A Place of Execution (1999) (49 page)

‘Looking back at it now, I think all she was doing that afternoon was drawing attention to the field between the woodland and the copse so that when I made my revelation to Inspector Bennett it would have all the more weight. It was probably wrong of us to hold back the information, but you have to remember that we had a very insular life in Scardale. We had no idea who these strangers were, whether they would genuinely try to find All or just pick on the likeliest-looking yokel to frame for whatever they decided the crime was. And as Mr Bennett has probably told you, I was the likeliest-looking yokel at that point. Nineteen, all knees and elbows and hormones. Not a pretty sight, I promise you. So of course they had me in for questioning.’

Catherine nodded. ‘George told me. That must have been very unpleasant.’ Charles nodded. ‘I was torn between being outraged that they couldn’t see we were all on the same side and being terrified that they were going to frame me. All I could think of was that I had to find a way of convincing them that I couldn’t have harmed a hair on Ali’s head without actually telling them what my gran had told me to keep to myself for the time being.

‘Of course, as far as the timing of that revelation was concerned, I’ve suspected for a long time that Gran was motivated by the desire to get the mysterious Uncle Peter off the hook. I was entirely oblivious to that at the time, since I didn’t even know he existed until I read about him in the local paper. Remarkable, really, to think the older generation actually did run Scardale as if it were some medieval fiefdom that you could banish undesirables from. But Uncle Peter was still one of the family and Gran always believed blood was stickier than water. So she used the ace she’d kept up her sleeve to divert Inspector Bennett away from the man she was convinced could never have hurt All. ‘I suppose that means I have to bear some of the responsibility for what happened later. Which is not a comfortable thought, I have to confess.’ He sighed. ‘My only excuse is that it had never occurred to me in nineteen years to stand up to my grandmother, and this didn’t seem like the appropriate time to start.’

Finding the entrance to the Scardale lead mine was Charles’s other vivid recollection. Although Catherine found it hard to see that eager young man inside the manicured manager of today, when he spoke about his discovery, all the passion and artlessness of the teenager he had been suddenly became apparent.

‘When my mam came to me that morning and said I was wanted to find an old lead mine inside Scardale Crag, I was gobsmacked. I didn’t believe such a place could exist and me not know about it. I’d lived in the dale all my life, and nobody had ever mentioned it. But what really convinced me that it couldn’t exist was that I would have sworn I knew every inch of Scardale. ‘Just because you live in a place doesn’t mean you have intimate knowledge of it. Take my cousin Brian. He probably knows every blade of grass in his cow pastures.

He’ll know every step of the path from his house to the cowshed, every inch of the way to his favourite fishing beat on the Scarlaston. But that’s all he knows. He never had the instinct to explore. I did, though. When I was a kid, I spent every waking hour that I wasn’t at school or working out in the woods and the fields. First time I climbed the crag I was only seven. I used to run up and down Shield Tor a couple of times a week, just for the hell of it. I loved every inch of Scardale.’ For a moment his face closed down as he was transported back to what he had left behind. ‘I miss it,’ he said abruptly. Then his face cleared, and he was back in memory.

‘So you see, I couldn’t figure out how the lead mine entrance could still exist without me knowing about it. Still, we were all desperate by that stage. Any chance of finding All was worth taking, in our opinion. ‘When I found the entrance, I was stunned. I’d never gone that far along the base of the crag before. In the summer, it was too overgrown, and in the winter it looked as if the way was impassable because of the tumble of rocks that obscured it when you were looking up from the river. In fact, it wasn’t a hard climb at all, and actually, it was right where the book said it would be. ‘What was doubly weird was that somebody else had penetrated Scardale’s secret when I hadn’t. The realization that my knowledge was so flawed was profoundly unsettling. I lost my trust in my own judgement, and that really shook me.

‘Oddly, though, it’s stood me in good stead over the years. I never fall for the flannel. I’m always on my guard against the flatterers. I know now that it’s possible to be hopelessly wrong about someone you see every day and you think you know. So it’s crazy to think you can know anyone on the basis of a few meetings. So, although it didn’t feel like it at the time, something good came out of what happened to All.’ He passed a hand over his jaw. ‘I tell you something, though. I’d happily settle for crap judgement if it meant All was still around.’ As far as background information about the players in the drama was concerned, Charles was much less useful than either Kathy or Janet. He gave an apologetic smile. ‘I was always a bit in my head,’ he said. ‘I was always telling myself stories, making up fantasies about how I was going to escape from Scardale and change the world. Half the time, I never really knew what was going on around me. And as for adult relationships—they were a mystery to me. I just knew that I didn’t seem to want what everybody else in Scardale wanted.’

He took a deep breath and looked straight into Catherine’s eyes. ‘I had to come to London to find out why that was. I’m gay, you see. I never had a name for it all those years I was growing up. I just knew I was different. So you see, I’m not the person to ask if I noticed anything odd about Ruth and Phil’s relationship.’

He smiled. ‘I thought everybody’s relationships were bloody odd.’

May 1998

A
s she nursed a gin and tonic in the upstairs room of the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden, Catherine’s mobile phone rang. ‘Catherine Heathcote. Hello?’ she said, praying it wasn’t Don Smart calling to cancel their interview.

‘Catherine? It’s Paul Bennett. Dad told me you’re in London, is that right?’

‘Yes. I’m down for a few days to talk to some people about the book.’

‘I’m in town too. I’m going back to Brussels tomorrow, but I wondered if you fancied dinner this evening?’

Delighted, Catherine said, ‘Love to,’ and they made arrangements to meet at seven. Cheered by the prospect of dinner with Paul, she looked up to see a gaunt-faced man staring uncertainly across at her. He paid for his pint of bitter, then crossed the room.

‘Are you Catherine Heathcote?’ he asked.

‘Don Smart?’ She half stood and extended her hand to shake his as he nodded and subsided into the chair opposite her. She wouldn’t have recognized him from the description George Bennett had given her. His red hair had faded to a dirty white, he was clean-shaven and his skin was dry and loose, mottled with age spots rather than freckles. The sharp foxy eyes that George had remembered with such clarity were red-rimmed, the whites tainted with a jaundiced yellow tint.

‘Smart by name and smart by nature,’ he said. She didn’t believe a word of it.

‘Thanks for agreeing to talk to me,’ was all she said.

He took an inch off the top of his pint. ‘I’m cutting my own throat,’ he said. ‘By rights, this should have been my book. I covered the story from day one, right through to the trial. But George Bennett would never open up to me afterwards. I suppose I remind him too much of his failure.’

‘His failure?’

‘He desperately wanted to find Alison Carter alive. It was no consolation to him that she was probably long dead before he ever caught the call. I think he’s been haunted by her death ever since, and that’s why he wouldn’t talk to me. He couldn’t sit and look at me and not feel like he’d let Ruth Hawkin down.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Smoke?’

She shook her head.

‘I only ever bother offering hacks these days,’ he said, lighting up with a sigh of pleasure.

‘Everybody else has quit. Even bloody newsrooms are smoke-free these days. So, Catherine, how are you getting along with my book?’

She smiled. ‘It’s interesting, Don.’

‘I’ll bet it is,’ he said bitterly. ‘From day one, word one, I just knew George Bennett was great copy. The man was a bulldog. There was no way he was going to give up on Alison Carter. All the rest of the cops, it was just another job to them. Sure, they felt sorry for the family. And I bet the ones who were fathers themselves went home and gave their daughters an extra-tight hug every night they were out on those moors searching for Alison.

‘But it was different with George. With him, it was a mission. The rest of the world might have given up on Alison Carter, but George couldn’t have been more passionate in her cause if she’d been his own daughter. I spent a lot of time following George Bennett on the Alison Carter case, but I never did figure out why he felt so strongly about it. It was like it was personal.

‘For me, it was a godsend. The job in the northern bureau of the News was my first national newspaper job, and I was on the lookout for the story that would take me to Fleet Street. I’d already done some of the Newss coverage of the Pauline Reade and John Kilbride disappearances, and I thought if I could get the cops to link them to Alison Carter, I’d have a great page lead.’

‘Which you would have done,’ she acknowledged.

His look was sour. ‘George wouldn’t play, of course. He was determined not to hand Alison Carter over to the detectives investigating the other missing children. I don’t know if that was a hunch or just pure none of us had any idea that Ian Brady and Myra Hindley even existed then, but George seemed to know by instinct that whatever had happened to Alison Carter, it was a one-off, and it was his.’

‘But it was thanks to George you finally did get your crack at Fleet Street, wasn’t it?’ Catherine asked.

‘There’s no doubt about that. I got some great stories out of the Alison Carter case. I did those cracking stories with the clairvoyant, I remember. That was my ticket to the big time. Ironically, that meant I never got to write a line of copy about the real Moors Murders revelations.’

Suddenly, Smart was off on the tales of his glory days working as a reporter on various national newspapers, finally returning to the Daily News as deputy night news editor. He’d been made redundant three years before, but still worked three nights a week as a casual newsdesk executive on the News. ‘The reporters they’ve got working for them these days, they haven’t got a clue.

That’s why they need somebody on the night desk that knows what he’s doing.

‘I tell you something, though. The Alison Carter case did more for me than help my career,’ he confessed. ‘Coming on top of the other missing kids, it put me right off the idea of having any children of my own. Unfortunately, my then wife didn’t feel the same. So you could say that my marriage was an incidental casualty of what happened to Alison Carter. What took place in that small Derbyshire village one December night had effects that nobody could have predicted. ‘It’s often the way with cases that involve a genuinely mysterious element. Nobody knows what’s really happened, and everybody’s life gets put under the microscope. Suddenly all sorts of secrets are forced into the open. It’s often not a pretty sight.’

‘Any regrets about the way you covered the case?’ Catherine asked.

His smile was patronizing. ‘Catherine, my love, I was one of the best. Still am one of the best, come to that. My job as I saw it was twofold. First, I had to provide my editor with good strong exclusive stories that made our existing readers stick with us and brought us new readers. Secondly, I was there to be a thorn in the flesh of the police, so they wouldn’t ever get complacent.

‘If that meant the odd barney with the bobbies, well, I had broad shoulders. The nearest George Bennett and I came to blows was over the clairvoyant stories. I got the idea for that from a story I’d read in an American magazine. The tabloid press here was much more staid then 332 than it is now, and one or two of the American publications had that bit of edge we didn’t have.

‘I used to cannibalize them for story ideas all the time. The clairvoyant idea was a classic example of that. I’d read this story about a murder out in the Arizona desert that was supposedly solved by a clairvoyant and that was in the back of my mind when the hunt for Alison Carter started. I put the idea to my editor and he loved it. I knew the British police would never have admitted working with a psychic so my only chance of finding someone with a reputation was to look abroad.

‘I called a friend of mine who worked at Reuters and got him to check their files, and that’s how I came across Madame Charest. I never met the woman, and it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had because she couldn’t speak a word of English. We had to do it all through an interpreter. Of course, I never believed a word of it. But it made great copy.

‘I know George thought it was irresponsible. He thought the only thing I was interested in was the greater good of Don Smart. But it wasn’t just that. The other side of it was that I genuinely wanted her found as much as George did, but news stories die quickly unless there’s more fuel to throw on the flames. To keep Alison Carter’s name and picture in the paper, I needed a fresh angle. The clairvoyant gave me that, and in turn, she gave Alison Carter a few more days in the headlines. ‘In Alison’s case, it probably made no difference. But it might have done,’ he said self-righteously.

‘She was wrong, though, wasn’t she? Your Madame Charest?’ Don Smart grinned and suddenly Catherine saw the fox that George had described. ‘So? It was a bloody good read. If you can do half as well, Catherine, you’ll maybe sell a few more copies of your book than your friends and family can buy between them.’

Don Smart had left a nasty taste in Catherine’s mouth that even a decent glass of burgundy in the Garrick Street wine bar couldn’t dispel. ‘He’s such a self-serving shit,’ she confided in Paul. ‘He’s the kind that started British tabloids sliding into the gutter, and he’s proud of it.’