A Place of Execution

by Val McDermid

  ‘The other thing everybody was worried about was that if it came out about the other kids, they’d all be taken into care because their parents hadn’t looked after them properly. They reckoned outsiders wouldn’t understand life in the dale, how the kids more or less ran wild as they pleased because it was such a safe place with no traffic and next to no strangers, even at the height of summer.

  ‘So they talked about it all that day, and eventually, somebody remembered reading a story in the paper about a missing girl. I don’t know whose idea it was, but they decided then that I should go missing and they’d arrange it so that it looked like he’d killed me. Because they knew he had a gun, and because of the photographs of me, they knew he’d hang if they could make it stick. And that way, it wouldn’t have to come out about the other kids, so they wouldn’t have the pain of going through it all for the police.’

  Alison sighed. ‘That was the end of my life as I’d known it. The plans were made quickly. It was mostly my mum and Kathy and Ma Lomas who worked it out, but they thought of everything. My Auntie Dorothy and Uncle Sam in Consett were roped in. Auntie Dorothy had been a nurse, so she knew how to take blood. She came over a few days before I disappeared and took a pint from me.

  They used that to mark the tree in the wood, and to stain one of Hawkin’s shirts. They had to delay the discovery of the shirt and my underclothes because they needed his semen. They knew they’d get it eventually because he always used a condom when he went with my mother.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘He didn’t want kids of his own. Anyway, my mother eventually got him to have sex with her. She had to plead with him that she needed it for comfort. So they used the sperm in the condom to stain my clothes. They didn’t know how much the scientists could tell from the blood and the semen, but they wanted to make sure they didn’t trip up on the details. ‘And of course, everybody had to be clear about their stories. They all had their roles to play, and they had to get it right. The little kids were kept in the dark, but Derek and Janet were in on it too. Kathy spent hours with them, making sure they knew how important it was not to let anything slip. Me, I wandered round in a daze most of the time. I kept taking Shep out for walks, trying to memorize everything I knew I was going to lose. I felt so guilty all the time. All this upheaval, everybody wound up like clock springs, and all I could think was that it was all my fault.’ She bit her lip and closed her eyes momentarily. ‘It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to understand that I wasn’t the one to blame. But at the time, I really, really hated myself.’ She hesitated briefly, her eyes glistening with tears again. She blinked hard, brusquely rubbed a hand across her eyes and continued.

  ‘While all this was going on in the dale, Dorothy and Sam arranged to move house from Consett to Sheffield the same week the disappearance was planned so the new neighbours wouldn’t realize I wasn’t really their Janis. It was pretty easy in 1963.’ Alison paused for a moment, her eyes looking inward as if searching for the next chapter in her tragic tale. ‘The glory days of full employment,’

  Tommy muttered. ‘That’s right. Sam was a skilled steel worker and it wasn’t hard for him to walk into a new job. And back then, houses went with jobs,’ Alison said.

  ‘The day it was all set for, Sam waited for me up by the Methodist Chapel in his Land Rover. He drove me to Sheffield, and I moved in with them. They put it about that I’d had TB and I had to stay indoors and not mix with folk until I was completely better again, so nobody would find out about the pregnancy. As time went on, Dorothy padded herself up so she’d look pregnant.’

  Alison closed her eyes and a spasm of pain crossed her face. ‘It was so hard,’ she said, looking up and meeting Catherine’s eyes. It was the writer who looked away first. ‘I lost everything. I lost my family, my friends, my future. I lost Scardale. Strange things were happening to my body, and I hated it. My mum couldn’t even come and visit until after the trial because nobody in the village had mentioned the existence of the Wainwrights to the police, and she didn’t want to have to explain where she was going. Dorothy and Sam were really good to me, but it never made up for what I’d lost. It was drummed into me that I had to go through with it for the sake of all the other children in Scardale; that we were doing it so Hawkin could never hurt another child the way he’d hurt me.’

  ‘It made a kind of sense, I suppose,’ Catherine said dully. Alison sipped more tea and said defiantly, ‘I’m not ashamed of what we did.’ Neither Tommy nor Catherine said anything.

  Alison pushed her hair back from her face again and continued her story. ‘Helen was born in my bedroom one afternoon in June, just a couple of weeks before that bastard Hawkin’s trial. Sam registered her as being his and Dorothy’s child, and they brought her up like that, thinking I was her big sister and Dorothy was her mum. A couple of years went by, then I got a job in an office.’ A wry smile appeared for the first time that morning. ‘A solicitor’s office, would you believe? You’d think I’d have had my fill of the law, wouldn’t you? Anyway, I went to night classes to catch up on the stuff I’d missed at school. I even did an Open University degree. I did some training in occupational psychology and eventually set myself up in business. And every step of the way felt like a spit in the eye to that bastard. But it was never enough, you know? ‘My real mum came and lived with us after Hawkin was hanged. I was glad of that. I really needed her. She didn’t want to go back to Scardale, so she set up the Scardale Trust to administer the estate. She kept this place, though. She knew I’d want to come back one day. We kept Helen in the dark about the Scardale connection. She thinks to this day that Ruth and her husband lived just outside Sheffield. Ruth told her that Roy had been cremated, so there was no grave for her to visit. Helen never questioned it.

  ‘When my mother died, the manor went to Dorothy on the understanding that it was meant for me and Helen, and when Dorothy died, it came to us. Helen thinks I’m mad, living in this backwater.

  But it’s my home, and it was lost to me for so long, I just want to enjoy it now.’ She stared into her tea. ‘So now you know.’

  Catherine frowned. She knew there must be so many questions she should ask, but she could think of none.

  ‘And every time you look at Helen, you must see him staring back at you,’ Tommy said.

  The muscles along Alison’s jaw bunched as she clenched her teeth. ‘When she was little, it wasn’t so obvious,’ she finally said. ‘By the time she’d really started to resemble him, I’d learned that I could use that to help me. That bastard destroyed my childhood, he deprived me of my family and friends. He would have killed me if he’d discovered I was pregnant, I know he would. He was the powerful one, I was the weak one. So I never want to forget the way I helped turn the tables. Let me tell you, taking your own life is a very powerful thing. And that’s what I did. But it’s a lot easier to lose control over your life than it is to win it. That’s why I wanted to make sure I never got complacent, never lost sight of my past. So I learned to be glad Helen was there as a constant reminder that we’d fought back against the man who tried to strip us of everything that made us who we were,’ she said passionately. After a long pause, she said, almost in a tone of wonder, ‘And you know, there’s nothing of him in her. She’s got all my mother’s strength and goodness. As if everything that made my mother special jumped a generation into her skin.’ Tommy cleared his throat, obviously moved by Alison’s story. ‘So the whole village was in on the conspiracy?’

  ‘All the adults,’ she confirmed. ‘Ma Lomas said everyone had to pretend they didn’t trust the police to begin with, and only let stuff trickle out gradually. You and George Bennett were a bonus, really.

  They couldn’t have predicted that they’d get a pair of cops who’d become so obsessed by the case that they wouldn’t give up. It meant the villagers really could hold back and know that they wouldn’t have to go chasing the police to get them to pick up the threads after things had gone quiet initially.’ Tommy shook his head, bemused by the terrible i
rony. ‘We were the victims of our own integrity.’ He gave a half-smile. ‘It’s not often you can say that about coppers. But if we’d been less determined to get a result, to see justice done, you’d never have got away with a conspiracy on this scale.’

  For a moment, nobody said anything. Alison got up and walked over to the window. She stared across the village green into the dale she’d set out from on a December night thirty-five years before and had obviously never stopped loving. Now she possessed it again, Catherine thought, but she’d paid a terrible price. Eventually, Alison dragged her eyes away from the view, straightened her shoulders and said, ‘So, what now?’

  ‘That’s a hell of a good question,’ Tommy said.

  56

  August 1998

  Catherine and Tommy bought another bottle of Bushmills on the way back to the cottage. Suitable equipment for a wake, she thought. Tonight they would bury once and for all the ghost of Alison Carter. Tomorrow they would each have a hangover, though that would be the least of their worries, Catherine suspected. But tonight, she wanted to be insensible by the time her head hit the pillow. Anything to escape that parade of horror and degradation that Philip Hawkin had bequeathed to the world.

  When she closed the door behind them, Catherine spoke for the first time since they’d left Alison Carter to her memories. ‘Well, that’s it,’ she said. ‘We got the truth.’ She crossed to the sideboard and poured them both stiff whiskeys.

  Tommy accepted his glass in silence. He was staring at the wall of photographs, facing the bitter knowledge that Ma Lomas and her clan had managed to fool the world long enough to send Philip Hawkin down the terrible road that led to judicial murder. It gave him no satisfaction to realize that his own gut instinct had been right about Hawkin. The man hadn’t been a killer, after all.

  Faced with the photographs Alison had devastated them with, Catherine could not resist the conclusion that the villagers of Scardale had had right on their side when they turned their sleepy backwater into a place of execution. They had known that nothing but death would stop Hawkin and save the other children he would lure into his grasp. Even sending their own children away would not have prevented him from continuing. He would have found other children to destroy; he had both the power and the money to do what he would with witnesses who would not be believed even if they could bring themselves to speak.

  ‘It never occurred to me that there would be others,’ Catherine said bleakly.

  ‘No.’ Tommy turned away from the accusing photographs and slumped into a chair.

  ‘I can’t find it in me to blame them for what they did,’ Catherine said.

  ‘In their place, I wouldn’t have had second thoughts about joining in,’ Tommy acknowledged.

  ‘The terrible irony is that compared to what Alison’s gone through, Philip Hawkin’s suffering was blessedly brief. She’s lived with it every day of her life since then. She lost so much, and always at the back of her mind there must have been the fear that one day she was going to open the door and find somebody like me on the other side.’ Catherine picked up the whiskey bottle and put it on the table between them. They sat in stunned silence, like the survivors of a terrible accident who can’t quite take in their lucky escape. Both remained locked in their thoughts for the time it took them to smoke a handful of cigarettes apiece. ‘George was right,’ Catherine finally said. ‘I can’t go ahead with the book. Sure, I’d get all the glory for revealing that such a famous case was built on lies and deceit. But I can’t do that to George and Anne. It’s not just the shame it would bring to George, but the pain it would give him to watch Helen and Paul disintegrate. And all the surviving Scardale villagers would face prosecution for conspiracy, not just Alison.’ Like a Greek tragedy, she thought, the reverberations of what had happened in Scardale thirty-five years before would shake apart other lives far distant from that afternoon, innocent lives who deserved protection from a past that was no fault of theirs.

  Tommy drained his glass and refilled it. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anybody would argue with you.’

  ‘You can go and tell George in the morning,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Don’t you want to tell him yourself?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve got enough to do, trying to get us out of the book contract without explaining the real reason. No, Tommy, you tell him. It’s only right. If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t know if I’d ever have worked out that Helen was Alison’s daughter by Hawkin. And then I wouldn’t have had the leverage to get her to talk. Or any reason to keep silence now. So you deserve the credit.’

  He snorted. ‘Credit? For taking the lid off this can of worms? I’ll pass, if it’s all the same to you. But I’ll be happy to tell George that nobody’s going to blow Paul and Helen’s lives to bits. I know how much it will mean to him. I’ll spare him the details, though.’ Catherine reached for the bottle. ‘That’d be a good idea,’ she said, pouring another inch of whiskey into her tumbler. ‘And then I suggest we all do our best to forget the last few days ever happened.’

  57

  October 1998

  George Bennett stared through the windscreen. It was late October, and now the leaves were off the trees, the field gateway he had pulled into gave a clear view down the dale to the village of Scardale. The familiar grey cottages looked like an organic part of the landscape from this distance, reminding him how the peculiarities of topography had shaped the social world of the village he’d first entered thirty-five years before. He gazed across the fields to Scardale Manor and thought about the woman who was about to become his son’s official sister-in-law. Some might think she—and the others who had taken part deserved to be punished for the conspiracy that had hanged a man who, whatever his other crimes, had been innocent of murder. But George didn’t care about retribution. He cared about the future more than the past. There was nothing like staring his own death in the face to make a man value his life. That was why he was making this trip today. Only three days before, the doctor had agreed that he could start to drive again, provided he didn’t undertake any long journeys. Cromford to Scardale wasn’t a long journey in terms of distance, he had reasoned. The distance here was all emotional and psychological, a span of thirty-five years and a compass of passions too complex to be calculated. Four days ahead lay the wedding that could finally resolve this dreadful history, and George was determined to do all he could to make sure the ghosts were laid to rest at last. And so he had phoned the woman he would never be able to call by her real name after today and asked for a meeting.

  Thirty-five years ago, he had first travelled this narrow road. Even then, his feelings had been mixed. He remembered with bitter irony his excitement at the possibility of taking charge of his first big case, a guilty excitement mixed with his concern both for the missing girl and her family.

  Not even in his wildest imaginings could he have foreseen how the disappearance of Alison Carter would come back to threaten not only his own peace of mind, but also the future happiness of his beloved son.

  One of the deeper ironies of the events of the last year had been the replacement of one guilt with another. He had always carried the conviction that he had somehow failed Ruth Carter until the process of working through the case with Catherine had finally allowed him to understand that he had done the best he could have done in the circumstances. But now he knew what had truly been happening in Scardale over that bitter winter, he was oppressed by a fresh burden. Surely there were points in the investigation at which he could have realized something was going on that went far beyond the surface he was being shown? Had he been so blinded by his arrogance and his obsession with getting a conviction that he’d missed pointers that a more experienced detective would have picked up on? And if he had uncovered the truth, would it have given Alison Carter a better life than she’d otherwise endured? Tommy Clough had assured him that wasn’t the case, that he’d been taken in every bit as much as George himself. But that was
no real consolation.

  Tommy, he felt sure, would have said that anyway as reassurance to a sick man.

  Whatever his past failings, he had to find a way to reconcile himself to them. Whether his damaged heart would give him months or years to live, he didn’t want that time to be contaminated with self-recrimination beyond bearing. He needed to forgive himself, and perhaps the first step on that journey was for him and Alison Carter to forgive each other for pains real and imagined.

  With a deep sigh, George put his car in gear and slowly edged back on to the Scardale road. No matter what the future might hold, it was time to take the first step on the road to burying the past, this time for ever.

  EOF

  Table of Contents

  Val McDermid - A Place of Execution (1999)

  Introduction

  Prologue