Val McDermid - A Place of Execution

Then, with a sigh, he began the distasteful search of Alison’s personal possessions. Half an hour later, he had found nothing unexpected. He’d even flicked through every book on the small bookcase that stood by the bed. Nancy Drew, the Famous Five, the Chalet School, Georgette Heyer, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre held neither secret nor surprise. A well-thumbed edition of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury contained only poetry. The dressing table yielded schoolgirl underwear, a couple of training bras, half a dozen bars of scented soap, a sanitary belt and half a packet of towels, a jewellery box containing a couple of cheap pendants and a baby’s silver christening bracelet inscribed, ‘Alison Margaret Carter’. The only thing he might have expected to find but hadn’t was a bible. On the other hand, Scardale was so cut off from the rest of the world, they might still be worshipping the corn goddess here. Maybe the missionaries had never made it this far.

A small wooden box on the dressing table yielded more interesting results. It contained half a dozen black and white snapshots, most of them curled and yellowing at the edges. He recognized a youthful Ruth Hawkin, head thrown back in laughter, looking up at a dark-haired man whose head was ducked down in awkward shyness. There were two other photographs of the pair, arms linked and faces carefree, all obviously taken on the Golden Mile at Blackpool. Honeymoon? George wondered. Beneath them was a pair of photographs of the same man, dark hair flopping over his forehead. He was dressed in work clothes, a thick belt holding up trousers that looked as if they’d been made for a man much longer in the torso. In one, he was standing on a harrow hitched to a tractor. In the other, he was crouched beside a blonde child who was grinning happily at the camera. Unmistakably Alison. The final photograph was more recent, judging by its white margins. It showed Charlie Lomas and an elderly woman leaning against a dry-stone wall, blurred limestone cliffs in the background. The woman’s face was shadowed by a straw hat whose broad brim was forced down over her ears by the scarf that tied under her chin. All that was visible was the straight line of her mouth and her jutting chin, but it was obvious from her awkwardly bent body that she was far too old to be Charlie Lomas’s mother. As if they were being captured by a Victorian photographer, held still by dire warnings of moving during the exposure, Charlie stood stony-faced and gazed straight at the camera. His arms were folded across his chest and he looked like every gauche and defiant young lad George had ever seen protesting his innocence in a police station.

‘Fascinating,’ he murmured. The photographs of her father were predictable, though he’d have expected to see them framed and on display. But that the only other image Alison Carter treasured was one that included the cousin who had made the convenient discovery in the copse was, to say the least, interesting to a mind as trained in suspicion as George’s. Carefully, he replaced the photographs in the box. Then, on second thoughts, he removed the one of Charlie and the old woman and slipped it into his pocket.

It was among the records that he found his first examples of Alison’s handwriting. On scraps of paper torn from school exercise books, he found fragments of song lyrics that had obviously had some particular meaning for her. Lines from Elvis Presley’s ‘Devil in Disguise’, Lesley Gore’s ‘It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry if I Want To)’, Cliff Richard’s ‘It’s All in the Game’ and Shirley Bassey’s ‘I (Who Have Nothing)’ painted a disquieting picture of unhappiness at odds with the image everyone had projected of Alison Carter. They spoke of the pains of love and betrayal, loss and loneliness. There was, George knew, nothing unusual about an adolescent experiencing those feelings and believing nobody had ever been through the same thing. But if that was how Alison had felt, she’d done a very efficient job of keeping it secret from those around her.

It was a small incongruity, but it was the only one George had found. He slipped the sheets of paper into another plastic bag. There was no real reason to imagine they might be evidence, but he wasn’t taking any chances with this one. He’d never forgive himself if the one detail he overlooked turned out to be crucial. Not only might it damage his career, but far more importantly, it might allow Alison’s killer to go free. He stopped in his tracks, his hand halfway to the doorknob.

It was the first time he’d admitted to himself what his professional logic said must be the case. He was no longer looking for Alison Carter. He was looking for her body. And her killer.

Thursday, 12 thDecember 1963. 6.23 p.m.

Wearily, George walked down the front path of Scardale Manor. He’d check in at the incident room in the Methodist Hall in case anything fresh had cropped up, then he’d drop off the hair samples at divisional HQ in Buxton and go home to a hot bath, a home-cooked meal and a few hours’ sleep; what passed for normal life in an investigation like this. But first, he wanted to have a few words with young Charlie Lomas.

He’d barely made it as far as the village green when a figure lurched out of the shadows in front of him. Startled, he stopped and stared, struggling to believe what he was seeing. His tiredness tripped a giggle inside him, but he managed to swallow it before it spilled into the misty night air. The shape had resolved itself into something an artist might have fallen into raptures over. The bent old woman who peered up at him was the archetype of the crone as witch, right down to the hooked nose that almost met the chin, complete with wart sprouting hairs and black shawl over her head and shoulders. She had to be the original of the photograph he carried in his pocket. The strange suddenness of the coincidence provoked an involuntary pat of the pocket containing her facsimile. ‘You’d be the boss, then,’ she said in a voice like a gate that creaked in soprano.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Bennett, if that’s what you mean, madam,’ he said.

Her skin crinkled in an expression of contempt. ‘Fancy titles,’ she said. ‘Waste of time in Scardale, lad. Mind you, you’re all wasting your time. None of you’ve got the imagination to understand owt that goes on here. Scardale’s not like Buxton, you know. If Alison Carter’s not where she should be, the answer’ll be somewhere in somebody’s head in Scardale, not in the woods waiting to be found like a fox in a trap.’

‘Perhaps you could help me find it, then, Mrs…?’

‘And why should I, mister? We’ve always sorted out our own here. I don’t know what possessed Ruth, calling strangers to the dale.’ She made to push past him on the path, but he stepped sideways to block her.

‘A girl’s missing,’ he said gently. ‘This is something Scardale can’t sort out for itself. Whether you like it or not, you live in the world. But we need your help as much as you need ours.’

The woman suddenly hawked violently and spat on the ground at his feet. ‘Until you show some sign of knowing what you should be looking for, that’s all the help you’ll get from me, mister.’ She veered off at an angle and moved off across the green, surprisingly quick on her feet for a woman who couldn’t, he reckoned, be a day under eighty. He stood watching until the mist swallowed her, like a man who has found himself the victim of a time warp.

‘Met Ma Lomas, then, have you?’ Detective Sergeant Clough said with a grin, looming out of nowhere.

‘Who is Ma Lomas?’ George asked, bemused.

‘Like with Sylvia, the question should be not, “Who is Ma Lomas?” but, “What is she?”’ Clough intoned solemnly. ‘Ma is the matriarch of Scardale. She’s the oldest inhabitant, the only one of her generation left. Ma claims she celebrated her twenty-first the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, but I don’t know about that.’