A Place of Execution (1999)

by Val McDermid

  ‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with Alison, though,’ Clough said.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ George said. ‘I’m not committing myself till I know why his family threw him out of Scardale. Whatever it was, it must have been bad if his own sister still won’t speak to him in passing twenty years later.’

  ‘You want him holding on to, then?’ Clough said, unable to keep the doubt out of his voice.

  ‘Oh, I think so. Safest place for him, don’t you think?’ George said over his shoulder as he walked towards the CID office. ‘DCI Carver’s convinced he’s our man, and it’ll take more than my opinion to change his mind. And a police station’s always a leaky sieve. Before closing time, half the town will know Peter Crowther’s been questioned about Alison’s disappearance. I don’t think Waterswallows Lodgings, number seventeen, would be the best place for him in those circumstances.’ He pushed open the door and contemplated his chief inspector, plastered leg propped on a wastepaper bin, evening paper in front of him. The whole room was still fragrant with the unmistakable aroma of fish and chips soaked with vinegar and wrapped in newspaper.

  ‘Got him to tell you where the girl is yet?’ Carver demanded. ‘I don’t think he knows, sir,’ George said, hoping his voice didn’t sound as weary as he felt.

  Carver snorted. ‘Is that what a university education does for you? Unbelievable. I’ll give you till morning to get chapter and verse out of that sad sack in the cells.’ He caught himself. ‘He is still in the cells, I take it? You’ve not let him walk?’

  ‘Mr Crowther is still in custody.’

  ‘Good. I’m off home now, it’s in your hands. If you’ve not got the truth out of him by then, I’m taking over, pot let or no pot leg. He’ll cough, believe you me. He’ll cough for me.’

  ‘I’m sure he will, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go back out to Scardale.’ George withdrew before Carver could offer any further insults to his capabilities.

  ‘Are we?’ Clough asked, following George to the car. ‘Going back to Scardale?’

  ‘I need to know what Peter Crowther did,’ George said bluntly. ‘He’s not going to tell us, so somebody else will have to. I’m tired of people in Scardale that don’t tell us what we need to know.’

  12

  Friday, 13th December 1963. 4.05PM

  George was beginning to think he would dream the road to Scardale for the rest of his life. The car plunged down the narrow defile in the gathering dusk of a gloomy winter afternoon. If the sun had made an appearance through the day’s cloud and mist, he’d certainly missed it, he thought, slowing down as the village green grew near. Men were milling around the police caravan, cups of tea sending wisps of steam to join the wraiths of mist creeping down the dale. The day’s fruitless searching was over with the dying of the light.

  Ignoring them, George crossed the green to Tor Cottage. It was time Ma Lomas stopped behaving like a character from a Victorian melodrama and started taking responsibility for what might happen to Alison if the matriarch and her extended family continued to keep their mouths shut, he told himself resolutely. As he rounded the woodpile that almost blocked the path to her front door, his foot snagged on something and he pitched forward. Only Clough’s quick grasp of his arm prevented him from an ignominious tumble.

  ‘What the hell…?’ George exclaimed, staggering to right himself. He turned and peered through the gathering gloom at Charlie Lomas, sprawled on his back amid a scattered pile of logs, and groaning. ‘I think you broke my ankle,’ Charlie complained. ‘What in the name of God were you doing?’ George demanded, crossly rubbing his arm where Clough’s strong fingers had dug into the muscle.

  ‘I was just sitting here, minding my own business, trying to get five minutes’ peace. It’s not a crime, is it?’ Charlie squirmed to an upright position. He rubbed the back of his hand fiercely across his face and in a gleam of light from the cottage window, George realized the youth’s eyes were bright with tears. He didn’t look capable of abducting a kitten, never mind a teenage girl.

  ‘Thinking about Alison?’ George said gently.

  ‘It’s a bit late to start treating me like a human being, mister.’ Charlie’s shoulders hunched in defiance. ‘What’s the matter with you lot? She was my cousin. My family. Ain’t you got anybody to care about, that you think it’s so bloody strange that we’re all upset?’

  Charlie’s words jolted George’s memory. He’d learned early on in his police life that he couldn’t do the job as well as he wanted unless his personal concerns were battened down firmly, protected from the raw pain and unpleasantness of so much of his work. Mostly, he managed to keep the Chinese walls intact. Occasionally, like now, the two realities collided. Suddenly George remembered that overnight he’d acquired someone new to care about.

  A smile crept over him. He couldn’t help it. He could see the contempt in Charlie Lomas’s eyes and the puzzlement in dough’s. But the sudden consciousness of the child that Anne was carrying was irresistible. ‘What’s so bloody funny?’ Charlie burst out.

  ‘Nothing’s funny,’ George said gruffly, dragging himself back into the appropriate state. ‘I was thinking about my family. And you’re right. I would be devastated if anything happened to them.

  I’m sorry if I offended you.’

  Charlie got to his feet, brushing himself down with his hands. ‘Like I said, it’s a bit late for that now.’ He half turned his head so his eyes were obscured by the shadow. ‘You looking for me or my gran?’

  ‘Your gran. Is she in?’

  He shook his head. ‘She’s not come back yet.’

  ‘Back from where?’

  ‘I saw her when we were coming back from looking for Alison. She was walking across the fields, over between where you found Shep and where we were yesterday, when you found that…stuff.’

  Charlie frowned as if recalling something half buried. ‘It was like she was going over the same road the squire was walking on Wednesday teatime.’ There are times when a particular combination of words shifts the world into slow motion. As the significance of Charlie Lomas’s words sank in, George had the strange swimming sensation of a man whose senses have moved into overdrive, leaving the outside world crawling by at a pitiful pace. He blinked hard, cleared his throat then said carefully, ‘What did you just say, Charlie?’

  ‘I said my gran was walking over the fields. Like she was heading towards the manor the back way,’ he added. He’d obviously decided that in spite of their treatment of him, it was in Alison’s interests to be helpful to this strange policeman who didn’t behave like any copper he’d ever seen in the flesh or at the pictures in Buxton.

  George struggled to keep his self-control. He wanted to grab Charlie by the throat and scream at him but all he said was, ‘You said she was walking the same road as the squire on Wednesday teatime.’ Charlie screwed up his face. ‘So? Why wouldn’t the squire be walking his own fields?’

  ‘Wednesday teatime, you said.’

  ‘That’s right. I particularly remember because of all the fuss later on when Alison went missing.’

  George exchanged a look with Clough. His incredulity met dough’s rage. ‘You were asked if you’d seen anybody in the fields or the woods on Wednesday,’ Clough ground out.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Charlie said defensively.

  ‘I asked you myself,’ Clough said, his lips stretched tight over his teeth, the sibilants hissing.

  ‘No, you never,’ Charlie insisted. ‘You asked if we’d seen any strangers. You asked if we’d seen anything out of the ordinary. And I didn’t. I just saw the same thing I’ve seen a thousand times before—the squire walking his own land. Anyway, it can’t have had anything to do with Alison going missing. Because it was still light enough to see clearly who it was, and according to what you said, Alison didn’t go out till it was nigh on dark. So there’s no call to take that tone with me,’ he added, straightening his shoulders and attempting a maturity he hadn’t earned. ‘Besides, you
were too busy trying to make out I had something to do with it to listen to anything I might have to say.’

  George turned away in disgust, his eyes closing momentarily. ‘We’ll need a statement about this,’ he said, his excitement at the possibilities this information opened up overcoming his frustration at the time wasted because the literal minds ofScardale could see no further than the question as asked. ‘Get yourself up to the Methodist Hall and tell one of the officers there I sent you. And give him every detail. The time, the direction Mr Hawkin was walking in, whether he was carrying anything, what he was wearing. Do it now, please, Mr Lomas, before I give in to the temptation to arrest you for obstructing a police inquiry.’

  He glanced over his shoulder in time to see Charlie’s eyes widen in panic. ‘I never did,’ he said, sounding half his age. ‘He never asked me about the squire.’

  ‘I never asked you about the Duke of Edinburgh neither, but if he was walking the fields, I’d expect you to tell me,’ Clough snarled. ‘Now, don’t waste any more time. Get your arse up the road before I decide to let my boot help you.’

  Charlie pushed past them and broke into a run, heading across the green to one of the muddy Land Rovers parked opposite. ‘Can you believe these people?’ George demanded. ‘Jesus, I’m beginning to wonder if they want Alison Carter found.’ He sighed heavily. ‘We’ll need to talk to Hawkin about this. He’s lied to us, and I want to know the reason why.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But I want to find out about Peter Crowther too.’

  ‘Depending on what the squire’s got to say for himself, Peter Crowther could be irrelevant,’ Clough pointed out.

  George frowned. ‘You don’t seriously think…Hawkin?’ Clough shrugged. ‘Do I think he’s capable of it? I’ve no idea, I’ve hardly spoken to the man. On the other hand, he has lied to us.’ He enumerated the possibilities on short, strong fingers. ‘Either he’s got something to hide, or he’s covering for somebody else he saw, or else he’s criminally absentminded.’

  Before George could respond, the issue was settled by the appearance of Ma Lomas, bundled in a winter coat and headscarf. She cocked her head and said, ‘You’re blocking my path.’

  The two men stepped aside. She carried on towards her door without acknowledgement. ‘We need to speak to you,’ George said. ‘I don’t need to speak to you,’ she retorted, struggling to rumble a large iron key into the door lock. ‘Never had to lock our doors before Ruth Carter brought strangers into the dale.’ The lock turned with a jarring screech of metal on metal.

  ‘Don’t you care what happens to your own flesh and blood?’ George said.

  She turned to face him, eyes narrowed. ‘You know nowt, you.’ Then she opened the door.

  ‘We’ll be going to talk to the squire after we’ve spoken to you,’ Clough chipped in as she was about to disappear inside. She stopped on the threshold, still as a mouse below a hovering hawk.

  ‘We know about him walking the field where you’ve just been. Mrs Lomas, we need to eliminate Peter Crowther from our inquiries if he’s an innocent man.’

  For a moment she stood thinking, letting the seemingly unconnected sentences settle. Then she nodded, cocking her head and fixing Clough with a calculating stare. ‘You’d better come in then,’ she said at last. ‘Mind you wipe your feet. And no smoking in here. It’s bad for my chest.’ They followed her into a parlour no more than nine feet square. A dim room with only one small window, it smelled faintly of camphor and eucalyptus. The stone floor was scattered with faded rag rugs. An armchair sat on either side of a grate flanked by two black iron ovens, each the size of a crate of beer. A kettle sat on one of the ovens, a curl of steam disappearing up the chimney from its spout. A sideboard stood on the opposite side of the room, its surface cluttered with carved wooden animals and roughly polished chunks of limestone containing fossils. In the tiny bay window, three tall ladder-back chairs in black oak loomed above a small dining table, as if threatening it with a beating. The only decorations were dozens of garish picture postcards of everything from Spanish beaches to Scandinavian baroque town halls. Seeing George’s bemused stare, Ma Lomas said, ‘They’re Charlie’s. It’s like pen pals, only postcards. He’s a dreamer. Thing that makes me laugh is that there’s hundreds of people all over the world looking at Squire Hawkin’s postcard of Scardale and thinking Derbyshire village life is milk-white sheep in a field full of sunshine.’ She hobbled across to the chair facing the door and settled herself down, squirming her shoulders until she was comfortable.

  ‘Can I sit down?’ George asked.

  ‘You won’t like the armchair,’ she told him. With her head, she gestured towards the hard chairs.

  ‘Better for your back, anyway.’ They turned a couple of chairs to face her. They waited while she leaned forward, poking the glowing coals ablaze. ‘Peter Crowther’s in custody in Buxton,’ George said when she’d made herself cosy. ‘Aye, I’d heard.’

  ‘Should he be, do you think?’

  ‘You’re the copper, not me. I’m just an old woman who’s never lived outside a Derbyshire dale.’

  ‘We could waste a lot of time trying to connect Peter Crowther to Alison,’ George continued, refusing to be diverted. ‘Time that would be better spent trying to find her.’

  ‘I told you before, the trouble with you and your detectives is that you understand nothing about this place,’ she said, her voice irritated.

  ‘I’m trying to understand. But people in Scardale seem more interested in hindering than helping me. I’ve just had the experience of discovering your grandson had omitted to mention something that could be a vital piece of evidence.’

  ‘That’s hardly surprising, considering the way you treated the lad. How come none of you had the sense to ask if he could have had owt to do with Alison going missing? Because he couldn’t have.

  When she disappeared, he was here in the house with me. That’s what you call an alibi, isn’t it?’ she demanded scornfully.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ George asked dubiously. ‘I might be old, but I’ve got all me chairs at home. Charlie came in just before half past four and started peeling potatoes. I can’t manage them with my arthritis the way it is, so he has to do them. Every night, it’s the same routine. He wasn’t messing about with Alison, he was here, taking care of me.’

  George took a deep breath. ‘It would have saved us a lot of time if either you or Charlie had seen fit to tell us that. Mrs Lomas, in cases involving missing children, the first forty-eight hours are crucial. That time is almost up and we are no nearer finding a young girl who is one of your relatives.’ George’s frustration made his voice rise. ‘Mrs Lomas, I swear I am going to find Alison Carter. Sooner or later, I am going to know what happened here two days ago. If that means searching every house in this village from roof beam to foundations, I’ll do it. If I have to dig up every field and garden in the dale, I’ll do it, and to hell with your crops and livestock. If I have to arrest every one of you and charge you with obstruction or even with being accessories, I’ll do it.’

  He stopped abruptly and leaned forward. ‘So tell me. Do you think Peter Crowther had anything to do with Alison’s disappearance?’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘As far as I know, and believe you me, I know most things around Scardale, Peter hasn’t set foot in this dale since the war ended. I don’t think he even knows Alison exists. And I’d put my hand on the Bible and swear she’s never heard his name.’ Her lips clamped shut, her nose and chin approaching like the points of an engineer’s callipers.

  ‘We can’t be sure about that. The lass has been going to school in Buxton. She’s got the look of her mother. Don’t forget, Mrs Hawkin would have been about Alison’s age when her brother last spent much time around her. With somebody who’s a bit lacking in the top storey, seeing Alison in the street could have triggered off all sorts of memories.’ Ma Lomas folded her arms tightly across her chest and shook her head vigorously as George spoke. ‘I’ll not believe it, I’ll not,’ she sa
id.

  ‘So, should we be interviewing Peter Crowther, Mrs Lomas?’ George asked, his voice gentler again in response to her obvious distress. ‘If he’d have stepped into the dale, we’d all have known.

  Besides, he’d have been at work,’ she added desperately.

  ‘They get Wednesday afternoons off. He could have been here. Mrs Lomas, what did Peter Crowther do that got him sent away?’

  ‘That’s nobody’s business now,’ she said emphatically. Her eyes were screwed up now, as if the firelight were the noonday sun. ‘I need to know,’ George persisted.

  ‘You don’t.’

  Tommy Clough leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his notepad dangling between his calves.

  George envied him his ability to appear relaxed even in an interview as tense as this had become. ‘I don’t think Peter Crowther could hurt a fly,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not the one who makes the decisions. I think it could be a while before Peter sees daylight again. A woman like yourself, Mrs Lomas, who’s never lived outside a Derbyshire dale, you’ll not have any reason to know what prisoners do with men they think have hurt children. What they do drives sane men mad. They hang themselves from the bars on their windows. They swallow bleach. They’d cut their wrists with butter knives if anybody were daft enough to let them have one. Your Peter will be used and abused worse than a street prostitute in a war zone. I don’t think you want that for him. You or anybody else in Scardale. If you did, you’d have seen to it that he caught what for twenty years ago.

  But you let him go. You let him build a bit of a life for himself. What’s the point in standing idly by and letting him lose it now?’

  It was a persuasive speech, but it had no effect. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she said, her head moving almost imperceptibly from side to side. George noisily pushed his chair back, the legs shrieking on the stoneflagged floor. ‘I haven’t the time to waste here,’ he said. ‘If you don’t care about Peter Crowther or about finding Alison, I’ll go to someone who will. I’m sure Mrs Hawkin will tell us anything we want to know. After all, he’s her brother.’