A Place of Execution

by Val McDermid

  ‘Did you see our story?’

  ‘I’m in the middle of a major inquiry, Mr Smart. If you want any comment from Derbyshire Police, you’ll have to go through the appropriate channels. Now, if you’ll excuse me…’

  Smart’s predatory smile appeared. ‘If you won’t take seriously my suggestion about links to other cases…have you considered a clairvoyant?’

  George frowned. ‘A clairvoyant?’

  ‘It could point you in the right direction. Focus your attention instead of spreading the search so wide.’

  George shook his head in wonderment. ‘I deal in facts, Mr Smart, not headlines.’ He took half a dozen brisk steps away from the journalist, then wheeled round. ‘If you really want to do something for Alison Carter rather than your own career, why not print a photograph of her?’

  ‘I take it that means there hasn’t been a breakthrough?’ Smart said to Clough as George stalked off to his car.

  ‘Why don’t you bugger off back to Manchester?’ Clough said, his voice low but firm, his face open and smiling. Without waiting to see the effect of his words, he followed George.

  ‘Smart by name thinks he’s smart by nature,’ George said bitterly as the car toiled up the dale. ‘It makes me sick. This isn’t a career opportunity, it’s a girl’s life that’s at risk here.’

  ‘He can’t afford to think like that. If he did, he’d never be able to write the story,’ Clough pointed out.

  ‘That might be better for everyone,’ George said. He was still stiff with annoyance when he strode into the Methodist Hall and made straight for the nearest table with a phone. He stood over the constable who was using it, tapping the end of an unlit Gold Leaf against the packet. The PC flashed a glance at him, the whites of his eyes betraying his nervousness.

  ‘That’ll be all then, madam, thank you very much,’ he gabbled, his hand reaching for the receiver rest to cut off the call even before he’d finished speaking. ‘There you go, sir,’ he added, thrusting the phone apprehensively at George.

  ‘This is DI Bennett for DCI Carver,’ George snapped. There was a pause, then he heard the nasal Midlands voice of his CID boss. ‘Bennett? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I got a message that you wanted to speak to me.’

  ‘Took their time delivering it,’ Carver grumbled. George had already discovered that after almost thirty years as a police officer, Carver had elevated complaint to an art form. George had spent his first month at Buxton apologizing, his second appeasing. Then he’d noticed how everyone else dealt with Carver’s complaints and he too had learned to ignore.

  ‘Have there been some developments, sir?’

  ‘You left instructions for the day shift with Sergeant Lucas,’ Carver accused.

  ‘I did, sir.’

  ‘Round up the usual suspects, generally a waste of time for all concerned.’

  George waited, saying nothing. The anger from his encounter with Smart was dammed up behind a wall of professional imperturbability, but thanks to Carver’s complaints, the weight of his fury was reaching critical mass. The last thing his career needed was for his rage to burst over Carver’s head, so he took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose.

  ‘This time, though, we might just have come up trumps,’ Carver continued. The grudging words came out with grinding slowness. It sounded as if he’d rather the exercise had been a failure, George thought with incredulous bitterness.

  ‘Is that right, sir?’

  ‘Turns out we’ve got somebody on our books. Indecent exposure to schoolgirls. Lifting women’s knickers off their clothes lines. Nothing very terrible, nothing very recent,’ Carver added in a dissatisfied aside. ‘But the interesting thing about this particular nonce is that he’s Alison Carter’s uncle.’

  George felt his mouth fall open. ‘Her uncle?’ he managed after a moment.

  ‘Peter Crowther.’

  George swallowed hard. He hadn’t even known there was a Peter Crowther. ‘May I sit in on the interview, sir?’

  ‘Why else do you think I was phoning you? I’m in agony with this ankle. Besides, me limping around like Hopalong Cassidy with my leg in a pot is hardly going to put the fear of God into Crowther, is it? You get yourself in here right now.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Oh, and Bennett?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Bring me some fish and chips, will you? I can’t be doing with canteen food. Shocking indigestion, it gives me.’

  George hung up, shaking his head. He lit a cigarette, screwing up his eyes and turning to scan the room behind him. Clough was leaning negligently against a table, scrutinizing one of the OS maps pinned to the wall. Grundy hovered near the door, uncertain whether he should go or stay. ‘Clough, Grundy,’ George said through a mouthful of smoke. ‘Car, now. We’re off to Buxton.’

  The doors were barely slammed when George turned in his seat, glared at Grundy and said, ‘Peter Crowther.’

  ‘Peter Crowther, sir?’ Grundy was trying for innocence and failing, his edgy eyes giving him away.

  ‘Yes, Grundy. Alison’s uncle, the one with the record of sex offences. That Peter Crowther,’

  George said sarcastically, stabbing his foot at the accelerator and jerking them all backwards as he shot up the lane towards Longnor.

  ‘What about him, sir?’

  ‘How come the first I hear about Peter Crowther is from the DCI? How is it that, with all your local knowledge, you didn’t get round to mentioning Peter Crowther?’ George had abandoned his sarcasm, going for the silky gentleness of the sadistic teacher who lulls his unwary pupils into false security before cutting off at the knees. ‘I didn’t think it was relevant. I mean, he lives in Buxton, has done for the last twenty years or more. I never gave him a thought,’ Grundy said, his ears scarlet.

  ‘That’s why you’re still a PC, Grundy,’ Clough said, swivelling in his seat and giving the constable the hard insolent stare that had catapulted a disturbing number of prisoners into violence that would more than double the sentences for their original offences. ‘You don’t think.’

  ‘That’s true, Clough, but you don’t have to have a brain to get stuck on point duty in Derby city centre for a few years,’ George said, sweet reason in a shirt and tie. ‘Village bobbies, however, are supposed to be able to think for themselves. PC Grundy, unless you truly fancy a change of assignment, I suggest you use the miles between here and Buxton to tell us all you know about Peter Crowther.’

  Grundy rubbed his eyebrow with the knuckle of his index finger. ‘Peter Crowther is Ruth Hawkin’s brother,’ he said, like a man working out complicated mental arithmetic. ‘Diane’s the oldest, that’s Terry Lomas’s wife Diane. Then Peter, then Daniel, then Ruth. Peter must be a good ten years older than Ruth. That’d make him somewhere around forty-five. ‘I never really knew Peter, he was away from Scardale long before I even became village bobby in Longnor. But I’d heard talk about him. Apparently he’s not the full shilling. His brother Daniel used to keep an eye on him when he was still living in Scardale, but something happened—I don’t know what, nobody outside Scardale does—and they decided they didn’t want him in the dale any longer. So they had him shipped out to Buxton. He lives in a single men’s hostel up by the golf course at Waterswallows. And he works in that sheltered workshop up the back of the railway yard, the one that makes lampshades and wastepaper baskets. I knew he’d been done for being a Peeping Tom, but it was summat and nowt.’

  George sighed heavily. ‘You knew all this about Peter Crowther, and it never crossed your mind to mention it?’

  Grundy shifted his weight from one buttock to the other. ‘You’ll understand when you see him, sir.

  Peter Crowther’s frightened of his own shadow. I don’t think he’s capable of accosting anyone, never mind abducting them.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have had to abduct Alison, though, would he?’ Clough butted in, his sarcasm cutting as a whip, his blue eyes cold. ‘He was her uncle. She wouldn’t
be frightened of him. If he said, ‘Hey, our Alison, I’ve got a pair of roller-skating boots that’d fit you, d’you want to come and see them?’ she’d not have thought twice about going along with him. He might be a bit strange, her Uncle Peter, but it’s not like he was a stranger, is it, PC Grundy?’ He managed to make the rank sound like an insult. ‘He’s not got the nerve,’ Grundy said stubbornly. ‘Besides, when I said they didn’t want him in the dale, I meant it. As far as I know, Peter Crowther’s not been back to Scardale in nigh on twenty years. And Scardale won’t have been near him, neither. I doubt he’d even know Alison if he passed her in the street.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Clough muttered, his face as grim as eyes narrowed against the smoke from his cigarette.

  Janet Carter had begged and pleaded to be kept off school in the wake of Alison’s disappearance.

  She might as well have saved her breath. Back in 1963, kids weren’t supposed to have feelings like adults. Grown-ups fed them all sorts of tales to shield them from things, thinking to protect them.

  The worst crime to the adult mind was disrupting the routine, for nothing would serve as a better signal to the younger generation that something was seriously wrong. So the world could have been about to end back in the dale, but Janet and her cousins still had to be dropped off at the lane end and packed off to school like it was any other morning.

  But when she’d arrived at school the morning after Alison’s disappearance, it had been unexpectedly exciting. For once, Janet was the centre of attention. Everybody knew Alison had disappeared. The police were at the school, interviewing Alison’s classmates and her teachers. There was only one topic of playground conversation, and Janet had the inside track. She was, in her small way, a celebrity. It was enough to make her forget the terror that had kept her awake half the night, wondering where Alison was and what was happening to her.There was a sort of delicious fear in the air, the sense that something forbidden had taken place that none of the children could quite grasp the significance of. Even those of them who lived on farms. They knew what animals did, but somehow they never quite made the jump across the species barrier. Of course, everyone had heard about girls being ‘interfered with’, but none of them really knew what that meant, except that it was something to do with ‘down there’ and the sort of thing that happened if you let a boy ‘go too far’. Though none of them really had a clue how far too far was.

  So the atmosphere at Peak Girls’ High was highly charged when Alison Carter went missing.

  Although most of her classmates were as scared, anxious and almost as upset as Janet herself, there was a part of them that felt stirred up in a way that was pleasurable even though they knew they shouldn’t be feeling like that. With all these emotions churning around, both the Thursday and Friday had been exhausting school days. By the time the final bell went, all Janet could think about was getting home and letting her mother fuss over her with a cup of tea.

  She had few reserves left for the shock that awaited her on the school bus. The driver was bursting with the news that Alison’s uncle was at the police station, being questioned. Her reaction was instantaneous. It was as if she closed in on herself. She was sitting on the front seat, where she had always sat with Alison, as near to the driver as she could be. ‘Which uncle?’ Derek asked.

  The driver tried the usual sort of joke about everybody being related in Scardale, but he could see Janet wasn’t in the mood. So he simply said, ‘Peter Crowther.’

  Janet frowned. ‘It must be some other Crowther, not a Scardale one.

  Alison doesn’t have an Uncle Peter.’

  ‘That’s all you know,’ he said with a wink. ‘Peter Crowther’s Alison’s mother’s daft brother. The one they shipped out of Scardale.’ Janet looked at Derek, who shrugged his shoulders, as baffled and bemused as she was. They had never heard a word about a second Crowther brother. His name had never been mentioned. All the way back to the lane end, the bus driver kept on about Peter Crowther, how he lived in a hostel and worked in a sheltered workshop for nutters that the council didn’t think were daft enough to be locked up, how he supposedly had some dark secret in his past and now the police thought he’d done away with Alison. Janet focused on the back of his thick red neck and wanted him to die.

  But she wanted the truth even more. Her father was waiting at the lane end for the bus to drop the children off. He’d been there for ten minutes; nobody in Scardale was taking any more chances.

  The first thing Janet said when the bus door closed behind them was, ‘Dad, who’s Peter Crowther? And what did he do?’

  Ray Carter, being the kind of man he was, told her. Then she wished he hadn’t.

  Grundy had been right about one thing at least, George thought as he leaned against the wall of the interview room. Peter Crowther was afraid of his own shadow. And of everyone else’s. The first thing that had struck him when he’d walked into the stuffy room was the thin acrid smell of Crowther’s fear, an odour quite distinct from the cheesy unwashed reek of his narrow body. ‘A chain-smoking interview,’ Clough had muttered in an aside, his nose wrinkled fastidiously against Peter Crowther’s personal miasma.

  ‘What?’ George had mumbled in reply as they stood on the threshold, deliberately sizing up Crowther to lay an even heavier weight of apprehension on the man.

  ‘You have to chain-smoke or you throw up,’ Clough illuminated him.

  George nodded his understanding. ‘You kick off,’ he said, moving to stand against the wall and letting Clough drop into the chair facing Crowther. George jerked his head towards the door and the uniformed PC who had been on guard slipped out with a look of relief. ‘All right, Peter?’

  Clough said, leaning forward on his elbows. Peter Crowther seemed to fold in on himself even more. His head was the colour and shape of a wedge of Dairylea cheese, George decided. Dairylea cheese with a straggle of cress stems across the top. Odd that he should look so greasily pale while he smelled so grubby. He didn’t actually look dirty. His clean-shaven pointed chin was tucked in towards his chest, his cat’s eyes angled up towards Clough. The man could have served as the illustrated dictionary definition of a cringe. He said nothing in response to Clough’s opening, though his lips moved, forming silent words.

  ‘You’re going to talk to me sooner or later, Peter,’ Clough said confidently, dropping one hand to his pocket and taking out his cigarettes. Nonchalantly, he lit up and blew smoke at Peter Crowther.

  When the smoke reached him, Crowther’s nose twitched as he inhaled it greedily. ‘Might as well be sooner,’ Clough continued. ‘So tell us, what made you decide to go back to Scardale on Wednesday?’

  Crowther frowned. He looked genuinely puzzled. Whatever he felt guilty about, it didn’t seem to involve Scardale. ‘Peter never,’ he said, his rising intonation indicating doubt rather than the bluster of the truly guilty. ‘Peter lives in Buxton. Waterswallows Lodgings, number seventeen. Peter don’t live in Scardale no more.’

  ‘We know that, Peter. But you went back to Scardale on Wednesday night. There’s no point in denying it, we know you were there.’ Crowther shuddered. ‘Peter never.’ This time he was firm.

  ‘Peter can’t go back to Scardale. He’s not allowed. He lives in Buxton. Waterswallows Lodgings, number seventeen.’

  ‘Who says you’re not allowed?’

  Crowther’s eyes dropped. ‘Our Clan. He says if Peter sets foot in Scardale ever again, he’ll cut Peter’s hands off. So Peter don’t go there, see? Can Peter have a fag?’

  ‘In a minute,’ Clough said, negligently blowing more smoke towards Crowther. ‘What about Alison? When did you see Alison last?’

  Crowther looked up again, his troubled face confused. ‘Alison? Peter don’t know no Alison.

  There’s an Angela works beside him, she puts the fringes on lampshades. Is it Angela you mean? Peter likes Angela. She’s got a leather jacket. She got it off her brother. He works in the tannery at Whaley Bridge. Angela’s brother, that is
. Peter works with Angela. Peter makes lampshade frames.’

  ‘Alison. Your niece Alison. Your sister Ruth’s girl,’ Clough said firmly.

  At the sound of Ruth’s name, Crowther jerked. His knees came up towards his chest and he wrapped his arms tightly round them. ‘Peter never,’ he gasped. ‘Peter never!’

  George moved forward and leaned his fists on the table. ‘You didn’t know Ruth had a daughter?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Peter never,’ Crowther kept repeating like a talisman. George unobtrusively signalled to Clough to back off. The sergeant leaned back in his chair and directed his smoke towards the ceiling.

  George took his own cigarettes out, lit one and held it out to Crowther, who was shivering now as he continued to mutter, ‘Peter never. Peter never.’ It took a few seconds for Crowther to notice the offering. He looked suspiciously at the cigarette, then at George. One hand snaked out and grabbed it. He held the cigarette cupped inside his hand, the tip pinched between thumb and forefinger, as if he expected it to be hijacked. He inhaled in quick snatches, his eyes flickering and fluttering between George, Clough and the cigarette.

  ‘When did you last speak to anyone from Scardale, Peter?’ George asked kindly, slipping into the chair next to Clough. Crowther gave a knotted shrug. ‘Don’t know. Sometimes Peter sees family on the market on a Saturday. But family don’t speak to Peter. One time, in the summer, Peter was in the paper shop buying smokes and our Diane came in. She nodded, but she didn’t say owt. I think she wanted to, but she knew if she did our Clan would hurt Peter bad. Clan always makes Peter scared. That’s why Peter never goes back to Scardale.’

  ‘And you really didn’t know Ruth had a daughter?’ said Clough the sceptic.

  Crowther twitched, his face clenching round his cigarette in a tight spasm. ‘Peter never,’ he moaned. He leaned forward into his knees and began to rock. ‘Peter never.’

  George looked at Clough and shook his head. He stood up and walked towards the door. ‘We’ll get somebody to bring you a cup of tea, Peter.’ Clough followed him into the hallway. ‘He’s hiding something,’ George said positively.