by Jane Adams
DETECTIVE
MIKE CROFT
BOOKS 1-3
JANE ADAMS
THREE ENTHRALLING CRIME MYSTERIES
CLICK ON THE BOOK YOU WANT TO READ
Book 1: The Greenway
Book 2: The Secrets
Book 3: Their Final Moments
TABLE OF CONTENTS ALL BOOKS
Book 1: THE GREENWAY
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
DETECTIVE MIKE CROFT SERIES
Book 2: THE SECRETS
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Book 3: THEIR FINAL MOMENTS
PART ONE
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
PART TWO
18 June, 1999
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Afterword
MIKE CROFT SERIES
A SELECTION OF OUR OTHER TITLES YOU MAY ENJOY
Glossary of English Slang for US readers
Book 1: 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 [email protected]
We’ll get them fixed ASAP. We’re very grateful to eagle-eyed readers who take the time to contact us.
©Jane Adams
Please join our mailing list for free Kindle crime thriller, detective, mystery books and new releases.
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THERE IS A GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH SLANG IN THE BACK OF THIS BOOK FOR US READERS.
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, as 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’
