A Place of Execution (1999) (22 page)

‘Indeed, sir. But this death is connected to a larger investigation and I require the report tomorrow.

I’m sorry if that interferes with your plans, but that is why the county pays you so handsomely.

Sir.’ George’s smile was pleasant, but his eyes held Blake’s without flinching. The doctor tutted.

‘Oh, very well. But this isn’t Derby, Inspector. We’re a small community out here. Most of us try to bear that in mind.’ He walked briskly away.

‘It’s obviously my week for making friends,’ George remarked as he turned back to Clough.

‘He’s a lazy sod,’ Clough said carelessly. ‘About time somebody reminded him who pays for his Jag and his golf club subscription. You’d think he would have been curious about the identity of a body he’d just been on intimate terms with, wouldn’t you? He’ll be on the blower this afternoon demanding to know what name to put on his report, I bet you.’

‘We’re going to have to go and break the news to Mrs Hawkin,’ George said. ‘And fast. The jungle drums will have been beating.

She’ll know there’s a body on the moors, and she’s bound to be thinking the worst.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a bad day when hearing your brother’s dead passes for good news.’

Kathy Lomas was feeding her pigs, filling their troughs with a mixture of wilted turnip tops and the vegetable trimmings and leftovers of the village. The thunder of galloping feet over the frozen ground caught her attention and she turned to see Charlie Lomas racing down the back field as if the hounds of hell were after him. He would have run straight past her if she hadn’t reached out to grab one of his flailing arms. His momentum whirled him round and cannoned him into the pigsty wall, where he would have tipped right over into the sty if his aunt hadn’t grabbed the back of his heavy leather jerkin.

‘What’s up, Charlie?’ Kathy demanded. ‘What’s happened?’ Winded, he bent double, hands on knees, chest heaving for breath. At last, he managed to stammer, ‘Old Dennis Dearden’s dog found a body in one of his sheep fields.’

Kathy’s hand flew to her chest. ‘Oh no, Charlie. No,’ she gasped. ‘That can’t be right. No, I won’t believe it.’

Charlie struggled into a half-erect position, leaning on the wall and panting. ‘I was down by the Scarlaston. I’ve got some illegal traps down there and I wanted to get them cleared out before the searchers got that far up Denderdale. I cut back up through Carter’s Copse and I overheard a couple of bobbies talking about it. It’s right, Auntie Kathy, they’ve found a body on Dennis Dearden’s land.’

Kathy reached out convulsively for her nephew and clung on to him.

They stood in their awkward embrace till Charlie had his breath back.

‘You’ve got to tell Ruth,’ she finally said.

He shook his head. ‘I can’t. I can’t. I was going to tell Ma.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Kathy said firmly, grabbing his arm above the elbow and marching him across the back fields to the manor. ‘Those bloody bastards,’ she muttered angrily as they went. ‘How dare they be tittle-tattling about it before anybody’s seen fit to tell our Ruth. Well, I’m damned if I’m going to wait on their pleasure to break the news.’ Kathy dragged Charlie into the manor kitchen without knocking. Ruth and Philip were sitting at the kitchen table over the remains of breakfast. His breakfast, Kathy noticed. She didn’t think Ruth had had anything but tea and cigarettes since Alison had disappeared. ‘Charlie’s got summat to tell you,’ she said baldly. She knew the pointlessness of dressing up bad news.

Charlie repeated his stumbling words, anxiously eyeing Ruth. If she hadn’t been sitting down already, she’d have collapsed. What colour was left in her face seeped away till she resembled a putty model. Then she started shivering as if she had a fever. Her teeth were chattering and her whole body was trembling. Kathy crossed the kitchen in half a dozen strides and took hold of her, rocking her as she had her children.

Philip Hawkin appeared oblivious to everything around him. Like Ruth, he’d paled at the news. But that was the only common point in their responses. He pushed his chair back from the table and walked out of the room like a man sleepwalking. Kathy was too occupied with Ruth to take it in at first, but Charlie stood staring after him openmouthed, unable to credit what he’d just seen.

Ruth Hawkin was wearing fresh clothes, George noted. A brown jersey dress under a knobbly heather-mixture cardigan indicated that she had probably gone to bed and tried to sleep for the first time since Alison had vanished. The dark bruises of insomnia told of her failure. She sat at the kitchen table folded in on herself, a cigarette held in shaking fingers. Kathy Lomas leaned against the cooker, arms folded, a frown on her face. ‘I don’t understand,’ Kathy said. ‘Why would Peter think of coming back to Scardale now? When all this is going on?’ Ruth Hawkin sighed. ‘He won’t have been thinking like that, Kathy,’ she said wearily. ‘Nothing penetrates his head except what affects him directly. He’ll have been upset by being at the police station, then when he went for a drink somewhere he thought was safe, he gets terrorized by the landlord. He only knows two places—Buxton and Scardale. But by God, he must have been scared out of his wits if he thought coming back to Scardale was the easy option.’ She crushed out her cigarette and rubbed her face in a washing motion. ‘I can’t bear it.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Kathy said bitterly. ‘We all know who to blame.’

She pursed her lips and glared at George and Clough. ‘No, not Peter. I can bear that. I’ve no grieving to do for him. It’s thinking about Alison I can’t bear. When young Charlie came tearing in saying there was a body up on Dearden’s farm, I couldn’t breathe. It was like I’d been punched in the chest. Everything inside me stopped working.’

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.

Saturday, 14
th
December 1963. 10.24
AM

T
he 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 been 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.’