A Place of Execution Read Free

did anything about it. After all, Ma might be dressing up the reason for her call as concern over a missing schoolgirl, but Grundy wasn’t so sure it wasn’t just an excuse to stir things up for the lass’s mother. He’d heard the talk and knew there were a few in Scardale as thought Ruth Carter had been a bit quick to jump the broomstick with Philip Hawkin, even if he had been the first man to put roses in her cheeks since her Roy had died.
    Then the phone had rung again, bringing a scowl to his wife’s face and dragging him out of his comfortable armchair into the chilly hall. This time, he couldn’t ignore the summons. Sergeant Lucas from Buxton knew about the missing girl, and he was on his way. As if it wasn’t bad enough having Buxton boots tramping all over his ground, he was bringing the Professor with him. It was the first time Grundy or any of his colleagues had ever had to work with somebody that had been to university, and he knew from the gossip on his occasional visits to the sub-division in Buxton that they were none of them comfortable with the idea. He hadn’t been slow to join the mutterings about the university of life being the best teacher for a copper. These graduates—you couldn’t send them out of a Saturday night on to Buxton marketplace. They’d never have seen a pub fight in all their born days, never mind know how to deal with one. As far as Grundy could make out, the only good thing that could be said about DI Bennett was that he could turn a handy bat at cricket. And that wasn’t reason enough for Grundy to be happy about him arriving on his patch to upset his carefully nurtured contacts.
    With a sigh, he buttoned up his shirt collar. He pulled on his tunic jacket, straightened his cap on his head and picked up his overcoat. He stuck his head round the living room door, a conciliatory smile fastened nervously on his face. ‘I’ve to go to Scardale,’ he said. ‘Shh,’ his wife admonished him crossly. ‘It’s getting to the exciting bit.’
    ‘Alison Carter’s gone missing,’ he added, spitefully closing the living room door behind him and hurrying down the hall before she could react. And react she would, he knew only too well. A missing child in Scardale was far too close to home for Longnor not to feel a chill wind on its neck.
    George Bennett followed Sergeant Lucas out to the yard where the cars were parked. He’d have far preferred to travel in his own car, a stylish black Ford Corsair as new as his promotion, but protocol demanded he climb into the passenger seat of the liveried Rover and let Lucas drive. As they turned south on the main road through the market square, George tried to stifle the prickle of excitement that had stirred in him when he had heard the words, ‘missing lass’. Chances were, as Lucas had rightly pointed out, that it would all come to nothing. More than ninety-five per cent of cases of children reported missing ended in reunion before bedtime, or at worst, before breakfast.
    But sometimes, it was a different story. Sometimes, a missing child stayed missing long enough for the certainty to grow that he or she would never come home. Occasionally, that was from choice.
    More often, it was because the child was dead and the question for the police then became how long it would take them to find a body.
    And sometimes, they seemed to vanish as cleanly as if the earth had opened up and gulped them down.
    There had been two cases like that within the last six months, both of them less than thirty miles away from Scardale. George always made a careful note of bulletins from outside forces as well as other Derbyshire divisions, and he had paid particular attention to these two missing persons cases because they were just close enough that the children might fetch up on his patch. Dead or alive.
    First had been Pauline Catherine Reade. Dark-haired and hazel-eyed, sixteen years old, a trainee confectioner from Gorton, Manchester. Slim build, about five