Detective Mike Croft Series Box Set Page 2

  Suddenly, she didn’t want to talk any more. She wanted to leave, go home, or at the very least, back to the cottage they had rented. In the pit of her stomach, she could feel the familiar panic, rising now from her stomach to clasp at her chest and throat.

  Slowly, she exhaled. Anna was saying something. Cassie forced herself to concentrate, divert her thoughts, her attention, from the familiar red panic haze that seemed to waver, absurdly, somewhere behind her eyes.

  ‘Sorry?’ she said, relieved that she had managed to sound almost normal.

  ‘I asked who Suzie is,’ Anna told her.

  ‘You all right, Cassie? You’ve gone very red,’ Simon asked her. ‘You’ve maybe been in the sun for too long.’

  She forced herself to smile. The panic was receding now, she took her time before answering.

  ‘Maybe we’ve all been in the sun too long,’ Fergus was saying, covering her silence for her. ‘I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m hungry.’

  ‘You’re always hungry,’ Anna told him. ‘Why you’re not twice as fat as Simon, I don’t know.’

  ‘Hey, now, just a minute. Are you implying that this body is anything less than perfect?’ Simon protested.

  Anna grinned at him, poked playfully at the slight flabbiness of his stomach. ‘Would I think that? No. But there is such a thing as too much perfection, and this bit’ — she pinched the spare flesh, none too gently, making him yelp in protest — ‘this bit,’ she went on, ‘is definitely too much of a good thing.’

  She leapt to her feet then and ran away from him. Simon gave chase, pausing to shout to the others that they would meet by the car.

  Relieved, Cassie watched them go.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Fergus asked anxiously. He placed his hands on her shoulders, strong fingers massaging the tension from them, probing almost to the point of pain. Perversely, Cassie found herself relishing the minor discomfort. She sat still, allowing his fingers to drive the last of the panic-born tension from her body.

  ‘You’re handling things really well,’ Fergus told her softly. ‘Have I told you how much I love you today?’

  She leaned back into his arms. ‘Not since breakfast,’ she said, ‘and that was hours ago.’

  They sat quietly. Fergus always smelt good, Cassie thought. He bent his head to kiss her, his beard and hair tickling her neck. She rested contentedly against him, allowing his hands and kisses to comfort her.

  ‘We should go,’ he said, ‘they’ll be waiting for us.’ Reluctantly, she allowed Fergus to pull her to her feet, and lead her back down the hillside.

  Just before they reached the others, he paused, and turned to her.

  ‘Cassie, Cassie love, you’re doing so well. If you’re really serious about putting this behind you, well, you’ve got to be able to talk about it in the same way you can talk about other things. However bad it was, sweetheart, it was one incident. One thing in a whole lifetime of things. You’ve got to be able to see it that way.’

  She stared helplessly at him. He wasn’t telling her anything new, anything she didn’t know.

  She nodded slowly. ‘All right, Fergus. I promise, I’ll try.’

  ‘Simon and Anna love you, Cassie. I love you. We all want to help.’ He held her tightly, stroking her thick brown hair. ‘It’s all going to be fine, Cassie. Everything’s going to be all right. Tonight,’ he said, ‘tonight I want you to talk about it, what happened here on the Greenway.’

  Chapter 2

  The evening had turned unexpectedly chill. The wind, which had blown from the land throughout the day, had veered seaward and now brought a salt-tinged coldness with it. Anna drew the thin curtain across the seaward window, shivering as she did so.

  Cassie laughed. ‘It’s not that cold.’

  ‘No? Tell my feet that.’

  ‘Might help if you put something on them.’

  Anna looked speculatively at her bare toes, wriggled them against the grey of the kitchen flagstones. Then she grinned, crossed the room to sit beside Simon and dumped her cold feet in his lap.

  ‘Best footwarmer in the business,’ she said, then frowned slightly and asked, ‘You’ve not been back here then, not since you were little?’

  Cassie shifted uneasily, shook her head. ‘No. My aunt and uncle moved away, so there seemed no reason to until now.’

  ‘Why now?’ Anna pressed her. ‘I mean, sure, it’s a great place, no complaints there, but why particularly?’

  Cassie looked uncomfortably at the floor, tracing the patterns in the faded rug with the toe of her shoe. ‘It seemed about time,’ she said slowly. ‘Last time I was here, well, things happened that I never wanted to think about. It made it kind of hard to come back.’

  She looked away, parting the curtain slightly to stare at the thick cloud rolling in across the coast.

  Anna looked anxiously at her, conscious that she had somehow upset her friend. It was not Anna’s way to pick too closely at what were clearly sore places in another’s mind. She scrabbled around for some neutral subject, grasped, unknowingly the one area Cassie had been trying to avoid.

  ‘Tell us more about the hill we were on today. Tan’s hill. There’ve got to be stories about it.’

  Simon nodded. ‘Those places usually have some kind of legend attached to them. Sometimes they’re known as fairy hills; you know, you go to sleep there and wake up either in some other world, or find you’ve slept for centuries. That sort of thing.’

  Cassie sighed and nodded slowly, bowing to the inevitable.

  ‘There are lots of stories about that one,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember them all now, it was a long time ago.’ She hesitated again.

  ‘When you stayed with your aunt?’ Anna prompted.

  ‘Yes.’ Cassie took a deep breath and told herself not to be so stupid. After all, this was what she had come for, wasn’t it?

  She began to speak again. This time the words came easily, almost too easily, as though they had been long confined in so small a place they now burst free before she closed the door again.

  ‘Aunty Pat said it was a witches’ hill. She said that there were records in the vicarage library of ceremonies held there on May eve and sometime around Christmas. Winter solstice I suppose. That was, I don’t know, sixteen something, I think.’

  ‘Doubt it,’ Simon commented. ‘Earlier maybe, or later, late seventeen hundreds. A century earlier, that was the height of the witch mania, they’d be in too much danger to meet openly somewhere as easy to see as that.’

  Cassie shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. Anyway, it seems the local vicar decided that it wasn’t on and held Christian ceremonies up there instead. I don’t remember the details, only that he said that the bonfires were a pagan thing and shouldn’t be allowed, oh, and there were some rumours of what he called sexual license going on up there.’ She laughed. 1 remember that bit because Uncle Mike used to joke about not knowing you needed a license for it. He said they’d probably manage to put a tax on it as well.’

  ‘A tax on sex!’ Simon shuddered, poked Anna in the ribs. ‘Be bankrupt in the first month.’

  Anna slapped his hand away. ‘Off, Simon. Go on, Cassie.’

  ‘Well, I don’t remember a lot more. The Greenway was supposed to be some kind of ceremonial pathway. I know it’s meant to be very ancient. Aunty Pat reckoned that it must have joined the path from the lighthouse at one time, before the farm was built. If you stand up near the old lighthouse and look towards the hill you can just trace the Greenway. I don’t know. They do seem to line up. Would there be a reason for it to lead to the sea, Simon?’

  He looked thoughtful. ‘Maybe. It’s very hard to say without being there, seeing the alignment. Danu came from over the sea, but not the North Sea. There could have been local associations though, some kind of blessing for the fishermen.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s really no way of knowing.’

  ‘There was an old woman living in the village when I used to stay here. Everyone said she was, you know, a bit
touched. Aunty Pat said she knew everything there was to know about the history and legends hereabouts, or, if she didn’t know, she’d make something up for the cost of a couple of brandies.’ She laughed again, more at ease now. Fergus was right, she must keep things in perspective. ‘She claimed that some ancestor of hers was hanged on Tan’s hill. Hanged for witchcraft.’ She paused. ‘It’s funny, before that, I always thought witches were burned, but she said not.’

  She looked to Simon for confirmation. He shook his head. ‘No, the Church made a nice distinction. You had to be a heretic to be worth burning; common or garden witches were only worth the rope to hang them with.’

  ‘Nice people,’ Anna commented. ‘And I suppose that was after they’d tortured them into confessing?’

  Simon shook his head again, raked his fingers through his short blonde hair. ‘Strangely enough, no. Not here. In Europe the inquisition got away with pretty much what it wanted. Here, actual torture wasn’t normally permitted for suspected witches. We didn’t lose out though, our lot just devised their own version. You could say that British witch hunters originated psychological manipulation.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you might find yourself locked up, alone, in the dark, being given only salt foods and no water. Maybe kept bound or chained too. Those things weren’t classed as torture, they were just part of the softening up process. Then there was all the stuff you read about in the spy novels. Sleep deprivation, total isolation, that sort of thing.’

  He paused long enough to rearrange Anna’s feet, then went on, ‘And you’d be watched, to see if the devil came for you.’

  ‘I don’t get you,’ Anna said.

  Simon laughed, reached out a hand to rumple Anna’s smooth black hair. ‘Well, for instance, you’d been accused of witchcraft, right? You find yourself bound hand and foot to a stool and sitting right in the middle of a cell, knowing that your accusers were watching everything that happened through a peephole in the wall. The belief was that the devil could come to his servant in any guise he chose. A rat, maybe, even a spider. If the watchers saw anything of that kind enter the cell, well, that would be it. Conclusive proof that they’d got it right. That the accusation was valid and it was time to get the ropes ready.’

  Anna was incredulous. ‘You’re kidding us.’

  ‘No, ’fraid not. It was no joke either to the accuser or the accused. Witchcraft had come to be seen as the Devil’s work. Once accused, well, you were as good as dead.’

  ‘I remember reading somewhere,’ Fergus said slowly, ‘that the lives lost between about sixteen-twenty and seventeen-thirty could be counted in their millions.’

  Simon nodded. ‘It’s impossible to know. Head counts have been done, but this was a time of such religious and political turmoil throughout Europe, and so much of the evidence is corrupt. Estimates vary. Some claim tens of thousands, others millions. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure.’

  Cassie’s mind was beginning to wander. With half an ear she heard Simon telling them about nature religion at the heart of the modem witch cult, as it had been in the past. Of how it was an expression of the duality of nature, and of people, worshipping a twinned male and female image as a symbol of the God-force. She heard Anna comment that the worship of mother earth in any form was probably a positive step if it brought awareness of environmental problems. She heard the talk veer full circle, to stand once more on Tan’s hill and Simon’s speculations that in earlier times it had probably figured in local beliefs as a place where the world of man and the world of spirit-beings met. A doorway into another world.

  ‘Fairyland!’ Anna’s voice was contemptuous.

  ‘Well, something like that.’ Simon’s voice showed both amusement and vague insult at Anna’s laughter.

  ‘Maybe that’s where Suzie went.’ The words, spoken with an attempt at flippancy, were out before she had a chance to recall them.

  ‘Cousin Suzie?’ Simon was quick to challenge.

  Cassie hesitated, found she was beyond returning. ‘She disappeared. No one knows what happened or where she went to. She disappeared on the Greenway and that was it. She was gone. I was left behind.’

  For several long moments no one spoke. Cassie felt Fergus’s arm tighten around her and heard his voice, calm and reassuring. ‘That’s why we’ve come here,’ he said. ‘Cassie needed to be able to face this place again.’

  It was some time before anyone said anything sensible.

  Simon, temporarily at a loss, made polite noises, while Anna, with her usual calm practicality, made tea and gave Cassie space in which to collect her thoughts.

  Then, as she placed the tea tray upon the low table close to where they sat, she said, ‘You may as well go on now, love. You’ve made a start, do yourself a favour and get it over with.’

  She handed Cassie her tea and sat down once more beside Simon, watching Cassie’s slow, acquiescent nod.

  ‘There’s not much to tell, really,’ Cassie said, trying belatedly to play down the drama of her partial revelation. ‘Like I said, Suzie went missing. I guess it happens all the time.’

  She sipped her tea, scalding her tongue. ‘I used to stay here in the holidays. I’ve told you that already. Aunty Pat is my mother’s sister, but they’re very different, she was always really relaxed, easy going. I felt more a part of her family than I did my own.’ She paused, uncertain again.

  Anna prompted. ‘Was Suzie about your age?’

  ‘Two years older. When she went missing, she’d just celebrated her twelfth birthday. Here, it wasn’t like it was at home. Provided we said when we’d be back, where we were going, that sort of thing, we could do pretty much what we liked. Everyone knew Pat and her family, and you couldn’t go very far without someone noticing. We were allowed to go to the beach on our own provided we didn’t swim, and that’s what we’d done that day.’

  ‘The day she disappeared?’

  ‘Yes. Twenty-fifth August. It had been really hot.’ Not a date she would ever forget. ‘We’d lazed around on the beach and then watched some of Aunty Pat’s neighbours bring their catch in. They’d been collecting the lobster traps. We’d forgotten the time and when we left the beach we were already late. Suzie wasn’t worried, it was only a matter of ten minutes or so and Aunty Pat always told us to be back around twenty minutes before she actually expected us, just to make sure we got there on time. But I was worried. I hated being late for anything.’ She smiled wryly. ‘I still do. Part of my mother’s legacy, I suppose. But the thing is, I can’t help thinking, if we’d gone the long way round by the road, instead of trying to make up time taking the short cut along the Greenway. I can’t help asking myself if Suzie would still be here.’

  Cassie fell silent, staring at her tea as though she might find answers in the cooling liquid.

  ‘Go on,’ Fergus said gently. ‘You’re doing fine.’

  She managed to award him a rather watery smile, and continued.

  ‘We’d cut along the Greenway before, and this time should have been the same. We turned off the road and were running down the path when suddenly . . . suddenly everything went strange. It was as if the whole world shifted out of focus for an instant and then everything went black. For some reason, I must have lost consciousness and when I came round, I was alone. There was no sign of Suzie.’

  Cassie hesitated again. Her chest felt tight and the familiar panic had begun to close in again. She reached out for Fergus’s hand, forcing her thoughts into some kind of proper shape before carrying on.

  ‘I remember being scared, confused. At first I didn’t even know where I was or what was going on. Then I remembered that Suzie should be with me and she wasn’t. I started to shout, calling her name over and over again. But she’d gone.’

  Cassie tailed off unable to keep the mournful note from her voice. How could she tell them that the worst thing was not that Suzie had gone — and even then, she had somehow known the absence was a final one — but the knowledg
e that Suzie had been taken and she had been left behind? Rejected.

  Anna was reaching across, trying to offer comfort; Simon, frowning slightly, as he did when he was considering all possible answers and appropriate responses. Fergus did what she needed most. He held her tight, his silent sympathy helping her to regain control.

  ‘I heard them calling,’ she said. ‘When we’d not come back Aunty Pat had come looking for us and when she couldn’t find us she’d got the neighbours in to help. I heard them calling to us and shouted back. I still didn’t know what had happened, I just knew that when I woke up, Suzie was gone.’

  The words continued to flow. Cassie, wrapped in memory, recalled how her aunt, frantic with worry, had shaken her. Had shouted at her, begging to know what had happened to her daughter. How she had wanted desperately for someone to cuddle her close, tell her that everything was going to be all right; that Suzie was safe at home and she needn’t worry any more. She wanted so much for her aunt to stop shouting at her. Stop asking her questions she had no answers for and all the other faces, other voices, crowding in on her, anxious and demanding until someone pushed them all aside and lifted the child Cassie, carried her to where it was quiet and there was stillness and darkness to hide in. Sleep. Forgetfulness. Retreat. Peace.

  ‘My parents came down that night, wanting to take me home. I can remember my mother and Aunty Pat arguing and Uncle Mike shouting at them both to be quiet. I knew my mother blamed my aunt for letting us run wild. Have too much of our own way. I knew as well that Aunty Pat blamed me. She couldn’t help herself. People need someone or something to blame when they’re hurt and I was just the closest thing. She kept saying over and over again, why my girl? Why did they take my Suzie? I knew she’d rather I’d been the one to disappear . . . she couldn’t help it . . . it just hurt her so much.’

  Tears came, inevitably, dripping into the remains of her tea. She clasped both hands around the mug, her shoulders tense, muscles clenched tight along the length of her back.