The path through the graves was overgrown, but I could see where it had once been. I was close enough now to see the name on the headstone, but I wasn’t looking at the stone. I was looking at the grave.
Graves flatten over time. Immediately after a burial, there is a mound of soft, loose earth. Even after the sexton has stamped and shaped his mound, after the turf has been replaced, it protrudes above ground level. This isn’t only the effect of the coffin, or casket: the sexton will allow for that. It’s because the earth has air trapped within it, and it takes time for the air to escape, for the soil to firm up. According to Dwane, it can take up to six months, depending on weather conditions, for a grave to settle.
No one had been buried in this churchyard for decades. The ground in here should be as dense as that covering the rest of the Hill. And it was.
But not where I was standing. This grave was a mound of loose soil. Not smooth and rounded, the way Dwane shaped his graves, but clumsily done, like a child’s sandcastle. This grave was fresh.
The mound began to move.
I think I cried out. Who wouldn’t? I’m sure I staggered back. I probably closed my eyes and prayed it wasn’t happening, but at some point, and I’m sure it only took me a second or two, I opened them to see the earth was still moving.
It seemed to be falling in on itself, as though something beneath the surface was tunnelling upwards, and then mounds of soil began to bubble up, like a stew coming to the boil. I heard the low, muffled sound of terror.
I shut my mind to the horrifying pictures flooding into it and dropped to my knees. I scooped earth into a cup made by both my hands. The ground felt warm and damp, as though absorbing the heat of the body trying to be free. I scooped again, dreading what I might unearth but knowing I had to keep going. I kept plunging my hands into the soil, getting deeper with every attempt.
When I touched warm flesh, I cried out again and pulled away. From beneath the earth came an answering cry. Luna. This was Luna, not some creature from my worst nightmare, and I had to keep going.
I resumed digging, my hands bleeding by this time. I carried on, even when I saw another torch shining from behind, when I heard the cry of the constable from the patrol car, and his running footsteps. By the time he reached me, a hand had appeared from beneath the earth and was grasping tight hold of my arm.
46
I don’t like to admit how close I came to tugging free and running at that moment, but the arrival of the other constable gave me the extra bit of courage I needed. The two of us scrabbled around in the dirt like dogs until Luna’s head was free of the earth. She gasped for breath and spat out soil, while I told her it was OK, we had her, she was safe now.
At one point, she seemed to stop breathing, but the quick-thinking man at my side stuck a finger in her mouth and scraped it clean. When we were sure she wasn’t going to choke, the two of us pulled her clear, and by the time she was out of the ground, other officers were arriving. The first set off back at a run to call an ambulance. We didn’t want to wait, though, so we carried her, between us, back along the corpse road.
Luna had been lucky, in many respects. She’d been buried shallowly, not in a coffin or casket at all, but in some rough sacking that she’d managed to tear apart. She smelled of alcohol and, when she could speak, complained of feeling woozy, of having a terrible headache.
Two of us travelled in the ambulance with her as she was rushed to Burnley General. We didn’t ask questions, but she wanted to talk. She told us she had no idea who’d abducted her. Her last memory had been of walking the final street before home when she’d heard a vehicle pulling up behind. A small van. Thinking it might be her dad come to find her, she’d waited. A masked figure had leaped from the driver’s side and bundled her into the back.
Her next memory was of waking up in a very dark space, blindfolded, with her hands tied behind her back and a sickening smell around her that had reminded her of the dentist.
Chloroform. I glanced at my colleague, saw the same idea reflected in his eyes.
In that short ambulance journey, Luna seemed determined to tell us everything she remembered. After a while – impossible for her to say how long, because she’d lost track of time – she’d been forced to drink something that had burned the back of her throat and made her feel sick and sleepy.
Another look at my colleague. Alcohol?
She claimed to have no memory of being carried from the dark room and put back in the van. Or of being carried again, or of being laid in a hole in the ground. She’d woken to find herself gasping for breath and could only have been in the ground minutes when I arrived. Her rescue could easily have been watched by the man who put her there. The man who’d phoned me.
Why had he done that?
We arrived at Burnley General at the same time as the rest of the Glassbrooks, and for the next half-hour chaos ensued. Only when the doctor insisted on Luna having some quiet did she say that she wanted to speak to me. Just me. She wanted everyone else, even her parents, to leave the room.
I tried to smile down at the pinched face on the white hospital pillow.
‘You’ve been so brave,’ I said. The smile wasn’t working. You’d have to toss a coin to say which of us was going to cry first.
Her little face seemed to contract further, and her big, scared blue eyes filled up. She reached towards me, her hands still grimy, the skin around her fingernails soaked in blood.
‘Can my mum hear us, do you think?’
‘I doubt it,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure. Sally hadn’t been pleased at being dismissed and wouldn’t be far away.
‘I don’t want her to know.’ The tear pools in Luna’s eyes brimmed over and fat droplets began rolling down her cheeks.
‘Know what?’ I whispered, although I was fairly sure I knew. There is something about that stricken look, the inability to meet people’s eyes that women instinctively recognise. I had yet to deal with a rape victim. I was pretty certain I’d found my first.
‘He did things to me.’ Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. ‘He hurt me.’
It was important to know the details, and so I coaxed them out of her. Her parents would have to know. There was no way we could protect them from that.
‘Did you get a look at him, Luna?’ I asked.
She shook her head and another tear rolled across her temple and onto the pillowcase.
‘Sometimes I thought there might be more than one man,’ she told the ceiling light, ‘but I only heard one voice.’
‘Did you recognise it?’
She shook her head.
‘Was he young or old?’
I concentrated on the voice for a while: she thought he was older than her father and definitely from Lancashire. There were no particular mannerisms or pronunciations that she remembered.
I spent over an hour in the hospital room with Luna, conscious of movement outside, of hushed voices and then raised voices, of faces peering in through the small window. Only when a ward sister came in and announced that the child really had to sleep did I give way to her mother, who looked at me as though I were the enemy.
I’d hoped, even expected, that Tom would be in the hospital waiting for me, that he would have volunteered to drive me home, or to the station if a debrief couldn’t wait until the morning. It was already gone three o’clock.
Instead, DI Sharples and two uniformed constables stood at the end of the corridor, as though blocking my way out.
‘WPC Lovelady,’ Sharples said, as I approached. ‘Come with us, please. We’re taking you in for questioning.’
47
The station was busy. All the staff on duty, and quite a few drafted in for overtime, had been out looking for Luna. Those not needed to process the crime scene up at the old churchyard had gathered in the station awaiting developments.
I was the development.
I was given no praise for being the one to dig Luna Glassbrook out of a premature grave. No one patted me on the b
ack. There was no chorus of three cheers. Instead, they were waiting in the car park as we arrived, or looking out of one of the upper windows, or hanging around in reception. Eyes watched me pass and I knew that something indefinable had changed.
I’d never been popular, but I was tolerated, as something of an oddity maybe, but one of them. Not any more. There was an invisible line, and I’d crossed it without even realising it was there.
By this time, I was shivering. Hours earlier, I’d left the Glassbrook house in a hurry, without a coat. The hospital had been as hot as hospitals usually are, but no sooner had I left it than the shaking began. No one offered me a coat, or a blanket, or even a cup of tea. Looking back, I’m not sure it would have helped much. I’m not sure the uncontrollable trembling was about cold.
I was led to the interview room and told to sit down. Not asked, told. Sharples and Brown sat opposite. I was facing the mirror that was really a window because that was where the suspects always sat.
‘Who’s watching us?’ I asked.
‘Couldn’t say.’ Sharples opened a file. ‘What’s puzzling me, Lovelady, is why you got a call from the killer, abductor, whatever we want to call him. Why would he phone you and tell you where Luna was in time to save her life?’
It had been puzzling me too.
‘I don’t think it was the killer,’ I said. ‘The killer gave no warnings about Patsy or the others. He didn’t want them to be found. I think the person who called me tonight was someone else.’
Sharples gave me a long, cold look. ‘Interesting theory,’ he said. ‘That you only now choose to mention.’
‘I’ve been a bit tied up the last few hours, sir.’
‘If not the killer, then who?’ asked Brown.
‘Someone who knows him,’ I said. ‘Someone who knows what’s going on but is too scared to say anything.’
‘But why contact you?’ Sharples said. ‘You’re not even a proper detective.’
‘I’m the only female officer at the station,’ I said. ‘I tend to be noticed.’
‘And this person who wants to help just happened to know your home telephone number?’
‘The Glassbrook house is a guest house,’ I said. ‘Anyone can find the number.’
In the room next door, something was dropped. I looked directly at the mirror, saw my own reflection and wondered whose eyes I was meeting on the other side.
‘Funny how you seem so adept at finding these missing kids,’ Brown said. ‘First Patsy, now Luna, and you’ve pointed us in the direction of Stephen and Susan. If that hunch turns out to be right, I think we’ll be asking ourselves whether you’ve a brilliance way beyond your age and experience or …’ He let the sentence hang in the air.
‘I was sent to St Wilfred’s after some children reported hearing screaming,’ I reminded him. ‘It was considered to be a prank call, so I was sent.’
‘Did someone point you in the direction of Stephen and Susan, or did you work that one out by yourself?’ asked Brown.
‘Tom thought of that, not me.’ I fixed my eyes on the mirror, searching him out. If he were behind it, he’d damn well know what I was thinking right now.
‘Really?’ Sharples said. ‘Because I remember you talking us through it, all proud of yourself. Tom was his usual gormless self.’ He turned to Brown. ‘Do you remember it any different, Woodsmoke?’
Brown shook his head.
‘The whole house heard the phone this morning,’ I said. ‘How was I supposed to have phoned myself?’
‘Ah, well, that’s the thing,’ said Sharples. ‘We’ve spoken to Mr and Mrs Glassbrook, and Mr Pickles, even young Cassie, and none of them can definitely remember hearing the phone.’
The sense I’d had since leaving the hospital, that this was an annoyance but one that would soon be cleared up, was fading. A tightening in my stomach told me that something might be going on here that I hadn’t quite figured out yet.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said, trying to sound calm. ‘They were all awake when I took the call.’ I thought back to the moment when my caller had disconnected, when I’d looked up to see an audience on the first-floor landing.
‘They say they heard you banging your bedroom door and running down the stairs. Then the sound of your voice. None of them are certain, but they don’t remember a phone ringing.’
Was that possible? I’d moved quickly, but the phone had still rung three, maybe four times before I’d reached it. The Glassbrooks were waiting for – dreading – a phone call. They wouldn’t sleep through three or four rings, would they?
Brown, meanwhile, had been fumbling beneath the table. He straightened up and I saw my clay figures in clear plastic bags. A rabbit, a cat, a fish, a bird and my crude attempt at a human figure.
‘I told you I wanted to see how easy it is to make effigies from local clay,’ I said. ‘I dug the clay out of the Glassbrooks’ garden. I told you that too.’
‘So you said.’
‘We found a lot of books in your room, Florence,’ said Brown. ‘Books about witchcraft, ghost stories, folklore. It’s a wonder you can sleep at night.’
‘I was under direct orders to learn as much as I could about witchcraft. I had no interest in the subject until we found the effigy with Patsy.’
‘You have to see this from our point of view, Florence,’ said Sharples. ‘You arrive in February, and not a month later, we have a child go missing. Then a second, a third, a fourth. And you seem to have far more success in working out what’s going on than a whole load of officers with twice your experience.’
I had an answer to that, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t help my case.
‘Luna was raped,’ I said, instead. ‘I haven’t had chance to make a report yet, but she was forced face down onto a flagged floor in a dark room and taken from behind. Twice. Am I supposed to have grown a penis?’
They both looked shocked. It was a word that nice young women didn’t use back in 1969.
‘You’ll be aware of the case of Myra Hindley, Lovelady,’ Sharples said.
‘I’m familiar with the case of Hindley and Brady,’ I agreed.
‘So you’ll know that Hindley was the lure. The pleasant young woman who was supposed to make the children feel safe about getting into vans and being driven off.’
‘She wasn’t only a lure, though,’ said Brown. ‘She played an active part in the torture. Some people believe she was the brains behind the business.’
‘I’m not a lure.’ I saw no point in pretending I didn’t know where this was going. ‘I don’t have an accomplice, and I had nothing to do with the disappearances.’
Sharples stood up. ‘I’m going to call it a night. Lovelady, Mr and Mrs Glassbrook don’t want you going back to their house tonight, and I have to see their point. I think it’s better if you stay here.’
The twisting thing in my stomach tightened. ‘In a cell?’
‘We’re not running a B and B, love. Be grateful you’re not under arrest.’
48
I might not have been under arrest, but when the cell door clanged shut and the footsteps of the duty sergeant faded away down the corridor, I was genuinely frightened for myself.
The cell was small and cold, and the flickering light remained on for the rest of the night. There was one blanket, and the mattress smelled of urine. There was a bucket in the corner. The walls were smoke-stained, and damp in places.
This was worse, far worse than stealing into churchyards in the dark and unearthing missing girls. That had called for bravado and the confidence of youth. This felt as though events had spiralled totally out of my control. How had I gone from a trusted member of the team to suspect? Had suspicions been growing over time and I’d been too self-absorbed to notice?
The books, the charts, the clay models? I’d been trying to get close to the killer, see what he was seeing. Instead, I’d put myself so completely in his shoes as to be almost indistinguishable, and I was no nearer being able to identify him.
Precious few on the inside, as I’d learned over the last few hours.
Luna had trusted me, had chosen me to confide all the worst aspects of her ordeal. The notion that I was an accomplice in her abduction was absurd. They would see that, soon. This would be over, soon.
Prisoners being held under arrest are supposed to be offered food every few hours. In spite of being in the cell for half the night, I was offered no food, not even a cup of tea. At eight in the morning, Detective Sergeant Brown pushed open the door.
‘You’re wanted upstairs,’ he said.
I got up, straightened my clothes as best I could and followed him along the corridor and up to the first floor. Once again, the station seemed unusually busy. Once again, conversations lulled as I approached.
Brown took me through CID to the superintendent’s office. Sharples was with him.
‘I’m suspending you without pay for the foreseeable future, Lovelady,’ Rushton said. ‘If you attempt to leave town, to contact the Glassbrooks or to come into the station, I’ll put you under arrest.’
‘With respect, sir, I have a right to know on what grounds.’ My legs were almost buckling beneath me, but I don’t think any of them would have known from my voice. I kept it steady. I kept it angry.
‘The team have raised questions that need answering.’ Rushton was struggling to look me in the eyes. ‘You’ve demonstrated insights into this case that don’t add up. You have no alibis for any of the nights the victims went missing—’
‘Sir, that’s not true,’ I said. ‘I was with Daphne Reece and Avril Cunningham when Luna was abducted.’
‘We spoke to the two ladies,’ Sharples said. ‘They weren’t sure what time you left their house on Saturday evening. There are no clocks in their house, and neither of them possesses a watch. They tell the time by the movements of the sun and the moon, apparently, and neither is reliable to anything more than a half-hour.’
The Craftsman Page 22
