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

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СКАЧАТЬ took a deep breath. ‘It would have saved us a lot of time if either you or Charlie had seen fit to tell us that. Mrs Lomas, in cases involving missing children, the first forty-eight hours are crucial. That time is almost up and we are no nearer finding a young girl who is one of your relatives.’ George’s frustration made his voice rise. ‘Mrs Lomas, I swear I am going to find Alison Carter. Sooner or later, I am going to know what happened here two days ago. If that means searching every house in this village from roof beam to foundations, I’ll do it. If I have to dig up every field and garden in the dale, I’ll do it, and to hell with your crops and livestock. If I have to arrest every one of you and charge you with obstruction or even with being accessories, I’ll do it.’ He stopped abruptly and leaned forward. ‘So tell me. Do you think Peter Crowther had anything to do with Alison’s disappearance?’

      She shook her head impatiently. ‘As far as I know, and believe you me, I know most things around Scardale, Peter hasn’t set foot in this dale since the war ended. I don’t think he even knows Alison exists. And I’d put my hand on the Bible and swear she’s never heard his name.’ Her lips clamped shut, her nose and chin approaching like the points of an engineer’s callipers.

      ‘We can’t be sure about that. The lass has been going to school in Buxton. She’s got the look of her mother. Don’t forget, Mrs Hawkin would have been about Alison’s age when her brother last spent much time around her. With somebody who’s a bit lacking in the top storey, seeing Alison in the street could have triggered off all sorts of memories.’

      Ma Lomas folded her arms tightly across her chest and shook her head vigorously as George spoke. ‘I’ll not believe it, I’ll not,’ she said.

      ‘So, should we be interviewing Peter Crowther, Mrs Lomas?’ George asked, his voice gentler again in response to her obvious distress.

      ‘If he’d have stepped into the dale, we’d all have known. Besides, he’d have been at work,’ she added desperately.

      ‘They get Wednesday afternoons off. He could have been here. Mrs Lomas, what did Peter Crowther do that got him sent away?’

      ‘That’s nobody’s business now,’ she said emphatically. Her eyes were screwed up now, as if the firelight were the noonday sun.

      ‘I need to know,’ George persisted.

      ‘You don’t.’

      Tommy Clough leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his notepad dangling between his calves. George envied him his ability to appear relaxed even in an interview as tense as this had become. ‘I don’t think Peter Crowther could hurt a fly,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not the one who makes the decisions. I think it could be a while before Peter sees daylight again. A woman like yourself, Mrs Lomas, who’s never lived outside a Derbyshire dale, you’ll not have any reason to know what prisoners do with men they think have hurt children. What they do drives sane men mad. They hang themselves from the bars on their windows. They swallow bleach. They’d cut their wrists with butter knives if anybody were daft enough to let them have one. Your Peter will be used and abused worse than a street prostitute in a war zone. I don’t think you want that for him. You or anybody else in Scardale. If you did, you’d have seen to it that he caught what-for twenty years ago. But you let him go. You let him build a bit of a life for himself. What’s the point in standing idly by and letting him lose it now?’

      It was a persuasive speech, but it had no effect. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she said, her head moving almost imperceptibly from side to side.

      George noisily pushed his chair back, the legs shrieking on the stone-flagged floor. ‘I haven’t the time to waste here,’ he said. ‘If you don’t care about Peter Crowther or about finding Alison, I’ll go to someone who will. I’m sure Mrs Hawkin will tell us anything we want to know. After all, he’s her brother.’

      Ma Lomas’s head came up as if someone had yanked at the hair on the back of her head. Her eyes widened. ‘Not Ruth. No, you mustn’t. Not Ruth.’

      ‘Why not?’ George demanded, letting some of his anger out. ‘She wants Alison found, she doesn’t want us to waste our time on false leads. She’ll tell us anything we want to know, believe me.’

      She glared at him, her witch’s face malevolent as a Halloween mask. ‘Sit down,’ she hissed. It was a command, not an invitation. George retreated to his chair. Ma Lomas stood up and moved unsteadily across to the sideboard. She opened the door and took out a bottle whose label claimed it contained whisky. The contents, however, were colourless as gin. She filled a sherry glass with the liquid and drank it down in one. She gave two sharp coughs, her shoulders heaving, then she turned back to them, her eyes watering. ‘Peter were always a problem,’ she said slowly.

      ‘He always had a dirty mind,’ she continued, making her way back to her chair. ‘Nasty. Mucky. You’d find him out in the fields, staring at any animals that were coupling. The older he got, the worse he got. He’d follow anybody that was courting, his own kith and kin, desperate to see what they were doing. You’d know when the ram were serving the ewes because you’d walk into the wood and find Peter standing with his…’ She paused, pursed her lips, then continued. ‘His thing in his hand, eyes on stalks, watching the beasts at their business. He’d been slapped and shouted at, kicked and called for it, but it made no difference to him. After a time, it didn’t seem to matter so much. In a place like Scardale, you have to endure what you can’t cure.’

      She stared into the fire and sighed. ‘Then young Ruth started to change from a little girl into a young woman. Peter was like a man obsessed. He followed her around like a dog sniffing after a bitch in heat. Dan caught him a couple of times up a ladder outside the lass’s bedroom, watching her through a crack in the curtains. We all tried to make him see sense – she was his own sister, it couldn’t go on. But Peter would never take a telling. In the end, Dan made him move out of the house and sleep over here in my cottage.’

      Ma Lomas paused and briefly rubbed her closed eyelids. Neither George nor Clough moved a muscle, determined not to break the momentum of the story. ‘One night, Dan came back from Longnor. He’d been having a drink. This was during the war, when we were supposed to keep a blackout. As soon as he turned into the dale, he could see a chink of light shining out like a beacon from the village. He pedalled as fast as he could, wanting to tell whoever it was that they had a light showing before the bobby saw it and fined them. He was a good half-mile away when he realized it must be coming from his own home. Then he really stepped on it. Soon, he recognized the very window – Ruth’s bedroom. He knew their Diane was alone with Ruth, and he was convinced something terrible had happened to one or other of them.’ She turned to face her spellbound audience.

      ‘Well, he was wrong, and he was right. He came roaring and rushing into the house like a hurricane, up the stairs two at a time, near on hitting his head on the beams. He flung open the door to Ruth’s room and there was Peter standing by Ruth’s bed, his pants round his ankles, the lantern casting a shadow on the ceiling that made his cock look like a broomstick. The lass had been fast asleep, but Dan bursting in like a madman woke her up. She must have thought she was having a nightmare.’ The old woman shook her head. ’I could hear her screaming right across the village green.

      ‘The next thing I heard was Peter screaming. It took three men to drag Dan off him. I thought he was a dead man, covered in blood like a calf that’s had a hard birth. We locked him in a lambing shed until his body had started to heal, then Squire Castleton arranged for him to go into the hostel in Buxton. Dan told him if he ever came near Ruth or Scardale again, he’d kill him with his bare hands. Peter believed him then and he believes him now. I know you’ll be thinking that what I’ve told you means he could have seen Ruth in Alison and done something terrible СКАЧАТЬ