Two uniformed officers were now heading towards us. Behind them, another car was pulling up.
Pay my respects? A spade left lying around? ‘They’ll never believe that.’
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s credible enough for them to pretend to. And you, Flossie, had better be more humble than Uriah Heep for the next few days. Nobody likes a smart-arse.’
20
Back at the Glassbrook house, I rinsed the spade under the outside tap and returned it to the shed. I was puzzled and a little spooked to see that the small black dog had vanished, even though the shed had remained locked, but as I walked back towards the house, I could see a pale face watching me from the kitchen window. Cassie Glassbrook was up unusually early. I thought I knew who’d been responsible.
Two of the station’s civilian staff were in the ladies’ toilets when I got to work, Elaine from the typing pool and Brenda who worked the switchboard. I envied the civilian women their freedom to wear dresses in the hot weather, and Elaine’s was obviously new from the way she was examining herself in the mirrors, twisting round to see the back view. It was short, sleeveless, a multi-coloured confusion of weird, swirling shapes. I didn’t like it, but in my half-blues and thick tights, I was already hot. I’d have swapped.
‘Good morning.’
I didn’t notice immediately that neither of them replied because my locker door was ajar. I pulled it open carefully and caught the same foul smell that hovers around public toilets in the summer and dark alleys close to pubs. My jacket looked untouched, but my cap wasn’t where I left it. I knew it would be wet even before I picked it up. Someone had pissed in my cap.
‘Know anything about this?’ The two women were pretending not to watch me as I carried my cap to the sink, but they were rubbish at acting.
‘’Bout what?’ Elaine tapped cigarette ash into the sink.
‘Problem?’ Brenda inspected her nails.
The two of them hadn’t worked out that mirrors reflect facial expressions, or maybe they just didn’t care that I could see their twisted smiles.
I rinsed my cap and tried my best to dry it with the thin revolving towel, hoping the wetting – two wettings – wouldn’t damage it, because I’d be fined.
By this time, I was late on parade. Only a matter of seconds, but it was just my luck for Rushton to be in the parade room and for the shift officers to be standing to attention as I slipped inside.
‘Good of you to join us, Flossie,’ the sergeant said, as I took my place at the end of the line, feeling my face burning. The constable next to me sniffed and moved a step away. Elsewhere in the room, I heard a snigger, turned quickly into a cough.
‘Morning, lads, lass.’ The super stepped forward. ‘You’ve all heard the rumours about what happened in the early hours and I’m here to tell you the gossip stops now.’
Rushton seemed to be making eye contact with everyone in the room, nine constables, apart from me.
‘The vermin of Fleet Street have descended in force,’ he went on. ‘Some of ‘em were here before the sun came up, but I guess they’re not naturally drawn to the hours of daylight. My point is, if I hear of anyone talking to them about the Patsy Wood case, I will have that man’ – he looked pointedly in my direction – ‘or woman scrubbing the station lavvies until they draw their pension. Do I make myself clear?’
A chorus of ‘Yes, sir’s’ rang out around the room.
‘And the same goes for the general populous. We talk to no one. I will be making an official statement later today. Have a good day, lads.’
In the doorway, Rushton paused for a word with the sergeant. I couldn’t hear what they said, but the sergeant glanced my way.
I was given Two Beat, alone, and as soon as we were dismissed, I made for the door, eager to get away from the sideways glances and pointed avoidance of the other constables, not to mention the grumbles about the gauntlet of reporters we all had to run to leave the building.
As I was about to step into Reception, I felt a nudge on my shoulder and looked back to see one of the older constables, a man called Colin, who was known as ‘the foreigner’ because he’d moved here from Yorkshire ten years earlier.
I guess that made me the Martian.
‘I’ve to drop you off down road.’ Without waiting for a response, he turned and made for the yard where the vehicles were kept.
‘Why?’ I followed him out, catching the back door as it swung towards me. I had my answer as we shot out of the station past the gathered crowd of journalists. I caught my name when they spotted me in the passenger seat of Colin’s car. One even started jogging after us.
Colin sniffed. ‘Wind window down,’ he said, without looking at me.
‘Thank you,’ I said, when he pulled over two hundred yards down the road. He was staring straight ahead through the windscreen and maybe I wasn’t supposed to hear what he said next.
‘Don’t hurry back.’
For a second – a wise and sensible second – I almost quietly closed the door and walked away. But then I thought of that little girl, interred alive in the most terrifying place imaginable, and of the other two, who’d probably shared her fate. And I thought about their killer, who was almost certainly somewhere in town, walking the streets, watching the children, waiting for his next chance.
The second passed and I bent down until I could see the side of his head.
‘What was I supposed to do? Leave her down there?’
He turned then and, angry though I was, I was alarmed by the look on his face. ‘Fuck off,’ he told me.
So I did.
21
The ‘beats’ are the defined areas of town that a police officer is expected to patrol, within set times, when on duty. I knew Two Beat well: it was one of the quieter ones during the daytime, considered suitable for a lone WPC. Mainly residential streets and a few corner shops, there was a primary school and an old cotton mill, which had closed its doors for the last time a few years earlier. Having a look around the mill, checking everything was in order, was my first task.
As I turned into the street, I heard Tom Jones bitterly querying the motivation of a woman called Delilah. Tom’s voice was replaced by the sound of a baby crying, a woman shouting at her children to hurry up, the high-pitched trilling of someone playing a recorder. All the front windows seemed to be open. Some of the women were already out, housecoats and aprons over their clothes, their hair tied up in scarves, scrubbing their doorsteps. It was almost a ritual in the North-West: the family left for the day; the woman of the house scrubbed the doorstep clean for their return. Most used large wooden brushes, but some still had the traditional donkey stones. A few wished me good morning; others watched me walk past.
Usually quiet during the day, the Perseverance Mill was nevertheless notorious at the station. Barely a week went by without reports of some night-time disturbance or other. In the early hours of that very morning, while I was making my way across the moor, two of our constables had been called out to investigate a possible break-in. They’d found nothing, but the sergeant wanted it checked again in daylight.
The mill lay at the end of a short residential road called Jubilee Street. Its front gates were solid iron, bolted and wrapped with a chain and padlock, the only relief in a high and dirty, broken-glass-topped brick wall that surrounded the mill and its yards. A pair of buzzards had nested in the chimney and I could see them circling as I approached.
Parked in the street, just a few yards down from the mill gates, was a black Daimler. I took a quick glance around, annoyed with myself for not making a note of the registration of the one I’d seen yesterday afternoon. Prestige cars weren’t exactly rare in Sabden – the mills and factories and surrounding farms had made some men very wealthy – but they weren’t ten a penny either.
I was just tall enough to see over the wall into the mill pond. Rubbish lay on its surface, while the narrow strip of land that circled it was chocked with brambles, nettles and elder. The tall, stately flowe
rs of the sweet bay willowherb rimmed its edges, and pale yellow iris poked their heads up through the water. Buddleia bushes grew around it too, the purple blooms browning as the flowers died. Their scent was strong and sickly in the already-warm morning air.
I made my way towards the rear of the mill, where the second set of gates were not so high, and my attention was caught by graffiti in greasy white paint
Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the Devil.
There was a symbol too, a sort of diamond shape. The graffiti was fresh. As I drew close, I could smell the chemicals in the paint.
Religious graffiti. Who’d heard of that? And why, on the whole of this disused building, was this the only sign of vandalism?
From the rear gates I could see across the yard and the entire back of the building. Huge metal loading doors allowed access to the basement. The lower windows were barred, several of them broken. Outbuildings were tucked against the wall. It was surprisingly neat, for an abandoned building. All seemed in order.
And then it didn’t. There was someone in the mill. For a second, maybe two, a human-shaped shadow appeared in one of the lower windows, and that presented me with a choice. I could jog back to the nearest police call box and report it or investigate myself. I didn’t relish the thought of scaling the gate, but any of my male colleagues would do it, no question.
I looked around – no one watching – and put my foot on the lowest crossbar. I swung a leg over, taking care of my skirt, and then dropped down.
It was all very different on this side of the wall. The mill seemed bigger and the yard darker. The high-pitched cry of one of the buzzards now seemed to be aimed directly at me. Maybe it was. Buzzards were known to be territorial.
I set off across the yard to the window where I’d seen the figure, but the glass was glazed and dirty, impossible to see through. I moved on to the next, and the next. No movement inside that I could see.
I had not imagined that shadow.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’
I turned to see two men had appeared from round the corner. One of them was a man called Terry Parker, a known offender. A wiry, rodent-faced character, he’d been interviewed when Stephen vanished, partly because of his history, partly because he lived very close to the Shorrock family. He hung back now behind the younger, bigger man.
The man I had a feeling I’d seen before but couldn’t place had a large ring of keys in one hand. He was in his mid-forties, with short brown hair and a heavy face. He wore a business suit, but his stomach hung over his waistband, and his shirt collar dug into the folds of his neck.
‘We had reports of a disturbance last night, sir,’ I said. ‘May I ask your name and the nature of your business here?’
I counted four seconds before he answered.
‘Mr Earnshaw, property owner. And now can I ask yours?’
‘WPC Lovelady, sir.’ I looked past him to where Terry seemed to be trying to slink away. ‘To save me checking with my sergeant, can you vouch for Mr Earnshaw, Terry?’
Terry twitched and continued to edge backwards. I took his silence as assent.
‘I know who you are,’ the bigger man said. ‘You’re Stan Rushton’s new poodle. Haven’t they got any cells need scrubbing out?’
‘Have you been inside the mill this morning, Mr Earnshaw?’
He stepped closer until I could smell stale alcohol and cigarette smoke on his breath. ‘I hardly think I have to account for myself on my own property.’
‘Nevertheless, sir, we’ve had reports of a break-in. Have you seen any signs of a disturbance?’
He leaned closer and I had to fight the instinct to back away. Then he raised a finger and tapped the air, inches from my jacket pocket. ‘Listen, love, I did not call you lot out last night, and neither did Terry here. We are the only people who have keys and the only ones authorised to report disturbances. So unless you hear from one of us in future, I suggest you stay in the station and concentrate on making tea for the senior officers.’
I nodded at the mill. ‘Do you mind if I look around inside?’
‘Aye, I do. Now push off before I have a word with Stan Rushton about your behaviour.’
Without a warrant or his permission, I could do nothing more. I wished them both a good morning and walked away. It crossed my mind to ask them to open the gates, but I had a feeling that request, too, would be denied. So I climbed back over, conscious of them watching. When I landed on the other side, I heard Earnshaw say, ‘Get that shit off the wall, Terry. I don’t pay you to let the place be vandalised.’
I made my report to the station officer. As I was locking the police box, I felt an unsettling sense of being watched and looked across the road to see Tom leaning against his car. For a second we stared at each other and I thought I could see something in his eyes that didn’t look entirely like the Tom I knew. I crossed the road. He didn’t speak.
‘Where’ve you been?’ I hadn’t seen him since I’d left St Wilfred’s.
‘The Wood house. Then the infirmary. I took Patsy’s dad to ID the body.’
‘You broke the news?’
‘Me and the super. They’d take it best from me, he said.’
‘Are they—’ I stopped.
‘Are they OK? No, Florence, they’re a very long way from being OK.’
‘Are you?’
He opened the car door. ‘Super sent me to get you,’ he said. ‘Look sharp.’
I got in the car. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as we pulled away from the kerb. Unusually, the radio wasn’t switched on.
‘Nowhere you’ll like,’ he told me.
22
‘Is this a punishment?’ I asked, as Tom and I walked down the tiled corridor on the ground floor of Blackburn Royal Infirmary. I’d never been to a post-mortem and I didn’t want to start with Patsy’s. Nor did I relish the thought of everyone at the station laughing at tales of me throwing up, or even fainting.
‘You really don’t know Rushton yet, do you?’ Tom spotted a ‘no smoking’ sign and looked for somewhere to leave his cigarette. Seeing nothing, he dropped it.
At the end of the corridor, through a set of double doors, we found Superintendent Rushton with three of CID’s most senior detectives: DI Sharples, who didn’t even look my way, and the two detective sergeants working directly under him, Bob Green and Garry Brown. Green, nicknamed Gusty, was in his early thirties, with long, fine hair that flew from his scalp at all angles, as though he were permanently caught in wind. I’d thought, at first, that his unusual hairstyle accounted for his nickname, but soon found out it was for another reason entirely. Brown, a decade older than Green, was called Woodsmoke, for no reason I’d managed to discover. All the men smelled of smoke back then. He smoked a pipe, rather than cigarettes, but it was made from a polished black lacquer, not wood.
A couple of seconds after Tom and I arrived, the pathologist appeared. His eyes settled on me. ‘Is the young lady coming with us?’ he asked.
‘She is,’ said Rushton.
Pursing his lips, the pathologist led the way.
The large, hexagonal mortuary had the look of the public baths in Sabden, which I visited at least weekly to supplement my hot-water ration at the boarding house. Everything functional, and yet elaborate too, with the intricate, showy design the Victorians loved. Sound bounced around off the tiled walls before disappearing into the high ceiling.
Arched windows surrounded us. The larger ones, set low in the walls, had been blacked out for privacy, but those higher up still let in natural daylight. Through one, I could see the leafy branches of a sycamore tree. Ignoring the thin, shrouded body on the marble table, I fixed my eyes on the swaying leaves. The pathologist, a Dr Dodds, said, ‘Everybody ready, then?’ and pulled back the sheet.
Silence fell. I lowered my eyes and looked at Patsy.
Her features had been composed, for which I was grateful. The snarling expression, s
o dreadful in the torchlight, making me think of a rodent in a trap, had been relaxed into something akin to sleep. In the early hours, though, I hadn’t appreciated the dreadful wounds to her hands and lower arms. She hadn’t been washed yet and they were covered in dried blood.
Her lips had lost all colour and were horribly cracked. They’d been bleeding too. There were three deep scratches on her left cheek, where she’d raked her own face.
‘We’re looking at the remains of an adolescent female,’ said the pathologist. ‘Caucasian. Weighing about a hundred pounds and with a height of around five foot two inches.’
Patsy wasn’t wearing clothes. I knew it to be normal, but couldn’t help feeling sad for her. She would have had a teenager’s extreme sensitivity about her body and could probably imagine little worse than lying naked in front of six men.
I had to stop thinking of her as alive.
‘Bit on the thin side,’ the pathologist said, ‘but otherwise she looks to have been in good health prior to her demise.’
‘Cause of death?’ Rushton was, of all of us, the furthest away from the table. I wasn’t sure he was even looking directly at Patsy, but rather at some undefined spot several inches above her. He’d shaved since the early hours, but badly. He’d cut himself twice, and missed patches of stubble altogether.
‘Given the airtight enclosure you found her in, the oxygen-poor environment, I’m looking at asphyxia as the cause of death,’ said the pathologist. ‘Certainly nothing I can see immediately suggests any different. The wounds to her hands and fingers’ – he raised Patsy’s left hand and shone his torch on the two middle fingers, both missing nails – ‘suggest that she was alive when she was put in the coffin.’
The Craftsman Page 8
