A Place of Execution (1999) (47 page)

Catherine was more than happy to agree to the lawyer’s suggestion if that was the only way she would get to see inside the manor. Finally, today she would see the interior of Philip Hawkin’s inheritance. Even better, she’d have a guide who could reveal which room had been Alison’s, which Hawkin’s study, and describe the original decor. She couldn’t help speculating about the woman she was about to meet. George Bennett had painted a portrait of a shrewish, pushy woman who had no respect for the police and who constantly nagged and harried at his heels whenever she felt she had cause. Peter Grundy had described her as a woman haunted by what might have been.

From Peter, she had also gleaned some of the bare facts ofKathyLomas’s life. Alison’s aunt lived alone these days. Her husband Mike had died five years before in a farm accident, trampled to death by a berserk bull. Her son Derek had left Scardale to go to university in Sheffield and had become a soil scientist for the United Nations. Kathy, now in her mid-sixties, ran a flock of Jacob’s sheep in Scardale. She spun the fleeces into yarn which she then turned into expensive designer sweaters on a knitting machine that, according to Peter Grundy’s wife, had more controls than the space shuttle.

Kathy and Ruth Carter were cousins, separated by less than a year, connected by blood on both maternal and paternal sides. They had grown into women and mothers side by side. Kathy’s Derek had been born a mere three weeks after Alison. The families’ histories were inextricably intertwined. If Catherine couldn’t get what she needed from Kathy Lomas, the chances were she wasn’t going to get it anywhere else. And if she was as awkward as George had predicted, this was one she would have to handle with consummate skill.

Catherine pulled up outside Lark Cottage, the eighteenth-century house Kathy had lived in continuously since her marriage nineteen years before Alison disappeared. The woman who opened the door was still straight and sturdy, her steel-grey hair pinned up in a cottage loaf. Coupled with her coarse red cheeks, it made her look like Mrs Bunn the Baker’s Wife from Happy Families.

Only her eyes gave the lie to her jolly appearance. They were cool and critical, making Catherine feel she was being appraised and costed in more than merely monetary terms. ‘You’ll be the writer, then,’ Kathy greeted her, reaching to one side and taking a battered anorak from its peg. ‘You’ll be wanting a look at the manor first, I expect.’ Her tone offered no scope for an alternative suggestion.

‘That would be great, Mrs Lomas,’ Catherine said, falling in beside the older woman as they crossed the corner of the green towards the manor. ‘I really appreciate you giving up your time like this for me.’ She cursed herself for starting to gush.

‘I’m not giving it up for you,’ Kathy said briskly. ‘It’s for the sake of Alison’s memory. I often think about our Alison. She were a grand lass. I imagine the life she would have lived if things had gone different. I see her working with children. A teacher, or a doctor. Something positive, useful.

And then I think about the reality.’ She paused at the door of the manor and gave Catherine a bleak, hard stare.

‘If I could turn back the hands of time and change one thing in my whole life, it would be that Wednesday night,’ she said bitterly. ‘I’d not let Alison out of my sight. There’s no point in telling me not to blame myself. I know Ruth Carter went to her grave wondering how she could have changed things, and I’ll go into the ground the same way when it’s my turn.

‘These days, my life seems to be full of regrets. What is it they say? ‘If might have beens were kings and queens, then we’d have kingdoms all.’ Well, I’ve had plenty of years to rue the things undone and the things unsaid. The trouble is, the only place I can say sorry to the people who matter is the graveyard. And that’s why I’m willing to talk to you, Miss Heathcote.’

She took a key from her pocket and unlocked the door, ushering Catherine into the kitchen. Money had clearly been no object when it had been renovated. The pine units and dresser had a patina that indicated their antiquity was the real thing, not some modern reproduction. The worktops were a mix of marble and sealed wood. As well as a dark-green Aga, the room had a matching American-style double-fronted fridge-freezer and a dishwasher. Catherine glanced at the short stack of newspapers on the end of the kitchen table. The top one was dated two days previously. So Janis Wainwright wasn’t long gone, she thought. In spite of that, the kitchen had the empty air of a place long unoccupied.

‘I bet it wasn’t like this in 1963,’ she said drily.

At last, Kathy Lomas managed a smile. ‘You’re not wrong.’

‘Maybe you could tell me what it was like?’

‘I think I’ll make us a cup of tea first,’ Kathy hedged. ‘I appreciate Ms Wainwright letting me see over the place. You know her sister’s engaged to George Bennett’s son?’

‘Aye. It’s a small world, right enough.’ She filled the kettle. ‘I met Helen in Brussels,’ Catherine continued. ‘A nice woman. It’s a shame her sister’s not around.’

‘She’s away a lot. I doubt she’d fancy being involved in a book about a murder,’ Kathy said repressively, clattering two mugs out of a cupboard on to the worktop.

Catherine walked across to the window that gave a view of the village green. She imagined the empty hours Ruth Carter must have spent straining vainly to pick out the rythym of her daughter’s walk approaching the house.

As if reading her thoughts, Kathy spoke. ‘Something inside me turned to stone that night when I watched those policemen milling around the village green. If I was ever in danger of forgetting, the nightmares would be reminder enough. I still can’t see a police uniform in the village without wanting to be sick.’

She turned back to brewing the tea. ‘It changed everything, that night, didn’t it?’ Catherine asked, surreptitiously switching on the tape recorder in her coat pocket.

‘Aye, it did. I’m just glad we had a copper like George Bennett on our side. If it hadn’t been for him, that bastard Hawkin might have got away with it. That’s the other reason why I was willing to talk to you. It’s about time George Bennett got the credit he deserves for what he did for Alison.’

‘You’re one of the few people in Scardale who seem to think so. Most of your family don’t see it like that. Apart from Janet Carter, and Charlie in London, everybody else has refused to talk to me,’

Catherine observed, still hoping she might recruit Kathy’s help in loosening their tongues. ‘Aye, well, that’s up to them. They’ll have their own reasons for that. I can’t say I blame them for not wanting to rake it up again. There’s no good memories for any of us from that time.’ She poured tea from an earthenware pot into two matching mugs. ‘Right then. You want to know what this place looked like?’

They spent an hour going from room to room, with Kathy providing detailed descriptions of the furnishings and decor and Catherine trying to recreate their image in her mind’s eye. She was surprised that she felt no sense of the sinister as Kathy walked her through the house. Catherine had imagined that somehow the events that had led to Alison Carter’s death would have seeped into the very walls of Scardale Manor, leaving their ghosts in the air like motes of dust. But there was nothing of that here. It was simply an imaginatively restored old house that, in spite of the money spent on it, was never going to be particularly distinguished. Even the outhouse Philip Hawkin had used as a darkroom lacked any atmosphere. Now it was simply a storage shed for gardening tools and old furniture, no more or less.

Nevertheless, it was a productive hour for Catherine, allowing her to set her knowledge of events against a concrete backdrop. She said as much as Kathy Lomas locked the door behind them and led Catherine back to Lark Cottage for their formal interview. ‘Aye, well, better you get it right,’

Kathy said. ‘Now, what did you want to ask me?’

In the end, Kathy’s testimony added little to the facts Catherine had learned from George. Its value lay mostly in the inside knowledge the older woman was able to dispense on the personalities involved. By the end of the afternoon, Catherine felt she had finally come close enough to knowing Ruth Carter and Philip Hawkin to write convincingly about them. That in itself had been worth the trip.

‘You’re seeing Janet after,’ Kathy remarked as Catherine wrote the identifying details on the final microcassette. ‘That’s right. She said evenings suited her best.’

‘Aye. With her working full-time, she likes to keep her weekends for her and Alison.’ Kathy got to her feet and gathered the mugs together. ‘Alison?’ Catherine almost yelped.

‘Her lass. Our Janet never wed. Wasted her twenties on a married man. Then she fell pregnant when she was thirty-five and old enough to know better. Some Yank she met when she was staying down south in a hotel at a conference. Any road, he was long gone back to Cincinnati before Janet realized she was in the family way, so she raised the lass herself.’

‘She called her daughter Alison?’

‘Aye. It’s like I said. She’s not forgotten in Scardale. Mind you, Janet was lucky. She had her mum as an unpaid child-minder so she was able to keep on playing at being the career woman.’ There was a surprising note of bitterness in Kathy’s voice. Catherine wondered whether she resented her own children for flying the nest and failing to give her the chance to be a hands-on grandmother, or if she despised Janet for resorting to such measures. ‘What does she do?’

‘She manages a building society branch in Leek.’ Kathy glanced out of her window where the curtains were still undrawn in spite of the darkness outside. The headlights of a car swung into sight from the lane end. ‘That’ll be her now. You’d better be off then.’

Catherine got to her feet, still feeling caught off balance by Kathy Lomas’s unpredictable swings from confiding to brusque. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’ Kathy’s narrow mouth pursed momentarily.

‘Happen,’ she said. ‘It’s been…interesting. Aye, interesting. I’ve told you things I’d forgotten I knew. So, when do we get to read this book?’

‘I’m afraid it’s not due to be published until next June,’ Catherine said. ‘But I’ll make sure you get a copy as soon as the finished version is available.’

‘Make sure you do, lass. I don’t want some reporter knocking on my door asking questions about some book I’ve never read.’ She opened the front door and stood back to allow Catherine to pass into the porch. ‘Tell Janet she owes me for half a dozen eggs.’

The door was closed behind her before Catherine had reached the end of the path. Stumbling a little in the dark, she turned to her right and walked past Tor Cottage, where Charlie Lomas had lived with his grandmother, and turned into the short path leading to Shire Cottage, where Janet Carter had grown up with her parents and three siblings. According to Peter Grundy, her parents had sold it to her three years before when they decided to retire to Spain because of the climate. Catherine couldn’t imagine wanting to live in the house where she’d grown up. She’d been happy enough as a child, but more than ready to make her escape to the freedom and opportunity of London when the chance came.

Whatever had provoked Janet Carter to stay in Scardale, when Catherine saw the interior of Shire Cottage, she realized it probably wasn’t sentimentality.The entire ground floor had been stripped out into a single large living space, broken up by the chimney breast. As one of the newer Scardale cottages—probably early Victorian, Janet explained—the ceilings were higher, so opening up the walls had created a remarkable sense of space. One end of the room held a tiny functional kitchen space with stainless-steel units that reflected the variegated greys of the exposed stone walls. The opposite end was a living space, dominated by the rich colours of Indian wall hangings and rugs. Between was a large pine table which seemed to double as dining space and work area. A teenage girl was sitting at it staring intently into a computer screen. She barely looked up as Janet showed Catherine in. ‘But it’s wonderful,’ Catherine exclaimed in spite of herself.

‘Brilliant, isn’t it?’ Janet’s features had grown even more feline with age.

Her almond-shaped eyes crinkled at the corners as she smiled delightedly.

‘It takes everybody by surprise. It’s much more conventional upstairs, but I wanted to make it completely different down here.’

‘Janet, it’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it in an old cottage.

How would you feel about my magazine doing a photo feature on it?’

Janet smirked. ‘There would be a fee, wouldn’t there?’ Catherine’s answering smile was wry. ‘I think the magazine could manage that. I’m only sorry I can’t offer you one for the book interview.

But publishers…they’re so mean with their money.’ What she meant was that she had no intention of offering any of her substantial advance to someone as obviously grasping as Janet Carter. She wondered how far she’d managed to screw down the price she’d paid her parents for the cottage.

They settled down on a low sofa and Janet poured red wine into heavy glass tumblers, waving a vague hand towards her daughter. ‘Ignore Alison. She won’t hear a word we’re saying. Comes home from school, sticks a ready meal in the microwave then she’s lost in cyberspace. She’s the same age now as All and me were in 1963, you know. When I look at Alison, I feel all the same anxieties my mother must have known, although my life’s so different from hers.

‘Everything changed the day All disappeared,’ Janet recalled, settling down in the manner of a woman who is ready for the conversational long haul. ‘I suppose I never appreciated how frightening it was for my aunt and my parents until I had a child of my own. All I could think about was that All was missing; it certainly never occurred to me that I should be worried on my own account. But for the adults, right from the word go, as well as the awful anxiety about All, there must have been tremendous fear that she might only be the first victim, that none of their kids was safe. ‘Back then, remember, children didn’t know anything about current affairs. We didn’t read the papers or follow the news unless it was about pop groups or film stars. So we were completely oblivious to the fact that there had already been two missing children just up the road in Manchester. All we were aware of was that All going missing meant our freedom was curtailed, and that was a very strange experience for us in Scardale.’ Catherine nodded. ‘I know exactly what you mean. It had the same effect on us in Buxton. Suddenly, we were treated like china.