Cross My Heart and Hope to Die

Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

About Bello:
www.panmacmillan.com/bello

Sign up to our newsletter to hear about new releases events and competitions:
www.panmacmillan.com/bellonews

• Sheila Radley
  
• Dedication
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• The Drop In
  
• 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 Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  

Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.

She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women's Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.

FOR DOROTHY

Their surname wasn't really Crackjaw of course. According to their pension books, the old couple were Zygmunt and Gladys Krzecszczuk. But the derisory nickname, with its rural disregard for the feelings of a foreigner, had been bestowed on Ziggy so long ago that most people in the village assumed that it was his real name.

Even those who knew better, including the sub-postmistress who paid the pensions, found it simplest to pretend that they thought Crackjaw an acceptable pronunciation of Krzecszczuk; and the police, when they were called in, were glad to do the same. After all, neither Ziggy nor Gladys was likely to complain, because they had both disappeared.

Their disappearance caused very little concern among the inhabitants of the Suffolk village of Byland. The Crackjaws lived in isolation at Longmire End, a mile out of the village by road and then another half mile up an unmetalled lane. Ziggy had worked for thirty-seven years at Longmire Farm, and he and his wife lived in one half of a red-brick double-dweller that had been built near the farm in the nineteenth century to accommodate two labourers and their families.

When the Crackjaws first lived there, all three houses at Longmire End had been occupied. Eventually, the tenant farmer had retired and moved away. The Longmire land was now cultivated by a farmer from the next village, and the big old timber-framed farmhouse was empty; so was the other half of the double-dweller. The Crackjaws'numerous children had dispersed and the old couple lived entirely alone, without a telephone, out of sight and for the most part out of mind.

Though Gladys Crackjaw, née Goffin, was Byland born and bred, none of her relatives now lived in the village. Her marriage to a foreign farm-labourer who spoke only a few words of English, most of them not nice, had deprived her of the only friends she had once had, the girls she had grown up with.

‘Poor Gladys,' was how they had referred to her at first, with amused contempt. Later – more kindly, taking into account her pinched, anxious face, the clinging toddlers, the many pregnancies: ‘Poor old Glad.'

But over the years Gladys's weary expeditions to the village on foot became so infrequent that she slipped from people's memories. Byland grew, and changed. Some of her contemporaries moved elsewhere, some died. By the time the survivors reached their mid-seventies, they had forgotten Gladys so comprehensively that she might as well have been dead too.

Her husband had always been the more visible of the couple. Throughout his working life Ziggy Crackjaw had been a familiar sight in Byland, a rough man in a greasy cap, with broad cheek-bones and thick black eyebrows that met across his nose. Every day after work, and twice on Saturdays and Sundays, he had been seen cycling through the village on his way to the White Horse, and wobbling precariously homewards again when he'd either had a skinful or run out of money.

Ziggy had been tolerated at the White Horse, but never liked or befriended. He was sullen when sober, argumentative when he was drunk, and incomprehensible most of the time. But soon after he reached pensionable age the White Horse changed hands, and Ziggy was forced to change his habits.

The new landlord and his wife, urban refugees, knew exactly what kind of country pub they wanted to run. It looked, in their dreams, exactly like the thatched and heavily beamed Byland White Horse, but cleaned up and renovated, and with the addition of a restaurant. The customers of their dreams were mostly other urban refugees, cheerfully free-spending but rarely drunk and never nasty with it.

Very few of the White Horse's usual customers measured up to the new landlord's standards. The pub was closed for two months while it was being transformed, and afterwards some of the more hygienic regulars were permitted to return in order to provide a little local colour, but Ziggy Crackjaw was not among them.

Too old to cycle to a pub elsewhere, Ziggy took to visiting the village once a week and buying drink for consumption at home. There were two general stores in Byland, one primarily a sub-post office, the other – standing on a rise and therefore known as the top shop – a newsagent and off-licence. Every Thursday, pension day, Ziggy would cycle down through the village to the post office to collect the pensions for himself and his wife, and then return home by way of the top shop where he bought his weekly provisions. These included two litre bottles of vodka, and as many cans of beer as he could pack into the wooden box that he had fastened to the carrier of his bicycle with orange binder twine.

Ziggy continued this practice for some ten years. His shoulders became hunched and stiff, his old legs took longer to push the pedals round, but whatever his health or the weather he made his Thursday morning shopping trip to Byland without fail. And Maureen Norris, joint owner with her husband of the top shop, always had Ziggy's regular purchases – the drink, plus two large wrapped sliced loaves of bread, two large packs of pork sausages, seven large cans of baked beans, half a pound of butter, half a pound of tea and two pounds of sugar – ready and waiting for him.

Then, one Thursday in late March, Ziggy Crackjaw failed to collect his provisions.

It had been a month of gales, and this week was the worst. Winds in Eastern England had been blowing at gale force, on one occasion gusting up to ninety miles an hour. By Thursday the winds had moderated, but they were still sufficiently strong to make Maureen think that the old man must have decided for once to postpone his shopping trip. But although Friday was a relatively calm day, Ziggy still didn't appear.

Saturday was the shop's half day. When Ziggy had not come by closing time, Maureen Norris – as kind-hearted as she was generously built – grew concerned. She and her husband weren't local people, but they'd lived in the village for seventeen years and she knew that Ziggy was married even though she'd never set eyes on his wife. Worried that the old couple might be ill, Maureen – who couldn't drive – urged her husband Vic to go out to Longmire End and see whether anything was amiss.

Vic Norris, a permanently harassed man, refused. It was pouring with rain, and he'd had a hell of a week. Bad enough in fine weather to have to get up every morning at five to sort and deliver newspapers, but wild weather made the job an endurance test.

This week, for four days in succession, he'd driven through winds so strong that they'd sometimes rocked his van, threatening to overturn it. Branches torn from trees had thumped down on the metal roof and he'd felt sure that if the wind didn't get him one of the bigger branches would, crushing him, van and all. It wouldn't be so bad if the customers appreciated what he went through to deliver their papers, but no, they took him for granted. Some of them even had the nerve to moan because he was late!

And now that he'd finished the day's deliveries and thankfully garaged the van until tomorrow morning (Sunday, always the worst day for newspapers, with all those blasted supplements; people didn't read half of'em, but soon complained if he forgot to deliver a single one) he had no intention of getting it out again.

Besides, he didn't give a damn about Ziggy Crackjaw.

The surly old bastard never paid his shop bill in full, always asking for cigarettes and other things as if as an afterthought, and then saying that he'd pay for them ‘next time'. And Maureen was soft, she had let the old man run up an account that began to look as though it never would be paid. No, Vic was hanged if he was going to spend a wet Saturday afternoon delivering to the Crackjaws out at Longmire End.

He went eventually, of course. Maureen kept on about ‘the poor old couple'and Vic knew there'd be no peace until he did as she wanted. Grumbling furiously, he put on his wet-weather gear again, loaded up the food and drink, and set off.

It was years since Vic Norris had driven up Longmire Lane – not since his early days as a newsagent, when Longmire Farm was occupied and he'd been so eager for custom that he'd been prepared to jolt all the way up there and back seven days a week just to deliver the
Telegraph
and
Farmers' Weekly
. He must have been mad, wasting all that time and petrol, not to mention the wear and tear on the van …

The narrow lane had changed during the intervening years. Then it had been bordered by hedges and ditches and overhung by trees, its surface rutted by the passage of farm vehicles in bad weather. But at least the resident farmer had always filled in the worst of the potholes for the sake of his own car.