The Greenway

by Jane Adams

  Sadly, he stepped back outside, and let his gaze travel thoughtfully around the weed-infested yard. The other officer emerged from his search of the other buildings, pulling cobwebs from his clothes and hair.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Mike demanded. ‘Apart from spiders.’

  The constable grinned, grateful to find some relief from the grim reality of the situation.

  ‘An old pram. Funny thing is, sir, it’s clean. Well,’ he amended, ‘sort of clean, like it’s been used recently.’

  Mike nodded. Had it been used to take Sara back to the Greenway? He was about to take a look for himself when a call from the house made him turn.

  ‘He’s here, sir. In one of the bedrooms.’

  Mike strode across the yard. ‘Alive?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He pushed by the officer and began to climb the stairs, hearing behind him the officer remark, ‘Just how can people stand to live like this?’

  He tried to be professional enough not to ask himself such daft questions, but even so . . . the smell, the amount of dirt . . . Mike found it hard to comprehend.

  The other constable stood uncertainly outside the door to the bedroom. Mike entered and motioned him inside. The room was dark, half-shut curtains and windows coated both inside and out in decades of grime added to the gloom. An old man sat at the end of the bed. Despite his surrounding conditions and his age, there was nothing emaciated or decayed about him. There was still a sense of strength, of purpose, of sternness in the way he sat, square-shouldered and straight-backed.

  ‘Mr Cooper?’ Mike spoke gently, uncertain of what approach to take.

  The man did not speak, but turned his eyes directly onto Mike. Mike felt a moment of almost superstitious panic, felt the young man at his side flinch, as though the look had been directed at him.

  ‘I knew you would come.’ The voice was husky as though long out of use, but there was no weakness in it. ‘I told her there was no other way. She should have let me see to it like last time.’ He shrugged slightly as though resigned to the fact that life always let him down.

  Mike waited, fearful of breaking the thread.

  ‘She said she’d see to it this time, said she’d take her to the hill, do it there, but I never believed her. Weak, she was. Just left the child there, under the hedge for just anyone to find. Thought she could come back and lie to me, but I won’t hold with that. Not with lying. So I followed her.’

  He looked down at the floor then as though he’d said all he wanted to say. Mike had stood, frozen, as the man spoke. Suddenly, he was terrified that he would say no more. That he would refuse to speak and the rest of the story would remain untold. With difficulty, he held back on the impulse to shout, to demand, instead he spoke softly, words dropping gently into the stillness, ‘And so you killed her.’

  The man lifted his head again, eyes widened as though surprised that Mike should want clarification.

  ‘Of course I did. What else was there to do? I knew she’d lied to me so I took wood from the woodpile.’ He paused sadly, then went on. ‘I didn’t have time for the child. There was a woman running down the hill and I could hear people shouting so I came home.’

  ‘And the wood you hit her with,’ Mike asked. ‘What did you do with that?’

  Cooper glared at him indignantly as though the question were beneath contempt. ‘Not a countryman, are you?’

  Mike was startled but he answered slowly, ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Ah, I thought not. Wouldn’t need to ask such damn, fool questions if you were.’ He paused, then, speaking slowly and patiently he said, ‘Firewood belongs on the woodpile. I put it back there ready for winter.’ He shook his head despairingly at Mike. ‘Young folk. No idea, have you? Think I’d go wasting good firewood?’ He shook his head again and stared down at the floor in fixed concentration. He did not even move to protest as Mike took his arm and led him away to the waiting car.

  Chapter 22

  It was two more weeks before the funerals of Suzanne Ashmore and Emma Cooper took place. Suzanne’s, in a large urban cemetery in the city where her parents now lived. Emma’s in the churchyard of the village where her short life had ended so tragically. Mike attended both, so did John Tynan.

  Suzie Ashmore’s funeral hilltop was well attended. Mike stood well back out of the way of those who had more right to be there. It was a bright September afternoon with just the slightest touch of autumn licking the trees that lined the route to the crematorium.

  The service had begun when he saw Cassie and Fergus slip quietly into the church and stand almost unnoticed at the back. Suzanne’s mother turned once to look at them, then turned away, her back a solid wall of disapproval. Mike shook his head sadly. He supposed it was too late to heal this kind of breach, founded as it was purely on grief, and beyond reason. He looked across and smiled at Cassie. Dr Lucas said that her recovery was exceeding all expectations, that she was ready to begin her life again. Mike was glad for them, for himself too. His friendship with Maria Lucas was blossoming and although he sensed that it would be a long time before either of them was ready to make a commitment, he felt that he too was beginning his life over.

  He pulled his mind somewhat reluctantly back to the present, aware that the service was almost over and that he should at least try to find the right page in the hymn book.

  Behind him there was a slight draught and a soft thud. He knew that Cassie and Fergus had chosen their moment to leave.

  The life and death of Emma Cooper was celebrated quietly a few days later. A couple of photographers turned up to record the event which warranted a paragraph or two in the local papers but other than that the funeral party was made up of Mike, Tynan and the others whose lives had been so shadowed by the consequences of this child’s death.

  It was on Mike’s mind that in a few days’ time there would be another funeral. That of Albert Cooper, found hanged by a bed sheet in a remand cell.

  And, thought Mike, irritably, he’d said not a word more about anything since their brief conversation that day at the Coopers’ cottage.

  He stood between the Thomas’s and the Malthams as Emma’s body was consigned once more to the earth, thinking how different this had been from the funeral of Suzie Ashmore.

  He looked across at the Cassidys. Quite a number of the local people had sent flowers, some attended the church service, but only the Cassidys had come to the graveside. Mike watched them as they stood there, keeping close to each other, their daughter safely between them. He thought how differently it might all have turned out . . . then forced himself not to think about it and bent with the others to drop a handful of earth into the grave.

  It was only as they left the churchyard that Mike noticed Cassie. She still held flowers in her hand.

  ‘Did you forget?’ he asked her. ‘I’ll walk you back up if you want.’

  Cassie smiled at him and shook her head. ‘We’ve already left flowers on the grave,’ she said. ‘I want to take these to Tan’s hill. It’s just my way of finishing things properly.’

  ‘We’d like you to come too,’ Fergus said. It was an invitation that evidently included Tynan as well.

  They walked in silence for several minutes, an odd, solemn procession. Then Anna asked, ‘Do we know why he took Sara?’

  Mike shook his head. ‘We can only make guesses,’ he said. ‘I talked to her after Cooper was arrested, she remembered seeing him there once, on Tan’s hill, or rather, she remembered seeing an old man talking, she thought, to himself. It scared her and she ran away.’

  ‘Maybe he thought she’d found the body, same as Suzie did?’

  ‘Maybe, we’ll never know now.’

  Anna nodded slowly. Simon reached across and took her hand. He’d been unusually silent until now. ‘It might seem far-fetched but have any of you noticed how like Suzie she looks? Sara Jane, I mean. Seeing her there, on the hill, it must have been as if she’d come back to haunt him.’

  No one commented, it didn
’t seem necessary and Mike, for one, had developed a superstitious caution against violating the mystical aspects of this whole business. There were still so many things he didn’t understand, like the child’s clothes in the back of the police car and that strange dream Cassie had related to him when he’d gone to see her the day after Cooper’s arrest. The meticulous and absurdly accurate detail she had been able to recall.

  ‘You didn’t do it,’ he had told her, suddenly anxious that she might take on this further burden of guilt.

  To his relief and surprise she had laughed. ‘I know I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But it felt good, like revenge without the consequences I suppose.’

  They’d reached the mouth of the Greenway now. Anna stopped and sat down on the grass.

  ‘Aren’t you going any further?’ Tynan asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘Call me superstitious if you like, but wild horses wouldn’t drag me up there again.’ Unconsciously, she moved a hand to touch her abdomen, already aware of the new life growing there.

  Tynan smiled. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure I want to go either.’

  Anna patted the ground beside her. ‘Have a seat.’

  Mike, Fergus and Cassie began to walk on alone, then Cassie stopped abruptly. ‘I can’t,’ she said softly. Fergus turned to kiss her gently then took the flowers from her hand.

  ‘Then let me.’

  Cassie nodded, relieved, and they watched her as she walked the short distance back to the others.

  Fergus and Mike stood for quite some time on the hilltop. They’d placed the flowers where the hidey hole had once been. Already the hawthorn and brambles were growing back, healing the manmade wound that gaped in the hedge-side. Then they’d gone back and stood on the hill looking down at the Greenway, stretching out, straight but for the kink around the hill.

  The afternoon was warm, a slight breeze keeping it from being hot. Far off out to sea there was a darkening, as though rain clouds gathered and already the strip of sea that they could glimpse from the hill top looked muddied, anticipating the dark of storm clouds.

  ‘I think we should go now,’ Fergus said, his voice sharpened slightly as though something troubled him.

  As they hurried back along the pathway, it seemed to Mike that there was a slight shimmering in the air, like a displaced heat haze moving before his eyes and that the ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. The hedges — high and solid though he knew them to be — blurred suddenly as though seen through misted glass.

  He felt panic rising, choking him, looked across at Fergus and saw the same emotions written on the other man’s face.

  Instinctively, they began to run, fleeing in unashamed panic from a place that no longer welcomed them.

  But it seemed that the sound of laughter pursued them down the high-hedged pathway, and, forcing himself to look back for an instant, Mike saw that two figures stood, small and childlike, against the blue sky on the crest of Tan’s hill.

  THE END

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