by Jane Adams
The first was a seemingly minor incident about a month before, when Mrs Ashmore remembered Suzie coming home in a panic because someone had chased her. She’d reported it to the police when Suzie had gone, thinking it might be important, but the track had been thrown very understandably when a local farmer came forward saying he thought it might have been him that frightened Suzie. She’d been with a group of kids, he said, pinching peas from one of his fields.
He stated that he’d shouted at the kids and chased them off. He’d been across the other side of the field at the time, no real threat, but Suzie might not have recognized him and been scared.
The other kids involved came forward somewhat reluctantly to confirm the story and the whole thing was passed off as irrelevant.
The second clue had come from Cassie herself. When the searchers had found her, she’d said something about a man and a woman, shouting, chasing them. She’d later been questioned about them but couldn’t even remember making such a statement. She’d seemed so confused when she’d been found that everyone assumed she’d banged her head, suffered concussion and imagined the people. So it had also been ignored.
Now, however, she’d been talking about them again, still not able to completely catch the memory and hold it fast, but, Mike thought, it still had significance.
He wondered again about Tynan, about his interview with the historical Mr Embury and what it might have turned up.
Were the Coopers linked to this? If so, how?
He gave up on the speculation as Tynan’s cottage came into view. Bill had beaten him to it. Mike was glad of that, knowing that Bill Enfield’s calm manner would have done much to help Tynan’s shock.
There was one more thing, well one among many, that still puzzled him. The little pile of clothes in the back of the locked police car. That, and more importantly, the woman. Was the woman whose body had been so savagely attacked Liza Cooper?
Tynan opened the door and stepped back silently to allow him to enter.
‘John. You’re all right?’
The older man nodded curtly as though resenting this indicator of weakness. Then he sighed, relaxed.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Can’t think what came over me but suddenly it was such a shock.’ He looked properly at Mike for the first time. ‘How long before we know for certain?’
‘We already do,’ he said. ‘Suzie’s medical and dental records had already been brought in for comparison. The dental records match. There was also a healed break to the right arm, she broke it about six months before she died. There’s no doubt now.’
Tynan swallowed convulsively as though he wanted to be sick. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘Do we know how?’
Mike hesitated. ‘We’ve only got the preliminary reports,’ he said gently. ‘But it seems the same as the other one.’
Tynan looked questioning and Mike remembered belatedly that he didn’t know how the other child had died. Mike himself had only found out a few hours before.
‘Strangulation,’ he said. ‘Probably manual. It’s a little early for specifics, but in both cases the hyoid bones are broken.’
Tynan had gone white, for a moment Mike thought he was going to faint. But he recovered and spoke very quietly. ‘Can you imagine how scared she was, Mike, not being able to breathe, choking, seeing her killer’s face . . . ?’
‘John!’ All afternoon Mike had been trying not to think along those lines. He turned sharply, taking the older man by the shoulders and shaking him slightly. ‘That’s enough,’ he said gently. ‘You think I don’t know what you’re feeling, but it does no good.’
He released Tynan, could see Bill, just emerged from the sitting room, his face grave. He moved towards the kitchen and Mike could hear him filling the kettle as he shepherded John Tynan into the sitting room, got him settled in one of the big armchairs.
‘Now,’ he said, his tone suddenly business-like. ‘You said you’d got something to tell me. How did it go with Embury?’
He saw Tynan relax a little, try and get his thoughts in order, preparing to recount what Embury had told him about the Coopers. Then, abruptly, his shoulders sagged once more and he looked across at Mike, his face stricken by some sudden thought. ‘Oh, God, Mike. Here’s me making all this fuss. Can you just imagine how the parents are feeling? After all this time, all the grieving they must have done already and now it’s starting all over again.’
Mike reached over, touched Tynan’s arm, his hand light, almost reluctant. ‘At least it can be over now, John. At least they know for certain.’
For a long moment Tynan stared at him, then said harshly, ‘Does knowing that it’s over really make you grieve less?’
Mike drew back as though Tynan’s words had been some physical assault. His mind filled suddenly with images of Stevie. With despair at the waste of it all.
‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t think it does.’
Chapter 21
Mike had been up since dawn but his first efforts to get the information he wanted were frustrated by the fact that bureaucratic institutions are not such early starters.
He’d stayed the night at Tynan’s, too tired, apart from anything else, to want to make the run back along unlit, twisting, single track roads. He’d gone to sleep thinking, not about the enquiry, but, perversely, that he should look up details of furniture auctions, get himself a dining table.
Somehow, a dining table seemed more important, should he invite Maria Lucas to dinner, than the fact that his culinary abilities lifted themselves little above skill with a tin opener and a microwave oven.
He’d slept deeply, unplagued by nightmares, and woken thinking about the Coopers. Something told him that the woman, he’d begun thinking of her now as Liza, was not the homeless itinerant they had first thought. Her pattern of movements, the way she seemed not to drift far from some centre around Ancaster, pointed at least to a base. Could she have hidden Sara Jane there? Keeping her for the full five days in the hidey hole just didn’t seem possible. There would be traces. Human faeces maybe, some smell of urine, and some kind of covering for the child. It may be late summer, but nights this close to the coast were often chilly.
No, she had to have been kept somewhere else and brought back to the Greenway.
Mike wasn’t sure he wanted to speculate as to the reasons. Would she have been a third pathetic burial under the hawthorn? Did Cassie disturb the would-be murderer? Did Cassie kill the woman?
They’d come this far and still so many questions.
If Cassie didn’t commit the murder, then who did?
He thought further, lying in the soft guest bed at Tynan’s, watching light penetrate slowly through a crack in the thick curtains.
If Liza had a base then why hadn’t it been found during the search? True, Ancaster, four miles away from the abduction, was outside the main search area, but even so, Mike had ordered a much broader sweep of all outbuildings and derelict properties.
Had someone simply not done their job? Or, more likely, had someone assumed that the relevant building fell in someone else’s briefed area.
Either could be true, but Mike thought there might be a third possibility. Suppose it was simpler than that. Liza had moved back with her father, moved to some place out towards Ancaster. Well, wasn’t it simplest to assume she was still there, given to wander perhaps and, after a lifetime of tending to a sick and deeply disturbed old man, perhaps not quite in the same universe that Mike inhabited, but, nevertheless, still there.
It made sense. The Coopers had evidently dropped out of sight and out of mind. Mike would be less surprised at this happening in a town, where anonymity and social invisibility could be had with ease. Here, where communities were theoretically much more tightly bound, it seemed odd that a middle-aged woman could be so unrecognizable even to her neighbours, that her picture in the paper brought reports only of a wandering gypsy selling clothes-pegs.
Where did she buy food? What doctor was she registered with? The questions went on. F
inally, Mike argued himself back to the centre. People see and hear what they want and expect to see and hear. The police reports had asked for news of a wanderer. A tramp of no fixed address, not Liza Cooper, resident of . . . wherever.
Practicably, he’d got only reports of an ageing itinerant. The explanation could be as simple as that.
He thought too of the description Tynan had given him of Embury’s place. Isolated, several miles from the village whose postal address it would be using. Suppose wherever it was the Coopers lived was similarly isolated? They could be easily forgotten, particularly as, it seemed, they’d made every effort on their own part to withdraw from society.
Mike sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed and slipped into the robe Tynan had lent him.
How to find out.
As quietly as he could, he padded downstairs and made for the telephone and drew a frustrating blank.
The recent electoral register didn’t list any Coopers out at Ancaster.
‘Some people do fall through the net,’ the duty sergeant told him. ‘It does happen, sir.’
Mike thanked him and put the phone down. No alternative now but to wait for the records’ office to open. He decided to dress, leave a note for Tynan and then go and camp outside until someone turned up. Was about to do the first of these when Tynan himself appeared on the stairs.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mike apologized. ‘I tried not to wake you.’
‘You didn’t.’ He smiled, though with not quite his usual cheerfulness. ‘I’ve been lying awake for over an hour. Afraid when I heard you using the phone, curiosity got the better of me.’
Mike laughed. ‘I’ve been trying to find the Coopers’ old address. But it looks as though I’m going to have to wait for other people to get up.’
Tynan smiled, and nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least it leaves time for breakfast.’ He paused, thoughtful. ‘I would guess it’s likely to be another long day.’
* * *
The dream had elements of the real and the surreal blended so perfectly that Cassie didn’t even try to distinguish them.
She walked across dew-laden grass, bare feet leaving dry, perfectly patterned footprints in the bejewelled surface. She was in a garden, but a garden so overgrown that wilderness had reclaimed the neat borders, the herbs, the vegetable patch and nettles grew between the tines of a fork laid down and long ago left to rust.
Cassie turned, walked now on a brick pathway. Moss and flaking brick clung to her feet, seemed to work their way between her bare toes, but she paid no attention. Pushing her way through a tangle of fruit trees and raspberry canes, she made her way not to the house but to one of the outbuildings off to its side. From within the shed came soft sounds, like some small animal. The door stood half open allowing a shaft of light to fall on the unconscious body of a child lying on a pile of straw.
Cassie looked back towards the house. From an upper window a man looked out. Not at the shed but at some vague point far off in the distance. As Cassie moved across the yard, he looked down, but there was nothing in his eyes or in his movement to say that he had seen her. Her or anything.
She paid him no attention, walked instead to the woodpile and lifted a piece which looked light enough to handle easily, heavy enough for her purpose. Then she crossed to the half-opened wooden door and stepped inside.
The woman from her dream knelt there, beside the child, one hand moving softly on the soft blonde hair; the other holding a light brown stocking. Her voice soft, tender, she sang softly to the motionless child, bending with an almost maternal care to kiss the sleeping face, then, with equal care, began to slip the stocking under the child’s head, arranging it carefully, tenderly, about the child’s throat.
Cassie waited no longer. There was no anger as she hit out, struck the woman as hard as her strength would allow on the right temple.
The woman, stunned, but still conscious, staggered to her feet, turning as she did so to face Cassie full on. As Cassie hit out again the woman raised an arm to protect her head. In Cassie’s dream, the arm shattered under the blow, the force of it sending the woman reeling to the floor. This time, as she tried to rise once more, Cassie lashed out at the woman’s head, striking the neck with all the force she could place behind it. The woman fell forward, landing face down on the concrete floor, trailing a glistening arc of blood that gleamed dull red in the early light.
As she hit out again the ground seemed to shift, to shimmer beneath her feet and Cassie found herself standing, the sunlight of early morning warm upon her back, at the foot of Tan’s hill, while up above her on the hill itself, she could hear two children laughing, saw Suzanne Ashmore and another child, smaller, darker, run hand in hand towards the Greenway.
Cassie woke. There was none of the panic, not a hint of the fear, the terror that had accompanied her previous dreams. Instead, she felt peaceful, supremely calm.
As Mike Croft sat in Tynan’s kitchen, trying to concentrate on breakfast and waiting impatiently for the day to begin, Cassie Maltham turned over in bed and went back to sleep feeling better — far better — than she had in years.
* * *
Nine o’clock saw Mike in the records’ office waving his I.D. at a bemused clerk. Nine-oh-five had him dealing with someone who actually knew what they were doing and a search being made for the relevant documents.
By ten he had bypassed Flint and was explaining his position to Peters and by early afternoon he was heading out of Norwich in the area car, a squad car following, travelling towards Ancaster.
There Mike discovered that his problems were just beginning.
His assessment had been correct. The house the Coopers had moved to was isolated. The Coopers themselves had reinforced this isolation and it took almost an hour of wrong turns and misinformation before Mike finally drove up a dirt track and up to a rusting iron gate.
Mike stood beside the gate, suddenly hesitant, watching for any signs of movement, but the front windows of the house looked utterly blank, looked also as though shutters had been closed on the inside, forbidding any glimpse of its inhabitants to the outside world.
Mike marvelled at just how cut off from the world the two had become. This house was less than two miles from Ancaster and yet it might have been in another world. The woman at the post office, from where they’d finally got directions to this forsaken place, had been voluble when once set in motion.
‘No one goes there you see. It’s not that we don’t care, you understand, but they don’t encourage help. She comes in here sometimes, but not often and when she does . . .’ She waved a hand in the air as though trying to dissipate smoke.
‘Well, you know, the smell. I don’t suppose she’s bathed in years.’
‘You say no one goes there,’ Mike queried. ‘What about post?’
‘What post? Must be years since they got any. Lord alone knows how they live. They say there’s money hidden all over the house, but,’ she laughed as though at some common joke, ‘I doubt any self-respecting thief’d want to break in there. I mean, you never know what you might catch.’
Mike had let her run on a bit, then taken his leave and they had made their way out here. They, she’d said . . .
Thoughtfully, he looked at the house again. No gas, no electricity, no mains water. Apparently there was a well in the garden, so the postmistress had informed him and given him a lecture on comparative water quality into the bargain.
There was something else his search at the records’ office had told him. There had been issued no certificate of death for Albert J. Cooper either a decade ago, or since. Could Liza have buried him somewhere and not notified death?
He picked the gate up, lifting it on its single rusting hinge and swung it awkwardly aside, led the four constables with him through the overgrown front garden and down the side of the house into the brick-floored yard at the back.
‘You two,’ he directed, ‘try the house doors.’
He directed the others towards the att
ached outbuildings and stood in the centre of the yard looking around at the devastation that had once been a home.
A flicker of movement caught his attention and he gazed up at the dark upper windows. Curtains half-hung, half-sagged from overstretched wires. One pair closed completely, the others slightly parted. He peered hard, willing whatever he’d half seen to move again. The two constables had circled the house and come back to the rear door.
‘No open windows, sir, and the front door’s probably bolted.’
He nodded impatiently. ‘Then you’d better try the back, break the blasted thing down if you have to.’
He saw them exchange a glance and turned away, he couldn’t blame them for not wanting to go in. Even from outside the place stank, though from the look of it, they’d have little problem with the door, even from where he stood he could see that it was rotting on its hinges.
‘Sir, I think you’d better look.’
The officer emerged from one of the brick-built sheds looking more than a little sick. Mike walked swiftly over and went inside. Until the officer had disturbed it the door had been firmly shut and the full impact of the smell hit him like some solid, suffocating force.
‘Christ Almighty.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the young man said, eyes watering in sympathy.
Mike pushed the door open to its fullest extent and stepped back to survey the scene from outside, reaching into his pocket for the flashlight he’d remembered to bring this time. This was the place. Nothing was more certain.
Human excrement littered one comer, in another lay a heap of filthy, decaying blankets and old sacking. Even from here they stank of urine. But what clinched it for Mike, what put beyond doubt that this was the place Sara had been kept, was the narrow strip of pale blue ribbon tied around a little tail of fair hair. Someone had fastened it to a nail hammered into the shed wall. More than anything else in this hell-hole, that sickened him the most . . .
‘Sir.’ The young officer was pointing. Mike looked; above the narrow window hung two more scraps of faded ribbon, one red and one green. One, tied carefully around a strand of dirty blonde hair, straight, without a hint of curl and about six inches long. The other, the green, encircled a delicate flowering of dark brown curls. The ribbon was frayed and rotten but someone . . . Liza? . . . had taken care to keep the soft curls free of cobwebs, of the thick layer of dust and grime that overlaid everything else.