A Place of Execution (1999) (58 page)

Alison’s head came up. ‘You don’t understand a damn thing,’ she said bitterly. ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘So help me to understand,’ Catherine challenged.

Alison stared at Catherine long and hard then stood up. ‘I have to fetch something. ‘Don’t worry,’ she added as Tommy pushed his chair back. ‘I’m not going to run away. I’m not going to do anything silly. But there’s something I need to show you. Then maybe you’ll believe me when I tell you what really happened.’

She walked out of the kitchen, leaving Tommy and Catherine staring at each other, wondering what was coming next. ‘You’re being a bit hard on her,’ Tommy said. ‘She’s been through hell. We don’t have the right to make her suffer.’

‘Come on, Tommy. She’s holding out on us. You have to ask what could be worse than we already know. She’s admitted to conspiring with her mother to murder her stepfather, but there’s still something locked away inside her that she thinks is even worse.’ Tommy gave Catherine a look that bordered on the contemptuous.

‘And you think you’ve a right to that knowledge?’

‘I think we all have.’

He sighed. ‘I hope we don’t all live to regret this, Catherine.’

August 1998

A
lison returned, carrying a locked metal file case. She unlocked it with a key from the table drawer, flipped the top open and stepped back as if afraid the contents might bite. Her shoulders hunched protectively as she crossed her arms over her chest. ‘I’m putting the kettle on,’ she said. ‘Tea or coffee?’

‘Black coffee,’ Catherine replied.

‘Tea,’ Tommy said. ‘Milk, one sugar.’

‘I’ve had my fill of what’s in that box,’ Alison said, turning her back and crossing to the Aga. ‘You look as much as you want, and maybe then you won’t be so bloody glib about my past,’ she added, turning briefly to glare at Catherine.

Tommy and Catherine approached with the cautious reverence of bomb-disposal experts moving in on a suspect device. The box contained perhaps a dozen manila envelopes, all around ten inches by eight. Tommy pulled out the first. In straggling block capitals, the ink faded, it was labelled, ‘Mary Crowther’.

Against the routinely domestic background noises of hot drinks being made, Tommy inserted his thumb under the tucked-in flap of the envelope. He tipped the contents on to the table. There were a dozen black and white photographs, some strips of negatives and two contact sheets. These were not happy portraits of an innocent seven-year-old girl. They were obscene parodies of adult sexuality, lewd poses that turned Catherine’s stomach. In one, Philip Hawkin appeared, his hand thrusting between the weeping child’s legs.

There were envelopes for Mary’s nine-year-old brother Paul; for thirteen-year-old Janet, eight-year-old Shirley, six-year-old Pauline, and even three-year-old Tom Carter; for Brenda and Sandra Lomas, aged seven and five; and for four-year-old Amy Lomas. The horror contained in those envelopes was almost beyond their comprehension. It was a guided tour of a hell Catherine would rather not have known about. Her legs gave way and she slumped into a chair, her face white and strained. Tommy turned his face away and shuffled the envelopes back into the file box. Now he understood the primeval urge to destroy Philip Hawkin. What had been done to Alison had been bad enough. But this was infinitely worse in its scale and its depravity. If he had seen these photographs thirty-five years before, he doubted whether he’d have been able to keep his hands away from the man’s throat.

Alison dumped a tray on the table. ‘If you want something stronger, you’ll have to go to thpub at Longnor. I don’t keep alcohol in the house. In my early twenties, I had a bad patch when the world looked better through a glass. Then I realized it was just another way of letting him win. Damned if I was going to do that after all we’d been through.’ Her voice was cold and hard, but her lips quivered as she spoke. She poured out coffee and tea and sat down at the opposite end of the table from Catherine and Tommy and the Pandora’s box she’d gifted them. ‘You wanted the truth,’ she said. ‘Now it’s going to be your burden too. See how you like living with it.’ Catherine stared dumbly at her, only barely beginning to realize the weight of the curse she had brought on her own head. Images engraved on her mind’s eye, she already knew she had condemned herself to nightmares.

Tommy said nothing, his head bowed, his eyes hidden beneath his heavy brows. He knew he was still numb from shock and wished that state would never pass.

‘I don’t know how to tell this story,’ Alison said wearily. ‘It’s been in my head for thirty-five years but I’ve had no practice. Once it was all over, none of us ever spoke of it again. I see Kathy Lomas every day I’m in Scardale, and we never mention it. Even with you coming round and digging up old memories, we’ve none of us sat down and talked about it. We did what we thought we had to do, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t feel guilty. And guilt isn’t something anybody finds easy to share. I learned that from personal experience long before I studied psychology.’ She pushed her hair back from her face and looked Catherine in the eye. ‘I never thought we’d get away with it. I lived every day in fear of the knock at the door. I remember my real mum ringing up Dorothy to talk about what was happening with the investigation. Every day she’d phone. And she was on pins because George Bennett was such a good, 394 honest copper. He was so persistent, she said. She was convinced he was going to work out what was really going on. But he never did.’ Tommy raised his head. ‘You all lied like you were born to it,’ he said stonily. ‘Come on, Alison, you might as well let us have the rest of it.’ Alison sighed. ‘You have to remember what life was like in the nineteensixties. Child abuse didn’t exist inside families or communities. It was something that some pervert, some stranger, might do. But if you’d gone to your teacher or your doctor or the village bobby and said the squire of Scardale was fucking and buggering all the village kids, you’d have been locked up for being mentally ill.

‘You also have to remember that Philip Hawkin owned us, lock, stock and barrel. He owned our livelihoods, our homes. Under old Squire Castleton, we’d grown up in a feudal system, more or less. Not even the grown-ups questioned the squire. And we were little kids. We didn’t know we could tell on the new squire. And we none of us knew about the others, not for sure. We were all too terrified to talk about what was happening, even to each other.

‘He was a shrewd bastard, you see. He’d never shown any signs of being a paedophile when he was courting my mother. He never had much time for me before he married her. He was nice enough, buying me things. But he never bothered me at all. I’m convinced the only reason he married my mother was a way of covering his back. If any of us had dared to speak out against him, he could have played the outraged innocent, the happily married man.’ She stabbed a finger at Tommy. ‘And you lot would have believed him.’

Tommy sighed and nodded. ‘You’re probably right.’

‘I know I’m right. Anyway, like I say, he never came near me before the wedding. But as soon as they were married, it was a different story.

Then it was, ‘little girls have to show their fathers how grateful they are for all he does for them,’ and all that sort of pernicious emotional blackmail. ‘But I wasn’t enough for him. That bastard Hawkin was abusing each and every one of us. Except Derek. I think Derek was that little bit too old for him to fancy.’ She cupped her hands round her mug of tea and sighed again. ‘And we all kept our mouths shut. We were bewildered and terrified, but none of us knew what to do.

‘And then one day, my mother asked me why I’d not been using the sanitary towels she’d bought me when my first period had started.

I told her I’d not had another period since. She started asking questions, and it all came out. What he’d been doing to me, how he’d been taking pictures of himself doing it to me. And she realized I must be pregnant.’

Alison took a sip of her tea to ease the huskiness in her voice and compose herself. ‘Next time he went into Stockport for the day, she ransacked his darkroom. And that’s when she found the rest of the pictures, in his stupid bloody safe. She knew then what he was. She got all the adults together and showed them the photographs. You can imagine what it was like. People were baying for Hawkin’s blood. The women were all for castrating him and letting him bleed to death. The men talked about killing him and making it look like a farm accident. ‘It was old Ma Lomas that talked sense into them. She said that if we killed him, somebody would have to take the blame. Even if he died under a tractor, it wouldn’t be written off as just another farm accident. It would be investigated, because he was important. He was the squire, not just some farm labourer who didn’t count for anything. One little slip, and somebody from the village would end up in the dock, especially once it became obvious I was pregnant. Besides, she reckoned he wouldn’t suffer nearly enough from a quick death.

‘The other thing everybody was worried about was that if it came out about the other kids, they’d all be taken into care because their parents hadn’t looked after them properly. They reckoned outsiders wouldn’t understand life in the dale, how the kids more or less ran wild as they pleased because it was such a safe place with no traffic and next to no strangers, even at the height of summer.

‘So they talked about it all that day, and eventually, somebody remembered reading a story in the paper about a missing girl. I don’t know whose idea it was, but they decided then that I should go missing and they’d arrange it so that it looked like he’d killed me. Because they knew he had a gun, and because of the photographs of me, they knew he’d hang if they could make it stick. And that way, it wouldn’t have to come out about the other kids, so they wouldn’t have the pain of going through it all for the police.’

Alison sighed. ‘That was the end of my life as I’d known it. The plans were made quickly. It was mostly my mum and Kathy and Ma Lomas who worked it out, but they thought of everything. My Auntie Dorothy and Uncle Sam in Consett were roped in. Auntie Dorothy had been a nurse, so she knew how to take blood. She came over a few days before I disappeared and took a pint from me.

They used that to mark the tree in the wood, and to stain one of Hawkin’s shirts. They had to delay the discovery of the shirt and my underclothes because they needed his semen. They knew they’d get it eventually because he always used a condom when he went with my mother.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘He didn’t want kids of his own. Anyway, my mother eventually got him to have sex with her. She had to plead with him that she needed it for comfort. So they used the sperm in the condom to stain my clothes. They didn’t know how much the scientists could tell from the blood and the semen, but they wanted to make sure they didn’t trip up on the details. ‘And of course, everybody had to be clear about their stories. They all had their roles to play, and they had to get it right. The little kids were kept in the dark, but Derek and Janet were in on it too. Kathy spent hours with them, making sure they knew how important it was not to let anything slip. Me, I wandered round in a daze most of the time. I kept taking Shep out for walks, trying to memorize everything I knew I was going to lose. I felt so guilty all the time. All this upheaval, everybody wound up like clock springs, and all I could think was that it was all my fault.’ She bit her lip and closed her eyes momentarily. ‘It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to understand that I wasn’t the one to blame. But at the time, I really, really hated myself.’ She hesitated briefly, her eyes glistening with tears again. She blinked hard, brusquely rubbed a hand across her eyes and continued.

‘While all this was going on in the dale, Dorothy and Sam arranged to move house from Consett to Sheffield the same week the disappearance was planned so the new neighbours wouldn’t realize I wasn’t really their Janis. It was pretty easy in 1963.’ Alison paused for a moment, her eyes looking inward as if searching for the next chapter in her tragic tale. ‘The glory days of full employment,’

Tommy muttered. ‘That’s right. Sam was a skilled steel worker and it wasn’t hard for him to walk into a new job. And back then, houses went with jobs,’ Alison said.

‘The day it was all set for, Sam waited for me up by the Methodist Chapel in his Land Rover. He drove me to Sheffield, and I moved in with them. They put it about that I’d had TB and I had to stay indoors and not mix with folk until I was completely better again, so nobody would find out about the pregnancy. As time went on, Dorothy padded herself up so she’d look pregnant.’

Alison closed her eyes and a spasm of pain crossed her face. ‘It was so hard,’ she said, looking up and meeting Catherine’s eyes. It was the writer who looked away first. ‘I lost everything. I lost my family, my friends, my future. I lost Scardale. Strange things were happening to my body, and I hated it. My mum couldn’t even come and visit until after the trial because nobody in the village had mentioned the existence of the Wainwrights to the police, and she didn’t want to have to explain where she was going. Dorothy and Sam were really good to me, but it never made up for what I’d lost. It was drummed into me that I had to go through with it for the sake of all the other children in Scardale; that we were doing it so Hawkin could never hurt another child the way he’d hurt me.’

‘It made a kind of sense, I suppose,’ Catherine said dully. Alison sipped more tea and said defiantly, ‘I’m not ashamed of what we did.’ Neither Tommy nor Catherine said anything.

Alison pushed her hair back from her face again and continued her story. ‘Helen was born in my bedroom one afternoon in June, just a couple of weeks before that bastard Hawkin’s trial. Sam registered her as being his and Dorothy’s child, and they brought her up like that, thinking I was her big sister and Dorothy was her mum. A couple of years went by, then I got a job in an office.’ A wry smile appeared for the first time that morning. ‘A solicitor’s office, would you believe? You’d think I’d have had my fill of the law, wouldn’t you? Anyway, I went to night classes to catch up on the stuff I’d missed at school. I even did an Open University degree. I did some training in occupational psychology and eventually set myself up in business. And every step of the way felt like a spit in the eye to that bastard. But it was never enough, you know? ‘My real mum came and lived with us after Hawkin was hanged. I was glad of that. I really needed her. She didn’t want to go back to Scardale, so she set up the Scardale Trust to administer the estate. She kept this place, though. She knew I’d want to come back one day. We kept Helen in the dark about the Scardale connection. She thinks to this day that Ruth and her husband lived just outside Sheffield. Ruth told her that Roy had been cremated, so there was no grave for her to visit. Helen never questioned it.