A Place of Execution (1999)

by Val McDermid

  The fifth stroke. The linen bag appears as if by a magic trick. The hangman drops it over Hawkin’s head with the ease of practice. Now it’s faster because nobody has to look at the man who will be dead inside a minute, his eyes have ceased to implore them, to stare with the wall-eyed panic of the condemned animal. The hangman pulls the bag down and smooths it round the neck so the linen won’t catch in the eye of the noose. The sixth stroke. The hangman slips the noose over his head, checking that the brass eye which had replaced the traditional slip-knot is positioned behind Hawkin’s ear for maximum speed in the fracture and dislocation process that makes hanging theoretically swift and relatively painless.

  The seventh stroke. The hangman steps back, signals to his assistant. The assistant pulls out the cotter pin that acts as a safety measure in the gallows mechanism. Then, almost in the same instant, the hangman pulls the lever.

  The eighth stroke. The trap falls away, Hawkin plunges down in the fatal drop.

  The ninth stroke. It is over.

  George knew there was sweat on his lip. He could see his hand tremble as it reached for his cigarettes. Tiny human gestures lost to Hawkin now, as they had been lost earlier to Alison Carter.

  Only with the release of his breath did he realize he’d been holding it. He rubbed a hand over his face, feeling the rough skin with something like gratitude.

  When the phone rang, he jumped.

  Within the same five minutes, Philip Hawkin had left the number of the living and Paul George Bennett had joined them. Tommy Clough and George never did get together for that drink.

  39

  February 1998

  Even a pale winter sun made the White Peak dramatic. The chill blue of the sky contrasted with the tired green of the fields, which seemed to have picked up a tinge of grey from the dry-stone walls.

  There were more shades of grey than seemed possible; the off-white of limestone cliffs, striated and stippled with a spectrum that ranged from dove through battleship to almost black; the darker tones of the barns and houses that dotted the landscape; the flat matt-grey of slate roofs, splashed with the white of hoarfrost where the sun had failed to reach; the dirty grey of moorland sheep.

  Nevertheless, it was the green and blue of grass and sky that dominated the landscape.

  The scarlet coupe cruising smoothly down the narrow country road stood out like an exotic parrot in an English wood. As the Methodist Chapel came into view on the right, the blonde woman behind the wheel touched the brakes softly. The car slowed gradually and she changed down a gear when she caught sight of a road sign she didn’t recall. Pointing to a narrow turning on the left, it read, ‘Scardale’. At last, she thought. The unfamiliar road sign was a timely reminder that the world had changed, she realized. Nowadays people who didn’t know where they were going had to be able to find Scardale. If she succeeded as well as she hoped, there would be plenty of others who would be seeking that guidance. With a shiver of excitement, she swung the car round the bend.

  Even though she vaguely recalled the sudden dips and rises of the twisting road, she kept her speed down. The high limestone walls had kept the weak February sunshine off the single-track road and it was still heavily rimed with frost, save where previous traffic had exposed the black tarmac. It wouldn’t be an auspicious start to the project if she skidded and damaged her paintwork, she reminded herself.

  It came as no shock to Catherine Heathcote when the dry-stone walls suddenly gave way to towering cliffs of streaked grey limestone. What was a surprise was that there was no longer a gate across the road, separating public from private. Now, the only indications that once Scardale had deliberately cut itself off were the stone gateposts and the cattle grid that her wide-profile tyres bumped softly over.

  Nothing in the landscape had changed significantly, she realized. Shield Tor and Scardale Crag still loomed above the dale. Sheep still safely grazed, although the dictates of fashion had imposed a flock of Jacob’s sheep among the more familiar hardy moorland ewes. The scatterings of woodland were more mature, it was true, but they’d been well maintained, with new saplings replacing the trees that had been cropped or felled by the harsh weather. But it still felt like leaving the world behind and entering a parallel universe, Catherine thought. For all the change in the view, she could have been a child again, peering from the back seat over the adults’ shoulders as they drove down into this remote world to find the mysterious source of the seeping Scarlaston on a summer Sunday afternoon. Only when she drew up on the edge of the village green was real change apparent. In the years since Hawkin’s execution, a new prosperity had come to Scardale. She reminded herself of what she’d learned when she’d first written about Alison Carter’s murder a dozen years before in a news feature commissioned because a new ‘no body’ case had hit the headlines. Catherine’s research in the local paper archives and among her mother’s bridge-playing cronies had revealed that when Ruth Hawkin had inherited the dale and the village from her husband, she had decided to move away from the memories. She had sold the manor house and set up a trust to administer the land and the farms. Tenants had been given the opportunity to buy their homes, and over the intervening years some had been sold to outsiders. Ruth Hawkin had also proved impossible to track down, and had refused all Catherine’s attempts to secure an interview via the solicitor who acted for the trust.

  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, fill
ing 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.

  40

  October 1997—February 1998

  The 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 Penni
nes 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?’