A Place of Execution (1999)

by Val McDermid

  ‘She’s away a lot. I doubt she’d fancy being involved in a book about a murder,’ Kathy said repressively, clattering two mugs out of a cupboard on to the worktop.

  Catherine walked across to the window that gave a view of the village green. She imagined the empty hours Ruth Carter must have spent straining vainly to pick out the rythym of her daughter’s walk approaching the house.

  As if reading her thoughts, Kathy spoke. ‘Something inside me turned to stone that night when I watched those policemen milling around the village green. If I was ever in danger of forgetting, the nightmares would be reminder enough. I still can’t see a police uniform in the village without wanting to be sick.’

  She turned back to brewing the tea. ‘It changed everything, that night, didn’t it?’ Catherine asked, surreptitiously switching on the tape recorder in her coat pocket.

  ‘Aye, it did. I’m just glad we had a copper like George Bennett on our side. If it hadn’t been for him, that bastard Hawkin might have got away with it. That’s the other reason why I was willing to talk to you. It’s about time George Bennett got the credit he deserves for what he did for Alison.’

  ‘You’re one of the few people in Scardale who seem to think so. Most of your family don’t see it like that. Apart from Janet Carter, and Charlie in London, everybody else has refused to talk to me,’

  Catherine observed, still hoping she might recruit Kathy’s help in loosening their tongues. ‘Aye, well, that’s up to them. They’ll have their own reasons for that. I can’t say I blame them for not wanting to rake it up again. There’s no good memories for any of us from that time.’ She poured tea from an earthenware pot into two matching mugs. ‘Right then. You want to know what this place looked like?’

  They spent an hour going from room to room, with Kathy providing detailed descriptions of the furnishings and decor and Catherine trying to recreate their image in her mind’s eye. She was surprised that she felt no sense of the sinister as Kathy walked her through the house. Catherine had imagined that somehow the events that had led to Alison Carter’s death would have seeped into the very walls of Scardale Manor, leaving their ghosts in the air like motes of dust. But there was nothing of that here. It was simply an imaginatively restored old house that, in spite of the money spent on it, was never going to be particularly distinguished. Even the outhouse Philip Hawkin had used as a darkroom lacked any atmosphere. Now it was simply a storage shed for gardening tools and old furniture, no more or less.

  Nevertheless, it was a productive hour for Catherine, allowing her to set her knowledge of events against a concrete backdrop. She said as much as Kathy Lomas locked the door behind them and led Catherine back to Lark Cottage for their formal interview. ‘Aye, well, better you get it right,’

  Kathy said. ‘Now, what did you want to ask me?’

  In the end, Kathy’s testimony added little to the facts Catherine had learned from George. Its value lay mostly in the inside knowledge the older woman was able to dispense on the personalities involved. By the end of the afternoon, Catherine felt she had finally come close enough to knowing Ruth Carter and Philip Hawkin to write convincingly about them. That in itself had been worth the trip.

  ‘You’re seeing Janet after,’ Kathy remarked as Catherine wrote the identifying details on the final microcassette. ‘That’s right. She said evenings suited her best.’

  ‘Aye. With her working full-time, she likes to keep her weekends for her and Alison.’ Kathy got to her feet and gathered the mugs together. ‘Alison?’ Catherine almost yelped.

  ‘Her lass. Our Janet never wed. Wasted her twenties on a married man. Then she fell pregnant when she was thirty-five and old enough to know better. Some Yank she met when she was staying down south in a hotel at a conference. Any road, he was long gone back to Cincinnati before Janet realized she was in the family way, so she raised the lass herself.’

  ‘She called her daughter Alison?’

  ‘Aye. It’s like I said. She’s not forgotten in Scardale. Mind you, Janet was lucky. She had her mum as an unpaid child-minder so she was able to keep on playing at being the career woman.’ There was a surprising note of bitterness in Kathy’s voice. Catherine wondered whether she resented her own children for flying the nest and failing to give her the chance to be a hands-on grandmother, or if she despised Janet for resorting to such measures. ‘What does she do?’

  ‘She manages a building society branch in Leek.’ Kathy glanced out of her window where the curtains were still undrawn in spite of the darkness outside. The headlights of a car swung into sight from the lane end. ‘That’ll be her now. You’d better be off then.’

  Catherine got to her feet, still feeling caught off balance by Kathy Lomas’s unpredictable swings from confiding to brusque. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’ Kathy’s narrow mouth pursed momentarily.

  ‘Happen,’ she said. ‘It’s been…interesting. Aye, interesting. I’ve told you things I’d forgotten I knew. So, when do we get to read this book?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not due to be published until next June,’ Catherine said. ‘But I’ll make sure you get a copy as soon as the finished version is available.’

  ‘Make sure you do, lass. I don’t want some reporter knocking on my door asking questions about some book I’ve never read.’ She opened the front door and stood back to allow Catherine to pass into the porch. ‘Tell Janet she owes me for half a dozen eggs.’

  The door was closed behind her before Catherine had reached the end of the path. Stumbling a little in the dark, she turned to her right and walked past Tor Cottage, where Charlie Lomas had lived with his grandmother, and turned into the short path leading to Shire Cottage, where Janet Carter had grown up with her parents and three siblings. According to Peter Grundy, her parents had sold it to her three years before when they decided to retire to Spain because of the climate. Catherine couldn’t imagine wanting to live in the house where she’d grown up. She’d been happy enough as a child, but more than ready to make her escape to the freedom and opportunity of London when the chance came.

  Whatever had provoked Janet Carter to stay in Scardale, when Catherine saw the interior of Shire Cottage, she realized it probably wasn’t sentimentality.The entire ground floor had been stripped out into a single large living space, broken up by the chimney breast. As one of the newer Scardale cottages—probably early Victorian, Janet explained—the ceilings were higher, so opening up the walls had created a remarkable sense of space. One end of the room held a tiny functional kitchen space with stainless-steel units that reflected the variegated greys of the exposed stone walls. The opposite end was a living space, dominated by the rich colours of Indian wall hangings and rugs. Between was a large pine table which seemed to double as dining space and work area. A teenage girl was sitting at it staring intently into a computer screen. She barely looked up as Janet showed Catherine in. ‘But it’s wonderful,’ Catherine exclaimed in spite of herself.

  ‘Brilliant, isn’t it?’ Janet’s features had grown even more feline with age.

  Her almond-shaped eyes crinkled at the corners as she smiled delightedly.

  ‘It takes everybody by surprise. It’s much more conventional upstairs, but I wanted to make it completely different down here.’

  ‘Janet, it’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it in an old cottage.

  How would you feel about my magazine doing a photo feature on it?’

  Janet smirked. ‘There would be a fee, wouldn’t there?’ Catherine’s answering smile was wry. ‘I think the magazine could manage that. I’m only sorry I can’t offer you one for the book interview.

  But publishers…they’re so mean with their money.’ What she meant was that she had no intention of offering any of her substantial advance to someone as obviously grasping as Janet Carter. She wondered how far she’d managed to screw down the price she’d paid her parents for the cottage.

  They settled down on a low sofa and Janet poured red wine into heavy glass tumbler
s, waving a vague hand towards her daughter. ‘Ignore Alison. She won’t hear a word we’re saying. Comes home from school, sticks a ready meal in the microwave then she’s lost in cyberspace. She’s the same age now as All and me were in 1963, you know. When I look at Alison, I feel all the same anxieties my mother must have known, although my life’s so different from hers.

  ‘Everything changed the day All disappeared,’ Janet recalled, settling down in the manner of a woman who is ready for the conversational long haul. ‘I suppose I never appreciated how frightening it was for my aunt and my parents until I had a child of my own. All I could think about was that All was missing; it certainly never occurred to me that I should be worried on my own account. But for the adults, right from the word go, as well as the awful anxiety about All, there must have been tremendous fear that she might only be the first victim, that none of their kids was safe. ‘Back then, remember, children didn’t know anything about current affairs. We didn’t read the papers or follow the news unless it was about pop groups or film stars. So we were completely oblivious to the fact that there had already been two missing children just up the road in Manchester. All we were aware of was that All going missing meant our freedom was curtailed, and that was a very strange experience for us in Scardale.’ Catherine nodded. ‘I know exactly what you mean. It had the same effect on us in Buxton. Suddenly, we were treated like china.

  Everywhere we went, we had to have an adult with us. My mum wouldn’t even let me take the dog for a walk in Grin Low woods on my own. Ironic really, when it turned out the danger was so close to home. But it must have been a thousand times worse for you, with all the fear and anxiety right on your own doorstep.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Janet said with feeling. ‘We were used to running free in the dale. We were never indoors in the summer, and even in the dead of winter, we’d be up on the hills, or following the Scarlaston down into Denderdale, or just hanging around in the woods. Because Derekand All and I were practically the same age, we were like triplets, never apart. Then suddenly, it was just me and Derek and we were stuck indoors. Like prisoners. God, it was dull.’

  ‘People forget what a drag it was being a young teenager in the early sixties,’ Catherine said, remembering only too well how much of a part boredom had played in her own adolescence.

  ‘Especially in a place like Scardale,’ Janet said. ‘You went to school and all your friends were talking about what they’d been watching on the TV, what they’d seen at the pictures, who they’d got off with at the church dance. We had none of that. They used to take the piss out of us Scardale kids all the time because we never had a clue what the rest of the world was on about. We weren’t so much listening to a different drum as stone bloody deaf. Well, you’ll remember if you were at school in Buxton.’ Catherine nodded. ‘I was the year above you at High Peak. As I remember, it wasn’t just the Scardale kids that got the piss taken out of them. We were equally horrible to everybody from the outlying villages.’

  ‘I can imagine. There’s nobody crueller to each other than kids. And compared to what happened to us after All went missing, being called names was the least of our pains. When I remember the weeks after she disappeared, the most vivid memory that comes to mind is sitting in my bedroom with Derek, listening to Radio Luxembourg on this huge old wireless we had. The reception was terrible, full of static and feedback. It was freezing in there as well—that was long before central heating came to Scardale. We used to sit in the bedroom with our winter coats on. But even now, there are certain songs that take me right back. The Searchers’

  Needles and Pins-, Cilia Black’s Anyone Who Had a Heart, Peter and Gordon’s World Without Love; and the Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand. Whenever I hear them, I’m back in my room, sitting on the pink candlewick bedspread, Derek sitting on the floor with his back to the door, his arms round his knees. And no All.

  ‘You take so much for granted when you’re a child. You spend every day in somebody’s company, and it never crosses your mind that one day they might not be there any more. In a way, you know, I feel lucky that you’re writing this book. So many of us lose people and there’s never anything to prove they were ever there except what’s in our heads. At least I’m going to be able to pick up your book and know that All really was here. Not for long enough, but she was here.’

  44

  May 1998

  George Bennett paused for breath, hands on hips as he sucked in the mild, humid air. His son waited a few steps ahead, savouring the spectacular view from the Heights of Abraham across the deep gorge carved by the River Derwent to the dramatic profile ofRiber Castle on the opposite hill.

  They’d taken the cable car from Matlock Bath up to the summit and now they were walking the wooded ridge, heading for a winding path that would bring them gradually back down to the river.

  Paul couldn’t even begin to count the number of walks he and his father had taken over the years.

  As soon as he was old enough to keep up, George had taken him walking in the dales and peaks of Derbyshire. Some of those days were carved in his memory, like climbing Main Tor the day before his seventh birthday. Others had disappeared apparently without trace, only surfacing when he revisited the same territory with Helen on one of their occasional visits. When he came home alone, as he had this weekend, he still liked to go out on the hills with his father, though these days George favoured routes that avoided the challenging climbs and reckless scrambles that they’d tackled when he’d been younger and fitter. Paul turned back to face his father, who had stopped panting, though his face was still scarlet from the effort of the short but steep section they’d just completed. ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ George said, straightening up and moving to Paul’s side. ‘I’m just not as young as I was.

  It’s worth it for the view, though.’

  ‘That’s one of the things I really miss, living in Brussels. I got spoilt, growing up with countryside like this on the doorstep. Now, if we want to go for a walk with a decent hill, we’ve got to drive for hours. So we tend not to bother. And working out in the gym’s no substitute for this.’ His gesture encompassed the horizon.

  ‘At least it doesn’t rain in the gym,’ George said, pointing to clouds further down the valley with the shadow of rain beneath them. ‘We’ll have that to contend with in half an hour or so.’ He started walking, Paul falling into step beside him. ‘I’ve not been out as much as I’d like lately myself,’ he continued. ‘By the time I’d spent the morning with Catherine and done the garden and all the other domestic bits and pieces, I hardly had time for anything more than the odd round of golf.’ Paul grinned. ‘So it’s all my fault, then?’

  ‘No, I’m not complaining. In a funny kind of way, I’m glad you talked me into it. I’d been bottling it up for far too long. I’d thought dealing with it would be more traumatic than it turned out.’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘All these years I’ve been advising my officers to confront their fears, to get back on the horse, and I’ve been doing the very opposite.’ Paul nodded. ‘You always taught me that it’s better to face up to the bogeyman.’

  ‘Aye, as long as you pick the ground for the confrontation,’ George said wryly. ‘Anyway, it turned out that the Alison Carter case wasn’t as much of a big bad bogeyman as I’d thought. And Catherine made it very easy for me. She’s done her background research, I’ll give her that. So a lot of the time, we were concentrating on quite detailed stuff and that made me realize that I’d actually done a pretty good job in the circumstances.’ They came to a bend in the path and George stopped and faced his son.

  He took a deep breath. ‘There is one thing I want to tell you because I don’t want you reading it in the book for the first time. It’s something your mother and I have always kept from you. When you were little, we didn’t tell you because we thought it might frighten you. You know how kids are—all that imagination turns something pretty insignificant into a big deal. And then when you were older,
well, there never seemed to be an appropriate time.’

  Paul smiled uncertainly. ‘Better get it over with, then. Tell me now.’ George reached for his cigarettes and fussed over lighting one in the slight breeze that drifted along the hill. ‘The day you were born was the day they hanged Philip Hawkin,’ he finally said. Paul’s smile melted into an expression of bewilderment. ‘My birthday?’ he said.

  George nodded. ‘I’m afraid so. I got the news that you’d been born just after they hanged him.’

  ‘That’s why you always made a big deal of my birthday? To try to take 324 your mind off the fact that you could never forget the other anniversary?’ Paul said, unable to keep the hurt from his voice. George shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he protested. ‘That’s not how it was. No, you being born was like—I don’t know how to put it—like a sign from the gods that I could put Alison Carter behind me, make a new start. Every year, it wasn’t Philip Hawkin’s hanging that I remembered on your birthday. It was—listen to me, I sound like some American self-help book—it was the sense of renewal that your birth gave me. Like a promise.’ The two men stood staring at each other, George’s face pleading with his son to believe him. A moment passed in silence, then Paul stepped forward and put his arms round his father in a clumsy hug. ‘Thanks for telling me,’ he mumbled, suddenly aware how much he loved his father, although their physical contact had always been rare. He dropped his arms and grinned. ‘I can see why you wouldn’t want me to find out something like that from Catherine’s book.’

  George smiled. ‘Judging by your reaction, you’d have been sure to take it the wrong way.’

  ‘Probably,’ Paul acknowledged. ‘But I can see why you didn’t tell me when I was a kid. That would have given me nightmares for sure.’