A Place of Execution (1999)

by Val McDermid

  She poured herself another drink and debated her next move. By the time she’d reached the bottom of the glass, she knew there was only one possible destination.

  Three hours later, Catherine was booking into a four-star hotel just outside Newcastle. One of the secrets of good journalism, she had learned, was knowing when to press ahead and when to possess her soul in patience. Her thirst for removing the wraps on this story was tempered by the wisdom of experience. Turning up unannounced on someone’s doorstep was always a bad idea late at night.

  She knew they’d invariably associate it with bad news before she’d even opened her mouth.

  But in the morning, people were more optimistic. Long before the invention of the postman with his prospect of good news, everybody knew that. So when she had still been a news reporter, wherever possible she had avoided the late-night knock and gone for the early-morning arrival.

  Catherine finally fell asleep to the movie channel, and it was after nine when she woke, grateful that she’d managed a decent night’s sleep, given what she had on her mind. The first thing she did was call the hospital. There was, they said, little change, though there were some grounds for optimism. She tried the Bennetts’ home number, but only the answering machine responded. She left her best wishes and hung up. An hour later, she was heading up the Ai. She was halfway up the path to the cottage when the door opened. ‘Catherine,’ Tommy said, his broad face crinkled in a smile. ‘You’re an unexpected treat. Come through, we’ll sit out the back.’

  She followed him through the spotless living room and kitchen into his back garden, a paradise of fragrant flowers and shrubs, all chosen, so he’d told her on her earlier visit, to attract birds and butterflies. Today, it was humming softly with bees, and the flutter of multicoloured wings continually snagged the corner of her eye as they spoke. Tommy pulled up a wooden chair for Catherine then sat on the bench that looked down the garden to the sea beyond. ‘So, what brings you up here?’ he asked once they were settled.

  She sighed. ‘I don’t know where to start, Tommy. However I say this, it’s going to sound like I’ve finally lost it.’ She looked down at the ground. ‘Have you heard about George?’

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked, alarm in his voice. Catherine met his stare. ‘He’s had a heart attack.

  A bad one, by all accounts. He’s in Derby Royal, in the intensive care ward. He’s been unconscious since the early hours of yesterday, as far as I’m aware. According to Paul, his heart stopped in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.’

  ‘And you came up all this way to tell me? Catherine, that’s really good of you.’ Tommy patted her hand. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.’ For the moment, she was content to occupy the role of concerned friend. He shrugged. ‘At my age, you come to expect it. How’s Anne taking it? She must be devastated.’

  ‘She’s not left his bedside. Paul’s home just now, with his fiancée, and they’re with her.’

  ‘Poor Anne. She’s lived her life for George. And with her arthritis, she’s not fit for heavy nursing, if it comes down to that.’ Tommy sighed and shook his head. He gazed out across the garden to the blue sparkle of the North Sea.

  Catherine took out her fresh pack of Marlboros. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asked.

  His bushy eyebrows rose. ‘I didn’t think you did. But be my guest.’ He rose and crossed to the shed in the corner of the garden. He returned with a terracotta plant saucer. ‘You can use that as an ashtray. Take your time.’ Tommy leaned back, crossing his legs at the ankle and stuffing his hands in the pockets of his baggy corduroy trousers. ‘On Monday, George went to Scardale. And on Monday night, he had his heart attack,’ she said baldly.

  ‘You got George to go to Scardale?’ Tommy’s eyes widened in surprise.

  ‘I didn’t. I could never manage to persuade him. But Paul did. He’s over on a visit with Helen, his fiancée. They’re planning on getting married later this year. Anyway, it turns out that Helen’s sister Janis moved to Scardale Manor a couple of years back. And they’d arranged to take George and Anne over there for lunch on Monday. I knew George was uncomfortable about going to Scardale, but once he got there, according to Paul, his behaviour became quite odd.’

  ‘Odd how?’

  ‘Paul said he seemed very tense. He had no appetite. Apart from taking a turn round the village green, he just sat in the garden, not talking to anyone. Paul said he was very distracted and wound up for the rest of the day and the evening.’ Catherine paused to collect her thoughts. She needed to be careful how she expressed herself to Tommy. He was very quick at picking, up nuances of what he wasn’t being told. ‘Before he was taken ill, he’d written to me, asking me to put a stop on the book. No reason, except that he’d come across some new information that meant the book must be suppressed. Of course, I told Paul about the letter when I saw him at the hospital. I was already convinced that George must have seen something in Scardale that had—I don’t know given him fresh insight into some aspect of the case, or set him worrying about something we’d included in the book. And Paul had come to the same conclusion. He’s racked with guilt. He thinks he’s responsible for George’s heart attack because he persuaded him to go back to Scardale. And he’s asked me if I can try to find out what lay behind George’s letter to me. So…’ She shrugged. ‘I have to get the answers.’

  ‘You’d have been a good copper,’ he said drily. ‘Coming from you, I’m not sure that’s a compliment.’ She fiddled with her cigarette, then firmly stubbed it out.

  ‘Oh, I’ve nothing but respect for them as could do a job that was too much for me,’ he said, pretending a ruefulness she knew he didn’t feel. ‘And where did you go for your answers? As if I couldn’t guess.’

  ‘That’s right. I went back to Scardale. I thought I’d ask Helen’s sister if I could have another look round the manor, to see if I could discover what had upset George so much.’ She shifted in her chair so she could look out over the sea.

  ‘And did you?’

  Catherine busied herself with another cigarette. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Tommy weighing her up, eyes shrewd in his weather-browned face. He knew there was something, but not even in his wildest imaginings could he have come up with what she was about to say, she thought.

  ‘I didn’t get to look round the manor,’ she said on an exhalation of smoke. ‘But I did get to see what must have sent George reeling.’ She opened her bag and took out the folder where she’d stashed the computer-aged photograph ofAlison Carter.

  Tommy held out his hand. She shook her liead. ‘In a minute. The woman who opened the door, the one who’s supposed to be Helen’s sister—it’s Alison Carter’s double. Right down to the scar through the eyebrow.’ She handed the folder to Tommy. He opened it gingerly, as if he expected it to explode in his face. What he saw was worse than anything he could have feared. His mouth fell open. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes either. I took Philip Hawkin’s photos ofAlison to an expert and had them computer aged. That could be a photograph of the woman who answered the door of Scardale Manor. But it’s also what Alison would look like if she was still alive.’ The folder was trembling in Tommy’s hands. ‘No,’ he breathed. ‘That can’t be right. It must be a relative.’

  ‘The scar’s the same, Tommy. You don’t get identical scars.’

  ‘You must have made a mistake. You can’t have seen her properly.

  Your imagination’s playing tricks.’

  ‘Is it? I don’t think so, Tommy. It wasn’t my imagination that gave George a heart attack. Whatever I saw, I think he saw it before me. That’s why I came to you. I need your help. I need you to come and look at Janis Wainwright and tell me and George it’s not Alison Carter. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like I’ve stumbled across the scoop of the century.’

  He covered his face with his free hand, rubbing his leathery skin so it resembled a crumpled animal hide. His hand drop
ped to his lap and he stared dully at Catherine. ‘You know what this means, if you’re right?’ She nodded slowly. She’d thought of little else on the long drive north, her mind on a rollercoaster where the high point was the professional effect of the revelation she would make, and the low point was what that would do to George Bennett and his family. Somewhere down the line, she knew she’d have to find a balance between those two consequences. But first she would have to hold the whole truth in her hand. Catherine looked Tommy straight in the eye and said, ‘It means they hanged Philip Hawkin for a crime that never happened.’

  51

  August 1998

  Tommy Clough was not a sentimental man. He had always lived in the present, drawing his nourishment from what was around him. His other great quality was persistence. So although he’d never felt particularly enriched by his years in the police, he’d stuck with the job because of the abiding desire for justice that had taken him there in the first place. Even then, however, he’d been able to sustain himself with his twin passions of birds and jazz.

  But he’d been telling Catherine nothing less than the truth when he had revealed that it had been the Alison Carter case that had marked the beginning of the end of his police career. He had cared too much about the outcome of a case that was at best shaky. The idea of Alison’s killer walking free had tormented him night and day in the lead-up to the trial, and he never wanted to go through that experience again. It had taken him a couple of years to work through what he really felt about the investigation and its results, but once he had made the decision, he’d been out of Derbyshire Police in a matter of weeks. And he had never regretted it for a moment.

  Catherine Heathcote’s arrival a couple of months earlier had forced him to re-examine the past for almost the first time since he had quit the force. For days before their interview, he had walked the cliffs and headlands near his cottage, turning the Scardale case over and over in his mind.

  One of his strengths as a copper had been his intuition. It had frequently made him push even when there was no concrete evidence, and it had paid off more often than not in arrests and convictions.

  He’d been convinced from the start that Philip Hawkin was a nasty piece of work. All his instincts had screamed that from his first encounter with the man. Long 366 before George Bennett ever voiced the first stirrings of suspicion about Hawkin, Tommy Clough had sensed the squire had something serious to hide.

  As soon as George had indicated he wanted them to look more closely at Hawkin, Tommy had been a terrier, running himself into the ground to sniff out any possible shred of evidence that might support the case. No one had worked harder, not even George himself, in the quest to nail Philip Hawkin.

  In spite of which, Tommy had never quite been settled in his own mind that Hawkin was a killer.

  He’d had no doubt that the man had been a vicious sexual predator, and he’d had nightmares over the photographs, which he knew hadn’t been doctored, either by George Bennett or anyone else.

  But even though he despised and loathed Hawkin, he had never been entirely convinced that the man was the killer they had revealed him to be. Perhaps it had been that niggle of doubt that had made him work so hard to build a rock-solid case against the man. He had been trying to convince himself as much as the jury. And the final conviction that his gut instinct had failed him had undermined his confidence in the way he did his job.

  And now Catherine had dropped her twin bombshell. She believed George Bennett was lying on a life-support machine because he’d realized, as she had, that Alison Carter was alive and well and living in Scardale. In one way, it made no sense. However, if Catherine was right, it vindicated Tommy dough’s own past uneasiness. Nevertheless, this was one time when he would give almost anything to have been wrong all those years before. For if Alison Carter truly was alive, then the repercussions would be appalling. Never mind any possible legal consequences, whoever Paul Bennett’s fiancée was, she was somehow intimately connected to a terrible mistake her future father-in-law had been instrumental in making.

  All of this rolled around Tommy’s head without resolution as he sat in his Land Rover, following Catherine’s car down the Ai towards Derbyshire. There had seemed no alternative but to go back with her and do what he could to protect George and his family from the fallout from what Catherine thought she’d discovered. She was, he thought, both headstrong and single-minded, and that was a dangerous combination around such potentially explosive material. She’d wanted to drive him back with her, but he’d been adamant that he wanted the freedom to come and go that he would lack if he was dependent on Catherine to ferry him around. ‘I’ll be wanting to visit George,’ he’d said. ‘And it might not always be convenient for you.’ Besides, he wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

  The five-hour journey seemed to flash past, and suddenly they were drawing up outside a cottage just off the main street in Longnor. Catherine announced that the first thing they had to do was find Tommy somewhere to stay. The pub did rooms, but in mid-August, they were all full of hikers and fishermen. Tommy shrugged, then marched straight up to Peter Grundy’s front door and announced that he’d be needing the Grundys’ spare room for a few days; would ten pounds a night be fine for bed and breakfast? Grundy’s wife, who’d never liked her husband’s bosses and was happy to part one from his money, nearly bit his hand off, though Peter had the grace to look embarrassed. Any questions they had about what had brought Tommy back to Derbyshire were satisfied by the news of George’s heart attack. ‘You need your friends around you at a time like this,’ Mrs Grundy said profoundly.

  ‘You certainly do,’ was Tommy’s grim response. ‘And I intend to do everything I can to help George and Anne.’ He’d given Catherine a quick glance, making sure she registered that their interests might not entirely coincide. She inclined her head in acknowledgement, and refused a cup of Mrs Grundy’s industrial-strength builder’s tea. ‘I’ll be in the cottage when you’re ready, Tommy,’ was all she said. Catherine had no time to ponder exactly what Tommy Clough thought he was up to. She was too impatient to get to her laptop. She went straight on-line and found that LSA had come up with the goods. They’d scanned in the photocopies of the certificates they’d tracked down and sent them to her as graphics files.

  First, Janis Hester Wainwright. Born January 12th 1951 in Consett. A female child, daughter of Samuel Wainwright and Dorothy Wainwright nee Carter. Father’s occupation, steel worker. Usual address, 27 Upington Terrace, Consett.

  Mother’s maiden name, Carter. It was a coincidence, but not much of one. Carter was too common a name to set any store by it, she told herself firmly. This was too important for her to clutch at straws. Concrete evidence was what she needed.

  Next, Helen’s certificate.

  Helen Ruth Wainwright.

  Born:

  June 10th 1964 in Sheffield.

  A female child, daughter of Samuel Wainwright and Dorothy Wainwright nee Carter.

  Father’s occupation:

  steel worker.

  Usual address:

  18 Lee Bank, Rivelin Valley, Sheffield.

  CERTIFICATE COPY OF AN ENTRY OF BIRTH GIVEN AT THE GENERAL REGISTER OFFICE, LONDON

  Registration District:

  County Durham

  Sub District of:

  Consett

  Application Number:

  7211758

  Name:

  Janis Hester

  Sex:

  Female

  When and Where Born:

  Twelfth January 1951, Consett

  Address:

  27 Upington Terrace, Consett, County Durham

  Name and Surname of Father:

  Samuel Wainwright

  Name, Surname and Maiden name of Mother:

  Dorothy Wainwright formerly Carter

  Occupation of Father:

  Steel Worker

  When Registered:

  Eighteenth January 1951

  CERTIFICATE COPY OF AN
ENTRY OF BIRTH GIVEN AT THE GENERAL REGISTER OFFICE, LONDON

  Registration District:

  Sheffield

  Sub District of:

  Rivelin Valley

  Application Number:

  2214389

  Name:

  Helen Ruth

  Sex:

  Female

  When and Where Born:

  Tenth June 1964, Rivelin Valley

  Address:

  18 Lee Bank, Rivelin Valley

  Name and Surname of Father:

  Samuel Wainwright

  Name, Surname and Maiden Name of Mother:

  Dorothy Wainwright formerly Carter

  Occupation of Father:

  Steel Worker

  When Registered:

  Fourteenth June 1964

  Coupled with Carter, this was starting to look significant, Catherine thought, feeling the excitement stirring inside her.

  She hit the page down key for the marriage certificate for Samuel and Dorothy Wainwright. The excitement was a physical sensation growling deep in her stomach. Place of marriage; St Stephen’s Church, Longnor in the district of Buxton. Date of marriage: April 5th 1948. Samuel Alfred Wainwright, bachelor, had married Dorothy Margaret Carter, spinster.

  CERTIFICATE COPY OF AN ENTRY OF MARRIAGE PURSUANT TO THE MARRIAGE ACT 1836

  Registration District:

  Buxton

  Marriage Solemnized at:

  St Stephen’s Church, Longnor

  In the:

  County of Derbyshire

  Application Number:

  87

  When Married:

  Fifth April 1948

  Chrstian name:

  Samuel Alfred

  Surname:

  Wainwright

  Age:

  22

  Condition:

  Batchelor

  Rank or Profession:

  Steel Worker

  Residence:

  27 Upington Terrace, Consett

  Father’s Name and Surname:

  Alfred Wainwright