A Place of Execution - Val McDermid

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said, angling towards an almost invisible opening in the brown ferns and the red and green foliage of the brambles. As soon as they entered the spinney, they lost most of the afternoon light. Half blind, George could see why the first wave of searchers might have missed something. He hadn’t fully appreciated how intransigent the landscape was or how easy it could be to miss something as big as, God forbid, a body. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could make out shrubby undergrowth among the trees. Underfoot, the path was slimy with trampled dead leaves. ‘I’ve been telling the squire for months now, this spinney needs thinning out,’ Carter grumbled, pushing aside the whiplash branches of a low-growing elder. ‘You could lose half the High Peak Hunt in here and never be any the wiser.’

      Suddenly, they came upon the rest of the search team. Three PCs and a lad stood in a cluster at a bend in the path. The lad looked no more than eighteen, dressed like Carter in leather jerkin and heavy corduroy trousers. ‘Right,’ said George, ‘who’s going to show me and Mr Thomas what’s what here?’

      One of the constables cleared his throat. ‘It’s just up ahead, sir. Another team had already been through here this morning, but Mr Carter here suggested we should take another look, on account of the undergrowth being so dense, like.’ He waved George and Inspector Thomas through and the others stood back awkwardly to let them pass. The PC pointed to an almost undetectable break in the undergrowth on the south side of the path. ‘It was the lad spotted it. Charlie Lomas. There’s a very faint track of broken twigs and trampled plants. A few yards in, it looks like there’s been a struggle.’

      George crouched down and peered at the path. The man was right. There wasn’t much to see. It was a miracle that any of them had spotted it. He supposed that the inhabitants of Scardale knew their territory so well that what appeared unobtrusive to him would leap out and hit them between the eyes.

      ‘How many of you trampled over there in your size tens?’ Thomas asked.

      ‘Just me and the Lomas lad, sir. We were as careful as we could be. We tried not to disturb anything.’

      ‘I’ll take a look,’ George said. ‘Mr Thomas, could one of your lads phone up to the incident room and get a photographer down here? And I’d like the tracker dogs here as well. Once the photographer’s finished, we’ll also need a fingertip search of the area.’ Without waiting for a response, George carefully held back the branches that overhung the faltering trail and moved forward, trying to keep a couple of feet to the left of the original track. Here, it was even more dim than on the path, and he paused to let his eyes adapt to the gloom.

      The PC’s description had been admirable in its accuracy. Half a dozen cramped steps, and George found what he’d been looking for. Broken twigs and crushed ferns marked an area about five feet by six. He was no countryman, but even George knew that this was recent damage. The shattered branches and stems looked freshly injured. One evergreen shrub that had been partially crushed was only wilted, not yet entirely dead. If this wasn’t connected to Alison Carter’s disappearance, it was a very odd coincidence.

      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.

       6

       Thursday, 12th December 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.

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