‘I don’t understand,’ Kathy said. ‘Why would Peter think of coming back to Scardale now? When all this is going on?’
Ruth Hawkin sighed. ‘He won’t have been thinking like that, Kathy,’ she said wearily. ‘Nothing penetrates his head except what affects him directly. He’ll have been upset by being at the police station, then when he went for a drink somewhere he thought was safe, he gets terrorized by the landlord. He only knows two places – Buxton and Scardale. But by God, he must have been scared out of his wits if he thought coming back to Scardale was the easy option.’ She crushed out her cigarette and rubbed her face in a washing motion. ‘I can’t bear it.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Kathy said bitterly. ‘We all know who to blame.’ She pursed her lips and glared at George and Clough.
‘No, not Peter. I can bear that. I’ve no grieving to do for him. It’s thinking about Alison I can’t bear. When young Charlie came tearing in saying there was a body up on Dearden’s farm, I couldn’t breathe. It was like I’d been punched in the chest. Everything inside me stopped working.’
She still hadn’t been functional when he’d arrived, George thought. Ruth had been sitting at the table, hands clasped over her head, as if she wanted to hear nothing and see nothing. Kathy had been sitting beside her, one arm round her shoulders, the other stroking her hair. There had been no sign of Ruth’s husband. When George had asked, Kathy had said bitterly that Philip had gone drip-white when Charlie had brought the news, then he’d walked out of the house. ‘He’ll not have gone far,’ she said. ‘Chances are he’ll be shut in that darkroom of his. It’s where he always goes when anything’s going on he doesn’t want to be part of.’
George decided Ruth Hawkin had more right to hear the news as quickly as possible than her husband had to share the moment with her. He blurted out his tidings in a single sentence. ‘It’s a man, the body that we’ve found.’
Ruth’s head jerked back. The look of dazzling joy on her face would have outshone the Christmas lights in Regent Street.
‘It’s not her?’ Kathy exclaimed.
‘It’s not Alison,’ George confirmed. He drew a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid it’s not all good news. We have tentatively identified the body. It’ll have to be confirmed by a member of the family, but we believe the dead man is Peter Crowther.’
There was a long, stunned silence. Ruth simply stared at him, as if she had taken in all she could with the news that the body in the field was not her daughter. Kathy looked aghast. Then she jumped to her feet, disgust on her face. She paced restlessly for a few moments, then had come to rest against the cooker, where she still stood, glowering. She knew who was to blame all right, George thought.
‘Now, all I can think is, thank God it’s not my Alison,’ Ruth continued. ‘Isn’t that terrible? Peter was a human being too, but I doubt there’ll be anyone to mourn him.’
‘We shouldn’t have to be mourning anybody,’ Kathy said, her voice stinging George like a switch of nettles. ‘When Ma Lomas started on with her doom and gloom about how we’d all suffer for bringing strangers into the dale, I thought she were gilding the lily as usual. But there was some truth in what she said. You lot haven’t managed to find Alison, and now one of ours is dead.’
‘Perhaps if you’d treated him more like one of yours when he was alive, he still would be,’ a voice from behind said. George turned to see Philip Hawkin. He had no idea how long Hawkin had been standing in the half-open doorway. But he’d clearly heard most of the exchange. ‘They hounded him from the village and then the Gestapo hounded him back,’ he continued. ‘God, the ignorance of people. He was clearly harmless enough. He’d never been violent; never, as far as I know, so much as laid a hand on any female. I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor wretch.’
‘You must be relieved it wasn’t Alison’s body,’ Clough said, ignoring Hawkin’s spleen.
‘Of course. Who wouldn’t be? I’m bound to say, though, that I’m disappointed in you and your men, Inspector. Two and a half days, and no news of Alison. You can see how distressed my wife is. Your failure is a torment to her. Can’t you do something more? Apply your imagination? Search more thoroughly? What about this clairvoyant the newspaper’s consulted? Couldn’t you pay attention to what she’s come up with?’ He leaned on his fists on the table, two spots of colour in his pale cheeks. ‘We’re under a terrible strain, Inspector. We don’t expect miracles, we just want you to do your job and find out what’s happened to our little girl.’
George tried to keep his frustration behind the mask of his official face. ‘We’re already doing our best, sir. There are more search parties going out now. We’ve got hundreds of volunteers from Buxton, Stoke, Sheffield and Ashbourne, as well as local people. If she’s out there to be found, we will find her, I promise you.’
‘I know you will,’ Ruth said softly. ‘Phil knows you’re doing your best. It’s just…the not knowing. It’s a slow torture.’
George dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘We’ll keep you informed of any developments.’
Outside, the raw winter air knifed into his lungs as he strode across the green, gulping deep breaths. Almost trotting to keep up, Tommy Clough said, ‘There’s something about Philip Hawkin that doesn’t ring right.’
‘His responses are all off-key. Like when you’re speaking a foreign language you’ve learned at evening classes. You might get all the grammar and the pronunciation right, but you never pass for a native speaker because they don’t ever have to think about it.’ George threw himself into the passenger seat of the car. ‘But just because he doesn’t fit in doesn’t make him a kidnapper or a killer.’
‘All the same…’ Clough started the engine.
‘All the same, we’d better go and face the music at the press conference. The superintendent’s going to want to nail somebody’s hide to the wall over this, and as sure as God made little green apples, you can bet Carver will have got his retaliation in first.’ George leaned back and lit a cigarette. He closed his eyes and wondered why he’d chosen the police. He could have taken his law degree to some comfortable firm of solicitors in Derby and become an articled clerk. By now, he might have been on the road to becoming a partner specializing in something calm like conveyancing or probate. Mostly, the idea repelled him. That morning, it was curiously appealing.
He opened his eyes on long chains of men moving across the dale closer than arm’s-length to each other. ‘Nothing to find there except what the earlier teams dropped,’ he said bitterly.
‘They’ll be using the least fit ones here in the dale,’ Clough said knowledgeably. ‘They’ll be keeping the top-class lads for the crags and the dales that are off the beaten track. Terrain like this, there’s always going to be places we’ve missed just because we don’t know it like the back of our hands.’
‘Do you think they’ll find anything?’
Clough screwed his face up. ‘Depends what there is to find. Do I think they’ll find a body? No.’
‘Why not?’
‘If we’ve not found the body by now, it’s well hidden. That means it’s been put where it is by somebody that knows their ground far better than anybody who’s out there searching. So no, I don’t think we’ll find a body. I think we’ve already found all that we’re going to find without something more to go on.’
George shook his head. ‘I can’t think like that, Tommy. That’s tantamount to saying that not only will we not find Alison, we won’t find the person who took her and probably killed her.’
‘I know it’s hard, sir, but that’s what our opposite numbers in Cheshire and Manchester have had to deal with. I know you don’t want to be reminded of what Don Smart’s been writing, but we might have lessons