Val McDermid - A Place of Execution

George leaned forward, one hand clinging to a tree branch for support. There might be important evidence here. He didn’t want to walk over this ground and cause any more harm than the searchers had already done. Even as the thought crossed his mind, his close scrutiny revealed a clump of dark material snagged on the sharp end of a broken twig. Black woolly tights, Ruth Hawkin had said. George’s stomach clenched. ‘She’s been here,’ he said softly.

He moved to his left, circling round the trampled area, stopping every couple of steps to examine what lay before him. He was almost diagonally opposite the point where he’d left the path when he saw it. Just in front of him and to the right, there was a dark patch on the startling white bark of a birch tree. Irresistibly drawn, he moved closer.

The blood had dried long since. But adhering to it, unmistakably, were a dozen strands of bright blonde hair. And on the ground next to the tree, a horn toggle with a scrap of material still attached.

Thursday, 12 thDecember 1963. 5.05 p.m.

George took a deep breath and raised his hand to knock. Before his knuckles could connect with the wood, the door swung open. Ruth Hawkin stood facing him, her drawn face grey in the evening light. She stepped to one side, leaning against the doorjamb for support. ‘You’ve found something,’ she said flatly.

George crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him, determined not to provide the watching eyes with more spectacle than was inevitable. His eyes automatically swept the room. ‘Where’s the WPC?’ he asked, turning to face Ruth.

‘I sent her away,’ she said. ‘I don’t need taking care of like a child. Besides, I reckoned there must be something she could do that would be more use to my Alison than sitting on her backside drinking tea all day.’ There was an acerbic note in her voice that George hadn’t heard there before. Healthy, he thought. This was not a woman who was going to collapse in a whimpering heap at every piece of bad news. He was relieved about that, because he believed he definitely qualified as the bearer of evil tidings.

‘Shall we sit down?’ he said.

Her mouth twisted in a sardonic grimace. ‘That bad, eh?’ But she pushed herself away from the wall and dropped into one of the kitchen chairs. George sat opposite, noticing that she was still dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing the night before. She’d not been to bed, then. Certainly not slept. Probably not even tried.

‘Is your husband out searching?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘I don’t think he was keen. He’s a fair-weather countryman, my Phil. He likes it when the sun shines and it looks like one of his picture postcards. But days like today, cold, damp, a touch of freezing fog in the air, he’s either sitting on top of the stove or else he’s locked in his darkroom with a pair of paraffin heaters. I’ll say this for him, though. Today, he made an exception.’

‘If you like, we can wait till he comes back,’ George said.

‘That won’t alter what you’ve got to say, will it?’ she said, her voice weary.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’ George opened his overcoat and removed two polythene bags from the inside poacher’s pocket. One contained the soft, fluffy ball of material snagged on the broken twig; the other, the smooth, ridged toggle, its natural shades of brown and bone strange against the man-made plastic. Attached to it by strong navy thread was a fragment of navy-blue felted wool. ‘I have to ask you, do you recognize either of these?’

Her face was blank as she reached for the bags. She stared at them for a long moment. ‘What’s this supposed to be?’ she asked, prodding the material with her index finger.

‘We think it’s wool,’ George said. ‘Perhaps from tights like Alison was wearing.’

‘This could be anything,’ she said defensively. ‘It could have been out there for days, weeks.’

‘We’ll have to see what our lab can make of it.’ No point in trying to force her to accept what her mind did not want to admit. ‘What about the toggle? Do you recognize that?’

She picked up the bag and ran her finger over the carved piece of antler. She looked up at him, her eyes pleading. ‘Is this all you found of her? Is this all there is to show?’

‘We found signs of a struggle in the spinney.’ George pointed in what he thought was the right direction. ‘Between the house and the wood where we found Shep, down towards the back of the dale. It’s dark now, so there’s a limit to what we can achieve, but first thing in the morning, my men will carry out a fingertip search of the whole spinney, to see if we can find any more traces of Alison.’

‘But that’s all you found?’ Now there was eagerness in her face.

He hated to dash her hopes, but he couldn’t lie. ‘We also found some hairs and a little blood. As if she’d hit her head on a tree.’ Ruth clapped her hand to her open mouth, suppressing a cry. ‘It really was very little blood, Mrs Hawkin. Nothing to indicate anything but a very minor injury, I promise you.’

Her wide eyes stared at him, her fingers digging into her cheek as if physically holding her mouth closed could somehow contain her response. He didn’t know what to do, what to say. He had so little experience of people’s responses to tragedy and crisis. He’d always had senior officers or colleagues with more experience to blunt the acuteness of other people’s pain. Now he was on his own, and he knew he would measure himself for ever according to how he dealt with this stricken woman.

George leaned across the table and covered Ruth Hawkin’s free hand with his own. ‘I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t grounds for concern,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing to indicate that Alison has come to any serious harm. Quite the opposite, really. And there is one thing that we can be sure of now. Alison hasn’t run away of her own accord. Now, I know that probably doesn’t seem like much of a consolation to you right now, but it means that we won’t be frittering away our resources on things that are a waste of time. We know that Alison didn’t go off on her own and catch a bus or a train, so we won’t be devoting officers to checking out bus and railway stations. We’ll be using every officer we have to follow lines of inquiry that could actually lead us somewhere.’

Ruth Hawkin’s hand fell away from her mouth. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

George gripped her hand. ‘There’s no reason to think so,’ he said.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she asked. ‘I ran out a while back.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘I should have sent yon WPC up to the shop at Longnor for me. That would have been useful.’

Once they were both smoking, he took back the plastic bags and pushed the cigarettes across in their place. ‘You keep these. I’ve more in the car.’

‘Thanks.’ The tightness in her face slackened momentarily and George saw for the first time the same smile that made Alison’s photograph so remarkable.

He let enough time pass for them both to gain some benefit from the nicotine. ‘I need some help, Mrs Hawkin,’ George said. ‘Last night, we had to work against the clock to try and find traces of Alison. And today, we’ve been searching. All the mechanical, routine things that are often successful, that we have to do. But I’ve not had a proper chance to sit down and talk to you about what kind of girl Alison was. If someone has taken her – and I won’t lie to you, that is looking increasingly likely – I need to know everything I can about Alison so that I can work out where the point of contact is between Alison and this person. So I need you to tell me about your daughter.’

Ruth sighed. ‘She’s a lovely lass. Bright as a button, always has been. Her teachers all say she could go to college if she sticks in at her books. University even.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘You’ll have been to university.’ It was a statement, not a question.