A Place of Execution (1999) (48 page)

Everywhere we went, we had to have an adult with us. My mum wouldn’t even let me take the dog for a walk in Grin Low woods on my own. Ironic really, when it turned out the danger was so close to home. But it must have been a thousand times worse for you, with all the fear and anxiety right on your own doorstep.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Janet said with feeling. ‘We were used to running free in the dale. We were never indoors in the summer, and even in the dead of winter, we’d be up on the hills, or following the Scarlaston down into Denderdale, or just hanging around in the woods. Because Derekand All and I were practically the same age, we were like triplets, never apart. Then suddenly, it was just me and Derek and we were stuck indoors. Like prisoners. God, it was dull.’

‘People forget what a drag it was being a young teenager in the early sixties,’ Catherine said, remembering only too well how much of a part boredom had played in her own adolescence.

‘Especially in a place like Scardale,’ Janet said. ‘You went to school and all your friends were talking about what they’d been watching on the TV, what they’d seen at the pictures, who they’d got off with at the church dance. We had none of that. They used to take the piss out of us Scardale kids all the time because we never had a clue what the rest of the world was on about. We weren’t so much listening to a different drum as stone bloody deaf. Well, you’ll remember if you were at school in Buxton.’ Catherine nodded. ‘I was the year above you at High Peak. As I remember, it wasn’t just the Scardale kids that got the piss taken out of them. We were equally horrible to everybody from the outlying villages.’

‘I can imagine. There’s nobody crueller to each other than kids. And compared to what happened to us after All went missing, being called names was the least of our pains. When I remember the weeks after she disappeared, the most vivid memory that comes to mind is sitting in my bedroom with Derek, listening to Radio Luxembourg on this huge old wireless we had. The reception was terrible, full of static and feedback. It was freezing in there as well—that was long before central heating came to Scardale. We used to sit in the bedroom with our winter coats on. But even now, there are certain songs that take me right back. The Searchers’

Needles and Pins-, Cilia Black’s Anyone Who Had a Heart, Peter and Gordon’s World Without Love; and the Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand. Whenever I hear them, I’m back in my room, sitting on the pink candlewick bedspread, Derek sitting on the floor with his back to the door, his arms round his knees. And no All.

‘You take so much for granted when you’re a child. You spend every day in somebody’s company, and it never crosses your mind that one day they might not be there any more. In a way, you know, I feel lucky that you’re writing this book. So many of us lose people and there’s never anything to prove they were ever there except what’s in our heads. At least I’m going to be able to pick up your book and know that All really was here. Not for long enough, but she was here.’

May 1998

G
eorge Bennett paused for breath, hands on hips as he sucked in the mild, humid air. His son waited a few steps ahead, savouring the spectacular view from the Heights of Abraham across the deep gorge carved by the River Derwent to the dramatic profile ofRiber Castle on the opposite hill.

They’d taken the cable car from Matlock Bath up to the summit and now they were walking the wooded ridge, heading for a winding path that would bring them gradually back down to the river.

Paul couldn’t even begin to count the number of walks he and his father had taken over the years.

As soon as he was old enough to keep up, George had taken him walking in the dales and peaks of Derbyshire. Some of those days were carved in his memory, like climbing Main Tor the day before his seventh birthday. Others had disappeared apparently without trace, only surfacing when he revisited the same territory with Helen on one of their occasional visits. When he came home alone, as he had this weekend, he still liked to go out on the hills with his father, though these days George favoured routes that avoided the challenging climbs and reckless scrambles that they’d tackled when he’d been younger and fitter. Paul turned back to face his father, who had stopped panting, though his face was still scarlet from the effort of the short but steep section they’d just completed. ‘You OK?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine,’ George said, straightening up and moving to Paul’s side. ‘I’m just not as young as I was.

It’s worth it for the view, though.’

‘That’s one of the things I really miss, living in Brussels. I got spoilt, growing up with countryside like this on the doorstep. Now, if we want to go for a walk with a decent hill, we’ve got to drive for hours. So we tend not to bother. And working out in the gym’s no substitute for this.’ His gesture encompassed the horizon.

‘At least it doesn’t rain in the gym,’ George said, pointing to clouds further down the valley with the shadow of rain beneath them. ‘We’ll have that to contend with in half an hour or so.’ He started walking, Paul falling into step beside him. ‘I’ve not been out as much as I’d like lately myself,’ he continued. ‘By the time I’d spent the morning with Catherine and done the garden and all the other domestic bits and pieces, I hardly had time for anything more than the odd round of golf.’ Paul grinned. ‘So it’s all my fault, then?’

‘No, I’m not complaining. In a funny kind of way, I’m glad you talked me into it. I’d been bottling it up for far too long. I’d thought dealing with it would be more traumatic than it turned out.’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘All these years I’ve been advising my officers to confront their fears, to get back on the horse, and I’ve been doing the very opposite.’ Paul nodded. ‘You always taught me that it’s better to face up to the bogeyman.’

‘Aye, as long as you pick the ground for the confrontation,’ George said wryly. ‘Anyway, it turned out that the Alison Carter case wasn’t as much of a big bad bogeyman as I’d thought. And Catherine made it very easy for me. She’s done her background research, I’ll give her that. So a lot of the time, we were concentrating on quite detailed stuff and that made me realize that I’d actually done a pretty good job in the circumstances.’ They came to a bend in the path and George stopped and faced his son.

He took a deep breath. ‘There is one thing I want to tell you because I don’t want you reading it in the book for the first time. It’s something your mother and I have always kept from you. When you were little, we didn’t tell you because we thought it might frighten you. You know how kids are—all that imagination turns something pretty insignificant into a big deal. And then when you were older, well, there never seemed to be an appropriate time.’

Paul smiled uncertainly. ‘Better get it over with, then. Tell me now.’ George reached for his cigarettes and fussed over lighting one in the slight breeze that drifted along the hill. ‘The day you were born was the day they hanged Philip Hawkin,’ he finally said. Paul’s smile melted into an expression of bewilderment. ‘My birthday?’ he said.

George nodded. ‘I’m afraid so. I got the news that you’d been born just after they hanged him.’

‘That’s why you always made a big deal of my birthday? To try to take 324 your mind off the fact that you could never forget the other anniversary?’ Paul said, unable to keep the hurt from his voice. George shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he protested. ‘That’s not how it was. No, you being born was like—I don’t know how to put it—like a sign from the gods that I could put Alison Carter behind me, make a new start. Every year, it wasn’t Philip Hawkin’s hanging that I remembered on your birthday. It was—listen to me, I sound like some American self-help book—it was the sense of renewal that your birth gave me. Like a promise.’ The two men stood staring at each other, George’s face pleading with his son to believe him. A moment passed in silence, then Paul stepped forward and put his arms round his father in a clumsy hug. ‘Thanks for telling me,’ he mumbled, suddenly aware how much he loved his father, although their physical contact had always been rare. He dropped his arms and grinned. ‘I can see why you wouldn’t want me to find out something like that from Catherine’s book.’

George smiled. ‘Judging by your reaction, you’d have been sure to take it the wrong way.’

‘Probably,’ Paul acknowledged. ‘But I can see why you didn’t tell me when I was a kid. That would have given me nightmares for sure.’

‘Aye. You always were an imaginative little bugger,’

George said, turning away to stub out his cigarette under his boot heel. He looked over his shoulder at Paul. ‘Oh, and another thing. If you want, next time you come over with Helen, maybe we could take a run out to Scardale and meet her sister.’

Paul grinned. ‘Helen would like that. She’d like that a lot. Thanks, Dad. I really appreciate your offer. I know how hard it must have been for you to make it.’

‘Aye, well,’ George said brusquely. ‘Come on, lad, let’s get off the hill before that rain comes and drowns us.’

Catherine had expected her return to London to be a relief from the narrow, quiet life she’d been leading in Longnor. It came as a shock to find that the city that had been her home for over twenty years seemed alien: too loud, too dirty, too fast. Even her beloved flat in Notting Hill seemed ridiculously large for one person, its cool pastels and modern furnishings somehow insubstantial compared to the thick stone walls and mismatched furniture of the tiny cottage in Derbyshire.

The idea of rushing round filling her spare moments with social activities seemed strange too, although she did force herself to arrange dinner with a couple of friends and colleagues. It wouldn’t do to become too out of touch with the world of work, she told herself firmly. And besides, after two more interviews, a meeting with the editor who had commissioned her book and a brainstorming session with a TV documentary producer who wanted to make a programme based on her research, she reckoned she was entitled to some unrelieved pleasure.

The first of her two interviewees was Charlie—or as he now preferred, Charles Lomas. He was the only one of her cast of characters—apart, of course, from Alison herself-who had shown up in her newspaper searches. She’d found a couple of feature articles about him, though neither of them mentioned the traumatic events of 1963 and 1964. The reason Charles Lomas had made the feature pages of the national newspapers was nothing to do with Scardale. Rather than remain in the dale where he’d been expected to carry on the family farming tradition, Charles had left Scardale in the winter of 1964. He hitchhiked to London where he found work as a messenger boy for a music publishing company in Soho. He was lucky to arrive at the time when the whole country seemed to be swinging to the Mersey beat. Within a matter of months, his northern accent had earned him a part-time job singing in a group. He ended up organizing their gigs and within five years, he had a profitable business managing rock bands.

By the time Catherine tracked him down, he had an international music publishing empire and still managed half a dozen of Britain’s highest-grossing rock musicians. In his reply to her written request for an interview, he’d faxed back that he’d talk to her simply because he believed his family owed a debt of gratitude to George Bennett and he couldn’t think of another way to repay it.

When his secretary ushered her into his fifth-floor office with its views of Soho Square, Catherine found herself taken aback. With his neatly barbered silver hair swept back from a high forehead, his manicured hands and his smooth cheeks gleaming from a recent shave, his designer jeans and shirt, it was hard to imagine the Scardale farmer Charles Lomas might have become. But it soon became clear he had inherited his grandmother’s legendary storytelling abilities. Before he could bring himself to talk about Alison, he entertained Catherine with gossipy tales of the music business for half an hour.

On the third time of asking, he finally answered her question about Alison. ‘That girl was a complete no-shit,’ he said admiringly. ‘She never had any problem speaking up if she was pissed off with you. You knew where you were with her. Janet was always a bit two-faced, she’d be little miss sweetness to your face and bitch behind your back. Still is, come to that. But All couldn’t be bothered with all that crap. That’s why I never believed she’d been lured away by someone.

Whoever took All would have had to have forced her, because she wasn’t some impressionable, silly little girl.

‘Right from the off, I wanted to do everything I could to help. I joined in with the search parties, and of course, it was me who found the place where the struggle had taken place. I can still remember the shock of stumbling across it. We’d developed a rhythm of searching by then, especially those of us who lived in the dale. We knew the ground so well, anything out of the ordinary would leap out at us, much more than it could at the bobbies they’d ferried in from all over the county.

‘When I noticed the disturbance in the undergrowth, it literally felt as if someone reached into my chest and grabbed my heart and lungs and squeezed them too tight for breath or circulation. And when I told my gran about it afterwards, the first thing she said was, ‘Hawkin walks that copse more than anybody else.’’And I told her I’d seen the squire walking the field between the Scarlaston woodland and the spinney the very afternoon Alison disappeared. ‘Say nowt about it,’ Gran said. ‘There’ll be a time and a place to tell that copper when he’ll pay proper attention. Speak too soon and it gets buried under the weight of everybody else’s tittle-tattle.’ &

‘Two days later, she said I should tell Inspector Bennett the next chance I got. She was going to take a look at the field herself, to see if she could pick up something the rest of us had missed.’ He smiled affectionately. ‘She always played to the gallery. She looked like a witch, so she had half the county convinced she had second sight, the power to cast spells and the ability to talk to the animals. In reality, it was just that she was sharper than a block of knives.

She was always cottoning on to things that nobody else noticed.