A Place of Execution (1999)

by Val McDermid

  She still hadn’t been functional when he’d arrived, George thought. Ruth had been sitting at the table, hands clasped over her head, as if she wanted to hear nothing and see nothing. Kathy had been sitting beside her, one arm round her shoulders, the other stroking her hair. There had been no sign of Ruth’s husband. When George had asked, Kathy had said bitterly that Philip had gone drip-white when Charlie had brought the news, then he’d walked out of the house. ‘He’ll not have gone far,’ she said. ‘Chances are he’ll be shut in that darkroom of his. It’s where he always goes when anything’s going on he doesn’t want to be part of.’ George decided Ruth Hawkin had more right to hear the news as quickly as possible than her husband had to share the moment with her. He blurted out his tidings in a single sentence. ‘It’s a man, the body that we’ve found.’

  Ruth’s head jerked back. The look of dazzling joy on her face would have outshone the Christmas lights in Regent Street. ‘It’s not her?’ Kathy exclaimed.

  ‘It’s not Alison,’ George confirmed. He drew a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid it’s not all good news. We have tentatively identified the body. It’ll have to be confirmed by a member of the family, but we believe the dead man is Peter Crowther.’

  There was a long, stunned silence. Ruth simply stared at him, as if she had taken in all she could with the news that the body in the field was not her daughter. Kathy looked aghast. Then she jumped to her feet, disgust on her face. She paced restlessly for a few moments, then had come to rest against the cooker, where she still stood, glowering. She knew who was to blame all right, George thought.

  ‘Now, all I can think is, thank God it’s not my Alison,’ Ruth continued. ‘Isn’t that terrible? Peter was a human being too, but I doubt there’ll be anyone to mourn him.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have to be mourning anybody,’ Kathy said, her voice stinging George like a switch of nettles. ‘When Ma Lomas started on with her doom and gloom about how we’d all suffer for bringing strangers into the dale, I thought she were gilding the lily as usual. But there was some truth in what she said. You lot haven’t managed to find Alison, and now one of ours is dead.’

  ‘Perhaps if you’d treated him more like one of yours when he was alive, he still would be,’ a voice from behind said. George turned to see Philip Hawkin. He had no idea how long Hawkin had been standing in the half-open doorway. But he’d clearly heard most of the exchange. ‘They hounded him from the village and then the Gestapo hounded him back,’ he continued. ‘God, the ignorance of people. He was clearly harmless enough. He’d never been violent; never, as far as I know, so much as laid a hand on any female. I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor wretch.’

  ‘You must be relieved it wasn’t Alison’s body,’ Clough said, ignoring Hawkin’s spleen.

  ‘Of course. Who wouldn’t be? I’m bound to say, though, that I’m 142 disappointed in you and your men, Inspector. Two and a half days, and no news of Alison. You can see how distressed my wife is. Your failure is a torment to her. Can’t you do something more? Apply your imagination? Search more thoroughly? What about this clairvoyant the newspaper’s consulted? Couldn’t you pay attention to what she’s come up with?’ He leaned on his fists on the table, two spots of colour in his pale cheeks. ‘We’re under a terrible strain, Inspector. We don’t expect miracles, we just want you to do your job and find out what’s happened to our little girl.’

  George tried to keep his frustration behind the mask of his official face. ‘We’re already doing our best, sir. There are more search parties going out now. We’ve got hundreds of volunteers from Buxton, Stoke, Sheffield and Ashbourne, as well as local people. If she’s out there to be found, we will find her, I promise you.’

  ‘I know you will,’ Ruth said softly. ‘Phil knows you’re doing your best.

  It’s just…the not knowing. It’s a slow torture.’ George dipped his head in acknowledgement.

  ‘We’ll keep you informed of any developments.’

  Outside, the raw winter air knifed into his lungs as he strode across the green, gulping deep breaths.

  Almost trotting to keep up, Tommy Clough said, ‘There’s something about Philip Hawkin that doesn’t ring right.’

  ‘His responses are all off-key. Like when you’re speaking a foreign language you’ve learned at evening classes. You might get all the grammar and the pronunciation right, but you never pass for a native speaker because they don’t ever have to think about it.’ George threw himself into the passenger seat of the car. ‘But just because he doesn’t fit in doesn’t make him a kidnapper or a killer.’

  ‘All the same…’ Clough started the engine.

  ‘All the same, we’d better go and face the music at the press conference. The superintendent’s going to want to nail somebody’s hide to the wall over this, and as sure as God made little green apples, you can bet Carver will have got his retaliation in first.’ George leaned back and lit a cigarette. He closed his eyes and wondered why he’d chosen the police. He could have taken his law degree to some comfortable firm of solicitors in Derby and become an articled clerk. By now, he might have been on the road to becoming a partner specializing in something calm like conveyancing or probate. Mostly, the idea repelled him. That morning, it was curiously appealing.

  He opened his eyes on long chains of men moving across the dale closer than arm’s-length to each other. ‘Nothing to find there except what the earlier teams dropped,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘They’ll be using the least fit ones here in the dale,’ dough said knowledgeably. ‘They’ll be keeping the top-class lads for the crags and the dales that are off the beaten track. Terrain like this, there’s always going to be places we’ve missed just because we don’t know it like the back of our hands.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll find anything?’

  Clough screwed his face up. ‘Depends what there is to find. Do I think they’ll find a body? No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘If we’ve not found the body by now, it’s well hidden. That means it’s been put where it is by somebody that knows their ground far better than anybody who’s out there searching. So no, I don’t think we’ll find a body. I think we’ve already found all that we’re going to find without something more to go on.’

  George shook his head. ‘I can’t think like that, Tommy. That’s tantamount to saying that not only will we not find Alison, we won’t find the person who took her and probably killed her.’

  ‘I know it’s hard, sir, but that’s what our opposite numbers in Cheshire and Manchester have had to deal with. I know you don’t want to be reminded of what Don Smart’s been writing, but we might have lessons to learn from their experience, even if it’s only in how to cope with getting absolutely nowhere.’ Clough stopped the car abruptly. There was nowhere to park on the main road as far as the eye could see. Cars, vans and Land Rovers jammed the verges. Where there were gaps, motorbikes and scooters were slotted in. ‘Oh, flaming Nora. What am I supposed to do now?’

  There was only one sensible solution. George stood by the Methodist Chapel and watched Clough expertly swing the big car round and head back down the lane to Scardale. He straightened his shoulders, took a final drag of his cigarette and flicked it into the road. He had no relish for what awaited him inside the church hall, but there was no point in putting it off.

  18

  Saturday, 14th December 1963. 10.24AM

  The purgatory of the press conference was over sooner than George had feared, thanks to the brisk military approach of Superintendent Martin. He dealt with Peter Crowther’s death with a laconic expression of regret.

  When one of the reporters had challenged him about unofficial leaks to the Courant, Martin had turned his artillery on the man.’The Courant’s reckless speculation was of its own making,’ he said in a parade-ground voice that was clearly unaccustomed to dissent. ‘Had they checked the rumour they had picked up, they would have been told exactly what every other reporter was told—that a man had b
een brought to the police station for questioning for his own comfort and had been released without a stain on his character. I will not have my officers turned into scapegoats for the irresponsibility of the press. Now, we have a missing girl to find. I’m taking questions relevant to that inquiry.’ There were a few routine questions, then inevitably Don Smart’s foxy features twitched into view as he raised his head from his notebook. ‘I don’t know if you’ve seen the story in this morning’s News7.’

  Martin’s bark of laughter was as harsh as his words. ‘Until I met you, sir, the only harlots I had met in peacetime had all been women. Though maybe I’m not so wide of the mark in spite of the whiskers, because all your work is good for, sir, is for filling the columns of the most sensationalist women’s magazine. I will not dignify your feeble attempts at stirring up contention with a comment. Except to say that it is rubbish, sir, arrant rubbish. I was tempted to ban you from these press conferences altogether but I have been reluctantly persuaded by my colleagues that to do so would give you the very notoriety you crave. So you may stay, but do not forget that the purpose of our gathering here is to find a young, vulnerable girl missing from home, not to sell more copies of your vile little rag.’

  By the end of his tirade, Martin’s neck was the scarlet of a rooster’s crest. Don Smart merely shrugged and dropped his eyes to his notebook again. ‘I’ll take that as a ‘no comment’, then,’ he said softly. Martin had brought the conference to a swift end shortly afterwards. As the reporters filed out, muttering among themselves and comparing notes, George braced himself. Now the superintendent had warmed up against Smart, he expected to be shredded and left for dead. Martin fingered the salt-and-pepper bristles of his moustache and stared at George. Without taking his eyes off him, he took his Capstans from his pocket and lit one. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Your version of yesterday’s events.’

  George briefly outlined his personal involvement with Crowther. ‘So I instructed Sergeant Clough to tell the duty officer in Buxton that Crowther should be released. We agreed that the duty officer should also be asked to spread the word both to the press and locally through the beat officers that there was no suspicion attaching to Crowther.’

  ‘You had not seen the story in the Couranff Martin demanded. ‘No, sir. We’d been out in Scardale all day. The paper doesn’t reach there till Saturday and we’d had no opportunity to see the early edition.’

  ‘And the duty officer said nothing to Sergeant Clough about the story?’

  ‘He can’t have done. If he had, Clough would have come back to me before authorizing the man’s release.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘You’d have to check with Clough, sir, but based on my knowledge of him, he’d have regarded any such story as a change in circumstances that might affect the decision I’d taken.’ George registered the frown on Martin’s face and prepared himself for the onslaught. It never came. Instead, Martin simply nodded. ‘I had a feeling it must have been a breakdown in communication. So. Two black marks against us. One, that one of our officers told the press something they should never have known. Two, that the duty officer failed to give officers in the field information relevant to their decision-making. We should be thankful that Mr Crowther’s family is too preoccupied with their other loss to give much thought to our role in his death. What are your plans for today?’

  George gestured with his thumb at a short stack of cardboard boxes by one of the trestle tables. ‘I arranged for the witness statements from 146 Buxton to be brought over here so I can go through them and still be on the spot if the searches produce anything.’

  ‘They’ll be finished searching by four, won’t they?’

  ‘Thereabouts,’ George said, puzzled by the question.

  ‘If they turn up nothing fresh, I expect you to be home by five.’

  Sir?’

  ‘I’m aware of the way you and Clough have been working this case, and I see no reason why you should kill yourselves. You’re both off duty tonight, and that’s an order. You have an important day tomorrow, I want you rested for it.’

  ‘Tomorrow, sir?’

  Martin tutted impatiently. ‘Has no one told you? My God, we need to do something about the communications in this division. Tomorrow, Bennett, we have the pleasure of entertaining two officers from other forces—one from Manchester and one from Cheshire. As you were doubtless aware even before Mr Smart of the Daily News drew our attention to the matter, both forces have had recent cases of puzzling disappearances of young people. They are interested in meeting to discuss whether there appear to be any significant connections between their cases and ours.’

  George’s heart sank. Wasting his time being diplomatic with other forces wasn’t going to help him to find what had happened to Alison Carter. Manchester City Police had had over five months to try and find Pauline Reade and Cheshire had been searching for John Kilbride for a good three weeks without any result. The detectives on those cases were simply clutching at straws. They were more concerned with appearing to be pursuing some sort of action on their own dead-ended cases than they were with helping his inquiry. If he’d been a betting man, he’d have put money on the meeting already being the subject of a press release from the other two forces. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if DCI Carver handled the meeting?’ he asked desperately.

  Martin eyed his cigarette with a look of distaste. ‘Your knowledge of the details of the case is altogether superior,’ he said shortly. He turned away and started walking towards the door. ‘Eleven o’clock, at divisional HQ,’ he said, without turning back or raising his voice.

  George stood staring at the door for long moments after Martin’s straight-backed exit. He felt a mixture of anger and despair. Already other people were writing off Alison’s disappearance as insoluble. Whether it could be connected to the other cases or not, it was clear that his superiors no longer expected him to find her at all, never mind to find her alive.

  Clenching his jaw, he yanked a chair towards the file boxes and began the task of reading the remaining witness statements. It was probably pointless, he knew. But there was a slim chance it might not be. And slim chances felt like the only ones he had left.

  19

  Sunday, 15th December 1963. 10.30AM

  For once, one of the papers had got it right. Every copy of the Sunday Standard contained a 12’ by 19’ poster. Extra copies had been distributed to every newsagent in the country, and every one that George had passed on his way to the police station was displaying it prominently. Under the thick black headline: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? the paper had reproduced one of Philip Hawkin’s excellent portraits of Alison. The text beneath read: Alison Carter has been missing from her home in Scardale village, Derbyshire, since half past four on Wednesday 13th December.

  Description: 13 years old, 5ft, slim build, blonde hair, blue eyes, pale complexion, with slanting scar running across right eyebrow; wearing navy duffel coat over school uniform of black blazer, maroon cardigan, maroon skirt, white blouse, black and maroon tie, black woollen tights and black sheepskin boots.

  Any information to Derbyshire County Police office at Buxton or any police officer.

  That was how journalists could help the police, George thought. He hoped Don Smart had choked over his breakfast when the poster had slid out of his copy of the Sunday Standard. He also wondered how many homes in the area would be displaying the poster by nightfall. He reckoned there would be more pictures of Alison Carter visible in High Peak windows than there were Christmas trees.

  It was a good start to the day, he thought cheerfully. It had already started well. Since he hadn’t had to rush out of the door before first light, he and Anne had had the chance to wake naturally and lie chatting comfortably. He’d brought a pot of tea upstairs and they’d had a rare companionable hour that had set the seal on the evening they’d spent together. If he’d been asked in advance, George would have vehemently denied that he could h
ave put Alison Carter from his mind for more than a minute or two. But somehow, Anne’s unfussy company had allowed him to switch off from the frustrations of his investigation. They’d had a candlelit supper, then listened to the radio cuddled up on the sofa together, giving tentative shape to their dreams for their unborn child. It had been too short a respite, but it had left him refreshed, his confidence restored in spite of a restless sleep.

  George fixed the poster to the CID notice board with drawing pins borrowed from some of the official notices. It would be a striking reminder to the visiting detectives that his case was very much alive. ‘That looks well.’ Tommy Clough’s voice echoed across the room as the door swung shut behind him. He shrugged out of his overcoat and slung it over the coatstand.

  ‘I’d no idea they were planning this,’ George said, tapping the poster with his fingernail.

  ‘It was all fixed up yesterday morning,’ Clough said carelessly, fastening the top button of his shirt and tightening his tie as he crossed the room.

  George shook his head. ‘I wish I was plugged into your grapevine, Tommy. Nothing happens here that gets past you.’ Clough grinned. ‘By the time you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll have forgotten more than I’ll ever know. I only found out about the posters because I was walking through the front office when the messenger came to pick up the photo. I meant to tell you, but it slipped my mind. Sorry, sir.’

  George turned and offered his cigarettes. ‘With us working so closely together on this, you might as well make it George when we’re on our own.’

  Clough took a cigarette and cocked his head to one side. ‘Right you are, George.’

  Before they could say more, the door swung open again and Superintendent Martin marched in. He was followed by two men dressed almost identically in navy suits, trilby hats and trench coats. In spite of their similar outfits, there was no prospect of confusing them. One had broad shoulders and a thick torso carried on legs that were almost comically short, barely allowing him to make the height requirement of five feet eight inches. The other topped six feet but looked as if he’d disappear if he stood behind a telegraph pole. Martin introduced them. The burly man was Detective Chief Inspector Gordon Parrott from Manchester City Police; the other, Detective Chief Inspector Terry Quirke from the Cheshire County force.