The Craftsman Read online

  I hear a low-pitched buzzing sound behind me and turn to see that bees have found their way inside somehow. In but not out again, because over a dozen tiny black-and-orange corpses litter the windowsill. Sally kept bees. There were four hives at the bottom of the garden, and during the spring and early summer that I lived here, she’d often go out to feed or inspect them, wrapped up in her heavy white veil and thick gloves. On warm days, she’d sit and watch the predictable trajectory of the worker bees as they zoomed out of the hives heading for blossom.

  She had a habit, one I found curious but charming, of making sure the bees were kept informed of any important news in the family. When Cassie, her elder daughter, won a music scholarship, she was sent straight outside to tell the bees. The news of the death of Larry’s aunt was told to the bees before some of the family were informed. Calamity would fall on the house, Sally told me, if the bees were kept in the dark.

  ‘Can I help you?’ someone says, in a tone that suggests helping me is the last thing on her mind, and I turn to see a stout, grey-haired woman in her seventies standing in the doorway. I fish in my bag and find my Met warrant card. I have no authority in Lancashire, but I doubt she’ll know that.

  ‘Assistant Commissioner Florence Lovelady,’ I tell her. ‘I was looking for the family.’

  ‘Haven’t lived here for years,’ she says, with her habitual note of triumph when giving bad news.

  I know who this woman is. Sally had a ‘woman that does’ who came in every day to help with the cooking and cleaning. This woman served me breakfast and dinner six days a week for five months and every two weeks brought a clean set of nylon sheets to my room. She never knocked before entering, just announced, ‘Sheets,’ before dumping them on the bed. I was always expected to change my own bed, but I’m pretty certain she did the job for the men who lodged here. She was the kind of woman happy to wait on men but considered it beneath her to do the same for a woman, especially one younger than herself. In the late 1960s, the worst sex discrimination I had to deal with always came from other women.

  I let my gaze move around the dusty surfaces, glance over the dead insects and say, ‘I’m surprised they haven’t sold it.’

  ‘The girls wanted to. It was Sally who hung on.’

  ‘You’re Mary, aren’t you? I lived here. In 1969.’ I don’t add, ‘Back when it happened.’ It hardly feels necessary.

  She squints at me.

  ‘The family called me Flossie,’ I say reluctantly. ‘My hair was different then. A much brighter shade of red.’

  ‘Ginger,’ she says. ‘Colour of carrots.’

  ‘How are you, Mary?’ I ask her.

  ‘You were covered in freckles.’ She takes a step closer, as if to check whether I still have them. I do, although they’ve faded over time. ‘You went bright red when someone showed you up.’

  ‘Where is Sally, do you know?’ I ask. ‘Is she still alive?’

  ‘Northdean Nursing Home at Barley,’ she tells me. ‘She won’t speak to you.’

  I still have my warrant card in my hand. ‘Do you mind if I look around?’ I ask her.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she tells me. ‘I need spuds. Then I’m locking up.’

  She leaves me, heading towards the vegetable garden, and I walk further into the house. I don’t open the door of the parlour – old habits die hard – and have no interest in the lodgers’ sitting room, so instead I walk along the high-ceilinged corridor until I’m almost at the front door, then turn and climb the stairs. My room was the smallest of those given to the lodgers, at the back of the house, overlooking the Hill.

  The door sticks and for a moment I’m tempted to see it as a sign that there is nothing to be gained from dredging up old memories. But my stubborn streak always won out against my better instinct and I push hard.

  The lilac-and-blue crocheted bedspread that I hated is still here, but its colour has faded from years of being exposed to sunlight. The narrow bed under the window is made up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those are the sheets I slept on all those years ago, that if we were to employ the forensic techniques that weren’t available to us in the 1960s, a trace of me could still be found. After all, who else would have lodged here after what happened? The door on the narrow wardrobe is hanging open. One of the drawers in the chest by the bed isn’t properly closed and I spot a plastic hairbrush in it that might have been mine once. It is as though no one has been in this room since I left it in a hurry. Randy and I weren’t allowed back after Larry Glassbrook’s arrest. Our things were collected by other officers and I spent the rest of my time in Lancashire in a hostel on the other side of town.

  The three police posters that I taped to the wall are still here.

  Missing, reads the first. Have you see Stephen Shorrock? Missing, says the second. Have you seen Susan Duxbury? Missing, again, on the third. Help us find Patsy. I taped the posters directly opposite my bed, in spite of Mary’s grumbles that they were morbid and would damage the woodchip wallpaper. They were the first things I saw when I woke up each morning, the last at night.

  As I’d approached the house, I’d avoided looking at Larry’s workshop, a one-storey brick building a short distance from the back door, but I can’t avoid it now. Its flat roof is directly in front of my window.

  I reach out and touch the wall for balance, take a deep breath although the air in here is stale and warm.

  The workshop is where Larry spent most of his time, where he played his music – no, I do not want those songs in my head – and where he made the coffins and caskets that held the remains of Sabden’s dead.

  And a few of its very unlucky living.

  4

  The words ‘coffin’ and ‘casket’ are used interchangeably, but the two are quite different. A coffin is a six- or eight-sided box that follows the contours of the body: narrow at the head, widening at the shoulders, tapering in again towards the feet. Think Dracula, rising. A casket is bigger, rectangular, usually with a large, curved lid.

  Larry Glassbrook made both, but hardwood caskets were his passion. I lodged with his family for five months in 1969 and once – when he was bored, I think – he invited me into his workshop. He played music as he worked – Elvis Presley, almost certainly – and broke off from time to time to roll his hips or slick back his dark hair. Larry was a handsome man and he made the most of his resemblance to the King of Rock. He was rarely short of female attention to be honest, I found him a bit creepy. There was no doubting his skill, though.

  He started with the lid, gluing and pressing together long slats of oak in a rounded vice. He used joint fasteners, a sort of heavy-duty staple, to make sure they couldn’t move. The box was made in a similar fashion, glued, fastened and joisted to give it strength. Larry liked to boast that his caskets could carry men weighing 300 pounds or more. The lid was fastened to the box with four metal hinges and sixteen screws.

  No one was getting out of a Larry Glassbrook casket once they were shut inside. In fairness, very few people tried.

  Coffins and caskets weren’t hermetically sealed in those days. If they had been, Patsy Wood might have died before she ever regained consciousness. Larry’s caskets were closed using a method he invented himself. Immediately below the rim of the lid, directly opposite the outer hinges, were two locking mechanisms hidden beneath decorative trims. When the latch was turned, a small metal strip on the inside of the coffin, concealed behind the fabric lining, slid into place and prevented the lid from being dislodged during interment, or by any clumsy handling. If Patsy had known where to feel, if she’d managed to tear away the satin lining, she might have been able to unlock the casket.

  She’d still have needed to deal with the ton of earth above it.

  She didn’t find the locks. We know that. But I can still imagine her reaching frantically around the tiny space she found herself in. I think she’d have screamed then, her voice loud and scared, but angry too. At fourteen, we don’t imagine anything really dreadful can happen to us
. At that point, she would have thought she was the victim of a practical joke, horrible but temporary. If she yelled loudly and long enough, they’d get her out of here, wherever ‘here’ was.

  She would have called out the names of those she could last remember, the people she’d been with before it happened. One of the things I wonder, when I think about Patsy’s time in the casket, is how quickly she stopped shouting for her friends and began to call for her mother.

  I’d put it at less than thirty minutes after she came round, but I imagine time goes slowly when you’re trapped beneath the earth.

  Caskets are bigger than coffins. She’d have been able to reach up, feel the smooth, pleated satin inches above her head. I think at that point she would have known what contained her. She knew the Glassbrook family. She knew what Larry Glassbrook did for a living. She’d probably been invited into his workshop, or sneaked in with her friends, to see the wooden boxes in various stages of readiness. She’d have known then that she was trapped in a casket, although she’d probably have called it a coffin.

  I imagine her falling silent, believing her mates (because of course it was her mates – who else would play such a trick on her?) were just outside the casket, listening to her screams. Patsy would have forced herself to be quiet, thinking they’d be quicker to let her out if they thought she might be in real trouble. Maybe she even gave a gasp or two, as though she were struggling for air.

  When that didn’t work, because it couldn’t work – her friends were nowhere near – I think she’d have screamed again, long, loud and hard this time. I have no idea how long a person can scream before it becomes impossible to go on. I hope I never find out. But at some point, maybe when she’d been conscious for about an hour, Patsy would have fallen silent, if only for a time.

  The exertion would have exhausted her. She’d have been panting. Hot. Sweating. It would have occurred to her that air was probably in short supply. I think this is when she would have begun to plan, to think of any possible ways of getting herself out. She’d have started, tentatively and as calmly as she could, to explore her surroundings. And then she’d have discovered something even more terrifying than that she was trapped in a coffin.

  She wasn’t alone.

  5

  The sight of Larry’s workshop has hit me hard. I sit on the bed to get my breath, positioning myself so that I can’t see it and am looking instead at the Hill. Of all the rooms in the house, this one has the best view of it.

  The Hill is unchanged, of course. I doubt it ever will change. In the sunshine, in August, it has a wild beauty that might almost make you forget its terrible history, the merciless persecution of helpless women that happened here. The grasses have turned golden, and the heather is blooming all the way up the south face. The bare rocks gleam like jewels in the bright light. It is a huge plateau-topped mass of limestone and clay that has given rise to a thousand legends, all of them dark. It soars above this small town, throwing its shadow over the lives of the people who live at its foot.

  This is Pendle. Witch country.

  High above the Hill, almost invisible in the cloudless cornflower-blue sky, is the curved outline of a waning moon. In a few more hours it will disappear altogether, before starting to wax again. Long ago, I gave up trying to shake off this constant awareness of the phases of the moon and doubt I ever will now. Every night before I go to bed, I look for the moon. I draw my curtains a little tighter when it is full, and when it’s at its darkest, at the end of the waning phase, I know I’ll struggle to sleep.

  The children were taken during the dark phase of the moon.

  I hear a sudden burst of humming, followed by the buffeting of a tiny body against a hard surface. On the window ledge among a scattering of bee carcasses is one desperate to be free. As I reach for the window catch, I avoid looking down at the workshop and see instead the hives at the bottom of the garden.

  The last time I saw Larry, he was dying. He sat across from me in the visiting room, coughing repeatedly into a bloodstained handkerchief. Almost seventy, he looked years older. His hair, still thick and slightly too long, had turned snow white, while his face was shrunken, lined and, deep within each wrinkle, there seemed to be a narrow line of prison filth. Long-term prisoners never look clean. His nose had been broken more than once, and an injury to just above his right eye had left his brow in a coarse and puckered zigzag.

  ‘You never ask me anything, Florence,’ he said, as his shaking hands reached for another of the cigarettes that were killing him. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I do. All the time.’ I tried not to stare at his twisted, arthritic hands. Those hands had once been so clever; now, they could barely hold the cigarette steady.

  He curled his lip, Elvis style, an affected habit he’d never lost. ‘Stuff about Sally and the girls, about how I am and whether I need anything. I don’t mean that.’ He leaned a little closer towards me. ‘I mean about before. You never ask me anything about that.’

  In all the years I visited Larry, I made a point of never talking about the case. I knew all about the power play that went on between convicted killers and their arresting officers, about how a need for information could turn even the smartest officer into an emotional hostage, craving closure he or she was never going to get. There were many gaps in our knowledge of the Glassbrook case, but I could live with that. I wasn’t going to beg.

  ‘So I’m wondering’ – he had a sly smile on his lips as he ignored my silence – ‘whether it’s because you’ve been afraid to learn the truth.’

  I faked a heavy sigh. ‘Is there something you want to tell me, Larry?’

  He seemed to think for a moment although, knowing Larry quite well by this time, I could tell when the thinking was real and when it was staged. Finally, he shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I told it to the bees.’

  Something shifts in the house, an old beam, maybe a floorboard, and in my nervous state the abrupt noise sounds like a footstep on the stairs. I spin round, dreading the sight of a small procession of dead teenagers coming up the stairs towards me, maybe even Larry himself. The staircase is empty, of course.

  I’ve spent the better part of thirty years trying to come to terms with my ‘ghosts’. I know they’re not really there. I don’t believe that the dead stay with us, or that we ever genuinely see them again after they’ve passed. Sometimes, though, I imagine myself having double vision, looking out at two worlds: the one I know to be real, seen by everyone else, and the other, created from the dark places in my own brain.

  In the world of my damaged imagination, ghosts are my constant friends.

  Needing to get out of this grim house now, I practically run down the stairs. There is no sign of Mary, so I step out into the garden. She’s still out of sight. I should tell her I’m leaving, so I skirt round the workshop towards where I remember the vegetable patch to be. I don’t find her, but I realise I’m close to the hives.

  Tell it to the bees.

  A silly idea. Bees don’t stay in neglected hives. The four rotting, wooden constructs will have been abandoned years ago. And yet I’m in the mood for rituals, for closure – why else did I come here? – and so I approach warily, the way I always used to, even though the chances of the guard bees rising to ward off an attack are non-existent.

  Nothing happens. The hives are empty. Even so I step closer.

  Tell it to the bees.

  ‘Larry is dead.’ I speak quietly, aware of how foolish I will look if Mary is close. ‘He died in prison two weeks ago.’

  There is no response from the hive.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ Feeling like an idiot, I’m about to turn away when I see that the upper part of one hive is loose, as though someone has lifted it and not replaced it properly. My love of order doesn’t like this, so I step closer and gingerly, because I’m still not a hundred per cent convinced this hive is empty, try to push it back into place.

  It won’t go. Either the wood has warped or something is
in the way. I lift carefully, hold my breath and peer inside. The frames that held the honeycombs are gone, leaving a small, dusty empty space.

  Not quite empty.

  Empty but for something that is impossible.

  I am looking down at what people round here call a ‘clay picture’, not really a picture at all but a three-dimensional effigy. Around eight inches high and fashioned from clay, it is meant to be female: the hair, breasts, belly and wide hips tell me that. The figure’s legs are bent at the knee, and her feet have been trussed, or hog-tied, to her hands behind her back. Worse than that, there are sharp pieces of wood, and I know that it’s blackthorn, because it’s always blackthorn, impaling each of her eyes and ears, her mouth, head, chest and genitals.

  The sounds of the summer day have faded. All I can hear is the steady thudding of my own heartbeat.

  This is impossible. The property was searched from front to back, attic to cellar, hedge to garden wall. This cannot have been here since Larry’s arrest.

  And yet who could have put it here since?

  Tell it to the bees.

  My hand is throbbing horribly now. It always does when I’m stressed, but never this bad. I reach out and touch the effigy with just the tip of one finger, tilting it. Some of it crumbles away and I feel physically sick, but I manage to move it enough to see. I’ve already seen the long, curly hair. I suspected, the second I saw it. Now I know for sure.

  Each of Larry’s victims was found with one of these effigies. The hog-tying of hands and feet represents the inability to move. They could not move in the caskets. Blackthorn pierced their eyes, ears and mouth because underground they were deaf, dumb and blind. The wounding of the head, chest and genitalia symbolised the draining of life that was inevitable once they were interred.

  At least, that’s what we assumed. Larry never told his interrogating officers why the clay pictures were important. He might have told me, but I never asked.