‘Come on, then,’ says Ben, after a few minutes. ‘Show me.’
I find the envelope and hand it across. Ben licks his fingers before pulling out the single sheet of pale blue paper.
‘Is this it?’ he says.
‘Told you it wouldn’t take long.’
‘Did he write it?’
‘Yup.’
His eyes dart up. ‘Sure?’
‘I got a couple of letters a year from him. I know his handwriting.’
‘You never told me.’
‘When was I supposed to tell you I was on the Christmas-card list of one of Britain’s most famous serial killers? When you were five? Your tenth birthday? When you became a teenager, maybe?’
He sits upright, a bit like a meerkat. ‘Christmas cards? Can we sell them?’
I lift my coffee and hold his stare through the steam. He looks back down at Larry’s last letter to me.
‘What does it mean?’ he asks.
‘I thought you might tell me.’
He ignores my sarcasm. ‘Were his others like this?’
‘No. His others were what you might expect. If he’d seen something about me in the news, he’d write and comment on it. Congratulate me if something had gone well, commiserate if it hadn’t. Mostly, though, he wrote about his family. What Sally and the girls were doing.’
‘He and his wife didn’t get divorced?’
‘You’d be surprised how many couples stay married in similar circumstances. Sonia Sutcliffe stayed married to Peter for thirteen years after he was sentenced.’
‘Did you go to see him?’
There is only one sensible answer to that question. Larry Glassbrook buried three kids alive, not to mention everything he tried to do to me. For better or worse, though, I never lie to my son.
‘Many times,’ I say. ‘Larry sent me visiting orders once a year. I nearly always went. I’ve never really known why.’
Ben is still stuffing food into his mouth, talking between bites. I’ve lost my appetite. He looks down, reads the letter again, this time aloud. ‘I’ve kept them safe for thirty years. Over to you …’ He glances back up. ‘You must have some idea what he meant. He knew he was dying. This is a sacred charge, Mum.’
Maybe I haven’t wanted to ask myself why.
I smile now at the earnest look on my son’s face. ‘From a murderer? I can only assume he was talking about Sally and the girls. That he wanted me to keep an eye on them.’
‘Must be, I guess.’ Ben leans across the table and lowers his voice. ‘So what’s with the voodoo doll?’
‘Clay picture,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘In these parts, they call it a clay picture.’
Ben has a smudge of ketchup on his upper lip. I’m itching to reach out and wipe it away, but I know it will irritate him, so I wait for him to sort it out himself.
‘The Pendle witches – you know, the men and women who were hanged for witchcraft in the seventeenth century – they made clay pictures of their enemies as part of their rituals and their spell-casting. To give them extra power, they baked in some essence of the intended victim. You know, hair, fingernails, blood.’ I shrug. ‘Allegedly.’
‘Larry Glassbrook was a witch?’ Ben’s eyes are wide with glee.
I lower my voice, because I’m pretty certain the people at the next table are listening to us. ‘We never really knew what purpose the clay effigies served for Larry.’ I stop and think. Ben can find all this out anyway, and knowing my son, he will. ‘We found one in each of the caskets, with the victims. He wouldn’t say what they were for.’
Ben, too, seems to have lost interest in food. ‘And they were young, these kids?’
‘They were fourteen, rising fifteen,’ I say, as though it’s no big deal.
Uncertainty flickers over his face. ‘My age?’
For a second the busy, noisy lunchtime restaurant around us falls silent. Or maybe that’s only in my head. ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Your age.’
His enjoyment in the old stories has faded. Ben is the child of two police officers. He knows that every scintillating story in the papers is very real for someone.
‘Bad times,’ he says.
‘The very worst of times,’ I agree, knowing he will pick up on the Dickens reference. He ignores it.
‘So why are you smiling?’ he says instead.
Part Two
‘Now it is the time of night
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide.’
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
12
Monday, 16 June 1969
Patsy Wood’s family lived in a two-up, two-down, a terraced house of four tiny rooms, in a long, grime-blackened row of mill cottages. There was only one other car in the road when we arrived, a white Hillman Imp, parked a few doors down.
Tom had barely pulled on the handbrake before the kids appeared. Still in school uniform, summoned by the throaty roar of the engine, not to mention the smooth, if too loud, tones of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, they emerged from alleys, from behind the strings of beads that hung in doorways, from their football game on the tiny patch of spare land. They stood watching as we climbed out of the car.
Detective Constable Tom Devine, a similar age to me but more senior because he’d joined the force at eighteen, was a flashy dresser who never wore a tie if he could avoid it. His bright paisley-pattern shirt was open at the neck, the collar spread wide over the lapels of his jacket. His dark hair was thick, longer than police regulations permitted, and his sideburns were wide stripes down the side of his face. I’d seen women in the station’s typing pool surreptitiously checking their hair and lipstick when they heard Tom’s voice in the corridor, but I was used to clean-shaven, short-haired young men who were heading into the City, to officer training at Sandhurst or home to run the family farm. I couldn’t look at Tom without thinking, Dad wouldn’t approve. That said, he was married, so my father’s opinion was a moot point.
Posters of the lost children had been strung round lampposts and gazed out from each front-room window. Patsy had been missing less than twenty-four hours, but her face was here too.
We were shown straight through ‘to the back’ by one of Patsy’s siblings. The room was low, dark and cramped. Patsy’s mother, Nancy, was bending over the range oven when we entered. She twisted upright, and her face took on that pinched, closed look that was to become so familiar to me in the years that followed. Back then, though, I saw hostility, not fear.
‘No news, Nance,’ Tom said quickly. Tom had been in charge of the door-to-door questioning that had started early that morning and was back now to update the family and do some follow-up. I’d been told to tag along because the superintendent thought a woman officer might be a nice touch. I was to make Nancy a cup of tea if she was struggling to cope.
‘We need to ask you summat,’ Tom went on. ‘You all right for a minute?’
‘I’ll just give them their tea.’ Nancy carried a metal dish to the table, where four young children sat, and began spooning food onto waiting plates. It was a supper dish I’d seen before in the North-West: an egg for each child, drowned in milk and crumbly local cheese, and then baked until the whole thing set.
‘Looks champion, that, kids.’ Tom nodded at the wide-eyed, pale-faced children, who hadn’t taken their eyes off us. ‘You lot all right?’
Nancy added slices of white bread to each plate before wiping her hands on her pinny and giving us her attention.
‘Florence here has been to Patsy’s school today,’ Tom said. ‘Have you met Florence? WPC Lovelady? She’s from down South, but you’ll understand her right enough in time.’
Nancy’s eyes flickered in my direction.
‘She’s been talking to the teachers, headmaster, all the other staff, even the dinner ladies and caretaker,’ Tom went on.
‘Mai
nly the children, though,’ I added. ‘Children always know the most about what’s going on among themselves, don’t you think, Mrs Wood?’
‘I dare say.’ Again she barely gave me a glance. ‘Folks down at Pilkington’s have been saying as how you got the wrong ‘uns with those Moors Murders. That whoever took those kids is still out there, and that he’s got our Patsy.’
The children in the room were following every word, even as they shovelled food into their mouths.
‘Bloody rubbish, excuse my French,’ Tom said. ‘This is nothing to do with what happened in Manchester. Take my word for it, Nance.’
‘Several of Patsy’s classmates claim she spoke about Manchester a lot, though.’ I tried not to react to the hard look Nancy turned on me. ‘She talked about her cousins there, gave the impression she was quite close to them. We wondered whether she might have got on a train or a bus, thinking that perhaps she might stay with them for a while. Maybe after an argument at home?’
Nancy’s stare hardened.
‘Nobody’s saying Patsy had an argument with you or her dad,’ Tom said quickly. ‘But we do need to know if you have family in Manchester.’
A brief nod. ‘Stan’s brother lives in Deansgate. Patsy wouldn’t know how to find it, though. She’s only been once.’
‘Children can be rather cunning,’ I said. ‘She may have found out the address without your knowing. And the public library would have street maps of Manchester.’
‘Our Patsy did not go sneaking around,’ said Nancy.
‘I tell you what, Nance – you give me the address and we’ll have the Manchester force pop round,’ Tom said. ‘So we can close off that line of enquiry, so to speak.’
Nancy gave a reluctant nod and turned to a nearby dresser.
‘One of the theories we’re working on is that the three missing children are together somewhere,’ I said, as Nancy pulled a tatty address book out of a drawer. ‘That they made plans as a group and absconded.’
‘Our Patsy had nothing to do with that Shorrock lad. Susan Duxbury neither.’
‘Quite frankly, Mrs Wood, that’s the best scenario right now,’ I told her. ‘Because if the three children are together, they’ll be looking out for each other. They’re still in a lot of danger, though, if they’re living rough.’
‘Right, we’ll leave you in peace.’ Tom slipped the address into his pocket. ‘Thanks for that, Nance. We’ll let you know what we find.’
The door slammed behind us. Tom leaned back against the wall and took out his cigarettes. ‘You’ve a great future behind a desk, WPC Lovelady.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
I knew exactly what he was talking about. I knew I hadn’t performed well in the Wood house.
‘You used words she didn’t understand, you let your sentences ramble on into the middle of next week, and you emphasised your poncey Southern accent.’
‘I did no such thing.’
I’d done exactly that. I was always doing it. My stomach got tied up in knots when I had to deal with actual real people and all sorts of rubbish came out of my mouth.
He set off towards the car, kicking an abandoned space hopper out of the way. ‘You’re always doing it. You think it shows how superior you are. Well, it doesn’t. It makes you sound like a stuck-up cow, and nobody round here will have any of it.’
Tom drove a Ford Cortina 1600E, sprayed metallic gold with a black vinyl roof. He opened the driver’s door and climbed in. ‘Oh, and you didn’t take any notice of her kids, and you didn’t offer to make her a brew.’
‘I’m a police officer, not a maid of all work.’ I walked round and joined Tom in the hot car.
‘Listen to me, our Flossie. You don’t mind if I call you that?’
I hated the ridiculous name my new colleagues had given me. It was undignified and demeaning. ‘Yes, I mind a lot. My name is Florence.’
Tom sighed. ‘You’re not popular down the nick, love. You’re too smart not to know it.’
I knew it. I got evidence of it on an hourly basis.
‘It’s not personal,’ Tom went on. ‘We all know you’re clever and you’re not afraid of a bit of hard graft, but you’ve got to stop acting like you’re better than the rest of us.’
I didn’t think I was better. Better educated, perhaps. But not better, not in an absolute sense.
Did I?
‘Everyone at the station has an unreasonable prejudice about anywhere south of Manchester. And half of them don’t think women should be police officers anyway.’
Tom gave a short laugh. ‘True. But we outnumber you. We’re always going to win.’
‘I can’t change the way I speak. Or my sex.’
‘No one wants you to, love. Just remember you’re here to help people.’
I turned to look at him then. His dark blue eyes were a tiny bit bloodshot, as though he’d drunk too much the night before, or not slept enough, and in the confines of the car, his aftershave smelled cheap. The women in the typing pool were easily impressed.
‘I’m here to fight crime,’ I told him.
He shook his head. ‘No, love, you’re really not.’ He sighed again as he switched on the engine and we pulled away. It wasn’t until we’d turned onto the main road and were heading back towards the station that I spoke again.
‘That thing she said, about the Moors Murders. I heard it earlier today at Patsy’s school.’ I had to raise my voice. Tom always had the radio on loud and I was competing with Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs Robinson’.
‘You’ll be hearing it a lot more.’
‘Surely nobody thinks Hindley and Brady were innocent? That the real killer of those children is still at large?’
‘Nobody who’s thinking straight,’ he said. ‘But people don’t think straight when they’re scared.’
He overtook a slow-moving Triumph and pressed his foot down. I took hold of the door handle.
‘It’ll be a long time before folk round here get over what them two did,’ Tom said. ‘Maybe they never will. Something like that happens, it taints a place. People feel responsible when they can’t keep their kids safe, even if it’s a neighbour’s kids or kids from the other side of town. Kids die, it’s everyone’s fault, and people round here can’t cope with it again. Not this soon.’
‘Is that why we’re pretending the three of them have run away from home?’ I said in a small voice.
‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.’
I said nothing.
Tom gave a heavy sigh. ‘We’re not daft, love – we know what’s going on. But just think about it. If we have to start calming everyone down and holding everyone’s hand and attending public meetings and putting out fires left, right and centre, who the bloody hell will be out looking for the kids?’
I hadn’t thought of that.
Tom said, ‘God help us if there’s another child killer on the loose, Florence. We’ll have blood on the streets.’
We pulled into the station and he swung into a parking space. For several seconds he sat still, as the music continued to blare out. Then he turned the radio off and looked at me.
‘Sorry to have a go, love. It’s not your fault you’re posher than the queen. This case is getting to all of us.’
He smiled at me as he switched off the engine and I had a feeling people would forgive Tom for a whole lot more than a bit of plain speaking.
‘Tom,’ I said. ‘Tell me if you think I’m stepping out of line, but there’s, well, this idea I’ve had.’
13
Sabden nick back then bore no resemblance to any police service facility one might come across today. CID was on the second floor, its various rooms marked by flimsy partitions that gave the illusion of privacy but did nothing to block out sound. Each pane of mottled internal glass was hung with venetian blinds, their strings grubby with the grease of a thousand sweaty palms and their blades caked in dust. They rattled as Tom and I pushed open the door.
We made our way along the line of metal filing cabinets that ran down the centre of the room. Each drawer was full to the brim. Paper was king back in 1969 and the station overflowed with it. Box files formed stalagmite towers around the room, and when they tumbled over, they remained in a cascade of paper and cardboard until someone got tired and kicked them out of the way.
The window ledges were similarly piled high with files and the occasional textbook. The windows themselves were rarely opened, for fear of falling objects hitting shoppers in the street below, and yet the collection of dead flies seemed to grow daily. Cleaners never came into CID. They didn’t have the nerve.
Most of the detectives smoked and I couldn’t spend any time in this room without my eyes stinging.
Before computers stored data, we pinned our information around us. Every wall was full of notices, instructions, memos, maps, missing persons’ photographs, ‘wanted’ posters. Nothing was ever taken down, just papered over as new information took precedence. Were we to remove all the paper from the walls, the sound insulation would take a dive. Or the walls might fall down.
CID was a hazy mass of ever-moving paper, dust and smoke.
At the far end of the room was a corner office. Tom knocked and pushed open the door at the answering grunt.
Superintendent Stanley Rushton, a tall, thick-set man of around forty, slammed down the phone and stared back at us through a thick cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘Fucking twat,’ he said to us.
Tom said, ‘Earnshaw again, boss?’
‘How the devil do you know that?’
No one ever sat down in the super’s office. There weren’t any chairs other than his, and I’d have liked to see anyone dare take that.
‘Lads have been talking,’ Tom said. ‘Get used to it, boss. Council elections coming up.’
I’d never met John Earnshaw but knew him to be the chairman of the town council. Owner of several mills in town, he was a wealthy and influential man.
The Craftsman Page 4
