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‘Yes, let’s not forget the squire,’ George said thoughtfully. He sighed and stood up. ‘We could do with finding out a bit more about him. St Albans, that’s where he hails from, isn’t it?’ He took out his notebook and jotted down a reminder. ‘Don’t let me forget to follow that up. Come on then, Tommy. Let’s have another crack at Scardale.’
Brian Carter wiped the teats of the next cow in line and, with surprising gentleness, clamped the milking machine on to her udder. Dawn had still been a few hours away when he’d left the warm bed he shared with his new wife, Denise, in Bankside Cottage, the two-bedroomed house where Alison Carter was born on a rainy night in 1950. Tramping up through the silent village with his father, he’d been unable to avoid thinking bitterly how much his cousin’s disappearance had changed his world already.
His had been a simple, uncomplicated life. They’d always been very self-contained, very private in Scardale. He’d grown used to getting called names at school and later in the pubs when folk had had a few too many. He knew all the tired old jokes about inbreeding and secret black magic rituals, but he’d learned to ignore all that and get on with his life.
When there was light, Scardale worked the land and when there wasn’t, they were still busy. The women spun wool, knitted jumpers, crocheted shawls and blankets and baby clothes, made preserves and chutneys, things they could sell through the Women’s Institute market in Buxton.
The men maintained the buildings, inside and out. They also worked with wood. Terry Lomas made beautiful turned wooden bowls, rich and lustrous, the grain chosen for its intricate patterns. He sent them off to a craft centre in London where they sold for what seemed ridiculous sums of money to everyone else in the village. Brian’s father David made wooden toys for a shop in Leek. There wouldn’t have been time for the wild pagan rituals that gullible drinkers speculated about in Buxton bars, even supposing anyone had been interested. The truth was, everyone in Scardale worked too bloody hard to have time for anything except eating and sleeping.
There was little need for contact with the outside world on a daily basis. Most of what was consumed in Scardale was produced in the circle of looming limestone – meat, potatoes, milk, eggs, some fruit and a few vegetables. Ma Lomas made wine from elderflowers, elderberries, nettles, dandelions, birch sap, rhubarb, gooseberries and whinberries. If it grew, she fermented it. Everybody drank it. Even the children would get a glass now and again for medicinal purposes. There was a van came on Tuesdays selling fish and greengrocery. Another van came from Leek on Thursdays, a general grocer. Anything else would be bought at the market in Leek or in Buxton by whoever was there selling their own produce or livestock.
It had been strange, the transition from being at school, where he’d gone out of the dale five days a week, to being an adult, working the land and sometimes not leaving Scardale from one month to the next. There wasn’t even television to disrupt the rhythm of life. He remembered when old Squire Castleton came back from Buxton with a TV he’d bought for the Coronation. His father and his Uncle Roy had erected the aerial and the whole village had crowded into the squire’s parlour. With a flourish, the old man had switched on, and they all stared dumbfounded at a February blizzard. No matter how David and Roy had fiddled with the aerial, all it did was crackle like fat on a fire, and all they could see was interference. The only kind of interference anybody in Scardale had a mind to put up with.
Now it was all changed. Alison had disappeared and all of a sudden, their lives seemed to belong to everybody. The police, the papers, they all wanted their questions answering, whether it was any of their business or not. And Brian felt like he had no natural defences against such an invasion. He wanted to hurt someone. But there was no one to hand.
It was still dark when George and Clough reached the outskirts of the village. The first light they came to spilled out of a half-closed barn door. ‘Might as well start here,’ George said, pulling the car over on to the verge. ‘Who’s this going to be?’ he asked as they tramped over the few yards of muddy concrete to the door.
‘It’ll likely be Brian and David Carter,’ Clough said. ‘They’re the cowmen.’
The two men in the barn couldn’t hear their approach over the clattering and heavy liquid breathing of the milking apparatus. George waited till they turned round, taking in the strangely sweet smells of dung, sweating animal and milk, watching as the men washed the teats of each cow before clamping the milking machine to her udder. Finally, the older of the two turned. George’s first impression was that Ruth Hawkin’s careful eyes had been transplanted into an Easter Island statue. His face was all planes and angles, his cheeks like slabs and his eye sockets like a carving in pink wax. ‘Any news?’ he demanded, his voice loud against the machinery.
George shook his head. ‘I came to introduce myself. I’m Detective Inspector George Bennett. I’m in charge of the investigation.’ As he walked towards the older man, the younger stopped what he was doing and leaned against the massive hindquarters of one of his Friesians, arms folded across his chest.
‘I’m David Carter,’ the older man said. ‘Alison’s uncle. And this is my lad Brian.’ Brian Carter gave a stately nod. He had his father’s face, but his eyes were narrow and pale, like shards of topaz. He couldn’t have been much more than twenty, but the downward cast of his mouth appeared to have been set in stone.
‘I wanted to say we’re doing everything we can to find out what’s happened to Alison,’ George said.
‘Haven’t found her though, have you?’ Brian said, his voice sullen as his expression.
‘No. We will be searching again as soon as it’s light and if you want to join us again, you’d be more than welcome. But that’s not why I’m here. I can’t help thinking that the answer to what happened to Alison was somewhere in her life. I don’t believe that whoever did this acted on the spur of the moment. It was planned. And that means somebody left traces. Whether you know it or not, someone in this village saw something or heard something that will give us a lead. I’m going to be talking to everybody in the village today, and I’ll say the same to you all. I need you to search your memories for anything out of the ordinary, anyone you saw that didn’t belong here.’
Brian snorted. He sounded surprisingly like one of his cows. ‘If you’re looking for somebody that doesn’t belong here, you don’t have to look very far.’
‘Who did you have in mind?’ George asked.
‘Brian,’ his father warned.
Brian scowled and fumbled in the pocket of his overall for a cigarette. ‘Dad, he doesn’t belong here. He never will.’
‘Who are we talking about?’ George persisted.
‘Philip Hawkin, who else?’ Brian muttered through a mouthful of smoke. His head came up and he stared defiantly at the back of his father’s head.
‘You’re not suggesting her stepfather had anything to do with Alison’s disappearance, are you?’ Clough asked, an edge of challenge in his voice that George suspected Brian Carter would find irresistible.
‘You didn’t ask that. You asked who didn’t belong here. Well, he doesn’t. Ever since he turned up, he’s been sticking his oar in, trying to tell us how to farm our land, as if he’s the one been doing it for generations. He thinks if you read a book or an NFU pamphlet, suddenly you’re an expert. And the way he courted my Auntie Ruth. He wouldn’t leave her alone. The only way she was ever going to get any peace was if she married him,’ Brian blurted out.
‘Didn’t think you minded that,’ his father said sarcastically. ‘If Ruth and Alison hadn’t moved out of Bankside Cottage, you and Denise would have had to start your married life in your old bedroom. I don’t know about you, but I could do without the bedhead banging on the wall half the night.’
Brian flushed and glowered at his father. ‘You leave Denise out of this. We’re talking about Hawkin. And you know as well as me that he doesn’t belong here. Don’t act like you don’t spend half of every day maunging on about what a useless article he is and how you wish the old squire had had more sense than leave the land to an incomer like Hawkin.’
‘That doesn’t mean he had anything to do with Alison going,’ David Carter said, rubbing his hand over his chin in what was clearly a familiar gesture of exasperation.
‘Your father’s right,’ George said mildly.
‘Maybe so,’ Brian muttered grudgingly. ‘But he always has to know best, does Hawkin. If he lays down the law in the house the way he does on the land, then my cousin’s got worse than a dog’s life. I don’t care what anybody says, she can’t have been happy living with Hawkin.’ He spat contemptuously on the concrete floor then turned away abruptly and stalked off to the far end of the milking shed.
‘Take no notice of the lad,’ David Carter said wearily. ‘His mouth works harder than his brain. Hawkin’s an idiot, but according to Ruth, he thought the world of Alison. And I’d take my sister’s word ahead of that son of mine.’ He shook his head and half turned to watch Brian fiddling with a piece of machinery. ‘I thought marrying Denise would knock some sense into him. Too much to hope for, I suppose.’ He sighed. ‘We’ll be out with the searchers, Mr Bennett. And I’ll think on what you’ve said. See if I can think of owt.’
They shook hands. George could feel Carter’s cool eyes appraising him as he followed Clough out into the grey-streaked light of dawn. ‘No love lost between young Brian and the squire,’ George commented as they walked back to the car.
‘He’s saying nothing that the rest of Scardale doesn’t think, according to PC Grundy. We had a chat with him last night after we’d done the door-to-door interviews. He says all the villagers reckon Hawkin’s in love with the sound of his own voice. He likes people to be in no doubt who the boss is, and they don’t take kindly to that in Scardale. The tradition here has always been that the villagers get on with working the land the way they see fit and the squire collects his rents and keeps his nose out. So you’re going to hear a lot of complaints about Hawkin,’ Clough said.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
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