A Place of Execution (1999) (44 page)

Inevitably, the process set in train by Ruth’s actions had led to a smartening up of the village. Fresh paint gleamed on windows and doors, gardens had been carved out of nothing and even in the grip of winter, early crocuses, dwarf irises and snowdrops provided splashes of colour. And of course, cars had invaded the village green where once there had only been battered Land Rovers and the squire’s Austin Cambridge. A modern Plexiglas kiosk had replaced the old red phone box, but the standing stone still leaned at its familiar angle. Even with the modern 296 cars and the smartened-up cottages, on an afternoon as chill as this, it wasn’t hard to picture Scardale as it had been when she’d first visited as a child and later, innocence dispelled, as a teenager. She’d been sixteen. Two and a half years had passed since Alison Carter’s murder, and Catherine had a boyfriend with a scooter. She’d persuaded him to drive her to Scardale one spring afternoon, so they could see for themselves the place where it had happened. It had, she acknowledged with some shame, been nothing more than ghoulish curiosity. She’d been at that age when outrage was the aim of every activity. They hadn’t had the stomach—or the footwear—for battling through the undergrowth to find the old mine workings, but their adolescent tumblings in the woodland behind the manor house had held an extra frisson for her because of the very notoriety of the spot.

It had also, she now realized, been a way of exorcizing the horror that had unfolded at Philip Hawkin’s trial. Of course, most of the details had been shrouded in the sensational euphemisms of journalese, but Catherine and all her friends knew that something terrible had happened to Alison Carter, the sort of terrible something that they’d only ever beeri warned could happen at the hands of strangers. It had been all the more frightening because it had befallen Alison at the hands of someone she knew and should have been able to trust. For Catherine and her friends, all from sheltered middle–class families, the idea that home didn’t necessarily mean safety had been profoundly unsettling.

On a more mundane level, it had placed constraints on their lives, both parental and self-imposed.

They’d been chaperoned and escorted to a stifling degree, just at a time when the rest of Britain’s teenagers were discovering the Swinging Sixties. Alison’s fate had coloured Catherine’s adolescence with hitherto unsuspected darkness, and she had never been able to forget either the case or the victim. More than any other single factor, it had probably influenced her own decision to shake the dust of Buxton from her heels as soon as she possibly could. University in London, then dogsbody work with a news agency and finally a job as a news feature writer had allowed her to sever the bonds with her past, filling her life with new faces, new fascinations, and leaving no loose ends behind. As she had progressed from one rung of the ladder to the next above it, Catherine had often wondered what Alison’s future would have held. Not that she was obsessed, she told herself. Just infected with the natural curiosity that should afflict any journalist who had grown up at one remove from such a strange and unnerving case.

And now, miraculously, she would be the one finally to unshroud the past and reveal the story behind the story. It was fitting, she thought. There couldn’t be another journalist better qualified to tell this truth. Catherine got out of the car and fastened her Barbour jacket, tucking her scarf tightly round her neck. She crossed the green, and climbed the stile that led to the footpath that she knew would take her through the copse where Shep had been found and on to the source of the Scarlaston. As the frosty grass crunched under her feet, she couldn’t help contrasting her walk with the last time she’d been in Scardale. A hot July afternoon ten years before, the sun blasting out of a brassy-blue sky, the trees a welcome respite from the heat. Catherine and a couple of friends had rented a holiday cottage in Dovedale as a base for a walking holiday in the Peaks. One of their trips had been a hike up the Scarlaston from Denderdale to Scardale. Hot and sticky after their expedition, they’d called a taxi from the phone box on the green then sat on a wall and swapped gossip about their London colleagues while they’d waited. Catherine hadn’t even mentioned Alison, strangely superstitious when it came to sharing the story with fellow journalists. It had never occurred to her then that she would be the person who would manage to persuade George Bennett to break his thirty-five-year silence and talk about the case. Although she’d never forgotten Alison Carter, writing the definitive book on one of the most interesting cases of the century hadn’t even been on Catherine’s agenda. It certainly hadn’t been on her mind the previous autumn in Brussels. But then, in Catherine’s experience, the best stories were never the ones you went looking for. And there was no question in her mind that this was going to be the best story of her career.

October 1997—February 1998

T
he rain poured down in an unrelenting sheet. It might have been bearable if she’d been comfortable and cosy in some glass-fronted bar looking out over the Grand Place, a steaming Irish coffee warming her hands while she gloated over scurrying figures wrestling their umbrellas against the wind. But kicking her heels on a wet Wednesday afternoon in a concrete Eurobox with a view of other office blocks while she waited for a Swedish commissioner to remember their appointment wasn’t Catherine’s idea of a good time. It wasn’t at all what she’d had in mind when she’d planned her little jaunt to Euroland.

Although Catherine was the commissioning editor for features on a glossy women’s monthly, she had never lost her taste for the news features that had first earned her a reputation. She liked from time to time to escape the stresses of day-to-day bureaucracy and the pettiness of office politics.

Her excuse was the need to remain in touch with her creative side, and to keep abreast with the changing circumstances faced by the writers she employed. So periodically, she would set up a feature that allowed her to do the research, the interviews and the writing. She’d thought it would be interesting to do a series of interviews with leading women in the EU. She’d reckoned without the endless bureaucracy and the dismal weather. Not to mention the fact that meetings always overran and nobody was ever on time for their interviews. Sighing, Catherine picked up the phone in the conference room and called her minder, a British press officer called Paul Bennett. She’d expected him to be offhand and up himself, like most government press officers, but he’d been a pleasant surprise. Once they’d discovered they’d both grown up in Derbyshire, the relationship had run even more smoothly, and Paul had managed to sort out most of her glitches so far.

‘Paul? It’s Catherine Heathcote. Sigrid Hammarqvist is a no-show.’

‘Oh bugger,’ he said with exasperation. ‘Can you hold a minute?’

Some classical music shrieked in her ears, the violins angry mosquitoes. Catherine sometimes wished she knew one piece of classical music from another, but she doubted that would be much help to her right then. She moved the receiver far enough from her ear to avoid the irritation but close enough to hear Paul when he came back on the line. A couple of minutes passed, then he spoke. ‘Catherine? I’m afraid it’s bad news. Or good, depending on your view of Mrs Hammarqvist. She’s had to go to Strasbourg for a meeting. Won’t be back till the morning, but her secretary promises faithfully she’s put you in for her eleven o’clock tomorrow. If that suits?’

‘My turn to say, ‘oh, bugger,’ Catherine said wryly. ‘I was hoping to catch the shuttle back tonight.’

‘Sorry,’ Paul said. ‘The Scandies have a tendency to see journalists as a bit too low down the food chain to lose sleep over.’

‘It’s not your fault. Thanks for sorting it out for me, anyway. And at least I get another night in sunny Brussels,’ she added ironically. Paul laughed. ‘Yeah, right. I don’t like to think of you hanging about at a loose end, though. Listen, if you’ve not got any other plans, why don’t you come round to our flat for a drink?’

‘No, don’t worry, I’ll be fine,’ Catherine said with professional insouciance.

‘I’m not just inviting you out of a sense of duty,’ he said insistently.

‘I’d like you to meet Helen.’

His partner, she recalled. An interpreter and translator with the Commission. ‘I’m sure that’s exactly what she fancies after another day in the Tower of Babel,’ she said ironically.

‘She reads your magazine every month, and she’ll kill me if I pass up the chance to bring you home for a glass or three of wine. And she’s another Northern lass,’ he added, as if that should clinch it.

Something had, for just after seven, Catherine found herself air-kissing Helen Markiewicz. Not exactly a typical Derbyshire greeting, she’d thought sardonically as she checked out Paul’s partner.

She certainly looked like she could be one of Catherine’s magazine’s target group. Thirty-something, her dark hair cut short in a tousled mop, falling forward over a broad forehead. She had a heart-shaped face, with straight dark brows, high cheekbones and a generous smile. Her make–up was subtle but effective, just as the style pages recommended for the professional woman. Helen seemed vaguely familiar, and Catherine wondered if she’d passed her in the corridors of the EU buildings she’d been in over the past few days. Someone so striking and stylish would have caught her eye, however unconsciously. She could see exactly why Paul was eager to show her off.

As Paul poured generous glasses of red wine, the two women settled into opposite corners of a squashy sofa. ‘Paul tells me Mrs Hammarqvist stood you up,’ Helen said, the traces of a Yorkshire accent still strong in her voice. ‘That must be a bit like steeling yourself to go to the dentist only to find he’s gone home early.’

‘She’s not that bad,’ Paul protested.

‘She’d give Grendel’s mother a run for her money,’ Helen said obscurely.

‘I’m sure Catherine won’t let her get away with anything.’

‘Oh, I’m sure she won’t, love.’ Helen grinned at Catherine. ‘Did he tell you I’m your number one fan? No bullshit—I actually have a subscription.’

‘I’m impressed,’ Catherine said. ‘But tell me, how did you two meet? Is this a Euro-romance?’

‘Watch her, Helen, she’s already sussing out the feature for next year’s Valentine’s Day edition.’

‘Not everybody brings their work home with them,’ Helen teased Paul back. ‘Yes, Catherine, we met in Brussels. Paul was the first person I’d met in the Commission with a northern accent, so we had an instant connection.’

‘And I fancied her like hell, so she had no chance,’ Paul added, looking over at Helen.

‘Where are you from, Helen?’

‘Sheffield,’ she replied.

‘Just over the Pennines from me. I grew up in Buxton.’ Helen nodded. ‘My sister’s over that way now. Do you know a place called Scardale?’

Catherine recognized the name with a jolt of surprise. ‘Of course I know Scardale.’

‘Our Jan moved there a couple of years ago.’

‘Really? Why Scardale?’ Catherine asked.

‘Just one of those things. My aunt lived with us for years and she inherited a house there from a distant relative of her late husband. Some second cousin, or something. When my aunt died, it went to our mum.

And when she died three years ago, she left it to me and Jan. It had always been rented out, but Jan fancied living in the country, so she decided to give the tenants notice and she took it over. It’d drive me crazy, living out there in the middle of nowhere, but she loves it. Mind you, she does a lot of travelling with her work, so I don’t suppose she gets the chance to get too fed up with it.’

‘What does she do?’ Catherine asked.

‘She’s got a consultancy business. She works mainly for big multinationals doing psychological assessments of key staff. She’s only been doing it a few years now, but she’s done really well,’

Helen said. ‘She’d have to, mind you, to pay for heating that barn of a house.’ There was only one property in Scardale that fitted that description.

‘She’s not living in Scardale Manor, is she?’ Catherine asked.

‘You obviously know the place,’ Helen laughed. ‘That’s right. So how come you know a poky little hole like Scardale so well?’

‘Helen,’ Paul said, a warning note in his voice. Catherine gave a twisted smile. ‘There was a murder in Scardale when I was a teenager. A girl was abducted and killed by her stepfather. She was the same age as I was.’

‘Alison Carter?’ Helen exclaimed. ‘You know about the Alison Carter case?’

‘I’m surprised you do,’ Catherine said. ‘You can hardly have been born when it hit the headlines.’

‘Oh, we know all about the Alison Carter case, don’t we, Paul?’ Helen said, almost gleefully.

‘No, Helen, we don’t,’ Paul said, sounding faintly cross. ‘OK, maybe we don’t,’ Helen said, her voice placating, her hand reaching out to touch his arm. ‘But we know a man who does.’

‘Leave it, Helen. Catherine’s not interested in a thirty-fiveyear-old murder case.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Paul. I’ve always been fascinated by the case. What’s your connection?’ She stared at his frowning face. Suddenly, something clicked in her brain. A faint resemblance that had chimed in the back of her head when they’d met, and now his name, connected to the Alison Carter case. Rapidly, she put two and two together. ‘Wait a minute…

You’re not George Bennett’s son, are you?’

‘He is,’ Helen said triumphantly.

Paul looked suspicious. ‘You know my dad?’

Catherine shook her head. ‘No, not personally. I know of him, though, because of the Alison Carter case. He did a terrific job on that.’

Paul said, ‘Yeah, well, it was before I was born, and Dad’s never been one to talk about his work much.’

‘It was a really important case, you know. Baby lawyers still have to learn about it because of its implications in murder cases where there’s no body. And there’s never been a book about the case.

All you can find is newspaper accounts from the time and dry-as-dust legal precedents. I’m amazed your father’s not written his memoirs,’ Catherine said. Paul shrugged and ran a hand through neatly barbered blond hair. ‘It’s not his kind of thing. I remember some journalist turning up at the house one time. I must have been about sixteen. This bloke said he’d covered the case at the time and wanted Dad to cooperate on a book about it, but Dad sent him away with a flea in his ear. He said to Mum afterwards that Alison’s mother had gone through enough at the time and she didn’t deserve to have it all raked over again.’