Cross My Heart and Hope to Die Read Online Free

afternoon, I’m going to Byland again. The son’s coming off the rig to meet me.’
    Quantrill sat up. ‘D’you mind if I come with you?’ he asked hopefully. ‘Not to interfere, just for the ride.’
    â€˜You’re still off sick,’ Hilary reminded him. ‘And what would Molly think?’
    â€˜You heard what she said, she’ll be glad to get me out of the house. Besides, I’m interested. If the old couple really are missing, I want to know what’s happened to them.’

Chapter Three
    The obstruction in Longmire Lane had been cleared, and Sergeant Lloyd was able to drive her Renault up to the gateless gap in the broken-down garden wall that fronted the old couple’s home.
    â€˜Good grief …’ said Chief Inspector Quantrill, easing himself reluctantly out of the passenger seat and turning up the collar of his coat. The wind was sharp, he still didn’t feel fully recovered from his bronchitis, and their destination was more uninviting than he’d imagined.
    The landscape was not picturesque, but even so the dilapidated building made a blot on it. The site of the two adjoining houses – a double-dweller, in Suffolk parlance – was at an elbow of the lane, where the surface of churned mud was differentiated from the cultivated land by a remnant of hedge and one or two scrubby trees.
    Immediately surrounding the houses was a piece of garden ground, long overgrown, with a few old fruit trees, one of which had been pushed at an angle by the gales. Surrounding the whole was an expanse of arable land, striped green by row upon row of emerging sugar beet. The only relief for the eye was a couple of hundred yards up the lane, where an old farmhouse stood on a rise, sheltered by stag-headed oaks.
    â€˜Is the farm occupied?’ Quantrill asked.
    â€˜No, it looks as though it’s been empty for some years. A great shame, because it’s a fine old timber-framed house. It needs a lot of work doing now, but I should think it’s had money spent on it in the past. Which is more than you can say of this pair.’
    The mean little double-dweller had been thrown together at a period when the cheapest materials, instead of being fittingly local, were Midland bricks and thin Welsh slate. The front elevation had a door at either end, and four windows, one up and one down for each house. In the centre of the roof was a shared chimney.
    After a hundred years of neglect, the building seemed to be on the point of disintegration. Slates were slipping off the roof, guttering hung loose, cracked brickwork was green with damp, windows and doors were rotting. There was, though, a difference between the two houses. The one on the right was unoccupied, its windows blackly empty behind broken panes. The one on the left was shabbily curtained, and a plaster Alsatian dog ornamented the window sill.
    â€˜It’s unfit for human habitation,’ pronounced Quantrill.
    â€˜Wait until you see inside,’ said Hilary.
    They could hear the sound of an approaching car and presently a Jaguar XJ6, several years old but obviously cherished, nosed cautiously up the lane towards them. The driver, a man in his early forties, was smoking a cigarette but he civilly dropped it in the mud as soon as he stepped out of the car. He was long-legged, athletic-looking, husky in a thickly padded bright blue windcheater.
    Hilary introduced herself and the Chief Inspector, and apologized for not having known how to pronounce the man’s name when she contacted him.
    Krzecszczuk laughed. ‘We’re known hereabouts as the Crackjaws,’ he advised, ‘but I gener’ly answer to Andrew.’
    His appearance was eye-catching. He had a shock of prematurely greying hair, thick black brows that met in a straight line over the top of his nose, and very wide cheekbones; a Slav with a Suffolk accent, very much aware of himself, and of Hilary, but pleasantly wry when she