The Craftsman Read online

  Dear Reader,

  On a spring day in 1612, a mill owner called Richard Baldwin, in the Pendle Forest of Lancashire chased two local women off his land, calling them ‘witches and whores’, threatening to ‘burn the one and hang the other’, and, in doing so, set in motion events that led to the imprisonment, trial and execution of nine women on the charge of murder by witchcraft: the infamous Pendle Witch Trials.

  Legend has it that female children born in the shadow of Pendle Hill are baptised twice. First, in church, as is customary. And then again, in a dark pool at the foot of the hill, where they are pledged to the service of another master entirely. These girls spend their lives coming to terms with their unusual heritage, because to be a woman of Pendle is both a blessing and a curse.

  As far as I know, I have only been baptised once, but I am a woman of Pendle. The women who were hanged for witchcraft in 1612 could have been my great-great-aunts or my ancestral grandmothers. And from my earliest days I’ve known that, had I been born in such a time of misogyny and superstition, I might well have been marked out a witch.

  Because I have always been different – the slightly weird girl at the back of the class, who didn’t fly with the wind, or follow the beaten path – so, I have always been intrigued by what makes some women into witches.

  The north of England, my homeland, is a dark place. It is the place where, for hundreds of years, dissidents have fled and outlaws have thrived. Shortly before I was born, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley preyed upon the children of the north. As a young woman, my freedom was severely curtailed by the reign of the Yorkshire Ripper. Mary Ann Cotton, Harold Shipman, Peter Dinsdale, Donald Neilson, were all killers of the north. I am often asked why I write the sort of books I do. Maybe that’s why.

  But there is one book that I have always wanted to write. The book about me, and women like me. Women of the north who stand out from the crowd and who are punished by that same crowd for daring to be different. I have always wanted to write a book about witches. Specifically, how women become witches. Do they make that choice themselves, or is it made for them? I used to think the latter, that it is societies that create witches. Now, after several years of research, I’m not so sure. I no longer dismiss the idea of witchcraft. Now, I think we all have powers within us. And some of us have learned to use them.

  The Craftsman is the story of women, and witches. Of the children we love and must protect. And of the men who fear us.

  I do hope you enjoy it.

  Sharon Bolton

  The Craftsman

  SHARON BOLTON

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  For Carrie

  Part One

  ‘I have supped full with horrors.’

  Macbeth, William Shakespeare

  1

  Tuesday, 10 August 1999

  On the hottest day of the year, Larry Glassbrook has come home to his native Lancashire for the last time, and the townsfolk have turned out to say goodbye.

  Not in a friendly way.

  It might be just fancy on my part but the crowd outside the church seems to have grown during the brief, chill funeral service, swelling the numbers that arrived early to claim a good spot, the way people do before a big parade.

  Everywhere I look, people stand among headstones, flank the perimeter wall and line the footpaths like some ghastly guard of honour. As we follow the coffin out into sunshine bright enough to cauterise wounds, they watch us, without moving or speaking.

  The press are here in force, in spite of the date being kept secret for as long as possible. Uniformed police hold them back, keeping the paths and the porch clear, but the photographers have brought stepladders and huge telescopic lenses. The rounded, fluffy microphones of the news presenters look powerful enough to pick up the scampering of church mice.

  I keep my eyes down, push my sunglasses a little higher on my nose, although I know I look very different now. Thirty years is a long time.

  A few yards ahead of me, beads of moisture swell and burst on the necks of the pallbearers. These men leave a trail behind them, a smell of aftershave and beer-infused sweat, of suits that aren’t dry-cleaned quite often enough.

  Standards have slipped since Larry’s day. The men who worked for Glassbrook & Greenwood Funeral Directors wore suits as black as newly mined coal. Their shoes and hair gleamed, and they shaved so close as to leave raw, rash-scarred skin behind. Larry’s men carried the caskets reverently, like the works of art they were. Larry would never have permitted the cheap laminate coffin I can see in front of me.

  Knowing that his own funeral fell short of the standards he’d insisted upon could have been a bitter disappointment to Larry. On the other hand, he might have laughed, loudly and cruelly, the way he did sometimes, when you least expected it, when it was most unnerving. And then he might have run his fingers through his black hair, winked suggestively and resumed dancing to the Elvis Presley tracks that seemed constantly to be playing in his workshop.

  After all this time, even thinking about Elvis Presley’s music sets my heart racing.

  The cheap coffin and its bearers turn like a giant crawling insect and leave the path. As we head south towards the Glassbrook family plot, the heat on our faces is as intense and searching as limelight in a down-at-heel musical hall. In Lancashire, this high on the moors, hot days are scarce, but the sun today seems determined to give Larry a foretaste of the temperatures waiting for him in his next place of confinement.

  I wonder what words his headstone might carry: Loving husband, devoted father, merciless killer.

  As his last minutes above ground tick away, the crowd seems to press forward and hang back simultaneously, like a confused tide that can’t quite remember whether it is ebbing or flowing.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, half hidden behind the rim of my sunglasses, I spot the teenagers. A boy and two girls, small, skinny, dressed in garishly coloured polyester. The eyes of the adults flick around the churchyard, resentfully at the mourners, nervously at the police, curiously at the media. The teenagers watch only the chief mourner, the woman who walks immediately behind the vicar, directly in front of me.

  She’s beautiful in a way that no one would have predicted when she was fifteen. Her hair has become honey-blonde, and her body has filled out. No longer does she resemble a carnival puppet, its head too big for its spindly stick body. Eyes that used to stare like those of a startled bushbaby from a TV wildlife programme are now the right size for her face. The black dress she wears has the crisp texture and clarity of colour of a brand-new purchase.

  A muttered whisper suggests the watchers are following. The woman in the new black dress turns her head. I can’t help but copy her and see that the three teenagers are coming too.

  At the sight of them, the wound on my left hand begins to hurt. I tuck it into my right armpit, using my upper arm to bring gentle pressure against the pain. It helps, a bit, but I can feel sweat trickling down between my shoulder blad
es. The vicar is no more relaxed than I am. His handkerchief is out, rubbing the back of his neck and dabbing at his forehead, but he begins the burial prayers with the air of a man who knows the end is in sight. At the appointed time, the pallbearers lessen the tension on the ropes they hold and the coffin wobbles lower until we no longer see it.

  That’s when it hits us. I see my own thought reflected in the eyes of those around me, and a whisper of troubled energy ripples through the crowd.

  ‘Better than you deserve, you bastard,’ calls a voice from the back.

  This is exactly what Larry did to his young victims. He lowered them into the ground. Only they weren’t dead.

  One of the teenagers, the youngest, has wandered away from his friends and is half hiding behind a headstone. He peers out at me with a sly curiosity. Stephen, the name comes to me quickly. The skinny kid in the blue shirt is Stephen.

  A slick, sweating pallbearer is offering me earth and so I take a handful and approach the grave. There are no flowers on the coffin lid, nor were there any in church. I don’t remember ever seeing a church without them before and I have a sudden vision of the women of the parish coming solemnly and silently into the building last night to remove them, because this is not an occasion for flowers.

  Close to the church wall, barely visible behind the crowd, is the man who was the sexton in the old days. He is dressed in a black suit now. He doesn’t look up, and I don’t think my old friend has seen me.

  I let the earth fall, conscious that, behind me, it is being offered to the other mourners, who are politely shaking their heads. Taking it was the wrong thing to do, then. The thing that has made me stand out. Again.

  The prayers are complete. ‘Judge not,’ ad-libs the vicar, suddenly brave, ‘that ye be not judged.’ He bows to no one in particular and scurries off.

  The pallbearers fade into the background. I step back too and the woman with honey-blonde hair is alone at the grave.

  Not for long. The watchers are egging each other on to become participants. Slowly the mass creeps forward. The teenagers, too, are drawing closer, although they are harder to see than the adults in the bright sunshine.

  The watchers come to a standstill. The woman in black looks at them directly, but none will meet her eyes. Then a woman of sixty-something steps forward, until her sandalled feet, toenails grimy with dust, stand on the very edge of the grave. I know this woman. Years ago, she confronted me, when misery and anger got the better of all her decent instincts. I remember her fat finger jabbing at my face, the bitterness of her breath as she leaned in and stabbed me with her threats and accusations. Her name is Duxbury; she is the mother of Larry’s first victim, Susan.

  Standing on the edge of Larry’s grave, she sucks in breath, leans forward and spits. It is possibly the first time in her life that she has done so. The spittle is thin, dribbling. If it makes a sound as it hits the wood, I don’t hear it. The next to approach the grave is more practised. A huge, bull-necked, bald-headed man, probably younger than the creases in his skin suggest. He hawks and then phlegm, solid as congealing paint, smacks onto the coffin. One by one the others follow, until the coffin beneath them must be spattered with spittle flowers.

  The last of them to approach the graveside is an elderly man, thin and dark-skinned, eyes like stones. He looks round.

  ‘Nowt personal, lass,’ he says to the woman in the black dress, as I try to imagine anything more personal than spitting on a grave. ‘We never blamed you.’ Bow-legged, arthritic, he moves away.

  For a minute, maybe more, the woman in the black dress is motionless, staring at something in the middle distance. Then, without looking back, she crosses the grass towards the path, perhaps bracing herself to run the gauntlet of reporters and photographers. They have kept their distance during the service, but they didn’t come here for nothing and they won’t leave without something.

  I follow in her wake, but a sound grabs my attention and I stop. Behind me, at the graveside, I hear the teenagers making high-pitched, sucking noises as they try to copy the adults and spit on Larry’s coffin. I suppose they have more excuse than most, but what they are doing seems feeble, and beneath them. I think I might speak to them, tell them it must surely be time to move on, but when I look back, they are nowhere to be seen. Those three kids haven’t walked the earth in thirty years and yet I can’t help but feel that the woman in the black dress has seen their ghosts too.

  2

  I have no means of knowing exactly what Patricia Wood suffered in the hours following her disappearance. I suppose I should consider that a blessing.

  After we found her, everyone said they couldn’t bear to think about it, that it was too terrible even to imagine, that one really shouldn’t dwell on such things.

  If only I could help myself. Imagination is a valuable tool, vital for any detective worth his or her salt. It’s also the heaviest cross we bear.

  And so I imagine that Patsy regained consciousness slowly, and that her first lucid thought was that she was struggling to breathe. The fabric that covered her face was satin, light in weight, but in a confined space full of stale air it must have felt stifling.

  There would have been an evil taste in her mouth, partly the result of not drinking for several hours. Disorientation would have been the worst of it, though, in those first few minutes, without a clue where she was or how she got there. Any memories she could dredge up would have been half formed, a mass of random pictures and snatches of dialogue. She would have tried opening her eyes, closing them, opening them again and found no difference at all.

  I think at this point she would have tried to move. To push herself to a sitting position. That’s when panic would really have set in, when she realised that she was entirely boxed in.

  It was worse than that, of course. Patsy was deep in the ground. Buried alive.

  3

  One or two of the older reporters stare as I leave, their eyes narrowing as they search their memories. I made the right decision not wearing uniform today. Given time, they’ll place me, but I don’t give them time. I push my way out through the gate and head up the hill towards my car. In any event, they are far more interested in the woman in the stylish black dress with the honey-blonde hair. She needs a police escort to get through the crowd, and I catch a glimpse of her as the waiting car pulls away. She looks at me from the passenger seat. In church, she’d given no sign of even knowing I was there. I assumed she’d forgotten me, that to her I was just another curious bystander. That glance through the darkened glass tells me she remembers me perfectly.

  I chose to lodge with the Glassbrooks rather than in any of the other boarding houses on offer when I moved to Sabden because I sensed an eccentricity in the family that appealed to me. They were different, somehow, to most of the people I met in town. I thought of them as colourful, exotic birds, surrounded by a flock of small, noisy, dust-covered house sparrows. After just a couple of weeks in Lancashire, I was acutely conscious of how very different I seemed to the people around me. I was looking for birds of a feather, I suppose. Not my only mistake, in this town.

  They lived on the outskirts of Sabden, in a large detached house. The narrow gravel drive is choked with weeds now, and dandelion seeds come drifting towards me like an airborne army. Moss covers the low stone wall that holds back the banked garden, and the grass between the fruit trees hasn’t been cut in months, maybe years. It is a tiny meadow now. The white clusters of cow parsley reach almost to the low branches of neglected fruit trees, where plums, already rotten, are abuzz with wasps. There are hundreds of apples on the trees, but the fruit is tiny and worm-ridden. A mush at the foot of each suggests that, for years, successive crops have fallen and rotted.

  I round the only bend in the drive and see the house. A stone mansion, built for a factory manager or wool merchant at the turn of the twentieth century. Paint has peeled away from the front door, and the huge bay window is dirty and cracked in places. That room was the lodgers’ sitting
room, where I spent my evenings when I could no longer reasonably stay at work and my room felt too lonely. The two other lodgers were men. Another police constable, called Randall (known as Randy) Butterworth, and a quiet, plump man in his forties called Ron Pickles, who worked with Larry at the funeral business. They and I talked sometimes, occasionally played cards, but mainly we stared at the grainy, dancing screen of a twelve-inch, black-and-white television. There was talk that the family, in the bigger parlour which overlooked the rear garden, had a colour TV, but this remained a rumour.

  The tiny television set is still there. So are the PVC-covered armchairs that felt slick and sticky in summer, too cold for comfort in winter. Barring broken light bulbs littering the carpet, the damp stains on the walls and the dirt on the windows, the lodgers’ sitting room is exactly as I remember it.

  I follow the path to the rear, keeping my eyes fixed on the walls and windows of the house. The curtains are drawn on the family parlour, but I have no real memories of that room anyway. I was never invited in. The back door is open.

  I step up and peer into the room they called the back kitchen. It’s small, with a huge stone sink and stained wooden worktops. Wall-mounted shelves hold dust-covered crockery, dull glassware and huge copper pans. My own mother would have called this a butler’s pantry, but the word ‘butler’ wasn’t part of the lexicon of the people of Sabden back in 1969.

  ‘Hello?’ I say.

  No one answers. A painful twinge shoots from my left hand towards my elbow as I step inside. A door opposite would take me into the bigger kitchen, where Sally cooked meals for her family and her lodgers. Her lotions and potions, as Larry called them, were made in this room, stored in a walk-in cupboard by the back door. She had a gas cooker, old back in 1969, to boil up herbs and roots. It’s still here.