‘And you are absolutely certain that it was Mr Hawkin you saw crossing the field?’ Stanley asked.
‘I only need glasses for reading,’ the old woman said. ‘I can still tell a kestrel from a sparrowhawk at a hundred yards.’
‘How can you be sure it was the Wednesday?’
She looked at him with exasperation. ‘Because that’s the day Alison went missing. When something like that happens, everything else that happened that day sticks in your memory.’
Stanley obviously found nothing to argue with in that. He took her on through her knowledge of the lead mine from the book in the study of Scardale Manor. ‘Did Squire Castleton often talk to you about local history?’ he eventually asked.
‘Oh aye,’ she said, off hand. ‘I’d known him since he was a little lad. He never lorded it over his tenants, not the old squire. We’d often sit and talk, him and me. We always said, when we went, half the dale’s history would go with us. He was always on at me to write it all down, but I couldn’t be bothered with owt like that.’
‘But that’s how you knew where to find the book?’
‘That’s right. Many’s the time we’ve sat and looked at that book, the old squire and me. I was able to put my hand on it right away.’
‘Why didn’t you mention the old lead mine to the police earlier?’ Stanley asked, apparently casually.
She scratched her temple with a finger lumpy with arthritis. ‘I don’t rightly know. I forget sometimes that not everybody knows the dale like I do. I’ve lain awake often since, wondering if it would have made any difference to poor Alison if I’d have mentioned the lead mine to Inspector Bennett the night she went missing.’ She sighed. ‘It’s a terrible burden to me.’
‘I have no more questions for you, Mrs Lomas, but my colleague Mr Highsmith will need to ask you some things. So if you would wait there?’ Stanley gave the matriarch a slight bow before sitting down.
This time, Highsmith waited for a few moments before he rose. ‘Mrs Lomas,’ he began. ‘It must be hard for you to see the nephew of your old friend in the dock here today.’
‘I never thought I’d be glad Squire Castleton were dead,’ she said in a low voice. ‘This would have broke his heart. He loved Alison like she was his own granddaughter.’
‘Indeed. If I might trouble you with a few questions, I’d be very grateful.’
She looked up and George, sitting at the back of the court, caught the wicked gleam in her eye. He winced. ‘Questions are no trouble to me,’ she snapped. ‘Tell truth and shame the devil. I’ve nothing to fear from your questions, so ask away.’
Highsmith looked momentarily taken aback. Her docile responses to Stanley’s questions had not prepared him for Ma Lomas in combative mood. ‘How can you be certain it was Mr Hawkin you saw cross the field that afternoon?’
‘How can I be certain? Because I saw him. Because I know him. The way he looks, the way he walks, the clothes he wears. There’s nobody in Scardale you could confuse with him,’ she said, her voice outraged. ‘I might be old but I’m not daft.’
A snigger stuttered round the press benches and the Scardale contingent allowed themselves tight smiles. Ma would show this London lawyer what was what.
‘That much is obvious, ma’am,’ Highsmith squeezed out.
‘You don’t have to “ma’am” me, lad. Ma’ll do.’
Highsmith blinked hard. The point of his pencil snapped against the pad in his hand. ‘This book in the study at the manor. You say you knew exactly where to look for it?’
‘Well remembered, lad,’ Ma said grimly.
‘So it was where it should have been?’
‘Where else would it have been? Of course it was where it should have been.’
Highsmith pounced. ‘No one had moved it?’
‘I can’t say that, can I? How can I know that? It wouldn’t be hard to put it back in the right place – them shelves are full. When you take a book out, it leaves a gap. So you put it back in the same place. Automatic,’ she said scornfully.
Highsmith smiled. ‘But there was no sign that anyone had done that. Thank you, Mrs Lomas.’
The judge leaned forward. ‘You’re free to go now, Mrs Lomas.’
She turned to Hawkin and smiled pure malicious triumph. George was relieved she had her back to the jury. ‘Aye, I know,’ she said. ‘More than he can say, isn’t it?’ She paraded across the room like the royalty she was in her village and settled in a specially vacated chair at the heart of her family.
The following day was taken up with an assortment of specialists who could testify on particular matters of fact. Hawkin’s tailor had travelled up from London to confirm that the stained shirt hidden in the darkroom was one of a batch the accused had had made to measure less than a year before. An assistant from Boots the Chemist revealed he had sold Philip Hawkin two rolls of elastoplast which corresponded to both the tape found on the muzzle of Alison’s dog and the short section fixing the safe key to the back of the drawer in the study.
A fingerprint officer revealed that Philip Hawkin’s prints were on the photographs and the negatives found in the safe. However, there were no prints on the Webley, and the cover of the antiquarian book had been impossible to retrieve prints from.
The final witness of the day was the firearms expert. He confirmed that one of the bullets found in the cave was clearly identifiable as a .38 fired from the gun that Ruth Carter had found hidden in her husband’s darkroom.
Through all of this testimony, Highsmith asked little, except to attempt to demonstrate that there were alternative explanations to all the statements made by the prosecution. Anyone, he argued, could have obtained a shirt belonging to Hawkin. They could even have stolen one from the manor washing line. Hawkin might not have been buying the elastoplast on his own account, but may have been running an errand for someone else. Of course his prints were on the pictures and the negatives – the police had thrown them at him across an interview room table before they were encased in plastic, before his solicitor had ever arrived at the police station. And the only person who had made any connection between the gun and Hawkin was, of course, his wife, who was so desperate to find an explanation for her daughter’s disappearance that she was even prepared to turn on her husband.
The jury sat impassively, offering no clue as to their opinion of his performance. At the end of the third day, the court adjourned till morning.
On Friday morning, George’s mind was jolted out of his own concerns. There, in the Daily Express, was a story that harrowed him.
Tracker dogs join hunt for lost boy
Eight policemen with two tracker dogs searched railway sidings, parks and derelict buildings today for short-sighted schoolboy Keith Bennett, missing from home for nearly three days.
Said a senior police officer: ‘If we do not find him today, the search will be intensified. We just don’t know what has happened to him. We do not suspect foul play yet, but we can find no reason for him to be missing.’
Twelve-year-old Keith of Eston Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, disappeared on Tuesday night on his way to visit his grandmother.
His home is in an area of Manchester where several murders have occurred and missing persons have gone untraced.
Home-loving
Left behind at home are the thick-lensed spectacles – with one lens broken – without which he has difficulty in seeing.
Keith’s mother, Mrs Winifred Johnson, aged 30, who has five other children and is expecting her seventh in two weeks, wept