A Place of Execution (1999)

by Val McDermid

  ‘Fascinating,’ he murmured. The photographs of her father were predictable, though he’d have expected to see them framed and on display. But that the only other image Alison Carter treasured was one that included the cousin who had made the convenient discovery in the copse was, to say the least, interesting to a mind as trained in suspicion as George’s. Carefully, he replaced the photographs in the box. Then, on second thoughts, he removed the one of Charlie and the old woman and slipped it into his pocket.

  It was among the records that he found his first examples of Alison’s handwriting. On scraps of paper torn from school exercise books, he found fragments of song lyrics that had obviously had some particular meaning for her. Lines from Elvis Presley’s ‘Devil in Disguise’, Lesley Gore’s ‘It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry if I Want To’), Cliff Richard’s ‘It’s All in the Game’ and Shirley Bassey’s ‘I (Who Have Nothing’) painted a disquieting picture of unhappiness at odds with the image everyone had projected of Alison Carter. They spoke of the pains of love and betrayal, loss and loneliness. There was, George knew, nothing unusual about an adolescent experiencing those feelings and believing nobody had ever been through the same thing. But if that was how Alison had felt, she’d done a very efficient job of keeping it secret from those around her. It was a small incongruity, but it was the only one George had found. He slipped the sheets of paper into another plastic bag. There was no real reason to imagine they might be evidence, but he wasn’t taking any chances with this one. He’d never forgive himself if the one detail he overlooked turned out to be crucial. Not only might it damage his career, but far more importantly, it might allow Alison’s killer to go free. He stopped in his tracks, his hand halfway to the doorknob. It was the first time he’d admitted to himself what his professional logic said must be the case. He was no longer looking for Alison Carter. He was looking for her body. And her killer.

  8

  Thursday, 12th December 1963. 6.23PM

  Wearily, George walked down the front path of Scardale Manor. He’d check in at the incident room in the Methodist Hall in case anything fresh had cropped up, then he’d drop off the hair samples at divisional HQ in Buxton and go home to a hot bath, a home-cooked meal and a few hours’ sleep; what passed for normal life in an investigation like this. But first, he wanted to have a few words with young Charlie Lomas. He’d barely made it as far as the village green when a figure lurched out of the shadows in front of him. Startled, he stopped and stared, struggling to believe what he was seeing. His tiredness tripped a giggle inside him, but he managed to swallow it before it spilled into the misty night air. The shape had resolved itself into something an artist might have fallen into raptures over. The bent old woman who peered up at him was the archetype of the crone as witch, right down to the hooked nose that almost met the chin, complete with wart sprouting hairs and black shawl over her head and shoulders. She had to be the original of the photograph he carried in his pocket. The strange suddenness of the coincidence provoked an involuntary pat of the pocket containing her facsimile. ‘You’d be the boss, then,’ she said in a voice like a gate that creaked in soprano.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Bennett, if that’s what you mean, madam,’ he said.

  Her skin crinkled in an expression of contempt. ‘Fancy titles,’ she said.

  ‘Waste of time in Scardale, lad. Mind you, you’re all wasting your time.

  None of you’ve got the imagination to understand owt that goes on here. Scardale’s not like Buxton, you know. If Alison Carter’s not where she should be, the answer’ll be somewhere in somebody’s head in Scardale, not in the woods waiting to be found like a fox in a trap.’

  ‘Perhaps you could help me find it, then, Mrs…?’

  ‘And why should I, mister? We’ve always sorted out our own here. I don’t know what possessed Ruth, calling strangers to the dale.’ She made to push past him on the path, but he stepped sideways to block her. ‘A girl’s missing,’ he said gently. ‘This is something Scardale can’t sort out for itself. Whether you like it or not, you live in the world. But we need your help as much as you need ours.’

  The woman suddenly hawked violently and spat on the ground at his feet. ‘Until you show some sign of knowing what you should be looking for, that’s all the help you’ll get from me, mister.’ She veered off at an 70 angle and moved off across the green, surprisingly quick on her feet for a woman who couldn’t, he reckoned, be a day under eighty. He stood watching until the mist swallowed her, like a man who has found himself the victim of a time warp.

  ‘Met Ma Lomas, then, have you?’ Detective Sergeant Clough said with a grin, looming out of nowhere.

  ‘Who is Ma Lomas?’ George asked, bemused.

  ‘Like with Sylvia, the question should be not, ‘Who is Ma Lomas?’ but, ‘What is she?’’ Clough intoned solemnly. ‘Ma is the matriarch of Scardale. She’s the oldest inhabitant, the only one of her generation left. Ma claims she celebrated her twenty-first the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, but I don’t know about that.’

  ‘She looks old enough.’

  ‘Aye. But who the hell in Scardale even knew Victoria was on the throne, never mind how long she’d been there for? Eh?’ Clough delivered his punchline with a mocking smile.

  ‘So where does she fit in? What relation is she to Alison?’ Clough shrugged. ‘Who knows? Great-grandmother, second cousin once removed, aunt, niece? All of the above? You’d need to be sharper than Burke’s Peerage to work out all the connections between this lot, sir. All I know is that according to PC Grundy, she’s the eyes and ears of the world. There’s not a mouse breaks wind in Scardale without Ma Lomas knowing about it.’

  ‘And yet she doesn’t seem very keen to help us find a missing girl. A girl who’s a blood relative.

  Why do you suppose that is?’ Clough shrugged. ‘They’re all much of a muchness. They don’t like outsiders at the best of times.’

  ‘Was this the kind of attitude you and Cragg came up against last night when you were asking people if they’d seen Alison Carter?’

  ‘More often than not. They answer your questions, but they never volunteer a single thing more than you’ve asked them.’

  ‘Do you think they were all telling you the truth about not having seen Alison?’ George asked, patting his pockets in search of his cigarettes. Clough produced his own packet just as George remembered leaving his with Ruth Hawkin. ‘There you go,’ Clough said. ‘I don’t think they were lying. But they might well have been hanging on to information that’s relevant. Especially if we didn’t know the right questions to ask.’

  ‘We’re going to have to talk to them all again, aren’t we?’ George sighed.

  ‘Like as not, sir.’

  ‘They’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Except for young Charlie Lomas.

  You don’t happen to know where he is, do you?’

  ‘One of the turnips took him up the Methodist Hall to make a statement.

  Must be half an hour ago now,’ Clough said negligently. ‘I don’t ever want to hear that again, Sergeant,’ George said, his tiredness transforming into anger.

  ‘What?’ Clough sounded bemused.

  ‘A turnip is a vegetable that farmers feed to sheep. I’ve met plenty of CID officers who’d qualify for vegetable status ahead of most uniformed officers I’ve met. We need uniform’s cooperation on this case, and I won’t have you jeopardizing it. Is that clear, Sergeant?’ Clough scratched his jaw.

  ‘Pretty much, aye. Though with me not managing to make it to grammar school, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to remember it right.’

  It was, George knew, a denning moment. ‘I tell you what, Sergeant. At the end of this case, I’ll buy you a packet of fags for every day you manage to remember it.’

  Clough grinned. ‘Now that’s what I call an incentive.’

  ‘I’m going to talk to Charlie Lomas. Do you fancy sitting in?’

  ‘It will be my pleasure, sir.’

  George set off towar
ds his car, then suddenly stopped, frowning at his sergeant. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were still on night shift till the weekend?’

  Clough looked embarrassed. ‘I am. But I decided to come on duty this afternoon. I wanted to give a hand.’ He gave a sly grin. ‘It’s all right, sir, I won’t be putting in for the overtime.’

  George tried to hide his surprise. ‘Good of you,’ he said. As they drove up the Scardale lane, George wondered at the sergeant’s capacity to confound him. He thought he was a pretty good judge of character, but the more he saw of Tommy Clough, the more apparent contradictions he found in the man.

  Clough appeared brash and vulgar, always the first to buy a round of drinks, always the loudest with the dirty jokes. But his arrest record spoke of a different man, a subtle and shrewd investigator who was adept at finding the weakness in his suspects and pushing at it until they collapsed and told him what he wanted to hear. He was always the first to eye up an attractive woman, yet he lived alone in a bachelor flat overlooking the lake in the Pavilion Gardens. He’d called round there once to pick Clough up for a last–minute court appearance. George had thought it would be a dump, but it was clean, furnished soberly and crammed with jazz albums, its walls decorated with line drawings of British birds. Clough had seemed disconcerted to find George on his doorstep, expecting to enter, and he’d been ready to leave in record time.

  Now, the man who was always first to claim overtime for every extra minute worked had given up his free time to tramp the Derbyshire countryside in search of a girl whose existence he’d had no knowledge of twenty-four hours previously. George shook his head. He wondered if he was as much a puzzle to Tommy Clough as the sergeant was to him. Somehow, he doubted it.

  George put his musings to one side and outlined his suspicions of Charlie Lomas to his sergeant.

  ‘It’s not much, I know, but we’ve got nothing else at this stage,’ he concluded.

  ‘If he’s got nothing to hide, it’ll do him no harm to realize we’re taking this seriously,’ Clough said grimly. ‘And if he has, he won’t have for long.’

  The Methodist Hall had a curiously subdued air. A couple of uniformed officers were processing paperwork. Peter Grundy and a sergeant George didn’t know were poring over detailed relief maps of the immediate area, marking off squares with thick pencils. At the back of the room, Charlie Lomas’s lanky height was folded into a collapsible wooden chair, his legs wound round each other, his arms wrapped round his chest. A constable sat opposite him, separated by a card table on which he was laboriously writing a statement.

  George walked across to Grundy and drew him to one side. ‘I’m planning on having a word with Charlie Lomas. What can you tell me about the lad?’

  Immediately, the Longnor bobby’s face fell still. ‘In what respect, sir?’ he asked formally. ‘There’s nothing known about him.’

  ‘I know he hasn’t got a record,’ George said. ‘But this is your patch.

  You’ve got relatives in Scardale ‘ ‘The wife has,’ Grundy interrupted.

  ‘Whatever. Whoever. You must have some sense of what he’s like.

  What he’s capable of.’

  George’s words hung in the air. Grundy’s face slowly settled into an expression of outraged hostility. ‘You’re not seriously thinking Charlie’s got something to do with Alison going missing?’

  His tone was incredulous.

  ‘I have some questions for him, and it would be helpful if I had some idea of the type of lad I’m going to be talking to,’ George said wearily. ‘That’s all. So what’s he like, PC Grundy?’

  Grundy looked to his right then to his left, then right again, like a child waiting to cross the road correctly. But there was no escape from George’s eyes. Grundy scratched the soft patch of skin behind his ear. ‘He’s a good lad, Charlie. He’s an awkward age, though. All the lads his age around here, they go out and have a few pints and try to get off with lasses. But that’s not right easy when you live in the back of beyond. The other thing about Charlie is that he’s a bright lad. Bright enough to know he could make something of his life if he could bring himself to get out of Scardale. Only, he’s not got the nerve to strike out on his own yet. So he gets a bit lippy from time to time, sounding off about what a hard time he has of it. But his heart’s in the right place. He lives in the cottage with old Ma Lomas because she doesn’t keep so well and the family likes to know there’s somebody around to bring in the coal and fetch and carry for the old woman. It’s not much of a life for a lad his age, but that’s the one thing he never complains about.’

  ‘Was he close to Alison?’

  George could see Grundy considering how far he could push it. That was one of the hardest parts of his job, this constantly having to stand his ground and prove himself to his colleagues. ‘They’re all close down there,’ Grundy finally said. ‘There was no bad blood between him and Alison that I ever heard.’

  However, it wasn’t bad blood that George was interested in where the two Scardale cousins were concerned.

  Realizing he’d gained all he could from Grundy, he nodded his thanks and strolled towards the rear of the hall, praying he didn’t look as exhausted as he felt. Probably he should wait till morning to interview Charlie Lomas. But he preferred to make his move while the lad was already on the back foot. Besides, there was always the million to one chance that Alison was still alive, and Charlie Lomas might just hold the key to her whereabouts. Even so slim a chance was too much to throw away.

  As he approached, George picked up a chair and dropped it casually at the third side of the table, at right angles to both Charlie and the uniformed constable. Without being told, Clough followed his example, occupying the fourth side of the small table and hemming Charlie in. His eyes flicked from one to the other and he shifted in his seat. ‘You know who I am, don’t you, Charlie?’ George asked.

  The youth nodded.

  ‘Speak when you’re spoken to,’ Clough said roughly. ‘I bet that’s what your gran always tells you.

  She is your gran, isn’t she? I mean, she’s not your auntie or your niece or your cousin, is she? Hard to tell down your way.’

  Charlie twisted his mouth to one side and shook his head. ‘There’s no call for that,’ he protested.

  ‘I’m helping your lot.’

  ‘And we’re very grateful that you’ve volunteered to come and give a statement,’ George said, falling effortlessly into Good Cop to dough’s Bad Cop. ‘While you’re here, I wanted to ask you one or two questions. Is that OK with you?’

  Charlie breathed heavily through his nose. ‘Aye. Come ahead.’

  ‘It was impressive, you finding that disturbed spot in the spinney,’ George said. ‘There had been a whole team through there ahead of you, and none of them so much as picked up a trace of it.’

  Charlie managed a shrug without actually releasing any of his limbs from their auto-embrace. ‘It’s like the back of my hand, the dale. You get to know a place right well, the slightest little thing just strikes you out of place, that’s all it were.’

  ‘You weren’t the first from Scardale through there. But you were the first to notice.’

  ‘Aye, well, happen I’ve got sharper eyes than some of you old buggers,’ he said, attempting bravado but not even making the halfway line. ‘I’m interested, you see, because we find that sometimes people who have been involved in a crime try to include themselves in the investigation,’ George said mildly.

  Charlie’s body unwound as if galvanized. His feet slammed on the floor, his forearms on the table.

  Startled policemen looked around from the front of the hall. ‘You’re sick,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sick, but I’ve got a good idea that somebody around these parts is. It’s my job to find out who. Now, if somebody wanted to take Alison away or do anything to her, it would be a lot easier to manage if it was somebody she knew and trusted. Obviously, you know her. She’s your cousin, you grew up with her. You tell he
r what records to get her stepfather to buy her. You sit by the fire with her in your cottage while your granny spins her tales of bygone days in sunny Scardale.

  You take her to the roller rink in Buxton on Wednesdays.’ George shrugged. ‘You’d have no trouble persuading her to go somewhere with you.’

  Charlie pushed himself away from the table, then thrust his trembling hands into his trouser pockets. ‘So?’

  George produced the photograph he’d taken from Alison’s room. ‘She kept a photo of you in her bedroom,’ was all he said as he showed it to Charlie.

  His face twitched and he crossed his legs. ‘She’ll have kept it because of Ma,’ he said insistently.

  ‘She loves Ma, and the old witch hates having her photo taken. This must be about the only picture of Ma in existence.’

  ‘Are you sure, Charlie?’ Clough interjected. ‘Because we think, my boss and me, that she fancied you. A nice young lass like that hanging around, worshipping the ground you walk on, not many blokes would say no to that, would they? Especially a lovely lass like Alison. A ripe fruit, ready for the plucking, ready to fall right into your hand. You sure that’s not what it was like, Charlie boy?’

  Charlie squirmed, shaking his head. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, mister.’

  ‘Has he?’ George asked pleasantly. ‘So how was it, Charlie? Was it embarrassing for you, having this kid trailing around after you when you went to the roller rink? Did Alison cramp your style with the older girls, was that the problem? Did you meet her in the dale yesterday teatime? Did she push you too far?’

  Charlie hung his head and breathed deep. Then he looked up and turned to face George. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you treating me like this? All I’ve done is try and help. She’s my cousin.

  She’s part of my family. We look out for each other in Scardale, you know. It’s not like Buxton, where nobody gives tuppence about anybody else.’ He stabbed his finger at each of the policemen in turn. ‘You should be out there finding her, not insulting me like this.’ He jumped to his feet. ‘Do I have to stop here?’