favourite, but I didn't see any point in asking to get hurt so I kept quiet in the hope that I wouldn't be noticed.

The village school was gloomy, with high church-shaped windows you couldn't see out of, and the days there went on for ever. From the time we were nine it was all spelling and sums and eleven-plus tests until we were sick of it. School bored me just as much as it bored the others, but I'd discovered that I liked reading. I passed the time by reading the books that came on the library van and the others passed it by playing up the teacher, seeing how far they could go before she lost her temper. Most days it was no distance at all.

Miss Griggs liked me just because I kept quiet. But she didn't need to make it public, she didn't need to shout at the others and slap them and then turn to me and say sweetly, ‘Now Janet, how are
you
getting on?' No wonder they took it out on me at playtime.

Andy Crackjaw was always the worst. He lived next door to us, with no other families within a mile, and he tormented me just to prove to the rest of the school that we weren't friends.

‘Don't you dare tell on me,' he used to say in the playground while everybody crowded round to watch him give my arm a Chinese burn, ‘else I'll
really
get you!'

I yelped, but quietly so as not to draw the teacher's attention, and made my promise.

If anyone had warned me when I was nine that I should still be at school when I was seventeen, I'd have run away from home. Except that I loved my home and family too much to think of leaving.

Home was marvellous when I was at the village school. Later, when I went to a town school and found out how other people lived, I was ashamed that our house at Longmire End was so primitive. But then, before I was eleven, it was the only way of life I knew.

We were a happy family, just the three of us. Mum often used to snap and grumble, and bang the pots and pans about to relieve her feelings, but she and Dad hardly ever quarrelled. Not like the Crackjaws next door. Mr Crackjaw isn't at home much, he's either working on the farm or drinking at the White Horse in the village, but whenever we see or hear him come wobbling home on his bike we know that a row's about to start. They're always arguing and shouting and swearing, we can hear them at it through our shared wall.

Mum says that Gladys used to be one of the prettiest girls in the village, but she has to be joking. Mrs Crackjaw looks a hag, with her scrawny face and straggling hair and her front teeth missing. Still, it can't be much of a life for her, with dirty old Ziggy and all those kids to look after. Andy's the eldest, a few months younger than me, and then there's a girl and two more boys, and after that I gave up trying to keep count.

Mum and Mrs Crackjaw are quite friendly, which is just as well because the only other people living in Longmire End are the Vernons up at the farm, and all we get out of Mrs Vernon is a gracious wave as she zooms past in their big car. So Mum and Mrs Crackjaw are glad to have each other for company, though they don't go into each other's houses. They usually meet down by the gate, at the pump where we get our water. I used to think it was coincidence that they met there so often, but then I realized that Mrs Crackjaw would go out as soon as she saw Mum, fetching a bucket of water whether she needed it or not for the sake of having a chat.

Mrs Crackjaw has always been a clumsy woman, forever tripping over things or walking into doors, bumping and bruising herself. ‘She's fallen downstairs,' Mum said sharply, hustling me indoors, when I once asked why the side of our neighbour's face had turned such a peculiar colour. I couldn't understand why she wasn't more careful, until the day I happened to be at the pump with Mum when Mrs Crackjaw came hobbling towards us with one hand clutching her hip.

‘Oh, Bet,' she said, in a snuffly voice, ‘I'm black and blue, black and blue.'

Mum made a clucking noise that wasn't entirely sympathetic. ‘You'll have to take more water with it, Glad,' she said. It was what Mum said about Ziggy whenever she saw him toppling off his bike on his way back from the White Horse, so I realized then that Mr Crackjaw wasn't the only one in that family who drank.

I often wished I weren't an only child, but living next to the Crackjaws must have put Mum off, with all those bristle-headed boys popping up like peas. ‘If there's more to come, they'll come,' I once overheard Mrs Crackjaw say; I couldn't tell from her voice whether she was vexed or just resigned, but it certainly sounded as though she believed it. Their name isn't really Crackjaw of course, it's some fantastic Polish concoction, all ‘k's'and ‘y's'and ‘z's'. No one ever tries to pronounce it except old Miss Griggs at school. I've sometimes collected Mrs Crackjaw's family allowance from the post office when she hasn't been feeling well, and her signature practically covers the page. She has to copy it from the cover of the allowance book to be sure of spelling it right.

When Dad and I were at home we didn't see much of the Crackjaws. We heard them all right, but we preferred to keep ourselves to ourselves. Andy would sometimes pull faces at me if we happened to meet at weekends or in the holidays, but he was usually going off to meet his gang and took no notice of me.

There was one occasion, though, not long before we both left the village school, when he started being nice to me.

‘I've got something to show you,' he said.

‘Where?'

‘In Spirkett's Wood. It's a secret. I'll show you on the way home.'

But I ran off on my own as usual. I'd had enough of Andy's Chinese burns. Lynn Baxter and Susan Freeman went with him instead, and they came back to school next day with the giggles.

‘You ought to have gone, Janet, you'd have liked it.'

‘Not interested.'

They fell about laughing. ‘She don't know what it was! She don't know what it's for!'

‘Don't want to know. Don't care.'

They kept prancing about the playground, taunting me, but I pretended not to mind. Then Andy ran up and kicked my ankles, so I knew that things were now back to normal and on the whole that was how I preferred it.

I couldn't ever tell Dad about Andy. Partly because I'd promised not to and I knew that if I did tell, Andy would find out and make things worse for me. And partly because I knew that Dad wouldn't be able to do anything about it, anyway.

Dad was tall and thin and pale, with wavy ginger hair and a modest chin, always very soft-spoken and gentle. He never ever smacked me, no matter what I did. There was none of the ‘you-wait-till-I-tell-your-Dad'routine from Mum that Mrs Crackjaw went through with her lot. Generally she didn't tell Ziggy, but when she did the Crackjaw kids were really for it, we could hear their howls through the wall even though we turned the telly up full blast. In our house, though, if I deserved a smacking I got it from Mum on the spot. Dad wasn't even much good at telling me off, so it wasn't likely that he'd have had any influence over Andy.