‘Can I sit down?’ George asked.
‘You won’t like the armchair,’ she told him. With her head, she gestured towards the hard chairs.
‘Better for your back, anyway.’ They turned a couple of chairs to face her. They waited while she leaned forward, poking the glowing coals ablaze. ‘Peter Crowther’s in custody in Buxton,’ George said when she’d made herself cosy. ‘Aye, I’d heard.’
‘Should he be, do you think?’
‘You’re the copper, not me. I’m just an old woman who’s never lived outside a Derbyshire dale.’
‘We could waste a lot of time trying to connect Peter Crowther to Alison,’ George continued, refusing to be diverted. ‘Time that would be better spent trying to find her.’
‘I told you before, the trouble with you and your detectives is that you understand nothing about this place,’ she said, her voice irritated.
‘I’m trying to understand. But people in Scardale seem more interested in hindering than helping me. I’ve just had the experience of discovering your grandson had omitted to mention something that could be a vital piece of evidence.’
‘That’s hardly surprising, considering the way you treated the lad. How come none of you had the sense to ask if he could have had owt to do with Alison going missing? Because he couldn’t have.
When she disappeared, he was here in the house with me. That’s what you call an alibi, isn’t it?’ she demanded scornfully.
‘Are you sure about that?’ George asked dubiously. ‘I might be old, but I’ve got all me chairs at home. Charlie came in just before half past four and started peeling potatoes. I can’t manage them with my arthritis the way it is, so he has to do them. Every night, it’s the same routine. He wasn’t messing about with Alison, he was here, taking care of me.’
George 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 stoneflagged 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. Clan 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, Clan 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, Clan 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.
No ‘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 Clan 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 geen. ‘The next thing I heard was Peter screaming. It took three men to drag Clan 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. Clan 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 to her.
But you’re wrong. It means the very opposite. If you want to make Peter Crowther crawl across the floor begging for mercy, just go and tell him Ruth and Clan are looking for him. The last place he’d ever come is Scardale. The last person he’d come near is anybody connected to Scardale. Take my word for it, I know.’
She sat back in her chair, her narrative over. The oral tradition would never die as long as Ma Lomas lived, George thought. She epitomized the village elder who holds the tribal history, its integrity protected only by her personal skills. He’d never expected to encounter one of those in 1963 in Derbyshire. ‘Thank you for telling us, Mrs Lomas,’ he said formally. ‘You’ve been very helpful. One more thing before we leave you in peace. Charlie said he’d seen Mr Hawkih in the field between the wood and the copse on Wednesday afternoon. He told us you were retracing his steps just now. Did you also see the squire on Wednesday, then?’ She gave him a calculating look, her eye as bright as a parrot’s. ‘Not after Alison disappeared, no.’
‘But before?’
She nodded. ‘I’d been having a cup of tea with our Diane. When I came out, Kathy were just getting into the Land Rover to go up to the lane end to pick up Alison and Janet and Derek from off the school bus. I saw David and Brian over by the milking parlour, bringing the cows in. And I saw Squire Hawkin crossing the field.’
‘Why didn’t you mention this?’ George asked, exasperated.
‘Why would I? There was nothing out of the ordinary in it. It’s his field, why wouldn’t he be walking it? He’s always out and about, snapping away with his camera when you least expect it.
Besides, like I said, Alison wasn’t even home from school by then. He’d have had to be a bloody slow walker to still be in the field when she came out with Shep. And this weather, nobody walks slow in Scardale,’ she added decisively, as if settling an argument.
George closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose. When he opened them again, he could have sworn a smile was twitching the corners of the old woman’s mouth. ‘I’ll have all this typed up into a statement,’ he said. ‘I expect you to sign it.’
‘If it’s truthful, you’ll get no argument from me. You going to let Peter go now?’
George got up and deliberately tucked his chair back under the table. ‘We’ll be taking what you’ve told us into consideration when we make our decision.’
‘He’s not a violent man, Inspector,’ she said. ‘Even supposing he had seen Alison, even supposing she’d reminded him of Ruth, all she’d have had to do was push him away. He’s a cowardly man.
Don’t waste your time on Peter and let a guilty man go free.’
‘You seem to have made your mind up that whatever’s happened to Alison, somebody made it happen,’ dough said, standing up, but making a point of keeping his notebook open.
Her face seemed to close in on itself, eyes narrowing, mouth pursing, nose wrinkling. ‘What I think and what you know are very different things. See if you can get them a bit closer together, Sergeant Clough. Then we’ll maybe all know what happened to our lass.’ She glanced up at the clock. ‘I thought you said you were going to talk to Squire Hawkin?’
‘We are,’ George said.
‘Better get your skates on, then. He likes his tea on the table at six sharp and I can’t see him changing his ways for you.’ They saw themselves out. ‘What did you make of that, Tommy?’
George asked.
‘She’s telling us the truth as she sees it, sir.’
‘And the alibi for Charlie?’
Clough shrugged. ‘She could be lying for him. She would lie for him, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But until we find somebody saying something different, or something more solid to tie him to Alison’s disappearance, we’ve got no reason to doubt her. And I agree with her about Crowther, for what it’s worth.’
The too.’ George ran a hand over his face. The skin felt raw with tiredness, the very bones seeming nearer the surface. He sighed. ‘We should let him go, sir,’ Clough said, fishing out his cigarettes and passing one to George. ‘He’s not going to run. He’s got nowhere to run to. I could call the station from the phone box and tell them to bail him. They can give him stringent conditions—he shouldn’t go within five miles of Scardale, he’s got to stay at the hostel, he should report daily. But there’s no need to keep him in, surely.’
‘You don’t think we’re exposing him to lynch-mob justice?’ George asked.
‘The longer we keep him, the worse it looks for him. We could get the duty officer to tip the wink to the newspaper lads that Crowther was never a suspect, just a vulnerable adult relative that we brought in so we could interview him away from the pressures of the outside world. Some sort of rubbish like that. And I could mention the need to spread the same word round the pubs.’ There was a stubborn set to Clough’s jaw. He had a point, and George was too tired to argue a case he didn’t feel passionately about either way.