The Greenway

by Jane Adams

  THE GREENWAY

  A stunning psychological thriller full of absolutely breathtaking twists

  Jane Adams

  Revised edition 2019

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  FIRST PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN IN 1995

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Jane Adams to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  We hate typos too but sometimes they slip through. Please send any errors you find to corrections@joffebooks.com

  We’ll get them fixed ASAP. We’re very grateful to eagle-eyed readers who take the time to contact us.

  ©Jane Adams

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  THERE IS A GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH SLANG IN THE BACK OF THIS BOOK FOR US READERS.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  For my family and for David

  ‘Just a matter of time’

  Prologue

  Even the scent was the same. The dust of late August overlaying the green and the faint tang of sea salt still clinging to her skin.

  The feelings too. Knowing that they were late and that Aunty Pat had made them promise to be back on time.

  In her dream, Cassie glanced back to see Suzie emptying sand from her shoes.

  ‘Come on, Sue!’ Cassie’s shout was anxious and insistent. Irritable even in her own ears.

  ‘I’m coming, for God’s sake. You worry too much, Cassie. What do you think she’s going to do?’

  She replaced the shoe, wriggling her foot into it without bothering to undo the laces. Suzie never seemed to worry about things in the way that she did. Cassie gnawed at her lower lip, shifted impatiently from foot to foot.

  Suzie came trotting over to her.

  ‘Look,’ she said sympathetically, ‘if you’re really that bothered, we’ll cut down between the fields, like we did the other day. Then we’ll only be a little bit late. OK?’

  Cassie nodded doubtfully.

  ‘Right then,’ her cousin said. ‘Race you!’

  Even in her dream Cassie could feel the exertion of that run. The sun, somehow heavy on her back. The way she seemed to breathe the dust thrown up by their running feet. Then the change from concrete hardness to the faintly crunchy springiness of sun-dried grass as they left the narrow road and turned onto the grass verge which marked the entrance to the Greenway.

  Cassie always tried to wake up at this point. Always tried to wrench her body from sleep and her mind back to consciousness.

  She never could.

  Instead, she was forced to relive the events with the same, no, a greater degree of intensity than she had twenty years before. Greater, because at this point the action slowed. Cassie was aware of every blade of grass flattened by her sandal-clad feet. Every twig and leaf from the high hedges which caught at her hair and seemed, with hindsight, to be a warning, telling them to go back and follow the road round to the village. She heard a snail shell crack beneath her feet, glimpsed the shadow of something, a bird maybe, thrust back into the bushes. Caught the softened thud of Suzie’s feet chasing hers up the green-carpeted, green-enclosed pathway.

  Then, the sudden shimmer, like a displaced heat haze; the feeling of heaviness cloaked around her shoulders, the ground shifting beneath her feet. Dimly, as she fell, she heard Suzie’s distant voice calling her name.

  Falling, falling.

  Cassie, the child, was engulfed in blackness. An absolute, soundless, thick as treacle blackness. She couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe.

  Then . . . nothing.

  Twenty years on, Cassie woke, fighting her way back to the world she referred to as real. Fingers clutching at the bed covers as though they were her only hold on the present.

  Cassie sucked air into lungs that seemed starved of it. Forcing herself to breathe deeply and slowly.

  She thought that she had cried out, but Fergus slept on beside her, unaware, peaceful. For a moment only she thought of waking him, reaching out her hand to touch his shoulder. Then, she drew back. Waking Fergus never helped. His sympathy only seemed to jar on her senses. Fergus never suffered from bad dreams. He could not understand the strength of them, the fear of the nightmares which dominated even Cassie’s waking hours. No. Fergus couldn’t help with this.

  Silently and slowly Cassie slipped from her bed, opened the wardrobe and felt blindly into the pocket of her oldest jacket. She withdrew a folded piece of paper wrapped in a plastic bag. Fergus didn’t know she still had it. She glanced anxiously at him, but he slept on, peaceful as a child.

  Cassie took out the paper. It was yellowed with age and much folded, the creases reinforced with tape where the fibres had begun to part. She unfolded it. Laid it flat upon the dressing table, shifting things aside to make room on the cluttered surface.

  A police notice. A request for help.

  ‘have you seen this child?’ headed the sheet in bold print. Cassie didn’t need to read the rest, she knew it by heart, by her soul. The detail, the date and the time of disappearance. The name of the twelve-year-old child.

  Turning the paper so that it caught the faint glimmer of the streetlight slanting through the curtains, Cassie stared at the image and through twenty years of lost time, the eyes of Suzanne Ashmore. Cousin Suzie stared back at her.

  Chapter 1

  ‘Fergus tells me that you know this place?’

  Cassie smiled, nodded.

  ‘Yes, I had relatives here, when I was a kid. I used to come and spend holidays with them.’

  ‘Great place to grow up,’ Simon commented enthusiastically. ‘The sea, beautiful countryside, hardly any traffic. I’ve seen more kids out on bikes and on their own these last two days than I’ve seen in years.’

  Anna took his hand, laughing at him. ‘Simon the romantic,’ she said fondly. ‘What about the bad side? Bet you haven’t thought about the cold weather, winter storms. No night-life. Having to travel fifteen miles or so to Norwich to do your shopping. How about all that then?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Anna, it can’t be that bad. There are local shops and as for bad winters, can’t you just see it? Raging seas, spray reaching the cliff tops . . .’

  ‘Half the cliffs being washed away . . .’

  ‘Curling up in front of a real fire . . .’

  ‘Having to clean it out every morning before you can light it…Typical townie you are, Simon — arrive in the summer, fall in love with a place and see no further than September. One winter here and you’d be back in the city so fast your little legs’d be a blur.’

  Dimly, Cassie heard Simon continue to protest, Anna laughing at him. She wandered away from their amiable bickering, the double act, a
s Fergus called them, and walked further up the hill to where Fergus was standing.

  He reached out, wrapped his arms tightly around her and smiled. ‘You OK?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m fine.’ It surprised her to find that she really meant it. This holiday had been Fergus’s idea and she had dreaded it. But now that she was here, she felt peaceful, at ease.

  She turned to face away from him, pulling his arms around her again, standing very close. ‘Look. Down there you can just see my aunt’s house. Their old house, you know, when they lived here.’

  ‘I know,’ Fergus said. He gently increased the pressure of his arms around her, clasping his hands over hers.

  ‘Down there . . .’ She hesitated for barely an instant, felt the reassuring warmth of his hand over hers and carried on. ‘Down there is what the locals call the Greenway. You can see the line of it, dead straight from the road to the foot of this hill.’

  ‘Hummock,’ Fergus said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m just not sure that you could call this a hill,’ he explained. ‘More like a blip, or an over-ambitious molehill. It’s only because this entire place is so flat that it looks like a hill at all.’

  Cassie laughed and Fergus squeezed her more tightly.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, ‘and I’m very, very proud of you.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Maybe you’re right, Fergus. I’ve got to learn to lay my own ghosts, twenty years is a long time.’

  The others had wandered up to join them, hands clasped but still bickering.

  ‘Tan’s hill,’ Simon was saying, waving an expansive arm. ‘Know what that means anyone?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Anna groaned. ‘Simon’s playing school ma’am again.’

  Simon ignored her.

  ‘It’s a contraction,’ Cassie said unexpectedly. ‘’Tan’s hill — St Anne’s hill.’

  ‘Very good.’ Simon applauded. ‘A prize for the lady in the red shirt.’ He paused, grinned at her and went on more seriously, ‘Actually there are a lot of Tan’s or St Anne’s hills. Most of them conical or gently rounded.’ He made a descriptive gesture with his hand playfully following the contours of Anna’s body, then dodging back to avoid the punch she threw at him. He went on, ‘Holy places, most of them. You know, pre-Christian. Thanks to dear old Pope Gregory, the more deep-rooted of the local obsessions, the Church just stuck a new label on. Most of the hills with an Anne or Tan label were Danu’s hills. She gave power to the land, fertility to the crops, that sort of thing.’ He grinned again. And poor old St Anne almost certainly died a virgin. Ironic, don’t you think?’

  ‘I thought that was virtually compulsory,’ Anna commented. ‘To die virginal if you were going to be saintly, I mean.’

  ‘Probably,’ he confirmed cheerfully, and made a deliberately clumsy grab for her. ‘Just glad you didn’t follow your namesake, that’s all I can say.’ He reached for her again, flopping down onto the springy turf and pulling her with him, sharing kisses, until, practicably, Simon’s curiosity got the better of the moment and he strained his head back to look at Cassie. ‘Is there water around here? A spring or stream or something?’

  ‘Mmm, yes. There’s a spring at the foot of the hill, just as you leave the Greenway. Why?’

  ‘What’s the Greenway?’ asked Anna.

  ‘It’s a kind of pathway between those two big fields. Look, you can just see the line of it from here.’ She pointed back down the hill towards the darker line of the high hedges against the ripening fields. ‘Why did you ask about water, Simon?’

  ‘Because water was Danu’s association. Places where she was worshipped were generally near water.’

  ‘Lots and lots of the stuff over there,’ Anna commented, waving a hand to where they could just glimpse the ocean over the rise of the cliff edge.

  ‘Not quite the same.’

  For several minutes, they were all silent. As Fergus had said, the hill was hardly impressive, but the flatness of the landscape made it a vantage point from which seven churches could be seen. Due east of them, the lighthouse reared skyward. They had earlier passed close by it, walking along the cliff edge and had seen the remains of its predecessor still clinging grimly to the sandstone. Year by year, the sea took a higher tribute, claiming a little more of the coastline. Cassie had been shocked at how much had gone since her last visit here. At how much closer to the cliff edge the flint church now stood. Somehow, she had thought, you just didn’t allow for churches, or lighthouses for that matter, dropping off the edge of cliffs. They seemed too big, too solid to be decimated by such insidious corrosion. She had to remind herself that she had been gone from here a long time. A few inches a year over so many years. It added up.

  This whole landscape was full of memories.

  ‘See down there?’ She pointed to a church, tree-shrouded and seeming to have no attendant village. ‘We went ghost hunting there.’

  ‘Ghost hunting?’

  ‘Yes. This area’s full of legends. Ghosts everywhere and just about every type you could imagine.’

  Simon pulled up a plantain stalk and nibbled thoughtfully at it. ‘And what variety of ghost were you hunting that time?’

  Cassie laughed. ‘Not sure I remember now. Headless coachman or something, I think.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’ Anna demanded.

  ‘No. We got cold and wet, it was raining of course, frightened a few motorists and gave up long before midnight.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘Aunty Pat was always game for that sort of thing. Always saw the funny side. And Suzie . . .’ She hesitated then, Suzie’s was a name she rarely allowed herself to say out loud. ‘Suzie would do anything if it looked like fun.’

  She stared down at the Greenway, her hopeful mood suddenly evaporated. Fergus clasped her hand.

  ‘You still keep in touch with them?’ Simon asked.

  Cassie’s answer sounded falsely cheerful even to herself ‘I still see Aunty Pat and Uncle Mike. Not often, but we keep in touch . . . sort of’

  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.