George stared at his food, chewing automatically. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said. ‘Alison Carter has a mother. I can’t leave her not knowing what’s happened to her daughter. I keep thinking about how I’d feel if it was my child that was missing, nobody knowing what had happened to her or where she was, nobody seemingly able to do anything to help.’
‘For heaven’s sake, George, you’re taking too much on your shoulders. You’re not the only policeman responsible for what’s going on out there. You take too much on yourself,’ Anne said, a trace of irritation in her voice.
‘That’s easy to say, but I keep being haunted with the idea that it’s a race against time. She could still be alive. While that’s still a possibility, I’ve got to give it everything I can.’
‘But I thought you had somebody in custody? Surely you can let up a bit now?’ She leaned across the table to refill his teacup.
George snorted. ‘You’ve been believing what you read in the papers again, haven’t you?’ he said, his voice a grim tease.
‘Well, the Courant didn’t leave much room for doubt.’
‘The Courant story is a mess of innuendo and inaccuracy. Yes, we picked up Alison Carter’s uncle. And yes, he’s got convictions for sex offences. And there the similarity ends between the truth and what’s in the paper. He’s a sad case who’s scared of his own shadow. Definitely not got all his marbles. All he’s ever been done for is exposing himself, and that was years ago. But when DCI Carver found out about him, he got over-excited and went off like Sputnik.’
‘Well, you can’t really blame him, George. You’re all in a state about this case. It’s not surprising if somebody loses his sense of proportion. The uncle must have seemed like an obvious suspect. Poor man,’ Anne said. ‘He must have been terrified.’ She shook her head. ‘This case seems full of pain.’
‘And there’s no sign of it getting better.’ He pushed his empty plate away. ‘Most cases, you can see a clear way forward. It’s obvious who’s done what, or at worst, where you should be looking. But not this one. It’s full of dead ends and dark corners. They’ve searched the whole dale and found nothing to lead us to Alison Carter. Somebody must know what happened to her.’ He sighed in exasperation. ‘I wish to God I could find out who.’
‘You will, darling,’ Anne said, pouring him a fresh cup of tea. ‘If anyone can, it’s you. Now, try to relax. Then tomorrow, you can look at things afresh.’
‘I hope so,’ George said fervently. He reached for his cigarettes, but before he could extract one from the packet, the phone rang. ‘Oh God,’ he sighed. ‘Here we go again.’
Friday, 13th December 1963. 10.26 p.m.
George leaned forward in the passenger seat of Tommy Clough’s Zephyr, staring intently through the windscreen. Outside, shafts of light from streetlamps illuminated slanted sheets of sleet that swirled in the wind like net curtains in a draught. It wasn’t the weather that interested George, however. It was the running battle that swam in and out of the pools of light outside the single men’s hostel at Waterswallows.
‘It’s hard to credit,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You’d think they’d be glad to get home from the pub on a night like this. Wouldn’t you rather be in front of your own fireside instead of risking double pneumonia and a clobbering from a bobby’s truncheon?’
‘After enough pints of Pedigree, you don’t care,’ Clough said cynically. He’d been in the pub himself when he’d heard that a lynch mob was marching on the men’s hostel at Waterswallows. Pausing only to phone the station, he’d driven straight to George’s house, knowing his boss would have been alerted. Now they were watching a team of a dozen uniformed officers dispersing a mob of about thirty angry drunks with a degree of controlled savagery that was as perfectly choreographed as a ballet. George felt a profound sense of gratitude that it wasn’t happening in weather clear enough for anyone to photograph it. The last thing he needed was a bunch of civil libertarians claiming the police were thugs when all they were doing was making sure a bunch of drunken vigilantes didn’t get the chance to beat the living daylights out of an innocent man.
Suddenly three struggling men loomed up in front of the car – two uniformed police officers and a man with shoulders a yard wide and a face streaming blood. A truncheon rose and fell across the man’s shoulders and he slumped insensible across the bonnet of the Zephyr. ‘Oh good. Now we can have him for malicious damage as well,’ Clough said ironically as one officer cuffed the man’s hands behind his back and left him to slide gently to the ground, trailing blood and mucus.
‘I suppose we’d better go and give them a hand,’ George said with all the enthusiasm of a man faced with dental treatment without anaesthetic.
‘If you say so, sir. Only, us being in plain clothes, we might only cause more confusion.’
‘Good point. We’d better hang on till the uniformed lads have got it sorted out.’ They watched in silence for another ten minutes. By then, a dozen men were in varying states of consciousness in the back of a paddy wagon. A couple of constables held handkerchiefs to their noses while another searched for the cap he’d lost in the melee. Out of the sleet, Bob Lucas appeared, his overcoat collar turned up against the weather. He pulled open the rear door of the car and dived in.
‘Some night,’ he said, his voice as bitter as the weather. ‘We all know who to blame for this, don’t we?’
‘The Courant?’ Clough asked in a butter-wouldn’t-melt voice.
‘Oh aye,’ Lucas said. ‘More like, whoever thought the Courant should know. If I thought it was one of my lads, I’d skin him alive.’
‘Aye, well,’ said Clough with a sigh. ‘We all know it wasn’t one of your lads, Bob. Nobody from uniform would have the nerve to give confidential information to the press.’ He softened the veiled insult with a crooked smile over his shoulder. ‘You’ve got them far too well trained for that.’
‘Is Crowther safe?’ George asked, turning round on the bench seat and reaching over to offer the uniformed sergeant a cigarette.
Lucas nodded his appreciation and helped himself. ‘He’s not there. After we released him, he came back, had his tea and went out again. They’re supposed to be back by nine, that’s when the doors get locked. But the warden says Crowther never showed up. He gave him quarter of an hour’s grace, knowing what kind of a day he’d had, but then he locked up as usual. He says nobody rang the bell or knocked the door before this lot showed up. Luckily, he had the sense not to open up and they hadn’t managed to break the door down before we turned up.’
‘So where is he?’ Clough asked, inching open his quarterlight so the bitter wind could whip the smoke into the night.
‘We’ve no idea,’ Lucas admitted. ‘His usual watering hole is the Wagon, so I thought I’d drop by on the way back to the station, see what they had to say for themselves.’
‘We’ll do it now,’ George said decisively, glad to have action to divert him from the constant nagging worry of the investigation.
‘I’ve still got loose ends to sort here,’ Lucas protested.
‘Fine. You do that, we’ll see the landlord at the Wagon.’ George’s nod was dismissive. Lucas gave him a sour look, took a deep drag of the cigarette and left the car without another word. If he’d been challenged, he’d have said the wind slammed the car door shut.
‘You know the landlord?’