I should have asked. I should have asked while I had the chance.
This new effigy has enough detail, especially on the trussed hands, for me to hear its message loud and clear. The right hand has five fingers splayed, the way our hands instinctively spread when we are in pain. The left lies limp, four digits in a soft curl. Only four. The third finger, the finger that would hold a wedding band, is missing.
My own left hand is in agony now. I bring both hands up to my mouth to numb the pain and the third finger of my right hand slips easily into the gap on the left. I wear my wedding band on a chain round my neck because the ring finger of my left hand was sliced off years ago.
The clay effigy is me.
6
People trapped in coffins don’t survive for long. Opinions we sought varied, putting survival time anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days, but on one point all the experts agreed: it depends on the size of the coffin and the person inside. We learned a great deal that summer about cubic litres of air, body volume and a human’s oxygen-consumption rate.
Patsy was small; her thin body wouldn’t have taken up too much space in the casket: there would have been room for oxygen, had she not been laid on top of a corpse.
Patsy’s casket wasn’t sealed and had it been left above ground, she’d have had a chance. (Possibly a chance to die of thirst, but a chance all the same.) As it was, the earth piled on top of it formed as effective a seal as anyone could wish for. From the time she was buried, she had a few hours, we decided, eight at most.
At some point, she would have had to make a choice between frantically tearing at her surroundings, trying to fight her way out, and lying still to conserve what oxygen she had, because someone had put her in here and eventually, surely for the love of God, someone would let her out.
How long can a young girl wait, patiently, for a prankster to come back and let her out of a buried coffin? An hour? Let’s say two.
We know Patsy’s faith wavered because of the state in which we found her – and the casket. Skin had been torn from her hands, several of her fingernails had ripped away, and the satin lining was smeared with her blood. The lining was torn to shreds; she’d wrapped long swathes of it round her fists to protect them against the hard oak of the lid. Even so, several of her knuckles had broken. The casket was unblemished.
When Patsy heard the children playing – faintly, as though through fog, because they were several feet above her and earth insulates against sound in the same way that water does – she would have thought her prayers had been answered and I think then that she would have really let rip with the shouting and the screaming and the pleading, to get her out, for God’s sake help her and get her out.
We can time this with some accuracy. She’d been in the ground for four and a half hours when she was given the first real hope of rescue.
She didn’t take into account the sheer terror of small children, hearing a voice screaming at them from a newly dug grave.
7
‘Mary!’ I stand at the back door of the house, yelling for her. ‘Mary, I need you back here now.’ I sound angry. I only wish I were.
For several seconds nothing happens. I watch a bee bounce from one lavender stem to another, and then Mary appears from round the back of Larry’s workshop.
‘Where did this come from?’ I point to the clay figure, now lying face down on the worktop. ‘No, don’t touch it. Do you have a clear plastic bag? Or some cling film? It may need to be fingerprinted.’
I am making no sense. I take a deep breath and try again. ‘Mary, who comes to this house apart from you? Who have you seen hanging around in the garden?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘It’s important.’ I’m close to losing my temper, but I’m not angry. ‘We can talk at the local police station, if you like.’
Instead of answering, Mary leans closer to look at the effigy and does something I’ve never seen before. She snarls. I can think of no better way to describe it. She curls back her lips and glares.
‘Have you seen it before?’
She shakes her head. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘It’s me, isn’t it? It’s got a missing finger.’ I hold up my left hand, although Mary knows exactly what happened to me. Everyone in town knew about it.
She digs into her pocket and pulls out a set of keys. As it clatters onto the worktop, more clay dust crumbles from the effigy and I have to stop myself yelling at her to be careful.
‘Lock up after yourself,’ she tells me, as she steps towards the door. ‘Keep the keys. I won’t need them.’
She leaves me alone in a house I can’t wait to get out of, but somehow I can’t move. I’m standing in the kitchen, but in my head I’m looking down into an open drawer in an abandoned bedroom. My hairbrush. I left my hairbrush behind.
I’m not angry. I’m scared.
I wrap the clay picture in an old tea towel and lower it carefully into a supermarket carrier bag before locking the door. I have no idea where I’m going. All I can think is, They have my hair.
They have my hair.
8
I’m not thinking as I run down the Glassbrooks’ drive, nor am I looking where I’m going. I don’t see the tall male figure coming the other way until the two of us have collided. Before I can get a grip of myself, I yelp like a whipped dog.
‘What the fuck?’ The boy who nearly knocked me off my feet catches hold of my upper arms and takes a half-step back to steady us both. ‘Mum, Mum, it’s me. No, no, Mum, look at me.’
I can’t breathe.
‘Come on, look at me and count to ten. One, two …’
By the time he reaches ten, I am breathing again and have joined in, mouthing the numbers silently. We have done this before.
‘I’m OK.’ I’m embarrassed and so I try to look stern instead. ‘And what have I told you about swearing?’
‘What happened?’ My teenage son, three inches taller than me and beautiful as a clear dawn after a long winter’s night, ignores the scolding. ‘I watched an old dear race down the drive a couple of minutes ago. Then you. What is this place?’ He drops my arms and takes a step towards the house.
‘Ben, don’t …’
His head turns back slowly. ‘Is this where they lived? You promised Dad you wouldn’t.’
‘You would have seen Mary. She looks after the place.’ My right hand is hurting too now and I glance down to see I’m gripping the house keys. I have no idea why Mary has given them to me. Or what I will do with them.
Ben is staring up the Glassbrooks’ drive again. He has a teenage boy’s natural fascination with the macabre and would never have stayed in the car had I told him where I was really going.
‘I can’t believe none of you knew,’ he says, almost to himself. ‘You lived in the same house all that time and you didn’t know.’ He glances back, but briefly. ‘Did he bring them here? The kids he took?’
‘We should go. Aren’t you hungry?’
We walk the last few paces down the drive towards the car. I open the car boot and tuck the effigy behind my overnight bag. ‘What have you been up to?’ I ask.
He sniffs. ‘Let down a few tyres. Nicked a pack of fags from that shop down there. Set fire to a garage. Oh, and I might have killed a dog with that thing in your glove compartment.’
‘What?’ I’m actually looking down the street for a dead dog – ‘Please tell me you haven’t touched that’ – before I see the look on his face.
‘How did you even know it was there?’ I ask.
‘I was looking for matches.’ He hands over the car keys, which I left in his safekeeping. ‘OK, I was looking for Polo. I found matches in the boot, though. They’d fallen out of your bag. You’ve brought some weird stuff, Mum.’
‘Get in,’ I tell him. ‘And stay out of the glove compartment. I can’t tell you how dangerous that thing is.’
We climb in and the first thing Ben does is open the glove compartment.
‘
Don’t.’ I lean over and push it shut.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a CS gas canister. A Section 1 firearm. I shouldn’t even have it with me and if you’re found with it we’ll both be in big trouble.’
‘Is it lethal?’
‘No, but painful and incapacitating for several minutes. They’re designed to buy enough time to take down and handcuff a violent suspect.’
‘And you’ve got one? Who are you going to use it on? A tea lady who gives you a bit of lip?’
Ben understands perfectly that senior officers within months of retirement are rarely on the front line, but it doesn’t stop his sly digs. As we move away from the kerb, he looks longingly at the glove compartment.
‘You know, we should just head home,’ I say. ‘After lunch.’
‘We just got here.’
‘We can be back by six. Seven at the latest.’
‘And what’s Dad going to do? Hitch a lift down the M6?’
We reach the bottom of the street. When I lived here before, the road was cobbled and we had to be careful how we drove over it. Slowly was the golden rule. It’s been Tarmacked over since.
‘Mum, did you forget?’
‘Of course not. We’re picking him up at Terminal 2, after dinner, which means I have to stay sober for the evening.’
I’m not lying. Our family plans had gone out of my head for a second, that’s all. I sense Ben watching me. I don’t turn to face him, because that would acknowledge what he’s thinking. That he and his dad were right all along. I shouldn’t have come back.
‘And here we are.’ I turn off the main road and into the car park behind the hotel where I’ve booked rooms for the next two nights. When I’ve switched off the engine and checked my text messages, I see my son is staring up in dismay at the huge, soot-blackened building, with its ornate stonework, its turrets and finials, and its dozens of grimy windows.
‘There’s a Premier Inn a couple of miles back along the motorway.’ I put an apologetic hand on his shoulder. ‘We could stay there if you like. It won’t be full. Hotels here are never full.’
He slowly shakes his head. ‘If it’s good enough for the Addams Family.’ He lifts both our bags and we walk together towards the front door of the Black Dog.
He lets me go ahead, as always his manners perfect in public, and as I step over the threshold into the dark hallway, I hear the low-pitched growling of a mean dog. At that moment, music starts to play somewhere in the hotel’s interior – Elvis Presley’s ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ – and a man, tall and dark-haired, a little younger than me, appears from a back room and leans on the reception counter.
‘WPC Lovelady,’ he smiles, but in my agitated state it looks more like a sneer. ‘Welcome back.’
I think I may be about to faint. This is Larry.
9
I think Patsy would have screamed at the children for a long time after they fled the churchyard. I think hearing signs of life would have given her renewed hope. She’d heard them: they must have heard her too. They’d gone to tell their parents. They’d be back soon, with shovels.
Any second now, she’d hear running footsteps, hear the sliding noise as metal cut through earth. She’d hear the soft thud as dirt went flying. She’d hear voices telling her to hold on, they were coming, they were going to get her out. They’d pull her into daylight, shielding her eyes from the bright sun and pouring orange squash down her throat to quench this dreadful thirst.
She’d have willed herself to be calm, to save her oxygen, because now all she had to do was give them time. They were coming.
No one was coming.
The four children, from three families, told no one what they’d heard. They weren’t allowed to play in the churchyard, and they feared a walloping from their dads even more than they feared the monster below ground that they believed they’d unearthed.
10
‘Mum?’ Ben says.
The man behind the reception desk holds a hand out to my son. ‘John Donnelly,’ he says. ‘I knew your mum years ago. She was quite the heroine round these parts.’
I am breathing again. This is not Larry. Not even much like Larry, now that my eyes are used to the dim interior. A similar height and build, the colouring is right, but his face is broader at the jaw; his nose is wider. This man is not nearly so handsome. This is John Donnelly, all grown up.
We sign in and exchange a few pleasantries, he hands over keys, and Ben and I go upstairs.
‘This is a voodoo doll,’ says Ben, when I emerge from the bathroom to find him sitting on my bed. He’s had the good sense not to remove it from the long. ‘Shit, is it supposed to be you?’
‘I thought that,’ I say. ‘Which is why I was a bit spooked when you saw me. But how could it be? How would anyone know I was going to be there today? And will you please stop swearing?’
He lifts his eyes. ‘Maybe you weren’t supposed to find it.’
‘I’m so glad I brought you with me.’
Ben gives me his wide, close-lipped smile. At primary school, one of his friends called him Goofy because he has a lot of quite large white teeth and he’s been self-conscious about them ever since. It’s a shame, because when he forgets himself and grins, letting his joy shine out, his smile is dazzling.
‘Dad phoned.’ He points to my mobile on the bed.
‘Everything OK?’
‘He’s fine, but he may not make it back today.’
‘Why?’
‘Thunderstorms at Charles de Gaulle. Lots of planes delayed. He may get back to London, but probably not Manchester.’
Nick was supposed to meet us here. We were going to spend the next day and night in Lancashire and drive home together. It was a chance to revisit roots, show my boys the place I earned my spurs. At least, that’s what we’d pretended.
‘He wants you to call him,’ Ben says. ‘He thinks we should head home.’
I think we should head home. I’ve said so already. If Nick is no longer coming to meet us, there is no reason to stay. ‘What do you think?’ I ask.
There is silence in the room for a few minutes.
‘Why are we here?’ Ben asks.
‘We discussed this. You’re still too young to be left on your own.’
He gives me that look of his. Absolutely nothing changes on his face. I swear not an eyelash twitches, and yet the expression becomes completely different. ‘Is it a discussion,’ he says, ‘if only one person is talking?’
‘Lots of us attend funerals of people we’ve put away,’ I say. ‘It’s a form of closure.’ I sit down beside him on the narrow bed. ‘Maybe because we spend all the time they’re in prison dreading the day they come out. When they die, that fear goes away. I was actually a bit surprised to see no one else from the old team in church.’
Ben lies back and puts his feet on my lap. ‘It was thirty years ago. They’ll be dead.’
‘You’re a real delight, you know that?’
For a few seconds he stares up at the ceiling and I enjoy the moment of having him close. Then his eyes drift over to the effigy, still on the bedside table, and he sits up again. ‘Mum, what happened to your finger?’
In an instant the mood has changed.
‘You know what happened to it. I told you.’
‘No, I mean what happened to it after, you know? Did you keep it?’
I need a deep breath before I answer that one. I haven’t seen my long-lost finger since … I’m not even going to think about it. ‘No, I didn’t keep it,’ I say. ‘It went into evidence and then … I didn’t ask, but I suppose it would have gone to the hospital mortuary to be disposed of like other amputated limbs.’
‘So it couldn’t have fallen into the wrong hands?’
‘The wrong hands were cuffed, in the dock,’ I say.
A silence that is the very opposite of comfortable falls between us.
They have my hair. They have my hair. I have no idea what I was thinking as I ran from the Glassbrook
house. There is no ‘they’. There are no ‘wrong hands’. Not any more.
Ben jumps to his feet. ‘On a scale of one to ten, how pissed off with me are you right now?’ he says.
I look him in the eye. ‘Had you not said “pissed off”, it would have been a six. It’s now rising seven.’
He lifts one perfectly shaped dark eyebrow. ‘So I’ve got a couple to play with?’
One thing I’ve learned about my son in fifteen years: when there’s something on his mind, he won’t let it go.
‘What?’ I say.
‘Are we here because of the letter?’
I stare back. ‘What letter?’
‘The one with the postmark “HMP Wormwood Scrubs”. The one that arrived two weeks ago, posted the day before he died.’
I say nothing. I have no idea what to say. And then I say the wrong thing.
‘You’ve been reading my letters? Snooping in my bag?’
Ben’s face flushes crimson. ‘Hell no. You emptied your bag on the kitchen table last night. I saw the envelope when I got up for a drink. I haven’t read it.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Come on, let’s go and find some lunch and decide whether we’re staying or not. You can read it then. It won’t take long.’
11
‘This used to be a Kenyon’s Bakery,’ I say, as Ben joins me, carrying a tray laden with packaged food and drinks containers the size of buckets. I haven’t been to the counter in McDonald’s since he was seven years old and able to count money. The menus and the various meal combinations are beyond my comprehension.
‘The counter ran round those two walls,’ I continue. ‘The serving ladies wore brown overalls and white pinafores with little white caps, and they made small meat pies that were the most delicious things ever. There were tables at this side of the room, and they were always full.’
Ben isn’t listening. He has a McDonald’s ritual that involves arranging the various bags of food and sides, adding ketchup and salt and pepper in a pre-set order, putting napkins in the right places. I know I won’t get his attention back until it’s done. I find my own packet, always what I imagine is the least calorific item available, and start to eat.
The Craftsman Page 3
