Val McDermid - A Place of Execution

‘Let’s follow her, then,’ George said. He wrapped his bleeding thumb with the handkerchief then took the rope from the handler. ‘Come on, girl,’ he encouraged the collie. ‘Show me.’ He shook the rope.

Immediately, Shep bounded to her feet and set off down the trail, tail wagging. They wove through the trees for a couple of minutes, then the track emerged from the trees on to the banks of a narrow, fast-flowing stream. The dog promptly sat down and looked back at him, her tongue hanging out and her eyes bewildered.

‘That’d be the Scarlaston,’ Miller’s voice said behind him. ‘I knew it rose in these parts. Funny river. I’ve heard tell it just sort of seeps out of the ground. If we have a dry summer, it sometimes vanishes altogether.’

‘Where does it lead?’ George asked.

‘I’m not sure. I think it flows either into the Derwent or the Manifold, I can’t remember which. You’d have to look at a map for that.’

George nodded. ‘So if Alison was carried out of the clearing, we’d lose the trail here anyway.’ He sighed and turned away, guiding his torch beam over his watch. It was almost quarter to ten. ‘There’s nothing more we can do in darkness. Let’s head back to the village.’

He practically had to drag Shep away from the Scarlaston’s edge. As they made their slow progress back to Scardale, George fretted about Alison Carter’s disappearance. Nothing made sense. If someone was ruthless enough to kidnap a young girl, surely they wouldn’t show mercy to a dog? Especially a dog as lively as Shep. He couldn’t imagine a dog with the collie’s spirit meekly submitting to having elastoplast tightly wound round its muzzle. Unless it had been Alison who’d done the deed?

If it had been Alison, had she acted on her own initiative or had she been forced to silence her own dog? And if she’d done it for her own ends, where was she now? If she’d been going to run away, why not take the dog with her for protection, at least until dawn broke? The more he thought about it, the less he understood.

George trudged out of the woods and through the field, the reluctant dog trailing at his heels. George found Sergeant Lucas conferring with PC Grundy in the light of a hurricane lamp hanging from the back of the Land Rover. Briefly, he explained the scenario in the woods. ‘There’s no point in trampling through there in the dark,’ he said. ‘I reckon the best we can do is put a couple of men on guard and at first light, we search the woodland inch by inch.’

Both men looked at him as if he’d gone mad. ‘With respect, sir, if you’re intending to keep the villagers out of the wood, there’s not a lot of point in leaving a couple of men to catch frostbite in the field,’ Lucas said wearily. ‘The locals know the lie of the land far better than we do. If they want to get into those woods, they will, and we’ll never know about it. Besides, I don’t think there’s a soul in the place who hasn’t already volunteered to help searching. If we tell them what’s what, they’ll be the last ones to destroy any possible clues.’

He had a point, George realized. ‘What about outsiders?’

Lucas shrugged. ‘All we have to do is post a guard on the gate on the road. I don’t imagine anybody’ll be keen enough to hike in from the next dale. It’s a treacherous path up the Scarlaston banks at the best of times, never mind on a frosty winter night.’

‘I’m happy to trust your judgement, Sergeant,’ George said. ‘I take it your men have been searching the houses and outbuildings?’

‘That’s right. Not a trace of the girl,’ Lucas said, his naturally cheery face as sombre as it could manage. ‘The building out the back of the manor, it’s where the squire develops his photographs. Nowhere for a lass to hide in there.’

Before George could respond, Clough and Cragg appeared from the shadows on the village green. Both looked as cold as he felt, the collars of their heavy winter coats turned up against the chill wind that whistled up the valley. Cragg was flipping back the pages of his notebook. ‘Any progress?’ George asked.

‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ Clough complained, offering his cigarettes round the group. Only Cragg took one. ‘We spoke to everybody, including the cousins she came back from school with. It was Mrs Kathy Lomas’s turn to pick them up at the road end, which she did as per usual. The last she saw of Alison, the lass was walking in the kitchen door of the manor. So the mother’s telling the truth about the lass getting home in one piece. Mrs Lomas went indoors with her lad and never saw Alison again. Nobody saw hide nor hair of the girl after she came home from school. It’s like she vanished into thin air.’

Thursday, 12 thDecember 1963. 1.14 a.m.

George looked around the church hall with an air of resignation. In the pale-yellow light, it looked dingy and cramped, the pale-green walls adding to the institutional flavour. But they needed an incident room large enough to accommodate a CID team as well as the uniformed officers, and there were precious few candidates within striking distance of Scardale. Pressed, Peter Grundy had only been able to come up with either the village hall in Longnor or this depressing annexe to the Methodist Chapel that squatted on the main road just past the Scardale turn-off. It had the advantage not only of being closer to Scardale, but of having a telephone line already installed in what claimed, according to the sign on its door, to be the vestry.

‘Just as well Methodists don’t go in for vestments,’ George said as he stood on the threshold and surveyed the glorified cupboard. ‘Make a note, Grundy. We’ll need a field telephone as well.’

Grundy added the telephone to a list that already included typewriters, witness-statement forms, maps of assorted scales, filing cards and boxes, electoral rolls and telephone directories. Tables and chairs were no problem; the hall was already well furnished with them. George turned to Lucas. ‘We need to draw up a plan of action for the morning,’ he said decisively. ‘Let’s pull up some chairs and see what we need to do.’

They arranged a table and chairs directly below one of the electric heaters that hung suspended from the roof beams. It barely dented the damp chill of the icy night air, but the men were glad of any relief. Grundy disappeared into the small kitchen and returned with three cups and a saucer. ‘For an ashtray,’ he said, sliding the saucer across the table towards George. Then he produced a Thermos flask from inside his overcoat and plonked it firmly on the table.

‘Where did that come from?’ Lucas demanded.

‘Betsy Crowther, Meadow Cottage,’ Grundy said. ‘The wife’s cousin on her mother’s side.’ He opened the flask and George stared greedily at the curl of steam.

Fortified by tea and cigarettes, the three men began to plan. ‘We’ll need as many uniforms as we can muster,’ George said. ‘We need to comb the whole of the Scardale area, but if we draw a blank there, we’ll have to widen the search down the course of the Scarlaston river. I’ll make a note to contact the Territorial Army, to see if they can spare us any bodies to help with the searching.’

‘If we’re spreading the net wider, it might be worth asking the High Peak Hunt if they can help us out,’ Lucas said, hunched over his tea to make the most of its warmth. ‘Their hounds are used to tracking, and their riders know the land.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ George said, inhaling the smoke from his cigarette as if it could warm his frozen core. ‘PC Grundy, I want you to make a list of all the local farmers within, say, a five-mile radius. At first light, we’ll send some men out to ask them all to check their land to see if the girl’s there. If she was running away, she could easily have had an accident, wandering around in the dark.’