by Val McDermid
‘I’m surprised you do,’ Catherine said. ‘You can hardly have been born when it hit the headlines.’
‘Oh, we know all about the Alison Carter case, don’t we, Paul?’ Helen said, almost gleefully.
‘No, Helen, we don’t,’ Paul said, sounding faintly cross. ‘OK, maybe we don’t,’ Helen said, her voice placating, her hand reaching out to touch his arm. ‘But we know a man who does.’
‘Leave it, Helen. Catherine’s not interested in a thirty-fiveyear-old murder case.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong, Paul. I’ve always been fascinated by the case. What’s your connection?’ She stared at his frowning face. Suddenly, something clicked in her brain. A faint resemblance that had chimed in the back of her head when they’d met, and now his name, connected to the Alison Carter case. Rapidly, she put two and two together. ‘Wait a minute…
You’re not George Bennett’s son, are you?’
‘He is,’ Helen said triumphantly.
Paul looked suspicious. ‘You know my dad?’
Catherine shook her head. ‘No, not personally. I know of him, though, because of the Alison Carter case. He did a terrific job on that.’
Paul said, ‘Yeah, well, it was before I was born, and Dad’s never been one to talk about his work much.’
‘It was a really important case, you know. Baby lawyers still have to learn about it because of its implications in murder cases where there’s no body. And there’s never been a book about the case.
All you can find is newspaper accounts from the time and dry-as-dust legal precedents. I’m amazed your father’s not written his memoirs,’ Catherine said. Paul shrugged and ran a hand through neatly barbered blond hair. ‘It’s not his kind of thing. I remember some journalist turning up at the house one time. I must have been about sixteen. This bloke said he’d covered the case at the time and wanted Dad to cooperate on a book about it, but Dad sent him away with a flea in his ear. He said to Mum afterwards that Alison’s mother had gone through enough at the time and she didn’t deserve to have it all raked over again.’
At once, Catherine’s journalistic instincts were on full alert. ‘But she’s dead now, Alison’s mother.
She died in ninety-five. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t talk about the case now.’ She leaned forward, suddenly excited. ‘I’d love to write the inside story of the Alison Carter case. It should be told, Paul. Not least because all the reports at the time glossed over the real truth about Philip Hawkin’s sexual abuse of his stepdaughter. It was an important case. Not just legally, but in the way it affected so many people’s lives.’
Surprisingly, Helen added her support. ‘Catherine’s right, Paul. You know how unscrupulous some journalists are. And you know how these historic cases are always resurfacing. If your dad doesn’t tell his own story, all that’ll happen is that some hack with an eye on the main chance will write about it after he’s dead too and there’s nobody to contradict some sensationalist version of events.
And with our Jan on the doorstep, so to speak, Catherine would be able to get right under the skin of the place.’ Paul held up his hands in mock defeat. Clearly Helen had whatever it took to shift him from borderline hostility to eager helpfulness. ‘All right, all right, girls. You win. I’ll have a word with the old man the next time I call home. I’ll tell him I’ve found the last trustworthy journalist in Europe and she wants to make him a star. Who knows, I might get to bask in his reflected glory. Now, who fancies wandering down to Jacques’s Brasserie for a bucket of mussels?’
A week later, back in London, her phone had rung. The son had worked on the father as no outsider could have. George Bennett was playing in a golf tournament for retired police officers near London the following week and he would meet her for a drink to discuss the possibility of her writing an account of the Alison Carter case based on his recollections. Catherine had dressed carefully for the meeting. Her one Armani suit, low heels. She wanted all the support she could get, and she agreed with her magazine’s fashion editor that there was nothing like superb Italian tailoring to make a woman feel in control. She spent more time than her impatience demanded on applying the tinted moisturizer, eye pencil, lip liner and lipstick she needed to feel good about herself. It took a little more with every passing year. Some of her colleagues had had cosmetic surgery, but they had marriages to consider. Catherine knew it was a lot harder to hold someone once the novelty had worn off than it ever was to find someone else’s someone willing to share some clandestine good times for as long as it lasted. Not that she had designs of that kind on George Bennett. But it wouldn’t hurt to make him feel flattered that she’d taken trouble for him.
He was still handsome, however, and that made her all the more glad she’d made the effort. Silver-blond hair, crooked smile, eyes that still held genuine good nature in spite of thirty years in the police; like Robert Redford, George Bennett was a man whose best days were a memory, but no one could look at him without knowing that there had been splendour in the grass.
And amazingly, George Bennett was finally ready to talk. She suspected a number of reasons. The one he articulated was that now Ruth Carter was dead, he felt able to talk freely without the prospect of causing her more pain. But she also thought that the dead hand of retirement was weighing heavily on him. After he’d retired from the police as a detective chief superintendent at fifty-three, he’d worked as a security consultant for several companies in the Amber Valley, but his wife’s increasing incapacity because of crippling arthritis had induced him to give that up the previous year. George Bennett was clearly not a man who liked to be out of the flow of the world, nor did he relish the obscurity of being just another elderly man to be dismissed as irrelevant.
Catherine thought her suggestion had come at the most opportune moment possible.
Four months later, they had a book contract and Catherine had negotiated a six-month leave of absence from her job. And she was in Scardale, a player at last in the drama that had shaped her adolescence.
41
February 1998
George Bennett stared at his reflection in the kitchen window. The ghost of the garden outside floated behind his features, blurring some of the lines that the last thirty-five years had etched.
Alison Carter’s disappearance had been the first case that had given him sleepless nights, though it had been a long way from the last. But here she was again, stealing sleep from him on a cold winter’s night. Half past five and no chance of slipping back into oblivion.
The kettle clicked off and he turned back to the cool fluorescence of the kitchen. He poured boiling water on the teabag he’d already placed in the mug and prodded it with a spoon until it had produced maximum strength. Too many years of police canteens had left him with a taste for the bitterness of tannin-loaded orange tea. He took the milk from the fridge and poured in just enough to cool the tea to the point where he could drink it immediately. Then he sat down at the kitchen table, shrugging his dressing gown closer to his body. He reached for the packet of cigarettes on the table and lit up.
Now the day of Catherine Heathcote’s first proper interview was upon him, George found himself caught in the snarls of regret. He’d always avoided talking about the case. Paul’s birth had seemed to him the perfect closure, a fresh start that would allow him to put Ruth Carter’s pain behind him.
Of course, it hadn’t been that clean or that easy. There were too many regular reminders in routine police work for him to have managed to wipe Alison Carter from the easily accessible area of his memory. But he’d managed to stick to his resolution not to talk about the case.
None of his colleagues had understood the reason for his silence over what they would have regarded as a triumph worth boasting about at every opportunity. OnlyAnne had really grasped that what underlay his decision was his sense of personal failure. Although he’d overcome tremendous odds to solve Alison’s baffling disappearance and he’d managed to gather enough evidence to hang the m
an responsible, George was plagued by the conviction that he’d taken far too long over it.
Ruth Carter had gone through long miserable weeks of uncertainty and false hope, clinging to the notion that her daughter might still be alive. Not only that, but Philip Hawkin had known more days of freedom than he had deserved. He’d been eating the meals his wife had cooked him, sleeping at night while she lay awake and afraid, walking his land with the certainty of possession, convinced he’d got away with murder. George blamed himself for allowing Hawkin even that brief interlude of security.
And so he had resisted all attempts to persuade him to talk about the case. He’d turned down offers from several writers who wanted to revisit the case through his eyes. Even that ambulance chaser Don Smart had thought he had the right to come knocking on his door and demand his time and his insights. That hadn’t been a difficult request to reject, George thought with a bitter smile.
It was ironic that the very love that had made it possible for him to move forward had been his undoing. He’d known when Paul had first told him and Anne about Helen’s sister in Scardale that if his son was as serious about this woman as he appeared to be, then sooner or later he would have to break his resolution never to revisit the scene of the crime. So far, it hadn’t arisen. But he knew that Helen’s divorce would be finalized soon, and he had a shrewd suspicion that the couple wouldn’t wait too long to marry. That would mean meeting Helen’s sister, her only surviving family, and he wouldn’t be able to avoid Scardale indefinitely. With that prospect hanging over him, Paul’s intercession on behalf of Catherine Heathcote had seemed fateful. It was as if events were conspiring to force him to think about Alison Carter again. He’d decided it wouldn’t hurt just to meet the journalist, to see if she was someone he felt he could trust. His first impression had been that she was just another glossy Fleet Street hack, but as they had talked and she had revealed the impact Alison’s murder had made on her own life, he had realized that he was never going to find anyone better suited to write a story that now seemed as if it were demanding to be told.
The familiar sound of footsteps descending the stair disturbed his thoughts. He looked up to see Anne appear in the doorway, rumpled with sleep. ‘Did I wake you, love?’ he asked, reaching across and switching the kettle on again.
‘My bladder woke me,’ she said wryly, moving slowly across to the chair opposite his. ‘And your side of the bed was cold, so I thought you might fancy some company.’
George got up and spooned the malted chocolate brew Anne loved into a mug. ‘I wouldn’t say no,’ he said as he poured the water in, stirring constantly. He returned to his chair and slid her drink across the table to her. She wrapped fingers twisted with arthritis round the mug, savouring its warmth against the constant throb of her rheumatic pain. ‘Nervous about today?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘As you’d expect, I’m wishing I’d never agreed to this.’
‘It would be a lesser man that didn’t have cold feet over something as important as this,’ she said kindly. ‘You can’t help wanting to get it right, to do Alison some kind of justice.’
He gave a quiet snort of derision. ‘You’re implying higher motives than I possess, love. I’m wishing I’d never agreed to it because I don’t want to see myself exposed in print for the fool I was over Philip Hawkin.’ Anne shook her head. ‘You’re the only one that thinks so, George. In everybody else’s eyes, you were the hero of the hour. If they had a Freedom of Scardale to give, they’d have granted it to you on the spot the day the jury brought in their verdict.’
He shook his head. ‘Maybe so. But you know I’ve never measured myself by other people’s yardsticks, only by my own, and by my standards, I let those people down. I was part of a system that let Alison down in the first place, a system that wouldn’t listen to a young girl’s claims that she was being sexually abused.’
Anne pursed her lips impatiently. ‘Now you’re being daft. Back then, nobody admitted there was any such thing as child sex abuse. Certainly not inside families. If you want to make yourself miserable imagining you failed Ruth Carter, that’s up to you. But I won’t sit by while you beat yourself up over the failings of British society thirty-five years ago. That’s just wallowing, George Bennett, and you know it.’ He smiled, acknowledging she was right. ‘You could be right. Maybe I should have let all this out years ago. Isn’t that what the trick cyclists are always telling us? Letting it out is healthy. Keep it buttoned up and you get all sorts of psychoses.’
Anne mirrored his smile. ‘Like paranoia that you’re to blame for all the wrongs of the world.’
He ran a hand through his hair. ‘There’s another thing, too. I’ve got to lay my ghosts to rest for Paul and Helen’s sake. We’re going to have to go to Scardale one of these days to meet Helen’s sister, and I’ve let Scardale become the bogeyman for me. I’ve got to change that or I’ll spoil it for everybody. And I don’t want to do anything that might ruin the lad’s happiness. Talking to a stranger about the whole mess might just make the difference for me.’
‘I think you could be right, love, and I can’t deny that I’m glad you’ve finally decided to talk about Alison. Apart from anything else, it happened at an important time in our lives. I’ve often had to hold back things I’ve wanted to say, memories I’ve wanted to share, because I knew that if I talked about when I was carrying Paul, it always reminded you of when you were putting your case together against Philip Hawkin. So I won’t be sorry if you opening up to Catherine Heathcote means I’ll be able to talk to you about some of the memories I’ve had to keep to myself. And not just to you, but to Paul too. I know that’s selfish of me, but that’s what I’d like.’
George’s eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘I had no idea you felt like that,’ he protested, shaking his head. ‘How could I not know?’ Anne sipped her drink. ‘Because I never let on, love. But now you’re properly retired, not doing your security work, it’s time we were able to look back on our life together without fear. We’ve still got a future, George. We’re not old, not by today’s standards.
This is our chance to clear the past away once and for all, for you to see that what you did was good, and right, and it made a difference.’ She reached out and put her gnarled hand over his.
‘Time for you to forgive yourself, George.’ The sigh seemed to come from the soles of his feet.
‘Well, I hope Catherine Heathcote’s in a forgiving mood.’ He yawned. ‘For I’m not going to be at my sparkling best at ten this morning unless I get some more sleep.’ He shifted his hand so it gently held Anne’s. ‘Thanks, love.’
‘For what?’
‘For reminding me I’m not the monster I sometimes imagine I’ve become.’
‘You’re not a monster. Well, except when you wake up with a hangover. It’ll be fine, George,’
Anne soothed him. ‘It’s not as if the past holds any surprises, is it?’
42
February ⁄ March 1998
Waking for the first time in her rented cottage in Longnor, Catherine had felt a momentary panic.
She couldn’t remember where she was. She should be sprawled in a warm room with tall sash windows. Instead, her nose was freezing and she was curled into a foetal ball under a strange duvet, the only light seeping round a thin curtain covering a small casement set in a stone wall over a foot thick.
Then memory clicked in with a thrill of excitement that almost banished her irritation at the icy chill of this one-up, one-down stone cottage that she’d taken a six-month lease on. The owners of the holiday cottage had been delighted by her approach. Now she understood why. No one in their right mind would rent this ice-box in winter, she thought as she jumped out of bed, shivering as her long legs were exposed to the air. Sometime today, she’d have to buy some warm pyjamas and a hot-water bottle or she wasn’t going to make it out of Longnor without a recurrence of the chilblains that had made her childhood a misery. She cursed the landlords as colourfully as only a journalis
t can, and ran from the room. The bathroom was a welcome refuge. A wall-mounted heater blew hot air instantaneously, and the power shower was blessedly steaming. She knew already that the living room-kitchen would warm up quickly too, thanks to an efficient gas fire. But the bedroom was purgatory. In future, she resolved, as she returned there after her shower, she’d remember to take her clothes to the bathroom with her.
As she dressed, she reminded herself that she hadn’t slept anywhere this cold since the family home in Buxton before the central heating had been installed when she’d been fifteen. Abruptly, she stopped halfway through pulling her sweater over her head. If she was trying to recreate Scardale in 1963, she couldn’t have ended up in a better place. Alison Carter would have grown up only too familiar with frost on the inside of her bedroom windows in the depths of winter. And with a warm, welcoming cottage kitchen, before her mother had exchanged that for life in the manor. Catherine hadn’t intended her research to involve quite such a degree of authenticity, but since it was being handed to her on a plate, she’d take it and be grateful. Besides, it was less than a hundred yards from Peter Grundy’s home. The retired Longnor constable was bound to be a valuable source, she felt sure. And he would be her entree into village life. She knew exactly how unfriendly village pubs could be to anyone perceived as an outsider, and she didn’t fancy six months of evenings without conversation. Even if it was only the fatstock prices at Leek Market.
Over a breakfast of black coffee and a bacon sandwich, she nicked through the photocopied cuttings she’d laboriously uncovered in the national newspaper archive at Colindale. She wouldn’t have much need of those today; but it didn’t hurt to keep going over the ground so she knew exactly how to shape the series of interviews she was about to embark on with George Bennett.