The Sleeping and the Dead by Ann Cleeves Page A

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the top of the page and she’d put on a lot of weight. Hannah thought she made the job sound grander than it was. The paper had turned into one of those free weeklies which are seventy per
cent adverts. She did write back to congratulate Sally about the promotion. She hadn’t wanted to appear mean spirited.
    When she was nineteen Sally married Chris, a lad they’d knocked about with. A baby arrived soon after. Chris worked for a printer and on summer evenings ran a disco in the caravan site
near the lake. There was one more baby then Hannah heard that they’d separated. Much later she saw a piece in a Newcastle paper saying Chris had been sentenced to twelve months’
imprisonment for selling drugs. She wondered if he would turn up at the prison, but if he had she’d never met him. Not so far as she knew. Would she have recognized him after all this
time?
    When Sally wrote to say that she was getting married for a second time to a local businessman, Hannah had imagined a shopkeeper or someone running a small unit on the business park near the
river. A barber even, like her dad. But it turned out that Sally’s new husband was an hotelier. Hannah might have gone to the wedding – in fact had been building herself up to it
– but in the end she was never invited. Sally said it was a very small affair because she and Roger were busy preparing for the holiday season. The hotel was close to the lake and attracted
tourists.
    On the drive to Cranford Rosie fell asleep before they’d left their estate and didn’t wake until they’d nearly arrived. She sat with her head tipped back, snoring slightly
through an open mouth. Hannah didn’t mind. It was a reminder of what she’d looked like as a small child.
    She had only been back to Cranford once, for her mother’s funeral, and that was in her third year of university. Because she was so far away – she had been at university in Exeter
– the funeral had been organized by Hannah’s aunt. Hannah had stayed with her for one night then returned to the West Country, glad of the excuse of exams.
    Jonathan couldn’t understand her refusal to return to the place of her birth. In the beginning at least, he had been interested in going. ‘For Christ’s sake, H, it’s only
fifty miles away. We could be there and back in an afternoon. Show me the scenes of your wild youth.’ He’d thought he was being funny. Hannah had made no attempt to explain her
reluctance.
    They came upon the town almost before she realized, and then she saw with a start that it had hardly changed at all. It felt as she remembered it: stately, quiet, seductive; a place which was
hard to leave, very different from Millhaven, the town on the coast which was now her home. That was rakish and full of people passing through – students, hotel workers, yuppies using it as a
staging post. And affluent businessmen like Richard Gillespie who lived there to show they had a certain style and personality. Though no doubt he would be moving on too.
    The hotel was in a village called Cranwell, very close to the lake. She must have passed through it on her way to the caravan site but she had no recollection. It was pretty enough. There was
one main street with stone cottages, a small first school backing on to open fields, a large church. The hotel was down a track next to the church and was called The Old Rectory. It was a big, grey
Victorian house with steep gables, an immaculate garden and a view of the graveyard. Hannah had been imagining something seedy, with draughty corridors and stained baths, and was pleasantly
surprised. It had an air of class and of money. Rosie had stirred as they pulled on to the drive and now stretched, yawned and scrabbled under the seat for her shoes. Hannah wished she didn’t
look quite so grubby or dishevelled. She wanted Sally to admire her daughter.
    There were other cars in a courtyard at the side of the house. All of them were newer and larger than Hannah’s