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

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СКАЧАТЬ enough, you haven’t. It’s clarified my thinking. I know now what we haven’t got. The more I’ve talked and listened this morning, the more certain I am that we’re not dealing with a stranger abduction. Whatever happened to Alison, she knew who she was dealing with.’

       Monday, 16^th December 1963. 7.40 a.m.

      The buoyant mood that had sustained George through another day’s fruitless searching vanished with the Monday-morning edition of the Daily News. This time, Don Smart’s tame clairvoyant had earned him the front page.

       LOST GIRL: FRENCH SEER GIVES DRAMATIC CLUE Exclusive by a Staff Reporter

      Investigations into the disappearance of 13-year-old Alison Carter took a dramatic turn today as a clairvoyant gave police vital new leads to her whereabouts.

      Madame Colette Charest has given details of what she believed were Alison’s movements when she disappeared five days ago from the tiny Derbyshire hamlet of Scardale.

      Speaking from her home in Lyons, France, Mme Charest gave her findings based on an Ordnance Survey map of the district, a photograph of the pretty blonde girl and on newspaper cuttings from the News.

       Impressed

      The details were passed on last night to Detective Chief Inspector M. C. Carver, who heads the team of detectives investigating the mysterious disappearance. He said, ‘We cannot afford to ignore anything. Her report looks impressive.’

      Mme Charest has amazed French police with her clairvoyant powers which have assisted in previous hunts.

      The 47-year-old French widow said she ‘saw’ Alison walking through woodland with a man she knew. He was aged between 35 and 45, with dark hair.

      She said Alison had been waiting for the man by water and that she had been sad and afraid.

       Still alive

      Most remarkably, Mme Charest persisted in her conviction that Alison is still alive and safe. ’She is living in a city. She is in a house that is one of a row of brick houses on a hill.

      ’She arrived there in something like a small van. It was night when she arrived and she has not been outside since she got there. She is not free to leave but she is not in pain.

      ‘There is a school playground near the house. She can hear the children playing and that makes her sad.’

      Meanwhile, teams of volunteers worked tirelessly with police officers and mountain rescue teams searching the dales and moorland round Scardale.

      Dogs and grappling irons were used to check a large expanse of moorland which contains several ponds and wells.

      DCI Carver said, ’We are spreading the search as widely as possible.

      ’The public are cooperating magnificently but we still need positive information about Alison’s movements after she left home with her dog on Wednesday afternoon.

      ‘Perhaps this new information might jog somebody’s memory. No matter how insignificant it may seem, we want to hear from members of the public who might know something.’

      ‘What does Carver think he’s playing at?’ he grumbled to Anne. ‘The last thing we want is to encourage this sort of thing. We’ll be swamped by every half-baked fortune teller in the country.’

      Anne placidly buttered her toast and said, ‘Most likely they twisted what he said.’

      ‘You’re probably right,’ George conceded. He folded the paper and pushed it across the table towards his wife as he rose. ‘I’m off now. Expect me when you see me.’

      ‘Try and get home at a decent time, George. I don’t want you to start getting into the habit of working all the hours God sends. I don’t want our baby growing up never knowing who its father is. I’ve listened to the way the other wives talk about their husbands. It’s almost as if they’re talking about distant relatives that they don’t like very much. It sounds like these men treat their homes as a last resort, somewhere to go when the pubs and clubs are shut. The women say even holidays are a strain. Every year it’s like going away with a stranger who spends the whole time fretting and sulking. That or drinking and gambling.’

      George shook his head. ‘I’m not that sort of man, you know that.’

      ‘I don’t suppose most of them thought that’s what they were getting into when they were newlyweds,’ Anne said drily. ‘Yours isn’t a job like any other. You don’t leave it behind at the end of the working day. I just want to make sure you remember there’s more to your life than catching criminals.’

      ‘How could I forget, when I’ve got you to come home to?’ He bent over to kiss her. She smelled sweet, like warm biscuits. It was, he knew now, her particular morning fragrance. She’d told him his odour was faintly musky, like the fur of a clean cat. That’s when he’d realized that everybody had their own distinctive scent. He wondered if the memory of her daughter’s aromatic signature was yet another of the things that tortured Ruth Hawkin. Stifling a sigh, he gave Anne a quick hug and hurried out to the car before his emotions spilled over.

      Swinging by the divisional headquarters to pick up Tommy Clough, George decided to give the morning press conference a miss. Superintendent Martin was far better at handling Don Smart than he’d ever be, and the last thing he needed was to be sucked into the public confrontation his anger made almost inevitable. ‘Let’s go and talk to the Hawkins,’ he said to his sergeant. ‘They must know in their hearts that hope’s running out. They won’t be wanting to admit it, either to themselves or to anybody else. We owe it to them to be honest about the situation.’

      The wipers swept the rain off the windscreen with mindless monotony as they headed off over the moors towards Scardale. At last, Clough said gloomily, ‘She’s not going to be out there in this and still be alive.’

      ‘She’s not going to be anywhere and still be alive. It’s not like abducting a little kid that you can terrify and shut up in a cellar somewhere. Keeping a teenage girl in captivity is in a different league altogether. Besides, sex killers don’t want to wait for their gratification. They want it now. And if she’d been kidnapped by somebody who was idiot enough to think Hawkin had enough money to make a ransom worthwhile, there would have been a ransom note by now.’ George sighed as he raised a hand to greet the dripping constable who still stood guard at the gate into Scardale. ‘Never mind the Hawkins. We’ve got to face up to the fact that it’s a body we’re looking for now.’

      The slap of the wipers was all that broke the silence until they pulled up on the village green alongside the caravan. The two men ran through the rain and huddled under the tiny porch waiting for Ruth Hawkin to answer George’s knock. To their surprise, it was Kathy Lomas who opened the door. She stood back to let them pass. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said brusquely.

      They filed into the kitchen. Ruth was sitting at the table wrapped in a pink quilted nylon housecoat, her eyes listless, her hair loose and uncombed. Opposite her sat Ma Lomas, layered in cardigans topped with a tartan shawl pinned across her breast with a nappy pin. George recognized the fourth woman in the room as Ruth’s sister Diane, young Charlie Lomas’s mother. The three younger women were all smoking, but Ma Lomas’s chest didn’t seem to mind.

      ‘What’s СКАЧАТЬ