sighed. ‘It’s hard for them, making friends outside Scardale. They never get the chance to join in anything after school. If they get invited to parties or owt, chances are they can’t get back home afterwards. The nearest they can get on a bus is Longnor. So they just don’t go. Besides, folk in Buxton are set against Scardale folk. They think we’re all heathen inbred idiots.’ Her voice was sarcastic. ‘The kids get picked on. So they stick to their own, by and large. Our Alison’s good company, and I hear tell from her teachers that she’s well enough liked at school. But she’s never really had what you’d call a best friend apart from her cousins.’
Another dead end. ‘There’s one other thing…I’d like to look at Alison’s room, if I may. Just to get a sense of what she was like.’ He didn’t add, ‘and to help myself to the contents of her hairbrush so the forensic scientists can compare what we found sticking to the blood on the tree in the spinney.’
She got to her feet, her movements those of a woman far older. ‘I’ve got the heater on up there. Just in case…’ She left the sentence unfinished.
He followed her into the hall, which was no warmer than it had been the night before. The transition nearly took his breath away. Ruth led the way up a broad flight of stairs with barley-sugar-twist banisters in oak turned almost black by years of polishing. ‘One other thing,’ he said as they climbed. ‘I presume that the fact that Alison is still called Carter means your husband hasn’t formally adopted her?’
The tensing of the muscles in her neck and back was so swift George could almost believe he’d imagined it. ‘Phil were all for it,’ she said. ‘He wanted to adopt. But Alison were only six when her dad…died. Old enough to remember how much she loved him. Too young to see he was a human being with faults and failings. She thinks letting Phil adopt her would be a betrayal of her dad’s memory. I reckon she’ll come round in time, but she’s a stubborn lass, won’t be pushed where she doesn’t want to go.’ They were on the landing now and Ruth turned to him, face composed and unreadable. ‘I persuaded Phil to let it lie for now.’ She pointed past George, down a corridor that made a strange dog-leg halfway down where the building had been extended at some indeterminate period. ‘Alison’s room is the last one on the right. You won’t mind if I don’t come with you.’ Again, it was a statement, not a question. George found himself admiring the way this woman still managed to know her own mind, even under such extreme stress.
‘Thanks, Mrs Hawkin. I won’t be long.’ He walked along the passage, conscious of her eyes on him. But even that uncomfortable knowledge wasn’t sufficient distraction to prevent him noting his surroundings. The carpet was worn, but had clearly once been expensive. Some of the prints and watercolours that lined the wall were spotted with age, but still retained their charm. George recognized several scenes from the southern part of the county where he’d grown up as well as the familiar stately historic houses of Chatsworth, Haddon and Hardwick. He noticed that the floor was uneven at the jink in the corridor, as if the builders had been incompetent in all three dimensions. At the last door on the right, he paused and took a deep breath. This might be the closest he’d ever get to Alison Carter.
The warmth that hit him like a blanket seemed curiously appropriate to what was, in spite of its size, a snug room. Because it was on the corner of the house, Alison’s bedroom had two windows, increasing the sense of space. The windows were long and shallow, each divided into four by deep stone lintels which revealed the eighteen-inch thickness of the walls. He closed the door and stepped into the middle of the room.
First impressions, George reminded himself. Warm: there was an electric fire as well as the plug-in oil radiator. Comfortable: the three-quarter-sized bed had a thick quilt covered in dark-green satin, and the two basket chairs had plump cushions. Modern: the carpet was thick brown shag pile with swirls of olive-green and mustard running through it, and the walls were decorated with pictures of pop stars, mostly cut from magazines by the looks of their skewed edges. Expensive: there was a plain wooden wardrobe and matching dressing table with a long, low mirror and a vanity stool in front of it, all so unscarred they had to be relatively new. George had seen bedroom suites like that when he and Anne were choosing their own furniture and he had a pretty good idea how much it must have cost. Cheap it wasn’t. On a table under the window was a Dansette record player, dark red plastic with cream knobs. A deep stack of records was piled haphazardly underneath. Philip Hawkin was clearly determined to make a good impression on his stepdaughter, he surmised. Maybe he thought the way to her heart was through the material goods she must have lacked as the child of a widow in a community as impoverished as Scardale.
George moved across to the dressing table and folded himself awkwardly on to the stool. He caught his eye in the mirror. The last time his eyes had looked like that had been when he’d been cramming for his finals. And he’d missed a patch of stubble under his left ear, a direct result of the lack of vanity of the Methodist faith. The absence of a mirror in the vestry had forced him to shave in his rear-view mirror. No self-respecting advertising agency would hire him to promote anything except sleeping pills. He pulled a face at himself and got to work. Alison’s hairbrush lay bristles upwards on the dressing table, and George expertly removed as many hairs as he could. Luckily, she’d not been too fastidious and he was able to accumulate a couple of dozen, which he transferred to an empty polythene bag.
Then, with a sigh, he began the distasteful search of Alison’s personal possessions. Half an hour later, he had found nothing unexpected. He’d even flicked through every book on the small bookcase that stood by the bed. Nancy Drew, the Famous Five, the Chalet School, Georgette Heyer, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre held neither secret nor surprise. A well-thumbed edition of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury contained only poetry. The dressing table yielded schoolgirl underwear, a couple of training bras, half a dozen bars of scented soap, a sanitary belt and half a packet of towels, a jewellery box containing a couple of cheap pendants and a baby’s silver christening bracelet inscribed, ‘Alison Margaret Carter’. The only thing he might have expected to find but hadn’t was a bible. On the other hand, Scardale was so cut off from the rest of the world, they might still be worshipping the corn goddess here. Maybe the missionaries had never made it this far.
A small wooden box on the dressing table yielded more interesting results. It contained half a dozen black and white snapshots, most of them curled and yellowing at the edges. He recognized a youthful Ruth Hawkin, head thrown back in laughter, looking up at a dark-haired man whose head was ducked down in awkward shyness. There were two other photographs of the pair, arms linked and faces carefree, all obviously taken on the Golden Mile at Blackpool. Honeymoon? George wondered. Beneath them was a pair of photographs of the same man, dark hair flopping over his forehead. He was dressed in work clothes, a thick belt holding up trousers that looked as if they’d been made for a man much longer in the torso. In one, he was standing on a harrow hitched to a tractor. In the other, he was crouched beside a blonde child who was grinning happily at the camera. Unmistakably Alison. The final photograph was more recent, judging by its white margins. It showed Charlie Lomas and an elderly woman leaning against a dry-stone wall, blurred limestone cliffs in the background. The woman’s face was shadowed by a straw hat whose broad brim was forced down over her ears by the scarf that tied under her chin. All that was visible was the straight line of her mouth and her jutting chin, but it was obvious from her awkwardly bent body that she was far too old to be Charlie Lomas’s mother. As if they were being captured by a Victorian photographer, held still by dire warnings of moving during the exposure, Charlie stood stony-faced and gazed straight at the camera. His arms were folded across his chest and he looked like every gauche and defiant young lad George had ever seen protesting his innocence in a police station.
‘Fascinating,’ he murmured. The photographs of her father were predictable, though he’d have expected to see them framed and on display. But that the only other image Alison Carter treasured was one that included the cousin who had made the convenient discovery in the copse was, to say the least, interesting to a mind as trained in suspicion as George’s. Carefully,
