A Place of Execution (1999)

by Val McDermid

  Highsmith recovered quickly. ‘So, of all the possible scenarios for this putative murder, you can come up with only one that would explain the absence of blood at the scene?’

  ‘Always supposing the girl was killed in the cavern? Yes, I can only come up with that one explanation.’

  ‘One possibility out of dozens, hundreds, even. Not what one could call a probable scenario, then?’

  Hammond shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Thank you, Professor.’ Highsmith sat down. He’d retrieved more than he’d expected. He was confident he could baffle a jury with science and so confuse them that acquittal was the only reasonable option. ‘That concludes the case for the prosecution,’ Stanley announced as Professor Hammond gathered his papers together and left the witness box. ‘I shall adjourn until next week,’

  Sampson announced.

  33

  The Trial 4

  Manchester Guardian, Monday, 22nd June 1964

  New clue to missing boy

  Police last night switched their hunt for a near-blind boy missing for five days after one of his schoolfriends had told them: ‘He used to boast he had a super-secret den somewhere.’

  The search was switched from around twelve year-old Keith Bennett’s home in Eston Street, Longsight, Manchester, to nearby parkland. A police spokesman said: ‘The boy may have a hideout and could have stocks of food. Wherever his hideout, it is a good one.’

  Russia admitted its space satellites could spy on its enemies; a heart attack ended Nehru’s leadership of India; Rhodesia’s new leader Ian Smith was sabre-rattling; The Searchers and Millie and the Four Pennies slugged it out for the top spot in the pop charts. But all George was aware of were the newspaper reports of Philip Hawkin’s trial. He tried to keep the papers away from Anne, but she walked to the newsagent every day and bought her own copies. She had to mix with the wives of the other officers; she wanted to know what was being said about her man so she knew how best to strike back on his behalf if anyone was foolish enough to break the solidarity of the police under pressure.

  The only defence witness apart from Hawkin himself was his former boss who gave him an anodyne and blameless reference. He was hardly passionate in Hawkin’s cause, but he did testify that he had never heard anything against the former draughtsman.

  When Hawkin went into the box, the fireworks had started. The headlines had screamed the following morning: POLICE FRAMED ME, MAN ACCUSED OF MURDER CLAIMS.

  EVIDENCE IN MURDER TRIAL WAS MANUFACTURED. LIES, LIES AND MORE LIES, DEFENDANT SAYS.

  ALISON’S KILLER IS STILL AT LARGE, COURT HEARS.

  George sat in his office and stared bitterly at the words in front of him. Never mind that they would wrap tomorrow’s fish and chips. The mud was slung and some of it would stick. Whatever happened after this case, he was going to ask for a transfer.

  Hawkin had, by all accounts, put up a dazzling performance in the box, protesting his innocence at every possible opportunity. Highsmith had given him plenty of those. For every piece of evidence against him he had found a rebuttal, some carrying more conviction than others. He had spoken frankly and faced the jury throughout, appearing open and candid.

  He had even admitted possession of the Webley, though not of having stolen it from Richard Wells.

  His version was that he had bought the gun from a former workmate, since conveniently deceased.

  He had always fancied owning a gun, he confessed rather shamefacedly. The man had offered it for sale before Hawkin had even heard about the burglary. Afterwards, he had made the connection but had been afraid to speak up in case he was suspected of having committed the burglary himself.

  And yes, he had shown the gun to his wife. He was now bitterly ashamed of his behaviour, he’d added. According to the papers, his testimony had seemed fearless. Hawkin had said several times that even though he had been betrayed by the police, he was still putting his faith in British justice and the good sense of a British jury.

  ‘Laying it on with a trowel,’ George growled, reading the extensive report under Don Smart’s by-line in the Daily News. Clough stuck his head round the door. ‘You ask me, he’s trying too hard.

  There’s nothing a jury hates more than feeling like they’re being flattered. You can butter them up all you like as long as they don’t realize it. But he’s burying them in flannel and they’ll choke on it.’

  ‘Nice try, Tommy,’ George sighed. ‘I wish I was there today to hear Stanley cross-examine.’

  ‘He’ll probably do a better job knowing you’re not.’

  Manchester Evening News, Wednesday, 24th June 1964

  Missing boys—and 2 mothers who wait

  By a Staff Reporter

  Two sad-eyed women, who both know the numbing mental agony of a mother whose child is lost, met at Ashton-under-Lyne today for the first time.

  Mrs Sheila Kilbride and Mrs Winifred Johnson sat at a table at Mrs Kilbride’s council house in Smallshaw Lane, Ashton, and talked of their sons who have disappeared.

  John Kilbride, missing from home since last November, was 12 years old. So was Keith Bennett, from Eston Street, ChorltononMedlock, Manchester, whose mother is Mrs Johnson. Keith disappeared seven days ago.

  Both are the first-born of big families. And both disappeared without trace.

  A NIGHTMARE

  Mrs Kilbride and Mrs Johnson talked quietly with the air of women who could not quite believe that it had happened to them.

  Said Mrs Kilbride: ‘Even after all this time, it is still like a nightmare.’

  As time went by, she said, she learned to live with the false hopes and the moments of heart-in-the mouth suspense whenever a car drew up outside.

  But the sleepless nights go on, and so do the days of deep despair.

  She told Mrs Johnson: ‘You’ve got to keep going. We are a big family like you, and we find we don’t even mention John’s name much now.’

  THE HOAXERS

  Mrs Kilbride warned of the cranks and hoaxers who, with their trickery, brought pain.

  ‘I have learned to be suspicious of everybody who comes calling,’ she said.

  ‘If they claim to be police or reporters and I don’t know them, I ask to see their identity cards.’

  Mrs Kilbride, the wife of a building labourer, has seven children, including John. Mrs Johnson, whose husband is an unemployed joiner, has six and is expecting a baby on July 5.

  POLICE HUNT

  Police are still looking for their boys. Keith’s description has been circulated all over the country.

  A spokesman in Manchester said: ‘We are naturally concerned for his safety. It is an unusual case in that this boy has never wandered away before, and has left his glasses, without which he can see very little.

  ‘He had only one shilling in his pocket. We usually pick such lads up quickly. We have no leads, but are doing all in our power.’

  34

  The Trial 5

  Extracts from the official transcript of R v Philip Hawkin; Desmond Stanley, QC, delivers his closing speech to the jury on behalf of the prosecution. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would like to thank you for your patience during this difficult trial. It is always distressing to contemplate the desecration of childhood, as you have had to do in this case. I will try to be as brief as I can, but I must first respond to the suggestions made by my learned friend during his conduct of the defence. You have seen and heard Detective Inspector George Bennett for yourselves.

  You have also seen and heard the accused, Philip Hawkin. Now, I know Inspector Bennett to be an officer of irreproachable integrity, but you do not have the benefit of my acquaintance with him. So you must rely on those facts we have before us. Inspector Bennett’s good reputation came into this courtroom ahead of the man himself.

  We heard Mrs Carter, the wife of the accused, sing his praises. Later, we heard Mrs Hester Lomas and Mr Charles Lomas speak with great warmth of his support for the villagers of Scardale who had lost one o
f their young, and of his tireless commitment to uncovering what had happened to Alison Carter. Mr Hawkin, on the other hand, is, by his own admission, a man who would buy an illegal firearm and keep it in a house where a teenage girl was living.

  Those are facts, ladies and gentlemen. Not conjecture, but fact. In spite of what my learned friend has implied, there are many other facts in this case. It is a fact that Philip Hawkin owns the Webley.38 revolver which was fired inside an isolated cavern where clothing identified by her own mother as belonging to Alison Carter was discovered. It is a fact that Philip Hawkin owns a book which meticulously describes the location of this cavern whose existence had been forgotten by everyone except one elderly woman. It is a fact that Philip Hawkin is capable of having produced the semen found on the torn remains ofAlison Carter’s school knickers.

  It is a fact that Philip Hawkin’s gun was wrapped in a bloodstained shirt and concealed in Philip Hawkin’s darkroom, an outhouse where no one went other than the accused. It is a fact that that shirt belongs to Philip Hawkin. It is a fact that the blood on that shirt, the copious amount of blood on that shirt, could have come from Alison Carter. It is a fact that there exists a perfectly reasonable explanation for the absence of blood in the cavern.

  Furthermore, it is a fact that the obscene photographs ofAlison Carter and the negatives from which they were printed have Philip Hawkin’s fingerprints all over them, not Inspector Bennett’s. It is a fact that some of those photographs were taken in Alison Carter’s bedroom, not abstracted from some pornographic magazine. It is a fact that Philip Hawkin possessed all the photographic equipment necessary to take those photographs and process them. Inspector Bennett may have a camera that could take those photographs, but he has no convenient darkroom at the bottom of his garden. He does not possess developing trays, enlargers, a stock of photographic paper or any of the other paraphernalia he would have needed to perpetrate so elaborate a fraud. Come to that, he has not the time.

  It is a fact that the photographs were well hidden in a safe whose key was concealed in Philip Hawkin’s study. It is a fact that Hawkin had that safe installed when he had the outhouse converted into a darkroom.

  Facts, ladies and gentlemen, are not in short supply in this case. Those facts are evidence, and the evidence points overwhelmingly to one conclusion. That there is no body does not mean that no crime has been committed. It may be of some help to you to know that you are not being asked to make a decision that has no precedent. Juries have previously convicted defendants of murder where no body had been found. If you are satisfied on the basis of the evidence laid before you and on your judgement of the witnesses that the crimes of rape and murder were committed against Alison Carter by the accused, then you must carry out your duty and return a guilty verdict. There is, as I have said, a clear pattern to events in this case, and it points inescapably to one conclusion.

  Philip Hawkin arrived in Scardale with power and wealth at his disposal for the first time in his life.

  For the 268 first time in his life, he could see the prospect of indulging his perverted appetite for young girls.

  To disguise his real desires, he paid court to Ruth Carter, a woman who had been widowed six years before. Not only was he persuasive and attentive, but he seemed relaxed about the prospect of taking on another man’s child. In secret, he was not relaxed; he was ecstatic at the prospect that lay ahead of him if he could only persuade the mother that his interest was in her and not her attractive little girl. He succeeded. And that is when Alison Carter’s childhood ended.

  When she became Philip Hawkin’s stepdaughter, she also became his prey. Living under the same roof, there was no escape. He took pornographic photographs of her. He debauched her. He raped her. He sodomized her. He forced her to commit oral sex. He terrorized her. We know this because we have seen it with our own eyes, in photographs that show no sign of being faked and every indication of being real. Hideous, vile, degrading and without a shadow of a doubt, a record of what really happened to Alison Carter at the hands of her stepfather. What went wrong we will never know, since the accused has refused the opportunity to put Mrs Ruth Carter out of her misery and tell us how he disposed of her daughter and why he did it. Perhaps Alison had had enough and threatened to tell her mother or another adult. Perhaps he had grown tired of her and he wanted rid of her. Perhaps a sick sexual game got out of hand. Whatever the reason—and it is not hard to imagine motive in a case as darkly barbaric as this—Philip Hawkin decided to kill his stepdaughter.

  So, in a dark, damp cave, he raped her one final time and then he pulled the trigger on his Webley revolver and murdered this poor thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

  Then when he was confronted with his villainy, he had the effrontery to attempt to wriggle off the hook by smearing the good name of an honest police officer.

  Philip Hawkin owed Alison Carter a duty of care. Instead, he used his position to exploit her sexually then, when something went wrong, he shot her dead. Then he disposed of her body, imagining that without a body, there could be no prosecution, no finding of guilt. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you can be guided by the evidence and prove him wrong. Philip Hawkin is guilty as charged, and I urge you to bring the appropriate verdict back to this courtroom.

  35

  The Trial 6

  Extracts from the official transcript of R v Philip Hawkin; Rupert Highsmith, QC, delivers his closing speech to the jury on behalf of the defence. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, yours is the most important task in this courtroom. In your hands lies the life of a man accused of the rape and murder of his stepdaughter. It is the job of the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he committed those crimes. It’s my job to demonstrate to you all the points in their case where they have failed to do that. I believe that when you have heard what I have to say, you will not be able to find it in your heart to convict Philip Hawkin of any crime whatsoever. The first thing the prosecution has to show is that a crime has in fact taken place. Now, this case presents some unusual problems right at the outset. There is no complainant. Alison Carter is missing, so she is unable to present an accusation of rape, unable to identify any assailant—if indeed there was an assailant, for the prosecution have not been able to produce any third party to whom Alison complained that she had been assaulted. No one witnessed the alleged rape. Philip Hawkin did not come home bruised and bleeding, as if he’d been involved in a violent struggle. The only evidence of rape is the photographs. I will return to the photographs in due course. All I will say at this stage is that you should bear in mind that the camera can indeed lie.

  You might think that the discovery of underclothes identified as belonging to Alison and stained with blood and semen are indications of rape. Not so, ladies and gentlemen. Sexual activity takes many shapes and forms. Distasteful though it is for you to have to consider it, these include the wearing of schoolgirls’ outfits by older women to indulge male fantasies. They also include the pretence of violence. So, in and of themselves, these exhibits prove nothing.

  Which brings us to the second charge, that of murder. But again, there are no witnesses. The prosecution has been unable to find one single person who will testify that Philip Hawkin was a violent man. Not one single witness has come forward to say that Hawkin was anything other than normal in his behaviour towards his stepdaughter. Not only are there no witnesses, there is no body.

  Not only is there no body, there is no blood at the alleged scene of the crime. The first shooting in the history of forensic science that has left no traces in the place where it is supposed to have taken place. For all the prosecution knows, Alison Carter is a runaway, surviving somehow on the fringes of society. In the absence of blood, in the absence of a body, how can they charge Philip Hawkin with murder? How dare they charge him with murder? All they have is a chain of circumstantial evidence. It’s well known that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. What then are we to make of a chain that consists solely of weak links? L
et us look at this evidence, piece by piece, and test its weakness. I am convinced, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that when we have done that, you will find it impossible to convict Philip Hawkin of either of these two terrible crimes of which he stands accused.

  You have heard two witnesses testify that on the afternoon of Alison’s disappearance, they saw Philip Hawkin in the field between the wood where Alison’s dog was found and the copse where a disturbance was later discovered to have taken place. I am not suggesting for one moment that either or both of those witnesses are lying. I think they have both convinced themselves that they are telling nothing less than the truth. However, I submit that in a small farming community such as Scardale, one winter afternoon is very much like another. It would not be difficult to confuse Tuesday with Wednesday. Now, bear in mind that everyone in Scardale was puzzled and upset by Alison Carter’s disappearance. If someone in authority, such as a police officer, were to suggest strongly that a mistake had been made, and that correcting that mistake would help to solve the conundrum, is it so very surprising that witnesses might find themselves going along with the suggestion? Especially since it would mean fixing the blame outside their own tight-knit community and on to the man they all perceived as an outsider, their new and much resented squire, Philip Hawkin? Let us not forget, ladies and gentlemen, that if Philip Hawkin goes to the gallows, Scardale and all it contains will pass to his wife, who is very much one of their own.

  Next, we come to the evidence of Mrs Hawkin herself. And whatever she says to the contrary, let us not forget that Mrs Hawkin she remains. You might think that the very fact that she is willing to testify against her husband speaks for itself. After all, what could induce a bride of less than eighteen months to support her husband’s prosecution other than compelling evidence? Does it not tell us something about the accused that she gave evidence against him when the prosecution case is so weak? No, ladies and gentlemen, it does not. What it does tell us is that there is nothing stronger for a woman than the bond of motherhood. Mrs Hawkin’s daughter went missing on Wednesday the eleventh of December. She is frantic. She is distraught. She is bewildered. The one person who seems to offer her any hope is a young detective inspector who throws himself into the case with passion and commitment. He is always there. He is compassionate and dedicated. But he is getting nowhere. Eventually, he forms a suspicion that the woman’s husband may have had a hand in Alison’s disappearance. And he becomes determined to establish his theory as fact.