Val McDermid 3-Book Crime Collection: A Place of Execution, The Distant Echo, The Grave Tattoo

VAL McDERMID

VAL McDERMID 3-BOOK BUNDLE

A Place of Execution

The Distant Echo

The Grave Tattoo

About the Author

Also by Val McDermid

Copyright

About the Publisher

VAL McDERMID

A Place of Execution

Praise for A Place of Execution

‘Compelling and atmospheric…a tour de force’

MINETTE WALTERS

‘Val McDermid is a roaring Ferrari amid the crowded traffic on the crime-writing road…a crime writer capable of holding her own in any company…she is a strong enough writer to create her own distinctive world’

JANE JAKEMAN, Independent

‘A gut-wrenching tale that spans two decades and brings the resonance of Greek tragedies to England. Psychological suspense that probes, prods and disturbs. A terrific achievement’

MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI, Time Out

‘This is an engrossing story, with its atmospheric portrait of a closed, inbred community…A Place of Execution is a substantial book and an impressive one, possibly the best McDermid has written, and it takes this most accomplished writer into higher territory’

SUSANNA YAGER, Sunday Telegraph

‘Beautifully written…this book is not simply a puzzle; it is almost an archaeological delving into a multi-layered, enclosed society. It may be that McDermid will write better novels than this in the future, but I do not see how’

GERALD KAUFMAN, Daily Telegraph

‘A Place of Execution has verve, depth and an unerring grasp of human responses’

She

‘Like a complex jigsaw puzzle, the pieces eventually fall into place, and for those who choose crime fiction for plotting and denouement, this will prove surprising and completely satisfying’

SUSIE MAGUIRE, Scotland on Sunday

‘A Place of Execution makes you question your assumptions about the whole crime genre…A crime novel about a miscarriage of justice, A Place of Execution is a wake-up call to crime writers everywhere. A terrific and original novel, brilliantly executed’

PAUL DAVIES, Daily Mirror

‘It [A Place of Execution] must be in the running for best crime novel of the year. She has propelled herself into the ranks of the very best in the business…If you’ve never read any McDermid, try this. Basically, if you can read at all, try this. Atmosphere, characters, strong plot, tension, menace – it’s got the lot’

JANICE YOUNG, Yorkshire Post

‘Deserves to be the crime novel of the year’

Prima

‘There is a great deal to admire in this novel…above all the book’s formal adventurousness and subtle orchestration of different narrative levels, that sets it apart from most thrillers. With A Place of Execution, McDermid has wrought a powerful, resonant novel about power and its abuse, about the past’s hold on the present, about the nature of knowledge’

LIAM MCILVANNEY, Glasgow Herald

‘Arguably her finest yet…Fear infuses every page…in this epic tragedy’

ERIC JACKSON, Manchester Evening News

‘This is an extraordinarily accomplished book…the whole affair is a complete success’

F. E. PARDOE, Birmingham Post

Acknowledgements

This was not an easy book to write. To delve into a past so recent that it is within many people’s living memory is to invite the exposure of one’s mistakes. Many people helped me to minimize the opportunities for such embarrassment. Douglas Wynn, true-crime writer, told me the tale that formed the distant seed of inspiration for this book and also helped me with research into historical cases. The staff of the Social Sciences department of Manchester Central Reference Library provided courteous assistance, as did their colleague Jane Mathieson. Without retired inspector Bill Fletcher, I could never have hoped to re-create the world of a county police force in the 1960s. Mark at the Buxton Advertiser provided invaluable access to the bound volumes in the cellar, and the Manchester Evening News library team also went out of their way to support my quest for authenticity. Dr Sue Black was generous with her forensic experience and Diana Muir supplied crucial assistance that both exposed the fatal flaw in the plot and allowed it to be salvaged. Peter N. Walker also allowed me to pick his brains for period detail and was kind enough to check the finished manuscript for glaring errors. Any remaining mistakes are entirely my responsibility.

I have taken some liberties with the geography of Derbyshire and with the city of Derby itself. The village of Scardale does not exist, although there are several approximations to it in the White Peak.

Writers are a bit like old buildings – we need a lot of shoring up. So thanks to my scaffolding team – Jane and Lisanne, Julia and both Karens, Jai and Paula, Leslie, Mel and, most of all, to Brigid.

Dedication

To my evil twin; laissez les bon temps rouler, cher.

Contents

Praise for A Place of Execution

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Epigraph

BOOK 1

Introduction

Prologue

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

PART TWO

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

PART THREE

The Remand

The Murder Charge

The Committal

The Trial 1

The Trial 2

The Trial 3

The Trial 4

The Trial 5

The Trial 6

The Trial 7

The Verdict

A Place of Execution

BOOK 2 PART ONE

PART TWO

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

PART THREE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Epigraph

You shall be taken to the place from whence you came, and thence to a place of lawful execution, and there you shall be hanged by the neck until you be dead, and afterwards your body shall be buried in a common grave within the precincts of the prison wherein you were last confined before your execution; and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

The formal death sentence of the English legal system

LE PENDU: THE HANGED MAN

Divinatory meaning: The card suggests life in suspension. Reversal of the mind and one’s way of life. Transition. Abandonment. Renunciation. The changing of life’s forces. Readjustment. Regeneration. Rebirth. Improvement. Efforts and sacrifice may have to be undertaken to succeed towards a goal which may not be reached.

Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling S. R. Kaplan

Introduction

Like Alison Carter, I was born in Derbyshire in 1950. Like her, I grew up familiar with the limestone dales of the White Peak, no stranger to the winter blizzards that regularly cut us off from the rest of the country. It was in Buxton, after all, that snow once stopped play in a county cricket match in June.

So when Alison Carter went missing in December 1963, it meant more to me and my classmates than it can have done to most other people. We knew villages like the one she’d grown up in. We knew the sort of things she’d have done every day. We suffered through similar classes and cloakroom arguments about which of the Fab Four was our favourite Beatle. We imagined we shared the same hopes, dreams and fears. Because of that, right from the word go, we all knew something terrible had happened to Alison Carter, because something we also knew was that girls like her – like us – didn’t run away. Not in Derbyshire in the middle of December, anyway.

It wasn’t just the thirteen-year-old girls who understood that. My father was one of the hundreds of volunteer searchers who combed the high moorland and the wooded valleys around Scardale, and his grim face when he returned home after a fruitless day scouring the landscape is still sharply etched in my memory.

We followed the hunt for Alison Carter in the newspapers, and every day at school for weeks, someone would be bound to start the speculation rolling. All these years later, I still had more questions for George Bennett than the former policeman could answer.

I have not based my narrative solely on George Bennett’s contemporaneous notes and current memories. While researching this book, I made several visits to Scardale and the surrounding area, interviewing many of the people who played a part in the unfolding of Alison Carter’s story, gathering their impressions, comparing their accounts of events as they experienced them. I could not have completed this book without the help of Janet Carter, Tommy Clough, Peter Grundy, Charles Lomas, Kathy Lomas and Don Smart. I have taken some artistic licence in ascribing thoughts, emotions and dialogue to people, but these sections are based on my interviews with those of the surviving protagonists who agreed to help me to try to create a truthful picture both of a community and the individuals within it.

Some of what happened on that terrible December night in 1963 will of course never be known. But for everyone who has ever been touched, however remotely, by Alison Carter’s life and death, George Bennett’s story is a fascinating insight into one of the most heartless crimes of the 1960s.

For too long, it has remained hidden in the shadow of the understandably more notorious Moors Murders. But Alison Carter’s fate is no less terrible for coming at the hands of a killer who had but a single victim. And the message of her death is still as important today. If Alison Carter’s story tells us one thing, it is that even the gravest of dangers can wear a friendly face.

Nothing can bring Alison Carter back. But reminding the world of what happened to her might prevent others coming to harm. If this book achieves that, both George Bennett and I will feel some satisfaction.

Catherine Heathcote Longnor, 1998

Prologue

The girl was saying goodbye to her life. And it was no easy farewell.

Like any teenager, she’d always found plenty to complain about. But now that she was about to lose it, this life suddenly seemed very desirable. Now at last she began to understand why her elderly relatives clung so tenaciously to every precious moment, even if it was riven with pain. However bad this life was, the alternative was infinitely worse.

She had even begun to regret things. All the times she’d wished her mother dead; all the times she’d wished that her dream of being a changeling would come true; all the hate she’d expended on the children at school who had called her names for not being one of them; all the fervent longings to be grown up, with these miseries behind her. It all seemed irrelevant now. The only thing that mattered was the uniquely valuable life she was about to lose.

She felt fear, inevitably. Fear of what lay beyond as well as what lay immediately ahead. She’d been brought up to believe in heaven and in its necessary counterweight, hell, the equal and opposite force that held things stable. She had her own very clear ideas of what heaven would be. More than she had ever hoped anything in her short life, she hoped that that was what lay in wait for her, so terrifyingly close now.

But she was desperately afraid that what she was going to was hell. She wasn’t so clear about what hell would consist of. She just knew that, compared to everything she’d hated about her life, it would be worse. And given what she knew, that meant it was going to be very bad indeed.

Nevertheless, there was no other possible choice for her. The girl had to say goodbye to her life.

For ever.

PART ONE The Early Stages

Manchester Evening News,

Tuesday, 10th December 1963, p. 3

£100 reward in boy hunt

Police continued to hunt for 12-year-old John Kilbride today – and hoped that a £100 reward might produce a new lead.

For a local managing director has offered £100 to anyone who gives information which leads directly to the discovery of John who vanished from his home in Smallshaw Lane, Ashton-under-Lyne 18 days ago.

1

Wednesday, 11th December 1963. 7.53 p.m.

‘Help me. You’ve got to help me.’ The woman’s voice quavered on the edge of tears. The duty constable who had picked up the phone heard a hiccuping gulp, as if the caller was struggling to speak.

‘That’s what we’re here for, madam,’ PC Ron Swindells said stolidly. He’d worked in Buxton man and boy for the best part of fifteen years and for the last five, he’d found it hard to shake off a sense that he was reliving the first ten. There was, he reckoned, nothing new under the sun. It was a view that would be irrevocably shattered by the events that were about to unfold around him, but for the moment, he was content to trot out the formula that had served him well until now. ‘What seems to be the problem?’ he asked, his rich bass voice gently impersonal.

‘Alison,’ the woman gasped. ‘My Alison’s not come home.’

‘Alison’s your lass, is she?’ PC Swindells asked, his voice deliberately calm, attempting to reassure the woman.

‘She went straight out with the dog when she came in after school. And she’s not come home.’ The sharp edge of hysteria forced the woman’s voice higher.

Swindells glanced automatically at the clock. Seven minutes before eight. The woman was right to be worried. The girl must have been out of the house near on four hours, and that was no joke at this time of year. ‘Could she have gone to visit friends, on the spur of the moment, like?’ he asked, knowing already that would have been her first port of call before she lifted the telephone.

‘I’ve knocked every door in the village. She’s missing, I’m telling you. Something’s happened to my Alison.’ Now the woman was breaking down, her words choking out in the intervals between sobs. Swindells thought he heard the rumble of another voice in the background.

Village, the woman had said. ‘Where exactly are you calling from, madam?’ he asked.

There was the sound of muffled conversation, then a clear masculine voice came on the line, the unmistakable southern accent brisk with authority. ‘This is Philip Hawkin from the manor house in Scardale,’ he said.

‘I see, sir,’ Swindells said cautiously. While the information didn’t exactly change anything, it did make the policeman slightly wary, conscious that Scardale was off his beat in more ways than the obvious. Scardale wasn’t just a different world from the bustling market town where Swindells lived and worked; it had the reputation of being a law unto itself. For such a call to come from Scardale, something well out of the ordinary must have happened.

The caller’s voice dropped in pitch, giving the impression that he was talking man to man with Swindells. ‘You must excuse my wife. She’s rather upset. So emotional, women, don’t you find? Look, Officer, I’m sure no harm has come to Alison, but my wife insisted on giving you a call. I’m sure she’ll turn up any minute now, and the last thing I want is to waste your time.’

‘If you’ll just give me some details, sir,’ the stolid Swindells said, pulling his pad closer to him.

Detective Inspector George Bennett should have been at home long since. It was almost eight o’clock, well beyond the hour when senior detectives were expected to be at their desks. By rights, he should have been in his armchair stretching his long legs in front of a blazing coal fire, dinner inside him and Coronation Street on the television opposite. Then, while Anne cleared away the dishes and washed up, he’d nip out for a pint and a chat in the lounge bar of the Duke of York or the Baker’s Arms. There was no quicker way to get the feel of a place than through bar-room conversation. And he needed that head start more than any of his colleagues, being an incomer of less than six months’ standing. He knew the locals didn’t trust him with much of their gossip, but gradually, they were beginning to treat him like part of the furniture, forgiving and forgetting that his father and grandfather had supped in a different part of the shire.

He glanced at his watch. He’d be lucky to get to the pub tonight. Not that he counted that a great hardship. George wasn’t a drinking man. If he hadn’t been obliged by his professional responsibilities to keep his finger firmly on the pulse of the town, he wouldn’t have entered a pub from one week to the next. He’d much rather have taken Anne dancing to one of the new beat groups that regularly played at the Pavilion Gardens, or to the Opera House to see a film. Or simply stayed at home. Three months married, and George still couldn’t quite believe Anne had agreed to spend the rest of her life with him. It was a miracle that sustained him through the worst times in the job. So far, those had come from tedium rather than the heinous nature of the crimes he encountered. The events of the coming seven months would put that miracle to a tougher test.

That night, however, the thought of Anne at home, knitting in front of the television while she waited for him to return, was far more of a temptation than any pint of bitter. George tore a half-sheet of paper off his scratch pad, placed it among the papers he’d been reading to mark his place, and firmly closed the file, slipping it into his desk drawer. He stubbed out his Gold Leaf cigarette then emptied his ashtray into the bin by his desk, always his last act before he reached for his trench coat and, self-consciously, the wide-brimmed trilby that always made him feel faintly silly. Anne loved it; she was always telling him it made him look like James Stewart. He couldn’t see it himself. Just because he had a long face and floppy blond hair didn’t make him a film star. He shrugged into the coat, noting that it fitted almost too snugly now, thanks to the quilted lining Anne had made him buy. In spite of the slight straining across his broad cricketer’s shoulders, he knew he’d be glad of it as soon as he stepped into the station yard and the teeth of the biting wind that always seemed to be whipping down from the moors through the streets of Buxton.

Taking a last look around his office to check he’d left nothing lying around that the cleaner’s eyes shouldn’t see, he closed the door behind him. A quick glance showed him there was nobody left in the CID room, so he turned back to indulge a moment’s vanity. ‘Detective Inspector G. D. Bennett’ incised in white letters on a small black plastic plaque. It was something to be proud of, he thought. Not yet thirty, and a DI already. It had been worth every tedious minute of the three years of endless cramming for the law degree that had eased him on to the fast track, one of the first ever graduates to make it to the new accelerated promotion stream in the Derbyshire force. Now, seven years from swearing his oath of allegiance, he was the youngest plain-clothes inspector the county force had ever promoted.

There was no one about to see the lapse of dignity, so he took the stairs at a run. His momentum carried him through the swing doors into the uniformed squad room. Three heads turned sharply as he entered. For a moment, George couldn’t think why it was so quiet. Then he remembered. Half the town would be at the memorial service for the recently assassinated President Kennedy, a special Mass open to all denominations. The town had claimed the murdered leader as an adopted native son. After all, JFK had practically been there only months before his death, visiting his sister’s grave a handful of miles away in Edensor in the grounds of Chatsworth House. The fact that one of the nurses who had helped surgeons in the fruitless fight for the president’s life in a Dallas hospital was a Buxton woman had only strengthened the connection in the eyes of the locals.

‘All quiet, then, Sergeant?’ he asked.

Bob Lucas, the duty sergeant, frowned and raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. He glanced at the sheet of paper in his hand. ‘We were until five minutes ago, sir.’ He straightened up. ‘It’s probably summat and nowt,’ he said. ‘A pound to a penny it’ll be sorted before I even get there.’

‘Anything interesting?’ George asked, keeping his voice light. The last thing he wanted was for Bob Lucas to think he was the kind of CID man who treated uniforms as if they were the monkeys and he the organ grinder.

‘Missing lass,’ Lucas said, proffering the sheet of paper. ‘PC Swindells just took the call. They rang here direct, not through the emergency switchboard.’

George tried to picture Scardale on his mental map of the area. ‘Do we have a local man there, Sergeant?’ he stalled.

‘No need. It’s barely a hamlet. Ten houses at the most. No, Scardale’s covered by Peter Grundy at Longnor. He’s only two miles away. But the mother obviously thought this was too important for Peter.’

‘And you think?’ George was cautious.

‘I think I’d better take the area car out to Scardale and have a word with Mrs Hawkin, sir. I’ll pick up Peter on the way.’ As he spoke, Lucas reached for his cap and straightened it on hair that was almost as black and glossy as his boots. His ruddy cheeks looked as if he had a pair of Ping-Pong balls tucked inside his mouth. Combined with glittering dark eyes and straight black eyebrows, they gave him the look of a painted ventriloquist’s dummy. But George had already found out that Bob Lucas was the last person to let anyone else put words in his mouth. He knew that if he asked a question of Lucas, he’d get a straight answer.