A Place of Execution - Val McDermid

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of the house, Alison’s bedroom had two windows, increasing the sense of space. The windows were long and shallow, each divided into four by deep stone lintels which revealed the eighteen-inch thickness of the walls. He closed the door and stepped into the middle of the room.

      First impressions, George reminded himself. Warm: there was an electric fire as well as the plug-in oil radiator. Comfortable: the three-quarter-sized bed had a thick quilt covered in dark-green satin, and the two basket chairs had plump cushions. Modern: the carpet was thick brown shag pile with swirls of olive-green and mustard running through it, and the walls were decorated with pictures of pop stars, mostly cut from magazines by the looks of their skewed edges. Expensive: there was a plain wooden wardrobe and matching dressing table with a long, low mirror and a vanity stool in front of it, all so unscarred they had to be relatively new. George had seen bedroom suites like that when he and Anne were choosing their own furniture and he had a pretty good idea how much it must have cost. Cheap it wasn’t. On a table under the window was a Dansette record player, dark red plastic with cream knobs. A deep stack of records was piled haphazardly underneath. Philip Hawkin was clearly determined to make a good impression on his stepdaughter, he surmised. Maybe he thought the way to her heart was through the material goods she must have lacked as the child of a widow in a community as impoverished as Scardale.

      George moved across to the dressing table and folded himself awkwardly on to the stool. He caught his eye in the mirror. The last time his eyes had looked like that had been when he’d been cramming for his finals. And he’d missed a patch of stubble under his left ear, a direct result of the lack of vanity of the Methodist faith. The absence of a mirror in the vestry had forced him to shave in his rear-view mirror. No self-respecting advertising agency would hire him to promote anything except sleeping pills. He pulled a face at himself and got to work. Alison’s hairbrush lay bristles upwards on the dressing table, and George expertly removed as many hairs as he could. Luckily, she’d not been too fastidious and he was able to accumulate a couple of dozen, which he transferred to an empty polythene bag.

      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, 12th December 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.

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