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Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 1992 by Collins Crime
Copyright © Emma Page 1992
Emma Page asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008171780
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780008171797
Version [2016-02-19]
For B.D., G.G., J.C., et al,
For all the happy hours
CONTENTS
All summer long the local children played on Whitethorn Common, a sizeable tract of land on the edge of Cannonbridge. The common didn’t present a flat, exposed terrain but a landscape of diversity and unexpectedness, swelling into hillocks, dipping into hollows; secluded spots, open spaces, trees and shrubs, smooth stretches of turf.
Now, in the caressing warmth of this golden Tuesday evening in September, the shadows had lengthened by eight o’clock. The blackberrying youngsters were departing with their pickings, the pensioners heading for home and television.
A young couple still strolled over the emerald slopes, their arms around each other. The girl, Jill Lingard, was nineteen years old, pretty enough in an everyday fashion, an air of robust common sense. Her boyfriend, Norman Griffin, seven years older, was a virile-looking young man with a stubborn set to his jaw.
They paused from time to time to survey one or other of the half-dozen houses, of varying sizes, dates and styles, dotted about the common, each in its own garden. They climbed a grass-covered eminence and stood looking down. ‘That’s the kind of house I’d like one day.’ Jill nodded in the direction of a substantial late-Victorian