A Place of Execution (1999) (12 page)

‘Was he close to Alison?’

George could see Grundy considering how far he could push it. That was one of the hardest parts of his job, this constantly having to stand his ground and prove himself to his colleagues. ‘They’re all close down there,’ Grundy finally said. ‘There was no bad blood between him and Alison that I ever heard.’

However, it wasn’t bad blood that George was interested in where the two Scardale cousins were concerned.

Realizing he’d gained all he could from Grundy, he nodded his thanks and strolled towards the rear of the hall, praying he didn’t look as exhausted as he felt. Probably he should wait till morning to interview Charlie Lomas. But he preferred to make his move while the lad was already on the back foot. Besides, there was always the million to one chance that Alison was still alive, and Charlie Lomas might just hold the key to her whereabouts. Even so slim a chance was too much to throw away.

As he approached, George picked up a chair and dropped it casually at the third side of the table, at right angles to both Charlie and the uniformed constable. Without being told, Clough followed his example, occupying the fourth side of the small table and hemming Charlie in. His eyes flicked from one to the other and he shifted in his seat. ‘You know who I am, don’t you, Charlie?’ George asked.

The youth nodded.

‘Speak when you’re spoken to,’ Clough said roughly. ‘I bet that’s what your gran always tells you.

She is your gran, isn’t she? I mean, she’s not your auntie or your niece or your cousin, is she? Hard to tell down your way.’

Charlie twisted his mouth to one side and shook his head. ‘There’s no call for that,’ he protested.

‘I’m helping your lot.’

‘And we’re very grateful that you’ve volunteered to come and give a statement,’ George said, falling effortlessly into Good Cop to dough’s Bad Cop. ‘While you’re here, I wanted to ask you one or two questions. Is that OK with you?’

Charlie breathed heavily through his nose. ‘Aye. Come ahead.’

‘It was impressive, you finding that disturbed spot in the spinney,’ George said. ‘There had been a whole team through there ahead of you, and none of them so much as picked up a trace of it.’

Charlie managed a shrug without actually releasing any of his limbs from their auto-embrace. ‘It’s like the back of my hand, the dale. You get to know a place right well, the slightest little thing just strikes you out of place, that’s all it were.’

‘You weren’t the first from Scardale through there. But you were the first to notice.’

‘Aye, well, happen I’ve got sharper eyes than some of you old buggers,’ he said, attempting bravado but not even making the halfway line. ‘I’m interested, you see, because we find that sometimes people who have been involved in a crime try to include themselves in the investigation,’ George said mildly.

Charlie’s body unwound as if galvanized. His feet slammed on the floor, his forearms on the table.

Startled policemen looked around from the front of the hall. ‘You’re sick,’ he said.

‘I’m not sick, but I’ve got a good idea that somebody around these parts is. It’s my job to find out who. Now, if somebody wanted to take Alison away or do anything to her, it would be a lot easier to manage if it was somebody she knew and trusted. Obviously, you know her. She’s your cousin, you grew up with her. You tell her what records to get her stepfather to buy her. You sit by the fire with her in your cottage while your granny spins her tales of bygone days in sunny Scardale.

You take her to the roller rink in Buxton on Wednesdays.’ George shrugged. ‘You’d have no trouble persuading her to go somewhere with you.’

Charlie pushed himself away from the table, then thrust his trembling hands into his trouser pockets. ‘So?’

George produced the photograph he’d taken from Alison’s room. ‘She kept a photo of you in her bedroom,’ was all he said as he showed it to Charlie.

His face twitched and he crossed his legs. ‘She’ll have kept it because of Ma,’ he said insistently.

‘She loves Ma, and the old witch hates having her photo taken. This must be about the only picture of Ma in existence.’

‘Are you sure, Charlie?’ Clough interjected. ‘Because we think, my boss and me, that she fancied you. A nice young lass like that hanging around, worshipping the ground you walk on, not many blokes would say no to that, would they? Especially a lovely lass like Alison. A ripe fruit, ready for the plucking, ready to fall right into your hand. You sure that’s not what it was like, Charlie boy?’

Charlie squirmed, shaking his head. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, mister.’

‘Has he?’ George asked pleasantly. ‘So how was it, Charlie? Was it embarrassing for you, having this kid trailing around after you when you went to the roller rink? Did Alison cramp your style with the older girls, was that the problem? Did you meet her in the dale yesterday teatime? Did she push you too far?’

Charlie hung his head and breathed deep. Then he looked up and turned to face George. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you treating me like this? All I’ve done is try and help. She’s my cousin.

She’s part of my family. We look out for each other in Scardale, you know. It’s not like Buxton, where nobody gives tuppence about anybody else.’ He stabbed his finger at each of the policemen in turn. ‘You should be out there finding her, not insulting me like this.’ He jumped to his feet. ‘Do I have to stop here?’

George stood up and gestured towards the door. ‘You’re free to leave whenever you want, Mr Lomas. However, we will need to speak to you again.’

Clough rose and walked round to George’s side as Charlie stalked angrily out of the door, all raw-boned clumsiness and outrage. ‘He’s not got the gumption,’ he said.

‘Maybe not,’ George said. The two men walked out in Charlie’s wake, pausing on the threshold as the youth set off down the Scardale road.

George stared after Charlie, wondering. Then he cleared his throat. ‘I’ll be heading home now. I’ll be back before first light in the morning. You’re in charge, at least of CID, till then.’

Clough laughed. It seemed to die in a puff of white breath in the oppressive night air. The and Cragg, sir, eh? That’ll give the villains something to think about. Was there any line of inquiry in particular you wanted us to pursue?’

‘Whoever took Alison must have got her out of the dale somehow,’ George said, almost thinking aloud. ‘He couldn’t have carried her for long, not a normally developed thirteen-year-old girl. If he took her down the Scarlaston valley into Denderdale, he’d have had to hike about four miles before he got to a road. But if he brought her up here to the Longnor road, it’s probably only about a mile and a half as the crow flies. Why don’t you and Cragg do a door-to-door in Longnor this evening, see if anybody noticed a vehicle parked by the side of the road near the Scardale turn?’

‘Right you are, sir. I’ll just find DC Cragg and we’ll get to it.’ George returned to the incident room and arranged for the tracker dogs to work Denderdale the following morning, spent half an hour in Buxton Police Station filling out requisition forms for the forensic lab on the evidence from the spinney and Alison’s hairbrush, then finally set off for home.

The villagers would just have to wait till tomorrow.

Thursday, 12
th
December 1963. 8.06
PM

G
eorge couldn’t remember ever closing his front door with a greater sense of relief. Before he could even take off his hat, the door to the living room opened and Anne was there, taking the three short steps into his arms. ‘It’s great to be home,’ he sighed, drinking in the musky smell of her hair, conscious too that he’d not washed since the previous morning. ‘You work too hard,’ she scolded gently. ‘You’ll do nobody any favours if you work yourself into the ground. Come on through, there’s a fire on and it won’t take me five minutes to warm up the casserole.’ She moved back from his embrace and looked critically at him. ‘You look worn out. It’s a hot bath and bed for you as soon as you’ve finished your tea.’

‘I’d rather have the bath first, if the water’s hot.’

‘And so you shall. I’ve had the immersion on. I was going to have a bath myself, but you’d better take the water. You get yourself undressed and I’ll run the bath.’ She shooed him upstairs ahead of her. Half an hour later, he was in his dressing gown at the kitchen table, wolfing down a generous helping of beef and carrot stew accompanied by a plate of bread and butter. ‘Sorry there’s no spuds,’ Anne apologized. ‘I thought bread and butter would be quicker and I knew you’d need something as soon as you got in. You never eat properly when you’re working.’

‘Mmm,’ he grunted through a mouthful of food.

‘Have you found her, then, your missing girl? Is that why you’re home?’

The food in his mouth seemed to congeal into an indigestible lump. George forced it down his gullet. It felt like swallowing a hairball the size of a golf ball. ‘No,’ he said, staring down at his plate. ‘And I don’t think she’ll be alive when we do.’

Anne’s face paled. ‘But that’s awful, George. How can you be sure?’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘I can’t be sure. But we know she didn’t go off of her own free will. Don’t ask me how, but we know. She’s not from the kind of family where she’d be kidnapped for a ransom. And people who steal children generally don’t keep them alive for long. So my guess is she’s already dead.

And if she’s not, she will be before we can find her, because we’ve got absolutely nothing to go on.

The villagers act like we’re the enemy instead of on their side, and the landscape is so difficult to search properly it feels like even that’s conspiring against us.’ He pushed his plate away and reached for Anne’s cigarettes. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said. ‘How can her mother begin to cope with it?’

‘She’s a strong woman, Ruth Hawkin. I suppose if you grow up in a place where life is as hard as it is in Scardale, you learn to bend rather than break. But I don’t know how she’s holding together.

She lost her first husband in a farming accident seven years ago, and now this. The new husband’s not a lot of use either. One of those selfish beggars who see everything in terms of how it’s going to affect them.’

‘What? You mean a man?’ Anne teased.

‘Very funny. I’m not like that. I don’t expect my tea on the table when I walk through the door, you know. You don’t have to wait on me.’

‘You’d soon get fed up if it wasn’t.’

George conceded with a shrug and a smile. ‘You’re probably right. Us men get used to you women taking care of us. But if our child ever went missing, I don’t think I’d be demanding my tea before my wife went out looking for her.’

‘He did that?’

‘According to one witness.’ He shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

‘Who am I going to tell? The only people I know here are other copper’s wives. And they’ve not exactly taken me to their bosom. The ones my age are all lower ranks’ wives so they don’t trust me, especially since I’m a qualified teacher and none of them have ever done anything more challenging than working in a shop or an office. And the officers’ wives are all older than me and treat me like I’m a silly girl. So you can be sure I’m not going to be gossiping about your case, George,’ Anne said with an edge of acerbity.

‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not been easy for you to make new friends here.’

He reached out to grip her hand in his.

‘I don’t know how I’d go on if I lost a child.’ Almost unconsciously, her free hand slipped to her stomach.

George’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ he asked sharply.

Anne’s fair skin flushed scarlet. ‘I don’t know, George. It’s just that…well, my monthly visitor’s overdue. A week overdue. So…I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean to say anything till I was sure, what with it being a missing child case you’re on. But yes, I think I might be expecting.’ A slow smile spread across George’s face as her words sank in. ‘Really? I’m going to be a dad?’

‘It could be a false alarm. But I’ve never been late before.’ She looked almost apprehensive.

George jumped to his feet and swung her out of her chair, spinning her around in a whirl of joy.

‘It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.’ They staggered to a halt and he kissed her hard and passionately. ‘I love you, Mrs Bennett.’

‘And I love you too, Mr Bennett.’

He pulled her close, burying his face in her hair. A child. His child. All he had to do now was figure out how to manage what had been beyond every parent since Adam and Eve: how to keep it safe. Up to that point, Alison Carter had been an important case to Detective Inspector George Bennett. Now it had symbolic importance. Now it was a crusade.

In Scardale, the mood was as brooding as the limestone crags surrounding the dale. Charlie Lomas’s experience at the hands of the police had flashed round the village as fast as the news of Alison’s disappearance. While the women checked anxiously and regularly that their children were all in bed asleep, the men had congregated in the kitchen of Bankside Cottage, where Ruth and her daughter had lived until her marriage to Hawkin.

Terry Lomas, Charlie’s father, chewed the stem of his pipe and grumbled about the police.

‘They’ve got no right to treat our Charlie like a criminal,’ he said.

Charlie’s older brother John scowled. ‘They’ve got no idea what’s happened to our Alison. They’re just making an example of Charlie so it looks like they’re doing something.’

‘They’re not going to let it go at that, though, are they?’ Charlie’s uncle Robert said. ‘They’ll go through us one by one if they get no change out of Charlie. That Bennett bloke, he’s got a bee in his bonnet about Alison, you can tell.’

‘But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ Ray Carter chipped in. ‘It means he’s going to do a proper job.

He’s not going to settle till he’s got an answer.’

‘That’s fine if it’s the right answer,’ Terry said. ‘Aye,’ Robert said pensively. ‘But how do we make sure he doesn’t get distracted from what he should be doing because he’s too busy persecuting the likes of young Charlie? The lad’s not tough, we all know that. They’ll be putting words in his mouth. For all we know, if they can’t get the right man, they’ll decide to have Charlie anyway and to hell with it.’