have thought herself resigned to losing her daughter, the instant when he told her they were formally treating Alison’s disappearance as a murder inquiry would send a blade of pain to her heart.
He lit another cigarette and paced in tight circles outside the darkroom. What was keeping Clough? He couldn’t leave the outhouse now the search was under way, for fear of a later defence argument that while it had been unattended, someone had slipped incriminating evidence inside. He didn’t want to continue searching either, realizing that with so circumstantial an array of evidence, every crucial find must be witnessed. George forced himself to breathe deeply, rotating his shoulders inside his coat to try to release some of the tension that knotted his neck in taut cords.
As the last light faded behind the western edge of the dale, Clough emerged, a wide grin spread across his face. ‘Sorry I took so long,’ he said. ‘I had to go through all the desk drawers. Nothing. Then I noticed one of the drawers wasn’t closing flush. So I pulled it out, and bingo! There was the safe key, stuck to the back of the drawer with elastoplast.’ He dangled the key in front of George. ‘The same kind of elastoplast that the dog was muzzled with, incidentally.’
‘Nice work, Tommy.’ He took the key and stepped back inside the darkroom. He crouched over the safe and glanced over his shoulder at his sergeant. ‘I’m almost scared to open it.’
‘In case there’s proof she’s dead?’
George shook his head. ‘In case there’s no proof of anything. I’m convinced now, Tommy. Too many small coincidences. Hawkin’s done for Alison, and I want him to swing for it.’ He turned to his task and slotted the key into the lock. It turned in smooth silence. He closed his eyes for a few seconds. Five minutes before he’d have called himself an agnostic. Now, he was a zealot.
Slowly he turned the handle and used it to lift open the heavy steel door. There was nothing inside but a thin stack of manila envelopes. George lifted them out almost reverently. He counted them aloud for the benefit of Clough, whose notebook was already open, pencil poised. ‘Six brown envelopes,’ he said, rising and placing them on the bench. George sat down. He had the feeling he’d need the support. He pulled on his soft leather driving gloves and started work.
The flaps had all been tucked inside. George inserted his thumb and flicked the first envelope open. It contained eight-by-ten photographs. He removed them by pushing the sides of the envelope inwards and letting the photos spill out on to the table, to avoid smudging any fingerprints on the envelope or the pictures. There were half a dozen photos, which he spread out using his pen.
Alison Carter was naked in all of them. Her face was devoid of its natural charm, rendered ugly by fear. Her body somehow expressed her reluctance to adopt poses that would have been lewd in an adult but which were gut-wrenchingly tragic in a child. Unless, of course, the viewer was the sort of paedophile who had taken them. Then, they would doubtless have appeared erotic.
Clough looked over his shoulder. ‘Ah, Jesus,’ he said, his voice thick with disgust.
George could find nothing to say. He gathered the photographs together and slid them back into the envelope, placing it carefully to one side. The second envelope contained strips of large-format negatives. With the aid of the light box on the table, they were able to establish that these were the negatives the prints had been made from. There were sixteen negatives. Hawkin hadn’t bothered printing ten of them. Those were the ones where Alison appeared to be crying.
The third envelope was worse. The poses were even more explicit. This time, however, there was a floppy quality to the girl’s head, a distant look in her eyes. ‘She’s either drunk or drugged,’ Clough said. Still George could not speak. Methodically, he replaced the photographs in their envelope then checked that the negatives in the fourth envelope corresponded to the photographs they’d just looked at.
The fifth envelope went beyond anything George could have imagined. This time all sixteen negatives had been printed. This time, Hawkin was in the photographs along with his stepdaughter. The background was unmistakably Alison’s bedroom, its very ordinariness an obscene counterpoint to the acts it had contained. It formed an innocent backdrop to experiences no thirteen-year-old should endure. In a series of terrible monochrome images, Hawkin’s erect penis thrust into Alison’s vagina, anus and mouth. His fingers probed her body with ruthless and repellent efficiency. All the while, he stared into the camera, exulting in his power.
‘The fucking bastard,’ Clough groaned.
George suddenly thrust himself away from the table, sending the chair crashing to the ground. Pushing past his sergeant, he made it through the door just as the wave of nausea he couldn’t contain swept through him. Hands on knees, he vomited until his stomach was in spasm and there was nothing left inside him but pain. He half leaned, half fell against the wall, sweating, tears pouring down his face, oblivious to the chill night wind and the scatter of sleety rain that swept the dale.
He’d rather have found her corpse than endured those images of her violated body. Plenty of motive there for running away. But more motive still for the man who had invaded her if she had finally rebelled and threatened to reveal his vile perversion. George ran a trembling hand over his wet face and struggled upright.
Clough, standing right behind him in the doorway, handed him the cigarette already lit. His beefy face was as pale as the night clouds. George inhaled deeply and coughed as the smoke hit a throat left raw by his retching. ‘Still think capital punishment’s such a bad thing?’ he gasped. The rain plastered his hair to his head, but he failed to react to the drops of icy water coursing down his face.
‘I could kill him with my own hands,’ Clough growled, his voice coming from deep in his throat.
‘Save him for the hangman, Tommy. This one, we do by the book. He doesn’t have any accidental falls, he doesn’t conveniently get put in a cell with a drunk who hates sex offenders. We bring him to court in one piece,’ George said hoarsely.
‘It won’t be easy. Meanwhile, what do we tell Alison’s mum? This…this beast’s wife? How do you say to a woman, “By the way, love, this man you married – he’s raped and buggered your daughter and probably murdered her.”?’
‘Oh Christ,’ George said. ‘We need a WPC out here. And a doctor.’
‘She won’t want a WPC, George. She trusts you. And she’s got her family around her. They’ll take better care of her than any doctor can. We’re just going to have to go in there and find a way to tell her.’
‘We better tell the uniforms as well. They can keep an eye out specifically for photographs or negatives.’ He shuddered as he breathed in deeply. ‘Let’s bag and tag those envelopes. Forensic will need to do their stuff with them.’
They forced themselves back into the darkroom and collected the envelopes with their hellish contents. ‘Take these indoors to Sergeant Lucas,’ George instructed Clough. ‘I don’t want to be standing there holding them when I speak to Ruth Hawkin. I’ll have a last look here to see if there’s anything else obvious. We’re going to have to get a team to go through every single one of those negatives. But not tonight.’
Clough disappeared into the night. George checked the room, but could see nothing else deserving his notice. He stepped back outside into the miserable weather and closed the door behind him. He carefully fixed a pair of police seals so that nobody could tamper with the evidence. He’d have to have an overnight guard placed on the outbuilding to protect its contents. Tomorrow, he’d organize a team to strip the place and start the long slog through Hawkin’s photographic collection. There would be no shortage of volunteers.
