Val McDermid: Val McDermid 3-Book Crime Collection: A Place of Execution, The Distant Echo, The Grave Tattoo

‘I see, sir,’ Swindells said cautiously. While the information didn’t exactly change anything, it did make the policeman slightly wary, conscious that Scardale was off his beat in more ways than the obvious. Scardale wasn’t just a different world from the bustling market town where Swindells lived and worked; it had the reputation of being a law unto itself. For such a call to come from Scardale, something well out of the ordinary must have happened.

The caller’s voice dropped in pitch, giving the impression that he was talking man to man with Swindells. ‘You must excuse my wife. She’s rather upset. So emotional, women, don’t you find? Look, Officer, I’m sure no harm has come to Alison, but my wife insisted on giving you a call. I’m sure she’ll turn up any minute now, and the last thing I want is to waste your time.’

‘If you’ll just give me some details, sir,’ the stolid Swindells said, pulling his pad closer to him.

Detective Inspector George Bennett should have been at home long since. It was almost eight o’clock, well beyond the hour when senior detectives were expected to be at their desks. By rights, he should have been in his armchair stretching his long legs in front of a blazing coal fire, dinner inside him and Coronation Street on the television opposite. Then, while Anne cleared away the dishes and washed up, he’d nip out for a pint and a chat in the lounge bar of the Duke of York or the Baker’s Arms. There was no quicker way to get the feel of a place than through bar-room conversation. And he needed that head start more than any of his colleagues, being an incomer of less than six months’ standing. He knew the locals didn’t trust him with much of their gossip, but gradually, they were beginning to treat him like part of the furniture, forgiving and forgetting that his father and grandfather had supped in a different part of the shire.

He glanced at his watch. He’d be lucky to get to the pub tonight. Not that he counted that a great hardship. George wasn’t a drinking man. If he hadn’t been obliged by his professional responsibilities to keep his finger firmly on the pulse of the town, he wouldn’t have entered a pub from one week to the next. He’d much rather have taken Anne dancing to one of the new beat groups that regularly played at the Pavilion Gardens, or to the Opera House to see a film. Or simply stayed at home. Three months married, and George still couldn’t quite believe Anne had agreed to spend the rest of her life with him. It was a miracle that sustained him through the worst times in the job. So far, those had come from tedium rather than the heinous nature of the crimes he encountered. The events of the coming seven months would put that miracle to a tougher test.

That night, however, the thought of Anne at home, knitting in front of the television while she waited for him to return, was far more of a temptation than any pint of bitter. George tore a half-sheet of paper off his scratch pad, placed it among the papers he’d been reading to mark his place, and firmly closed the file, slipping it into his desk drawer. He stubbed out his Gold Leaf cigarette then emptied his ashtray into the bin by his desk, always his last act before he reached for his trench coat and, self-consciously, the wide-brimmed trilby that always made him feel faintly silly. Anne loved it; she was always telling him it made him look like James Stewart. He couldn’t see it himself. Just because he had a long face and floppy blond hair didn’t make him a film star. He shrugged into the coat, noting that it fitted almost too snugly now, thanks to the quilted lining Anne had made him buy. In spite of the slight straining across his broad cricketer’s shoulders, he knew he’d be glad of it as soon as he stepped into the station yard and the teeth of the biting wind that always seemed to be whipping down from the moors through the streets of Buxton.

Taking a last look around his office to check he’d left nothing lying around that the cleaner’s eyes shouldn’t see, he closed the door behind him. A quick glance showed him there was nobody left in the CID room, so he turned back to indulge a moment’s vanity. ‘Detective Inspector G. D. Bennett’ incised in white letters on a small black plastic plaque. It was something to be proud of, he thought. Not yet thirty, and a DI already. It had been worth every tedious minute of the three years of endless cramming for the law degree that had eased him on to the fast track, one of the first ever graduates to make it to the new accelerated promotion stream in the Derbyshire force. Now, seven years from swearing his oath of allegiance, he was the youngest plain-clothes inspector the county force had ever promoted.

There was no one about to see the lapse of dignity, so he took the stairs at a run. His momentum carried him through the swing doors into the uniformed squad room. Three heads turned sharply as he entered. For a moment, George couldn’t think why it was so quiet. Then he remembered. Half the town would be at the memorial service for the recently assassinated President Kennedy, a special Mass open to all denominations. The town had claimed the murdered leader as an adopted native son. After all, JFK had practically been there only months before his death, visiting his sister’s grave a handful of miles away in Edensor in the grounds of Chatsworth House. The fact that one of the nurses who had helped surgeons in the fruitless fight for the president’s life in a Dallas hospital was a Buxton woman had only strengthened the connection in the eyes of the locals.

‘All quiet, then, Sergeant?’ he asked.

Bob Lucas, the duty sergeant, frowned and raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. He glanced at the sheet of paper in his hand. ‘We were until five minutes ago, sir.’ He straightened up. ‘It’s probably summat and nowt,’ he said. ‘A pound to a penny it’ll be sorted before I even get there.’

‘Anything interesting?’ George asked, keeping his voice light. The last thing he wanted was for Bob Lucas to think he was the kind of CID man who treated uniforms as if they were the monkeys and he the organ grinder.

‘Missing lass,’ Lucas said, proffering the sheet of paper. ‘PC Swindells just took the call. They rang here direct, not through the emergency switchboard.’

George tried to picture Scardale on his mental map of the area. ‘Do we have a local man there, Sergeant?’ he stalled.

‘No need. It’s barely a hamlet. Ten houses at the most. No, Scardale’s covered by Peter Grundy at Longnor. He’s only two miles away. But the mother obviously thought this was too important for Peter.’

‘And you think?’ George was cautious.

‘I think I’d better take the area car out to Scardale and have a word with Mrs Hawkin, sir. I’ll pick up Peter on the way.’ As he spoke, Lucas reached for his cap and straightened it on hair that was almost as black and glossy as his boots. His ruddy cheeks looked as if he had a pair of Ping-Pong balls tucked inside his mouth. Combined with glittering dark eyes and straight black eyebrows, they gave him the look of a painted ventriloquist’s dummy. But George had already found out that Bob Lucas was the last person to let anyone else put words in his mouth. He knew that if he asked a question of Lucas, he’d get a straight answer.

‘Would you mind if I came along?’ George asked.

Peter Grundy replaced the phone softly in its cradle. He rubbed his thumb along a jaw sandpaper-rough with the day’s stubble. He was thirty-two years old that night in December 1963. Photographs show a fresh-faced man with a narrow jaw and a short, sharp nose accentuated by an almost military haircut. Even smiling, as he was in holiday snaps with his children, his eyes seemed watchful.

Two calls in the space of ten minutes had broken the routine peace of an evening in front of the TV with his wife Meg, the children bathed and in bed. It wasn’t that he hadn’t taken the first call seriously. When old Ma Lomas, the eyes and ears of Scardale, took the trouble to subject her arthritis to the biting cold by leaving the comfort of her cottage for the phone box on the village green, he had to pay attention. But he’d thought he could wait till eight o’clock and the end of the programme before he did anything about it. After all, Ma might be dressing up the reason for her call as concern over a missing schoolgirl, but Grundy wasn’t so sure it wasn’t just an excuse to stir things up for the lass’s mother. He’d heard the talk and knew there were a few in Scardale as thought Ruth Carter had been a bit quick to jump the broomstick with Philip Hawkin, even if he had been the first man to put roses in her cheeks since her Roy had died.