A Place of Execution (1999) (26 page)

The cavers muttered agreement. Barry fished a packet of cigarettes from a waterproof pouch slung round his neck. ‘You look like you could use one of these,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’ George turned to the two uniformed officers and said, ‘One of you, go back to the caravan and tell Sergeant Clough we’ve found some clothing and we need a full team down here to secure a possible crime scene. And for God’s sake, man, do it discreetly. If anybody asks, we have definitely not found a body. I don’t want a repeat of Friday’s newspaper story.’

One of the bobbies nodded nervously and turned on his heel, jogging back up the path towards the heart of the village. ‘Your job is to make sure nobody who isn’t a police officer comes within twenty yards of this mine entrance,’ George told the other PC before turning back to Barry. ‘That central area in there—is there any chance that any of the other passages are accessible from there?’

Barry shrugged eloquently. ‘It doesn’t look like it. But I can’t be sure without a proper good look.

It’s always possible that there was a way through and somebody backfilled the passage behind them to make it look impassable. But this is a mine, not a cave system. Chances are there’s only one straightforward way in and one straightforward way out. Anybody that dug themselves into the hill is still going to be there, but they’re not very likely to be alive and kicking. I don’t think she’s in there, lad.’ He put a hand on George’s arm then turned away to squat on the rocks with his mates.

It took seven hours for a thorough search of the cave. Trevor the caver brought his camera back underground and meticulously photographed every inch of the walls and floor. There was no way in or out other than the narrow passage. None of the blocked passages showed any sign of recent interference. There was no trace of a body having been disposed of in the mine. George couldn’t decide whether that should depress or encourage him.

By mid-afternoon, a duffel coat with a missing toggle, a pair of tights ripped with such savagery that the legs were entirely separated, and a pair of navy-blue gym knickers were on their way to the county police laboratory, carefully packaged to preserve any forensic traces. But George didn’t need a scientist to tell him that the stains on the damp clothes had a human source.

He’d been a police officer too long not to recognize blood and semen.

Two further discoveries were, if anything, even more disturbing. Embedded in the walls of the cave, one officer had found a distorted lump of metal that had once been a bullet. That had led to an inch-by-inch scrutiny of the fissured limestone. Deep in a crack, a second piece of metal had been found.

This time, there was no mistaking its function. It was, unquestionably, a bullet from a handgun.

The Long Haul 1

Daily News, Friday, 20
th
December 1963, p.5

Heartbreak Christmas for lost girl’s mother

By Staff Reporter Donald Smart

Mrs Ruth Hawkin is not buying a Christmas present for her daughter, Alison, this year. But Alison’s stepfather, Philip, has filled the missing girl’s room with gaily wrapped parcels containing records, books, clothes and makeup. Mrs Hawkin, 34-year-old mother of Alison, cannot face Christmas shopping for her daughter. Nine days ago, she waved goodbye to her daughter as she set out from the family home in the tiny Derbyshire hamlet of Scardale to walk her pet sheepdog. She has not seen her 13-year-old daughter since.

A relative said, ‘If Alison is not found, it will be a very unhappy Christmas for everyone in Scardale.

‘We are a very close-knit community and it has hit us very hard. Everybody is baffled by Alison’s disappearance. She’s a lovely girl and no one can think of any reason why she might have run away.’

Police have questioned thousands of people, combed remote dales and moorland and dragged rivers and reservoirs in vain in the hunt for the pretty blonde schoolgirl.

Two other families will also have a gap at the Christmas table. A month ago, John Kilbride, aged 12, of Smallshaw Lane, AshtonuLyne, disappeared. He was last seen on Ashton Market. Five months ago, 17-year-old Pauline Reade left her home in Wiles-street, Gorton, Manchester, to attend a local dance. Neither has been seen again.

It wasn’t the Christmas George Bennett had envisaged a few months before. He’d been looking forward to his first Christmas in their own home, just him and Anne. He’d reckoned without the pressures of family. Anne was an only child, so there were no conflicting demands on her parents; and being newlyweds, they automatically became the focus for George’s mother and father.

Realizing it would be their first and last chance to celebrate alone, Anne had done her best to persuade their families that a Boxing Day get-together would be just the ticket. She had failed. As it was, they’d barely escaped George’s sister, his brother-in-law and their three small children.

Still, it had been a wonderful lunch. Anne had been planning and working for weeks ahead to make everything run smoothly. Not even Alison Carter’s disappearance could dent her determination that her first Christmas in her own home would be exemplary. And it had been. Once the presents were opened and he’d made the appropriate expressions of delight over socks, shirts, sweaters and cigarettes, George had had little to do except make sure everyone’s glass was topped up with sherry and Babycham for the women, bottled beer for the men. As they’d decided in advance, they revealed Anne’s pregnancy after the Queen’s speech. The mothers rivalled each other in their excitement and, using the washing-up as an excuse, soon disappeared into the kitchen to give the mother-to-be the benefit of their counsel. Anne’s father congratulated George gruffly then settled down with a celebratory brandy and cigar to watch TV. George and his father Arthur remained at the dining table. As usual, they were not entirely comfortable with each other, but the news of the baby had bridged some of the distance a university degree had put between George and his train-driver father.

‘You’re looking tired, lad,’ Arthur said.

‘It’s been a hard couple of weeks.’

‘That missing lass, is it?’

George nodded. ‘Alison Carter. We’ve all been putting the hours in, but we’re not a lot further forward than we were the night she went missing.’

‘Did I not read somewhere in the papers that you’d found some of her clothes?’ Arthur asked, sending a perfect smoke ring heading for the light fitting.

‘That’s right. In a disused lead mine. But all that’s really told us is that she definitely didn’t run away. It hasn’t brought us any closer to finding out what really happened or where she is now.

Except that we also found a couple of bullets embedded in the limestone,’ he added. ‘One was mangled beyond recognition, but we were lucky with the other one. It went into a crack in the limestone wall, so the forensics boys got it out more or less intact. If we ever find the gun it came from, we’ll be able to make a positive identification.’

His father sipped his brandy and shook his head sadly. ‘Poor lass. She’s not going to be alive when you find her, is she?’ George sighed. ‘You wouldn’t find a bookie to give you odds on it. It’s been keeping me awake nights. Especially with Anne in her condition. It changes things, doesn’t it? I’d never given it much thought before. You know how it is—you reckon you’ll find the right girl, get married, have a family. It’s the way things go if you’re lucky. But I’d never sat down and thought about what it would mean to be a father. But knowing that it’s going to happen, and finding it out in the middle of an investigation like this…Well, you can’t help thinking how you’d be feeling if it was your kid.’

‘Aye.’ His father breathed heavily through his nostrils. ‘You’re right, George. Having a kid makes you realize how many hazards there are in the world. You’d go mad if you let yourself brood on it.

You’ve just got to tell yourself that nothing’s going to happen to your own.’ He gave a wry smile.

‘You made it through more or less in one piece.’ It was a cue to swap stories of George’s childhood brushes with danger. But part of him was immune to the shift of subject. Deep inside, Alison Carter was lodged like a crumb in the windpipe. Eventually, George extinguished his cigar and stood up. ‘If you don’t mind, Dad, I’m going to pop out for an hour. My sergeant’s volunteered for Christmas duty, and I thought I’d nip round to the station and wish him a Merry Christmas.’

‘On you go, lad. I’m going to settle down with Anne’s dad and pretend to watch the telly.’ He winked. ‘We’ll try not to snore too loud.’ George pocketed a box of fifty cigarettes he’d been given by an aunt and drove across town to the police station. He found Tommy dough’s desk vacant, apart from the ballistics file on the bullets from the mining cavern. His jacket was slung over the back of his chair, so he couldn’t be far away, George reasoned. He picked up the familiar file and flicked through it again. One bullet was mashed beyond redemption, but the one that had found a crack in the rock had told a distinct story to the firearms examiner.

‘The exhibit is a round-nose full-metalled-jacket lead bullet,’he read. ‘The calibre is.38. The bullet reveals seven lands and grooves, the lands narrow and the grooves broad. The grooves demonstrate a right-hand twist. These rifling marks are consistent with a projectile fired from a Webley revolver.’ The door swung open and Tommy Clough walked in, brow furrowed as he read a telex.

‘Merry Christmas, Tommy,’ George said, tossing the box of cigarettes across the room.

‘Cheers, George,’ Clough said, sounding surprised. ‘What brings you in? Family at war?’ He crossed the room and sat down, shoving the telex in the file.

‘I was sitting there with my paper hat on pulling crackers and eating goose and wondering what kind of Christmas they’re having at Scardale Manor.’

Clough ripped the cellophane off the cigarettes. Straightening up in his seat, he pushed the file to one side and offered the open box to George. ‘I’d say that depends on how bright Ruth Hawkin is.

And on whether we show her this telex.’

‘Meaning?’

Clough took his time lighting a cigarette. ‘Since we didn’t get anywhere through official channels connecting Hawkin to a Webley, I decided to try coming at it sideways. So I sent out a request for information on any reports of stolen Webleys. Amongst the dross, there was one that looked a bit interesting. From St Albans. Two years ago, a Mr Richard Wells reported a break-in at his home.

Among the stolen items was a Webley.38 revolver.’

From his air of expectation, George could tell there was more to come.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘Mr Wells lives two doors away from Philip Hawkin’s mother. The families used to play bridge together once a week. Mr Wells kept his Webley as a souvenir of the war, and he boasted about it often, according to their CID duty man. They never got anyone for the housebreaking, either. The family was away on holiday, so it could have happened at any time that week.’ Clough grinned.

‘Merry Christmas, George.’

‘That’s a better present than a box of fags.’

‘Fancy a run out there? Just to take the air?’

‘Why not?’

They were silent for most of the drive. As they turned into the lane that led to Scardale, George said, ‘Care to elaborate on what you said earlier about their Christmas depending on how bright Mrs Hawkin is?’

‘It’s nothing we haven’t already discussed a dozen times in the last few days,’

Clough said. ‘First off, we’ve got the conflict between what Hawkin told us about his movements on the afternoon Alison went missing and what we heard from Ma Lomas and Charlie. Second, we’ve got the lead mine. Apart from Ma Lomas, everybody in Scardale denies they’d even heard of the old workings, never mind knowing where they were. But the book that details the exact location of the entrance happens to be sitting on a shelf in Philip Hawkin’s library.’

‘And let’s not forget the lab results,’ George said softly. The irresistible conclusion of what they had found in the lead mine was that Alison Carter had been raped and almost certainly murdered.

The blood that stained the clothing had all been group 0, which corresponded with Alison’s medical records. Whoever had stained Alison Carter’s knickers with semen had been a secretor. Thanks to that, the police now knew her assailant’s blood group was A. That was something Philip Hawkin had in common with forty-two per cent of the population. So did three other men in the dale—two of Alison’s uncles and her cousin Brian. What separated them from Philip Hawkin was that they all had alibis for the time of her disappearance. One uncle had been in a pub in Leek following the Christmas fatstock market, and her cousin Brian had been milking the cows with his father. If Alison had been attacked by someone from inside the dale, it was beginning to appear that there was only one possible candidate. ‘It could have been somebody who came up the Scarlaston valley from Denderdale. Somebody who knew her from Buxton. A schoolteacher or a fellow pupil. Or just some pervert who’d been watching her at school,’ Clough said when he returned to the car after closing the gate that obstructed the road into the village.

‘They couldn’t have got there in time. It’s a good hour and a half’s walk from the road in Denderdale up the river banks. And they’d never 172 have got back down there in the dark with Alison, alive or dead. They’d both have ended up in the river,’ George said positively. ‘I agree with you. All the circumstantial evidence points to one man. But we’ve no body, and we’ve no direct evidence. Without that, we can’t justify bringing him in for questioning, never mind charging him.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Damned if I know,’ George sighed. The car came to a halt beside the brown patch of grass that marked where the police caravan had stood. On Superintendent Martin’s orders, it had been towed back to Buxton on the previous Friday. Searches had effectively ended on the same day. There was nowhere left to look.

George stepped out into the chill evening air. The village looked curiously untouched by what had happened. There was no obvious sign that anything had altered, apart from the newspaper poster pasted to the back of the phone box. Around the green, the houses still huddled. Lights burned behind curtains, the occasional bark of a dog split the silence. There were no Christmas trees visible at any of the windows, it was true. Nor were there any holly wreaths on the cottage doors of Scardale. But George wasn’t convinced that there would have been on any other Christmas in Scardale either.