Читать книгу Val McDermid 3-Book Crime Collection: A Place of Execution, The Distant Echo, The Grave Tattoo - Val McDermid, Val McDermid - Страница 23

Friday, 13^th December 1963. 4.05 p.m.

George was beginning to think he would dream the road to Scardale for the rest of his life. The car plunged down the narrow defile in the gathering dusk of a gloomy winter afternoon. If the sun had made an appearance through the day’s cloud and mist, he’d certainly missed it, he thought, slowing down as the village green grew near. Men were milling around the police caravan, cups of tea sending wisps of steam to join the wraiths of mist creeping down the dale. The day’s fruitless searching was over with the dying of the light.

Ignoring them, George crossed the green to Tor Cottage. It was time Ma Lomas stopped behaving like a character from a Victorian melodrama and started taking responsibility for what might happen to Alison if the matriarch and her extended family continued to keep their mouths shut, he told himself resolutely. As he rounded the woodpile that almost blocked the path to her front door, his foot snagged on something and he pitched forward. Only Clough’s quick grasp of his arm prevented him from an ignominious tumble.

‘What the hell…?’ George exclaimed, staggering to right himself. He turned and peered through the gathering gloom at Charlie Lomas, sprawled on his back amid a scattered pile of logs, and groaning.

‘I think you broke my ankle,’ Charlie complained.

‘What in the name of God were you doing?’ George demanded, crossly rubbing his arm where Clough’s strong fingers had dug into the muscle.

‘I was just sitting here, minding my own business, trying to get five minutes’ peace. It’s not a crime, is it?’ Charlie squirmed to an upright position. He rubbed the back of his hand fiercely across his face and in a gleam of light from the cottage window, George realized the youth’s eyes were bright with tears. He didn’t look capable of abducting a kitten, never mind a teenage girl.

‘Thinking about Alison?’ George said gently.

‘It’s a bit late to start treating me like a human being, mister.’ Charlie’s shoulders hunched in defiance. ‘What’s the matter with you lot? She was my cousin. My family. Ain’t you got anybody to care about, that you think it’s so bloody strange that we’re all upset?’

Charlie’s words jolted George’s memory. He’d learned early on in his police life that he couldn’t do the job as well as he wanted unless his personal concerns were battened down firmly, protected from the raw pain and unpleasantness of so much of his work. Mostly, he managed to keep the Chinese walls intact. Occasionally, like now, the two realities collided. Suddenly George remembered that overnight he’d acquired someone new to care about.

A smile crept over him. He couldn’t help it. He could see the contempt in Charlie Lomas’s eyes and the puzzlement in Clough’s. But the sudden consciousness of the child that Anne was carrying was irresistible.

‘What’s so bloody funny?’ Charlie burst out.

‘Nothing’s funny,’ George said gruffly, dragging himself back into the appropriate state. ‘I was thinking about my family. And you’re right. I would be devastated if anything happened to them. I’m sorry if I offended you.’

Charlie got to his feet, brushing himself down with his hands. ‘Like I said, it’s a bit late for that now.’ He half turned his head so his eyes were obscured by the shadow. ‘You looking for me or my gran?’

‘Your gran. Is she in?’

He shook his head. ‘She’s not come back yet.’

‘Back from where?’

‘I saw her when we were coming back from looking for Alison. She was walking across the fields, over between where you found Shep and where we were yesterday, when you found that…stuff.’ Charlie frowned as if recalling something half buried. ‘It was like she was going over the same road the squire was walking on Wednesday teatime.’

There are times when a particular combination of words shifts the world into slow motion. As the significance of Charlie Lomas’s words sank in, George had the strange swimming sensation of a man whose senses have moved into overdrive, leaving the outside world crawling by at a pitiful pace. He blinked hard, cleared his throat then said carefully, ‘What did you just say, Charlie?’

‘I said my gran was walking over the fields. Like she was heading towards the manor the back way,’ he added. He’d obviously decided that in spite of their treatment of him, it was in Alison’s interests to be helpful to this strange policeman who didn’t behave like any copper he’d ever seen in the flesh or at the pictures in Buxton.

George struggled to keep his self-control. He wanted to grab Charlie by the throat and scream at him but all he said was, ‘You said she was walking the same road as the squire on Wednesday teatime.’

Charlie screwed up his face. ‘So? Why wouldn’t the squire be walking his own fields?’

‘Wednesday teatime, you said.’

‘That’s right. I particularly remember because of all the fuss later on when Alison went missing.’

George exchanged a look with Clough. His incredulity met Clough’s rage. ‘You were asked if you’d seen anybody in the fields or the woods on Wednesday,’ Clough ground out.

‘I wasn’t,’ Charlie said defensively.

‘I asked you myself,’ Clough said, his lips stretched tight over his teeth, the sibilants hissing.

‘No, you never,’ Charlie insisted. ‘You asked if we’d seen any strangers. You asked if we’d seen anything out of the ordinary. And I didn’t. I just saw the same thing I’ve seen a thousand times before – the squire walking his own land. Anyway, it can’t have had anything to do with Alison going missing. Because it was still light enough to see clearly who it was, and according to what you said, Alison didn’t go out till it was nigh on dark. So there’s no call to take that tone with me,’ he added, straightening his shoulders and attempting a maturity he hadn’t earned. ‘Besides, you were too busy trying to make out I had something to do with it to listen to anything I might have to say.’

George turned away in disgust, his eyes closing momentarily. ‘We’ll need a statement about this,’ he said, his excitement at the possibilities this information opened up overcoming his frustration at the time wasted because the literal minds of Scardale could see no further than the question as asked. ‘Get yourself up to the Methodist Hall and tell one of the officers there I sent you. And give him every detail. The time, the direction Mr Hawkin was walking in, whether he was carrying anything, what he was wearing. Do it now, please, Mr Lomas, before I give in to the temptation to arrest you for obstructing a police inquiry.’

He glanced over his shoulder in time to see Charlie’s eyes widen in panic. ‘I never did,’ he said, sounding half his age. ‘He never asked me about the squire.’

‘I never asked you about the Duke of Edinburgh neither, but if he was walking the fields, I’d expect you to tell me,’ Clough snarled. ‘Now, don’t waste any more time. Get your arse up the road before I decide to let my boot help you.’

Charlie pushed past them and broke into a run, heading across the green to one of the muddy Land Rovers parked opposite. ‘Can you believe these people?’ George demanded. ‘Jesus, I’m beginning to wonder if they want Alison Carter found.’ He sighed heavily. ‘We’ll need to talk to Hawkin about this. He’s lied to us, and I want to know the reason why.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But I want to find out about Peter Crowther too.’

‘Depending on what the squire’s got to say for himself, Peter Crowther could be irrelevant,’ Clough pointed out.

George frowned. ‘You don’t seriously think…Hawkin?’

Clough shrugged. ‘Do I think he’s capable of it? I’ve no idea, I’ve hardly spoken to the man. On the other hand, he has lied to us.’ He enumerated the possibilities on short, strong fingers. ‘Either he’s got something to hide, or he’s covering for somebody else he saw, or else he’s criminally absent-minded.’

Before George could respond, the issue was settled by the appearance of Ma Lomas, bundled in a winter coat and headscarf. She cocked her head and said, ‘You’re blocking my path.’

The two men stepped aside. She carried on towards her door without acknowledgement. ‘We need to speak to you,’ George said.

‘I don’t need to speak to you,’ she retorted, struggling to fumble a large iron key into the door lock. ‘Never had to lock our doors before Ruth Carter brought strangers into the dale.’ The lock turned with a jarring screech of metal on metal.

‘Don’t you care what happens to your own flesh and blood?’ George said.

She turned to face him, eyes narrowed. ‘You know nowt, you.’ Then she opened the door.

‘We’ll be going to talk to the squire after we’ve spoken to you,’ Clough chipped in as she was about to disappear inside. She stopped on the threshold, still as a mouse below a hovering hawk. ‘We know about him walking the field where you’ve just been. Mrs Lomas, we need to eliminate Peter Crowther from our inquiries if he’s an innocent man.’

For a moment she stood thinking, letting the seemingly unconnected sentences settle. Then she nodded, cocking her head and fixing Clough with a calculating stare. ‘You’d better come in then,’ she said at last. ‘Mind you wipe your feet. And no smoking in here. It’s bad for my chest.’

They followed her into a parlour no more than nine feet square. A dim room with only one small window, it smelled faintly of camphor and eucalyptus. The stone floor was scattered with faded rag rugs. An armchair sat on either side of a grate flanked by two black iron ovens, each the size of a crate of beer. A kettle sat on one of the ovens, a curl of steam disappearing up the chimney from its spout. A sideboard stood on the opposite side of the room, its surface cluttered with carved wooden animals and roughly polished chunks of limestone containing fossils. In the tiny bay window, three tall ladder-back chairs in black oak loomed above a small dining table, as if threatening it with a beating.

The only decorations were dozens of garish picture postcards of everything from Spanish beaches to Scandinavian baroque town halls. Seeing George’s bemused stare, Ma Lomas said, ‘They’re Charlie’s. It’s like pen pals, only postcards. He’s a dreamer. Thing that makes me laugh is that there’s hundreds of people all over the world looking at Squire Hawkin’s postcard of Scardale and thinking Derbyshire village life is milk-white sheep in a field full of sunshine.’ She hobbled across to the chair facing the door and settled herself down, squirming her shoulders until she was comfortable.

‘Can I sit down?’ George asked.

‘You won’t like the armchair,’ she told him. With her head, she gestured towards the hard chairs. ‘Better for your back, anyway.’

They turned a couple of chairs to face her. They waited while she leaned forward, poking the glowing coals ablaze. ‘Peter Crowther’s in custody in Buxton,’ George said when she’d made herself cosy.

‘Aye, I’d heard.’

‘Should he be, do you think?’

‘You’re the copper, not me. I’m just an old woman who’s never lived outside a Derbyshire dale.’

‘We could waste a lot of time trying to connect Peter Crowther to Alison,’ George continued, refusing to be diverted. ‘Time that would be better spent trying to find her.’

‘I told you before, the trouble with you and your detectives is that you understand nothing about this place,’ she said, her voice irritated.

‘I’m trying to understand. But people in Scardale seem more interested in hindering than helping me. I’ve just had the experience of discovering your grandson had omitted to mention something that could be a vital piece of evidence.’

‘That’s hardly surprising, considering the way you treated the lad. How come none of you had the sense to ask if he could have had owt to do with Alison going missing? Because he couldn’t have. When she disappeared, he was here in the house with me. That’s what you call an alibi, isn’t it?’ she demanded scornfully.

‘Are you sure about that?’ George asked dubiously.

‘I might be old, but I’ve got all me chairs at home. Charlie came in just before half past four and started peeling potatoes. I can’t manage them with my arthritis the way it is, so he has to do them. Every night, it’s the same routine. He wasn’t messing about with Alison, he was here, taking care of me.’

George took a deep breath. ‘It would have saved us a lot of time if either you or Charlie had seen fit to tell us that. Mrs Lomas, in cases involving missing children, the first forty-eight hours are crucial. That time is almost up and we are no nearer finding a young girl who is one of your relatives.’ George’s frustration made his voice rise. ‘Mrs Lomas, I swear I am going to find Alison Carter. Sooner or later, I am going to know what happened here two days ago. If that means searching every house in this village from roof beam to foundations, I’ll do it. If I have to dig up every field and garden in the dale, I’ll do it, and to hell with your crops and livestock. If I have to arrest every one of you and charge you with obstruction or even with being accessories, I’ll do it.’ He stopped abruptly and leaned forward. ‘So tell me. Do you think Peter Crowther had anything to do with Alison’s disappearance?’

She shook her head impatiently. ‘As far as I know, and believe you me, I know most things around Scardale, Peter hasn’t set foot in this dale since the war ended. I don’t think he even knows Alison exists. And I’d put my hand on the Bible and swear she’s never heard his name.’ Her lips clamped shut, her nose and chin approaching like the points of an engineer’s callipers.

‘We can’t be sure about that. The lass has been going to school in Buxton. She’s got the look of her mother. Don’t forget, Mrs Hawkin would have been about Alison’s age when her brother last spent much time around her. With somebody who’s a bit lacking in the top storey, seeing Alison in the street could have triggered off all sorts of memories.’

Ma Lomas folded her arms tightly across her chest and shook her head vigorously as George spoke. ‘I’ll not believe it, I’ll not,’ she said.

‘So, should we be interviewing Peter Crowther, Mrs Lomas?’ George asked, his voice gentler again in response to her obvious distress.

‘If he’d have stepped into the dale, we’d all have known. Besides, he’d have been at work,’ she added desperately.

‘They get Wednesday afternoons off. He could have been here. Mrs Lomas, what did Peter Crowther do that got him sent away?’

‘That’s nobody’s business now,’ she said emphatically. Her eyes were screwed up now, as if the firelight were the noonday sun.

‘I need to know,’ George persisted.

‘You don’t.’

Tommy Clough leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his notepad dangling between his calves. George envied him his ability to appear relaxed even in an interview as tense as this had become. ‘I don’t think Peter Crowther could hurt a fly,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not the one who makes the decisions. I think it could be a while before Peter sees daylight again. A woman like yourself, Mrs Lomas, who’s never lived outside a Derbyshire dale, you’ll not have any reason to know what prisoners do with men they think have hurt children. What they do drives sane men mad. They hang themselves from the bars on their windows. They swallow bleach. They’d cut their wrists with butter knives if anybody were daft enough to let them have one. Your Peter will be used and abused worse than a street prostitute in a war zone. I don’t think you want that for him. You or anybody else in Scardale. If you did, you’d have seen to it that he caught what-for twenty years ago. But you let him go. You let him build a bit of a life for himself. What’s the point in standing idly by and letting him lose it now?’

It was a persuasive speech, but it had no effect. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she said, her head moving almost imperceptibly from side to side.

George noisily pushed his chair back, the legs shrieking on the stone-flagged floor. ‘I haven’t the time to waste here,’ he said. ‘If you don’t care about Peter Crowther or about finding Alison, I’ll go to someone who will. I’m sure Mrs Hawkin will tell us anything we want to know. After all, he’s her brother.’

Ma Lomas’s head came up as if someone had yanked at the hair on the back of her head. Her eyes widened. ‘Not Ruth. No, you mustn’t. Not Ruth.’

‘Why not?’ George demanded, letting some of his anger out. ‘She wants Alison found, she doesn’t want us to waste our time on false leads. She’ll tell us anything we want to know, believe me.’

She glared at him, her witch’s face malevolent as a Halloween mask. ‘Sit down,’ she hissed. It was a command, not an invitation. George retreated to his chair. Ma Lomas stood up and moved unsteadily across to the sideboard. She opened the door and took out a bottle whose label claimed it contained whisky. The contents, however, were colourless as gin. She filled a sherry glass with the liquid and drank it down in one. She gave two sharp coughs, her shoulders heaving, then she turned back to them, her eyes watering. ‘Peter were always a problem,’ she said slowly.

‘He always had a dirty mind,’ she continued, making her way back to her chair. ‘Nasty. Mucky. You’d find him out in the fields, staring at any animals that were coupling. The older he got, the worse he got. He’d follow anybody that was courting, his own kith and kin, desperate to see what they were doing. You’d know when the ram were serving the ewes because you’d walk into the wood and find Peter standing with his…’ She paused, pursed her lips, then continued. ‘His thing in his hand, eyes on stalks, watching the beasts at their business. He’d been slapped and shouted at, kicked and called for it, but it made no difference to him. After a time, it didn’t seem to matter so much. In a place like Scardale, you have to endure what you can’t cure.’

She stared into the fire and sighed. ‘Then young Ruth started to change from a little girl into a young woman. Peter was like a man obsessed. He followed her around like a dog sniffing after a bitch in heat. Dan caught him a couple of times up a ladder outside the lass’s bedroom, watching her through a crack in the curtains. We all tried to make him see sense – she was his own sister, it couldn’t go on. But Peter would never take a telling. In the end, Dan made him move out of the house and sleep over here in my cottage.’

Ma Lomas paused and briefly rubbed her closed eyelids. Neither George nor Clough moved a muscle, determined not to break the momentum of the story. ‘One night, Dan came back from Longnor. He’d been having a drink. This was during the war, when we were supposed to keep a blackout. As soon as he turned into the dale, he could see a chink of light shining out like a beacon from the village. He pedalled as fast as he could, wanting to tell whoever it was that they had a light showing before the bobby saw it and fined them. He was a good half-mile away when he realized it must be coming from his own home. Then he really stepped on it. Soon, he recognized the very window – Ruth’s bedroom. He knew their Diane was alone with Ruth, and he was convinced something terrible had happened to one or other of them.’ She turned to face her spellbound audience.

‘Well, he was wrong, and he was right. He came roaring and rushing into the house like a hurricane, up the stairs two at a time, near on hitting his head on the beams. He flung open the door to Ruth’s room and there was Peter standing by Ruth’s bed, his pants round his ankles, the lantern casting a shadow on the ceiling that made his cock look like a broomstick. The lass had been fast asleep, but Dan bursting in like a madman woke her up. She must have thought she was having a nightmare.’ The old woman shook her head. ’I could hear her screaming right across the village green.

‘The next thing I heard was Peter screaming. It took three men to drag Dan off him. I thought he was a dead man, covered in blood like a calf that’s had a hard birth. We locked him in a lambing shed until his body had started to heal, then Squire Castleton arranged for him to go into the hostel in Buxton. Dan told him if he ever came near Ruth or Scardale again, he’d kill him with his bare hands. Peter believed him then and he believes him now. I know you’ll be thinking that what I’ve told you means he could have seen Ruth in Alison and done something terrible to her. But you’re wrong. It means the very opposite. If you want to make Peter Crowther crawl across the floor begging for mercy, just go and tell him Ruth and Dan are looking for him. The last place he’d ever come is Scardale. The last person he’d come near is anybody connected to Scardale. Take my word for it, I know.’

She sat back in her chair, her narrative over. The oral tradition would never die as long as Ma Lomas lived, George thought. She epitomized the village elder who holds the tribal history, its integrity protected only by her personal skills. He’d never expected to encounter one of those in 1963 in Derbyshire. ‘Thank you for telling us, Mrs Lomas,’ he said formally. ‘You’ve been very helpful. One more thing before we leave you in peace. Charlie said he’d seen Mr Hawkin in the field between the wood and the copse on Wednesday afternoon. He told us you were retracing his steps just now. Did you also see the squire on Wednesday, then?’

She gave him a calculating look, her eye as bright as a parrot’s. ‘Not after Alison disappeared, no.’

‘But before?’

She nodded. ‘I’d been having a cup of tea with our Diane. When I came out, Kathy were just getting into the Land Rover to go up to the lane end to pick up Alison and Janet and Derek from off the school bus. I saw David and Brian over by the milking parlour, bringing the cows in. And I saw Squire Hawkin crossing the field.’

‘Why didn’t you mention this?’ George asked, exasperated.

‘Why would I? There was nothing out of the ordinary in it. It’s his field, why wouldn’t he be walking it? He’s always out and about, snapping away with his camera when you least expect it. Besides, like I said, Alison wasn’t even home from school by then. He’d have had to be a bloody slow walker to still be in the field when she came out with Shep. And this weather, nobody walks slow in Scardale,’ she added decisively, as if settling an argument.

George closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose. When he opened them again, he could have sworn a smile was twitching the corners of the old woman’s mouth. ‘I’ll have all this typed up into a statement,’ he said. ‘I expect you to sign it.’

‘If it’s truthful, you’ll get no argument from me. You going to let Peter go now?’

George got up and deliberately tucked his chair back under the table. ‘We’ll be taking what you’ve told us into consideration when we make our decision.’

‘He’s not a violent man, Inspector,’ she said. ‘Even supposing he had seen Alison, even supposing she’d reminded him of Ruth, all she’d have had to do was push him away. He’s a cowardly man. Don’t waste your time on Peter and let a guilty man go free.’

‘You seem to have made your mind up that whatever’s happened to Alison, somebody made it happen,’ Clough said, standing up, but making a point of keeping his notebook open.

Her face seemed to close in on itself, eyes narrowing, mouth pursing, nose wrinkling. ‘What I think and what you know are very different things. See if you can get them a bit closer together, Sergeant Clough. Then we’ll maybe all know what happened to our lass.’ She glanced up at the clock. ‘I thought you said you were going to talk to Squire Hawkin?’

‘We are,’ George said.

‘Better get your skates on, then. He likes his tea on the table at six sharp and I can’t see him changing his ways for you.’

They saw themselves out. ‘What did you make of that, Tommy?’ George asked.

‘She’s telling us the truth as she sees it, sir.’

‘And the alibi for Charlie?’

Clough shrugged. ‘She could be lying for him. She would lie for him, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But until we find somebody saying something different, or something more solid to tie him to Alison’s disappearance, we’ve got no reason to doubt her. And I agree with her about Crowther, for what it’s worth.’

‘Me too.’ George ran a hand over his face. The skin felt raw with tiredness, the very bones seeming nearer the surface. He sighed.

‘We should let him go, sir,’ Clough said, fishing out his cigarettes and passing one to George. ‘He’s not going to run. He’s got nowhere to run to. I could call the station from the phone box and tell them to bail him. They can give him stringent conditions – he shouldn’t go within five miles of Scardale, he’s got to stay at the hostel, he should report daily. But there’s no need to keep him in, surely.’

‘You don’t think we’re exposing him to lynch-mob justice?’ George asked.

‘The longer we keep him, the worse it looks for him. We could get the duty officer to tip the wink to the newspaper lads that Crowther was never a suspect, just a vulnerable adult relative that we brought in so we could interview him away from the pressures of the outside world. Some sort of rubbish like that. And I could mention the need to spread the same word round the pubs.’ There was a stubborn set to Clough’s jaw. He had a point, and George was too tired to argue a case he didn’t feel passionately about either way.

‘All right, Tommy. You call them and say it’s my orders. And make sure somebody informs the DCI. He won’t like it, but that’s his hard cheese. I’ll see you in the caravan. If I don’t get a brew inside me, I’ll be falling off my perch before I can get anything out of the squire.’

George didn’t even wait for a response. He walked straight across the green to the police caravan. No prickle of intuition made him turn and stay Detective Sergeant Clough’s hand. After all, Clough was convinced he was doing the right thing. Not even Ma Lomas’s instincts had cried out against releasing Peter Crowther.

It was a burden of knowledge they would all share equally.