Kirjahaku

Local gossip said the burned out cottage at the edge of the marshes, and the stretch of beach that lay in front of it, was haunted. By the ghost of a girl who used to live there, but who set fire to it one day, then deliberately walked into the sea to drown herself, when someone let it be known that the lover she had lived there with had betrayed her with another woman, before abandoning her completely, by going off to fight on the battlefields of First World War France. Dying there as well, so local gossip said.Local gossip didn't say who the woman had been, or the name of the soldier who had treated her so badly, because it didn't know, but there were at least two women and a man still living in the village who did.And soon another man, newly arrived in the village, was going to know too.

The wreckage of a millionaire's plane found crashed onto the side of a Welsh mountain. A burned out holiday cottage deep in the Welsh Marches, with the remains of a body still smouldering amongst the ashes. A mysterious package missing, first from the plane, and then from the cottage, that everyone is looking for, but no one can find. Too busy looking over their shoulders trying to see what the next guy is doing, no one is watching Chief Inspector Macdonald, but he's the one pulling the strings.

Middleton Hall was an eighteenth century landscape garden with lake, woodlands, statuary and buildings originally designed by Humphrey Repton, now swallowed up by urban sprawl. The Borough Council had purchased it from its last noble owner during the 1930s, when local authorities still had the funds for such extravagances, and turned it into a public park. Now, in 1983, it was an anachronism, an uneasy mixture of olde worlde gardens and up to date recreational facilities. The park, like most of the people attracted to work in it, or visit it, was a square peg in the round hole of a forward looking Leisure Services Department. Workers like Melody- a young girl with a secret she dare not share with anyone; Carol, who had found love late in life and didn't know how to deal with it; Gerald, whose wife had ambitions for him beyond his peace of mind. Visitors like Sammy, the dog who hated cyclists; Irene Tomlin, the cyclist who hated park keepers; Arnold, a young man who kept digging up the formal lawns in search of a golden cockerel he thought the author of a book he'd read had buried somewhere in the grounds. When local councillor Warren Hescott reluctantly agreed to a tree planting ceremony he didn't want, in order to celebrate his twenty five years of service to the community, he said he'd only take part in the event if the tree planted in his honour was the special cedar he knew his old enemy, Hereward Gordon, the former Director of Parks had, out of pure bloody mindedness after being forced to take early retirement, secreted away in his garden in one of the lodges in the grounds of the Hall before he went, rather than using the tree to complete the main avenue of the Hall as he should have done. Warren thought he'd escape the celebrations by doing that, but he was wrong, and people working in the park, or only visiting it, found themselves more and more involved when events surrounding the ceremony escalated out of control as plot and counter-plot to retrieve the tree for the ceremony failed. Add in the usual flashers and suicides who frequented the park, and the attempts by the local police force to apprehend a non-existent rapist invented by the local press in an attempt to sell more copies of their paper, and the way was open for an exciting summer for everyone as they attempted to plant Councillor Hescott's Tree.

The greenway had named after had had a lot of different names itself down through the centuries. Most reflecting the fears folk had about what type of creatures they were most liable to meet along the green way if they were foolish enough to venture along it. Hobbs Lane had been one of the names it had had in days so long ago now no one could remember them anymore. Hob being an antiquated name for Satan, or Old Nick, or the Devil, nobody used anymore. In those far off days it had often also been called Waylands Way, in reference to Wayland, the Smith, or Volund as he was also called by more learned folk, a god of the Norse people, who had become a devil to those not of that faith. Pucks Lane and Pans Lane were other names it had down through the centuries. Both referring to the satyr whose pipes would summon all manner of nightmarish creatures to follow their call. Elves and pixies, hobgoblins and spirits. Trolls and imps. Sylphs and Sprites and fairies, all were said to 4 have haunted the lane at various times during its existence. And if that hadn't been enough, there was a legend connected with the old Green Way too.A legend about a girl being kidnapped on her way to her wedding in Shropshire and never being seen again, some time back in the fifteen or sixteen hundreds, or thereabouts. In the garden of Greenaway Cottage, not actually hidden, but carefully positioned so you'd not notice them at all, unless you actually went looking for them, were a brace of reindeer grazing contentedly in the lee of a sleigh which looked as if it had been struck by lightning. Struck by lightning several times that is.And the truth was that it looked that way because it had been struck by lightning. Struck by lightning several times, in fact. Whilst the two women who lived in the cottage together at that time were riding in it in fact. Rumour had it that the two women who lived in the cottage, who folk took to be sisters, weren't really sisters at all, but aunt and niece, though both their surnames were the same as that of the cottage they lived in; Greenaway.It was also rumoured that they had brought the sleigh and the reindeer back from another dimension with the help of a third person no longer living with them and had been living quietly together in the cottage at the end of the village ever since. Causing no harm to anyone, as some people were quick to point out in their defence, but arousing a great deal of interest amongst other people in the village none the less.It was said by those other people in the village, about the aunt and her niece, that people from the other world they'd been visiting and from which they'd returned in the sleigh which looked as if it had been struck by lightning several time, drawn by the reindeer now quietly grazing in the lee of it, sometimes visited them in reciprocal fashion in the dead of night at particular times of the year.Times such as Lughnasad or Halloween, for example, days which were considered to be generally more magical times of the year than others. Nobody really believed the stories, though, because the ladies didn't look capable of getting out of their fireside chairs even, never mind leaving them and setting off for adventures in other dimensions.