George felt his mouth fall open. ‘Her uncle?’ he managed after a moment.
‘Peter Crowther.’
George swallowed hard. He hadn’t even known there was a Peter Crowther. ‘May I sit in on the interview, sir?’
‘Why else do you think I was phoning you? I’m in agony with this ankle. Besides, me limping around like Hopalong Cassidy with my leg in a pot is hardly going to put the fear of God into Crowther, is it? You get yourself in here right now.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Oh, and Bennett?’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Bring me some fish and chips, will you? I can’t be doing with canteen food. Shocking indigestion, it gives me.’
George hung up, shaking his head. He lit a cigarette, screwing up his eyes and turning to scan the room behind him. Clough was leaning negligently against a table, scrutinizing one of the OS maps pinned to the wall. Grundy hovered near the door, uncertain whether he should go or stay. ‘Clough, Grundy,’ George said through a mouthful of smoke. ‘Car, now. We’re off to Buxton.’
The doors were barely slammed when George turned in his seat, glared at Grundy and said, ‘Peter Crowther.’
‘Peter Crowther, sir?’ Grundy was trying for innocence and failing, his edgy eyes giving him away.
‘Yes, Grundy. Alison’s uncle, the one with the record of sex offences. That Peter Crowther,’ George said sarcastically, stabbing his foot at the accelerator and jerking them all backwards as he shot up the lane towards Longnor.
‘What about him, sir?’
‘How come the first I hear about Peter Crowther is from the DCI? How is it that, with all your local knowledge, you didn’t get round to mentioning Peter Crowther?’ George had abandoned his sarcasm, going for the silky gentleness of the sadistic teacher who lulls his unwary pupils into false security before cutting off at the knees.
‘I didn’t think it was relevant. I mean, he lives in Buxton, has done for the last twenty years or more. I never gave him a thought,’ Grundy said, his ears scarlet.
‘That’s why you’re still a PC, Grundy,’ Clough said, swivelling in his seat and giving the constable the hard insolent stare that had catapulted a disturbing number of prisoners into violence that would more than double the sentences for their original offences. ‘You don’t think.’
‘That’s true, Clough, but you don’t have to have a brain to get stuck on point duty in Derby city centre for a few years,’ George said, sweet reason in a shirt and tie. ‘Village bobbies, however, are supposed to be able to think for themselves. PC Grundy, unless you truly fancy a change of assignment, I suggest you use the miles between here and Buxton to tell us all you know about Peter Crowther.’
Grundy rubbed his eyebrow with the knuckle of his index finger. ‘Peter Crowther is Ruth Hawkin’s brother,’ he said, like a man working out complicated mental arithmetic. ’Diane’s the oldest, that’s Terry Lomas’s wife Diane. Then Peter, then Daniel, then Ruth. Peter must be a good ten years older than Ruth. That’d make him somewhere around forty-five.
‘I never really knew Peter, he was away from Scardale long before I even became village bobby in Longnor. But I’d heard talk about him. Apparently he’s not the full shilling. His brother Daniel used to keep an eye on him when he was still living in Scardale, but something happened – I don’t know what, nobody outside Scardale does – and they decided they didn’t want him in the dale any longer. So they had him shipped out to Buxton. He lives in a single men’s hostel up by the golf course at Waterswallows. And he works in that sheltered workshop up the back of the railway yard, the one that makes lampshades and wastepaper baskets. I knew he’d been done for being a Peeping Tom, but it was summat and nowt.’
George sighed heavily. ‘You knew all this about Peter Crowther, and it never crossed your mind to mention it?’
Grundy shifted his weight from one buttock to the other. ‘You’ll understand when you see him, sir. Peter Crowther’s frightened of his own shadow. I don’t think he’s capable of accosting anyone, never mind abducting them.’
‘He wouldn’t have had to abduct Alison, though, would he?’ Clough butted in, his sarcasm cutting as a whip, his blue eyes cold. ‘He was her uncle. She wouldn’t be frightened of him. If he said, “Hey, our Alison, I’ve got a pair of roller-skating boots that’d fit you, d’you want to come and see them?” she’d not have thought twice about going along with him. He might be a bit strange, her Uncle Peter, but it’s not like he was a stranger, is it, PC Grundy?’ He managed to make the rank sound like an insult.
‘He’s not got the nerve,’ Grundy said stubbornly. ‘Besides, when I said they didn’t want him in the dale, I meant it. As far as I know, Peter Crowther’s not been back to Scardale in nigh on twenty years. And Scardale won’t have been near him, neither. I doubt he’d even know Alison if he passed her in the street.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Clough muttered, his face grim as his eyes narrowed against the smoke from his cigarette.
Janet Carter had begged and pleaded to be kept off school in the wake of Alison’s disappearance. She might as well have saved her breath. Back in 1963, kids weren’t supposed to have feelings like adults. Grownups fed them all sorts of tales to shield them from things, thinking to protect them. The worst crime to the adult mind was disrupting the routine, for nothing would serve as a better signal to the younger generation that something was seriously wrong. So the world could have been about to end back in the dale, but Janet and her cousins still had to be dropped off at the lane end and packed off to school like it was any other morning.
But when she’d arrived at school the morning after Alison’s disappearance, it had been unexpectedly exciting. For once, Janet was the centre of attention. Everybody knew Alison had disappeared. The police were at the school, interviewing Alison’s classmates and her teachers. There was only one topic of playground conversation, and Janet had the inside track. She was, in her small way, a celebrity. It was enough to make her forget the terror that had kept her awake half the night, wondering where Alison was and what was happening to her.
There was a sort of delicious fear in the air, the sense that something forbidden had taken place that none of the children could quite grasp the significance of. Even those of them who lived on farms. They knew what animals did, but somehow they never quite made the jump across the species barrier. Of course, everyone had heard about girls being ‘interfered with’, but none of them really knew what that meant, except that it was something to do with ‘down there’ and the sort of thing that happened if you let a boy ‘go too far’. Though none of them really had a clue how far too far was.
So the atmosphere at Peak Girls’ High was highly charged when Alison Carter went missing. Although most of her classmates were as scared, anxious and almost as upset as Janet herself, there was a part of them that felt stirred up in a way that was pleasurable even though they knew they shouldn’t be feeling like that. With all these emotions churning around, both the Thursday and Friday had been exhausting school days. By the time the final bell went, all Janet could think about was getting home and letting her mother fuss over her with a cup of tea.
She had few reserves left for the shock that awaited her on the school bus. The driver was bursting with the news that Alison’s uncle was at the police station, being questioned. Her reaction was instantaneous. It was as if she closed in on herself. She was sitting on the front seat, where she had always sat with Alison, as near to the driver as she could be. ‘Which uncle?’ Derek asked.
The driver tried the usual sort of joke about everybody being related in Scardale, but he could see Janet wasn’t in the mood. So he simply said, ‘Peter Crowther.’
Janet