A Place of Execution

by Val McDermid

  He was, George thought, a remarkable lieutenant.

  32

  The Trial 3

  For the rest of the week, George sat at the back of the court, always contriving to arrive a few minutes after each session began and slipping away as soon as the court rose. He knew he was being ridiculous, but he couldn’t escape the idea that everyone was looking at him because they were wondering whether he was corrupt, or, even worse, because they’d already decided he was.

  He hated the thought of being taken for one of those coppers who made up their minds to have somebody for a crime, regardless of the evidence. But he couldn’t stay away. The third day of the trial saw the Scardale witnesses appear. Charlie Lomas managed to repeat his unflustered performance at the committal, impressing the jury with his open manner and his obvious unhappiness about the disappearance of his cousin.

  Next was Ma Lomas, dressed for the occasion in a rusty black coat with a spray of white heather pinned to the collar. She admitted her name was Hester Euphemia Lomas. It was clear she held the court in neither awe nor deference, responding to the two QCs precisely as she would have done to George in the comfort of her own living room. She insisted on a chair and a glass of water, then proceeded to ignore both. Stanley treated her with exaggerated courtesy, which she returned with utter indifference. ‘And you are absolutely certain that it was Mr Hawkin you saw crossing the field?’ Stanley asked.

  ‘I only need glasses for reading,’ the old woman said. ‘I can still tell a kestrel from a sparrowhawk at a hundred yards.’

  ‘How can you be sure it was the Wednesday?’

  She looked at him with exasperation. ‘Because that’s the day Alison went missing. When something like that happens, everything else that happened that day sticks in your memory.’

  Stanley obviously found nothing to argue with in that. He took her on through her knowledge of the lead mine from the book in the study of Scardale Manor. ‘Did Squire Castleton often talk to you about local history?’ he eventually asked.

  ‘Oh aye,’ she said, off hand. ‘I’d known him since he was a little lad. He never lorded it over his tenants, not the old squire. We’d often sit and talk, him and me. We always said, when we went, half the dale’s history would go with us. He was always on at me to write it all down, but I couldn’t be bothered with owt like that.’

  ‘But that’s how you knew where to find the book?’

  ‘That’s right. Many’s the time we’ve sat and looked at that book, the old squire and me. I was able to put my hand on it right away.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention the old lead mine to the police earlier?’ Stanley asked, apparently casually.

  She scratched her temple with a finger lumpy with arthritis. ‘I don’t rightly know. I forget sometimes that not everybody knows the dale like I do. I’ve lain awake often since, wondering if it would have made any difference to poor Alison if I’d have mentioned the lead mine to Inspector Bennett the night she went missing.’ She sighed. ‘It’s a terrible burden to me.’

  ‘I have no more questions for you, Mrs Lomas, but my colleague Mr Highsmith will need to ask you some things. So if you would wait there?’ Stanley gave the matriarch a slight bow before sitting down. This time, Highsmith waited for a few moments before he rose. ‘Mrs Lomas,’ he began. ‘It must be hard for you to see the nephew of your old friend in the dock here today.’

  ‘I never thought I’d be glad Squire Castleton were dead,’ she said in a low voice. ‘This would have broke his heart. He loved Alison like she was his own granddaughter.’

  ‘Indeed. If I might trouble you with a few questions, I’d be very grateful.’

  She looked up and George, sitting at the back of the court, caught the wicked gleam in her eye. He winced. ‘Questions are no trouble to me,’ she snapped. ‘Tell truth and shame the devil. I’ve nothing to fear from your questions, so ask away.’

  Highsmith looked momentarily taken aback. Her docile responses to Stanley’s questions had not prepared him for Ma Lomas in combative mood. ‘How can you be certain it was Mr Hawkin you saw cross the field that afternoon?’

  ‘How can I be certain? Because I saw him. Because I know him. The way he looks, the way he walks, the clothes he wears. There’s nobody in Scardale you could confuse with him,’ she said, her voice outraged. ‘I might be old but I’m not daft.’

  A snigger stuttered round the press benches and the Scardale contingent allowed themselves tight smiles. Ma would show this London lawyer what was what.

  ‘That much is obvious, ma’am,’ Highsmith squeezed out.

  ‘You don’t have to ‘ma’am’ me, lad. Ma’ll do.’

  Highsmith blinked hard. The point of his pencil snapped against the pad in his hand. ‘This book in the study at the manor. You say you knew exactly where to look for it?’

  ‘Well remembered, lad,’ Ma said grimly.

  ‘So it was where it should have been?’

  ‘Where else would it have been? Of course it was where it should have been.’

  Highsmith pounced. ‘No one had moved it?’

  ‘I can’t say that, can I? How can I know that? It wouldn’t be hard to put it back in the right place—them shelves are full. When you take a book out, it leaves a gap. So you put it back in the same place. Automatic,’ she said scornfully.

  Highsmith smiled. ‘But there was no sign that anyone had done that.

  Thank, you, Mrs Lomas.’

  The judge leaned forward. ‘You’re free to go now, Mrs Lomas.’ She turned to Hawkin and smiled pure malicious triumph. George was relieved she had her back to the jury. ‘Aye, I know,’ she said.

  ‘More than he can say, isn’t it?’ She paraded across the room like the royalty she was in her village and settled in a specially vacated chair at the heart of her family.

  The following day was taken up with an assortment of specialists who could testify on particular matters of fact. Hawkin’s tailor had travelled up from London to confirm that the stained shirt hidden in the darkroom was one of a batch the accused had had made to measure less than a year before. An assistant from Boots the Chemist revealed he had sold Philip Hawkin two rolls of elastoplast which corresponded to both the tape found on the muzzle of Alison’s dog and the short section fixing the safe key to the back of the drawer in the study.

  A fingerprint officer revealed that Philip Hawkin’s prints were on the photographs and the negatives found in the safe. However, there were no prints on the Webley, and the cover of the antiquarian book had been impossible to retrieve prints from.

  The final witness of the day was the firearms expert. He confirmed that one of the bullets found in the cave was clearly identifiable as a .38 fired from the gun that Ruth Carter had found hidden in her husband’s darkroom.

  Through all of this testimony, Highsmith asked little, except to attempt to demonstrate that there were alternative explanations to all the statements made by the prosecution. Anyone, he argued, could have obtained a shirt belonging to Hawkin. They could even have stolen one from the manor washing line. Hawkin might not have been buying the elastoplast on his own account, but may have been running an errand for someone else. Of course his prints were on the pictures and the negatives—the police had thrown them at him across an interview room table before they were encased in plastic, before his solicitor had ever arrived at the police station. And the only person who had made any connection between the gun and Hawkin was, of course, his wife, who was so desperate to find an explanation for her daughter’s disappearance that she was even prepared to turn on her husband.

  The jury sat impassively, offering no clue as to their opinion of his performance. At the end of the third day, the court adjourned till morning.

  On Friday morning, George’s mind was jolted out of his own concerns.

  There, in the Daily Express, was a story that harrowed him.

  Tracker dogs join hunt for lost boy Eight policemen with two tracker dogs searched railway sidings, parks and derelict buildi
ngs today for short-sighted schoolboy Keith Bennett, missing from home for nearly three days.

  Said a senior police officer: If we do not find him today, the search will be intensified. We just don’t know what has happened to him.

  We do not suspect foul play yet, but we can find no reason for him to be missing.’

  Twelve-year-old Keith of Eston Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, disappeared on Tuesday night on his way to visit his grandmother.

  His home is in an area of Manchester where several murders have occurred and missing persons have gone untraced.

  Home-loving Left behind at home are the thick-lensed spectacles with one lens broken—without which he has difficulty in seeing. Keith’s mother, Mrs Winifred Johnson, aged 30, who has five other children and is expecting her seventh in two weeks, wept today as she talked of her missing son.

  She said: ‘He has never done anything like this before. He’s a home-loving lad. He can hardly see without his spectacles.’

  Said his grandmother, Mrs Gertrude Bennett, aged 63, of Morion Street, Longsight, Manchester: ‘We can not eat, sleep or do anything for worrying about him.’

  The police search party is made up of a sergeant, five constables and two dog handlers.

  They are searching an area within a mile of Keith’s home.

  George stared at the paper. The thought of another mother going through what Ruth Carter had experienced was agonizing for him. But in a corner of his mind, he couldn’t help thinking that if it had to happen, it could not have come at a more opportune moment. For any member of the jury reading the paper, Winifred Johnson’s anguished plight could only reinforce Ruth Carter’s agony and diminish any inclination to believe Hawkin.

  A sudden wave of shame washed over him. How could he be so callous? How could he even think about exploiting the disappearance of another child? Disgusted with himself, George crumpled the paper and tossed it into the bin.

  That afternoon, as he made his way up the stairs towards the courtroom, he saw a familiar figure waiting by the door. Spotless in his dress uniform, Superintendent Martin stood fiddling with his soft black leather gloves.

  As George approached, he looked up. ‘Inspector,’ he greeted him, his face inscrutable. ‘A word, please.’

  George followed him down a side corridor to a small room that smelled of perspiration and cigarettes. He closed the door behind them and waited.

  Martin lit one of his untipped cigarettes and said abruptly, ‘I want you back in the office next week.’

  ‘But, sir—’ George protested.

  Martin held up a hand. ‘I know, I know. The prosecution should finish today and then it’ll be the defence case next week. And that’s precisely why I want you back in Buxton.’

  George’s head came up and he glared at his station commander. ‘This is my case, sir.’

  ‘I know. But you know as well as I do what defence Highsmith’s going to run. He’s got no choice.

  And I will not have one of my officers sit in a courtroom and hear his character traduced by some slick lawyer who doesn’t care what damage he does to a decent man.’ The telltale scarlet tide was rising up Martin’s neck. He began to pace to and fro. ‘With respect, sir, I can take anything Highsmith throws at me.’ Martin stopped pacing and eyed George. ‘You think so, do you? Well, even if you can, I’m not having you at the mercy of the press. If you’re not willing to take cover for your own sake, you ought to do it for that wife of yours. It’ll be bad enough if she has to read reports that accuse you of all sorts of mischief without her being treated to photographs of you skulking in and out of cars as if you were the one on trial.’ George ran a hand through his hair. ‘I’m due some leave.’

  ‘And I’m refusing you permission to take it,’ Martin snapped. ‘You will stay away from.Derby until this trial is over. And that is an order.’

  George turned away and lit a cigarette. It was hard not to see his banishment as the gods’ retribution for his response to Keith Bennett’s disappearance.

  ‘At least let me be here for the verdict,’ he said indistinctly. Professor John Patrick Hammond recited the qualifications that made him one of the leading forensic experts in the north of England.

  His was a name that ranked alongside that of Bernard Spilsbury, Sydney Smith and Keith Simpson in the public imagination as one of that handful of men who could apply their scientific knowledge to a scatter of traces and draw from them incontrovertible evidence of guilt. It had been Pritchard from the DPP who had insisted on bringing a high-profile expert into the case. ‘When we’ve got so little to go on, we should defend it with the big guns,’ he’d said, and Superintendent Martin had agreed. Hammond was a small, precise man whose head was too big for his body. He compensated for his faintly ridiculous appearance with a solemn and portentous manner. Juries loved him because he could translate scientific jargon into layman’s language without ever making them feel talked down to. Stanley had the good sense to keep his questions to a minimum, allowing Hammond to explain for himself. Hammond made sure the jurors fully appreciated the key points.

  The blood on the tree in the copse, on the torn underwear in the cave, and on the stained shirt was all from a female with blood group O, which was also Alison’s blood group. The amount of blood on the shirt was consistent with a serious wound. The semen on the shirt had been deposited by a secretor with blood group A. The accused was a secretor with blood group A.

  He also explained that forensic examination had revealed scorch marks on the shirt that were entirely consistent with a gun having been fired close to the material. Hammond demonstrated by holding the shirt against himself. George noticed Ruth Carter’s head fall into her hands. Kathy Lomas put an arm around her and pulled her close. ‘As you will see, Your Lordship,’ Hammond explained, ‘the gunshot residue is present on the right cuff and also on the right front of the shirt. If someone wearing this shirt were to have held a gun at fairly close quarters, this is exactly what we’d expect to find. There is no other explanation consistent with this particular arrangement of scorching and staining.’

  Highsmith rose for the cross-examination feeling faintly frustrated. This case had not been one of the most successful performances of his life so far. There was so little to get a grip of, and what there was seemed so flimsy. Here at last was something concrete to attack. ‘Professor Hammond, can you tell us what proportion of the population have blood group A?’

  ‘Approximately forty-two per cent.’

  ‘And what percentage of the population are secretors whose blood group is present in their other bodily fluids?’

  ‘Approximately eighty per cent.’

  ‘Forgive me, mathematics has never been my strong point. What percentage of the population are group A secretors?’

  Hammond’s eyebrows flicked up and down. ‘About thirty-three per cent.’

  ‘So all we can say is that these semen stains could have been left by a third of the male population of this country?’

  ‘That is correct, yes.’

  ‘So rather than pointing specifically to my client, the best you can say is that these tests do not rule him out.’ It was not a question and Hammond did not respond. ‘Moving on to this stained shirt. Is there anything that would indicate that the accused was the person wearing this shirt when a shot was fired next to it?’

  ‘In forensic terms, no.’ Hammond sounded reluctant, as he always did when forced to admit his science could not answer every question. ‘So, anyone could have been wearing the shirt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the person wearing the shirt need not have been the person who deposited the semen on the other pieces of clothing?’ Hammond paused for a moment. ‘I consider it rather unlikely, but I suppose it is possible.’

  ‘The amount of blood on the other clothing was significantly less. Would that be consistent with the sort of bleeding that can occur when the hymen is breached?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say. Some women lose a consider
able amount of blood when they lose their virginity. Others none at all. But if the bloodstains on the shirt came from that source, then this woman was haemorrhaging on a potentially fatal scale.’

  ‘And yet there was no blood at the supposed scene of the crime. Surely if someone had been fatally shot in that cavern, there would have been blood everywhere? Pooled on the floor, splashed on the walls, spattered on the roof? How is it possible that there was no blood except what stained the various garments?’

  ‘Are you asking me to speculate?’ Hammond asked crisply. ‘I’m asking if, in your experience, it would be possible for someone to be fatally shot in that cavern without the scene exhibiting bloodstains,’ Highsmith said, his words enunciated slowly and clearly. Hammond frowned and thought for a moment, casting his eyes upwards in the act of memory. At last, he said, ‘Yes. It would be possible.’ Highsmith frowned. But before he could speak, Hammond continued.

  ‘If, say, the girl was held close and the gun was jammed under her ribs. A bullet travelling with an upward trajectory would destroy the heart, but it might well lodge behind the shoulder blade. If there was no exit wound, there would be no forward spatter of blood. And if she was held close, the back spatter would be absorbed in the larger bloodstain on the shirt.’