I am puzzled by her continual use of the word ‘slave’.
‘What use can a slave without corporeal form be to anyone?’ I ask.
‘Every use in the world if you are a dark magician. An unfettered soul can slip through walls, can fly through air, can frighten enemies to death. A slave that is not bound by earthly laws would make its owner powerful beyond imagining.’
I hold up my hands. ‘Marlene, you’re losing me. I believe there are natural energies to be harnessed, but what you’re talking about now—’
‘It is not the worst of it.’
‘It’s not?’
‘The chained soul has no rest. When he is not doing his master’s bidding, he returns to his grave, to rejoin his rotting body. Only he does not know that his flesh is being eaten by worms. He thinks he is still alive. When this magic is performed, the one who is trapped below ground will remain so for all time.’
‘No spell can keep a body alive without air.’
She leans forward, almost forgetting there is a fire between us. ‘You don’t get it, do you? The body dies, but the soul doesn’t know it. It is the worst of all deaths because it never ends. It is worse, far worse than being buried alive, because if you are only buried alive, you will die after a few hours. The Craftsmen were trying to make a soul slave when you were here before. The first two were killed by the cordial. Patsy Wood was enslaved, but we set her free when we burned her body. When Larry was in prison, they could not act, because they feared he would retract his confession if more children started disappearing, but they have always yearned to make a soul slave and they are trying again now. With your son.’
She looks down at my left hand. ‘They will have his bone, which is your bone. They have made the effigy. That figure you found will no longer be at the station. Somewhere there will be a coffin, a place of death. They will have planned to use you when they knew you were coming back. Your boy was a bonus.’
This woman is mad. What she is talking about is impossible. Unspeakable. I push myself up.
‘An effigy of you will work for him too because he is flesh of your flesh.’
‘Why children?’ I ask. ‘Apart from me, the early victims were all children.’
She gets to her feet too. ‘Not children. Teenagers. Because they are almost grown but still small and cannot fight well. Adults would be best, but adults are harder to entrap.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’ I say. ‘When the children vanished, you must have known this then. You burned Patsy’s body.’
She turns and spits. ‘You think the police would have believed stories about black magic? Would you?’
‘We would have dismissed stories of black magic,’ I admit, ‘but we might have been prepared to accept that others believed in it. You should have told us.’
She looks away. ‘We didn’t know anything.’
‘Rubbish. You know more than you’re admitting,’ I say. ‘It may have been speculation and rumour for Avril and the others, but you are too well informed.’
She looks down.
‘Your husband is one of them, isn’t he? Charles Labaddee is a Craftsman.’
‘He is no longer my husband.’
She has given me the answer I need.
‘Who else?’ I step round the fire to get closer to her. ‘Who else is a Craftsman? Where do they meet? Where are they keeping Ben? And when do they plan to perform this sick ritual? Tonight?’
I remember that this is the night of the dark moon and panic surges inside me.
‘I don’t know.’ She shakes her head. She will not turn from me, makes no attempt to walk away, but I sense that she is broken. And that she has told me all she knows.
‘If my son dies tonight, I will make sure that you are charged with obstructing the course of justice and being an accessory to murder,’ I tell her. ‘Your husband will rot in prison and—’
Her scream stops me in my tracks.
‘You think any of that matters?’ She grabs hold of my shoulder and hisses into my face, ‘Listen to me. Your son will not die. Dying would be a blessing compared to what he will suffer. He will be trapped in that box to the end of time, gasping for breath and banging on the wood until he thinks his fingers are broken and screaming to be set free. He will be crying for you to save him long after you are dead and turned to dust.’
The ground beneath me shifts and I feel myself falling. All the stars have been extinguished and the darkness is closing in on me. Then something slaps hard against my face.
Marlene has hit me. I see her hand raised, ready to strike again. ‘You must find your boy’s body and then you must burn him,’ she snarls at me. ‘If you don’t do that, he will never know peace. It is the last thing you can do for him. Find him and burn him.’
67
I can’t remember getting back down the Hill to my car, but I am here, switching on the engine, about to drive away. There are cuts on my hands, and my knees are grazed, but I don’t recall falling. I don’t remember heading back towards town, but suddenly I am in the police-station car park. I switch off my engine, knowing my car will have been spotted by the desk sergeant, that already people in the building will know I’m back. I take a second to sit in the car, breathing deeply, counting to ten, plastering on the façade of calm, of sanity.
Marlene thinks I’ve lost. She thinks Ben is already dead, that the Craftsmen have taken their revenge on me and that all I can do now is to save his immortal soul. I will not accept this. I am looking for my son, not his body.
Larry was not the killer. I know this now. Larry confessed because he believed his daughter, Luna, had killed three of her friends and he took the blame to protect her. His secreting away of the photographs was an insurance policy: as long as she stayed out of trouble, he’d keep quiet.
I’ve kept them safe for thirty years, he wrote to me. Over to you … I thought he meant his family. He didn’t. He meant the children of the town.
But Larry was wrong too. Luna and her friends were no more responsible for the deaths of Susan, Stephen and Patsy than he was. Larry was misled by the people who sent him photographs and my finger. I think of my hair and shoe, of the combs and handkerchiefs and keys of the other victims that were found in Larry’s workshop and wonder whether they were planted, sent to him like the photographs and my finger, or whether he picked them up himself when he rescued me.
Larry rescued me. Although I think I’ve known this for some time, the realisation hits me hard. I owe my life to the man who for thirty years I called a monster.
I must trust someone, Avril said, and she is right. I trust the coven, even Marlene. I believe that in the end she told me everything she knows. Avril and the others understand what is going on here, but most of them are elderly women, women with neither power nor influence, and there is a limit to what they can do. There always was.
I trust Tom. I believe in the collective power and integrity of the British Police Force, but Tom and his team are blinkered. Faced with different possibilities, they will pick the one that is easiest to manage, just as we did thirty years ago. Tom and his team are looking for Ben, but in the wrong places.
And so now I have a choice to make. I can join the coven, put my faith in the power of collective thought and the ancient forces of the world to guide me to my son, casting protection spells and finding spells. I have been a witch for thirty years, almost as long as I’ve been a police officer.
But I was WPC Lovelady first.
When I go inside, I ask for Brian Rushton, not Tom. I trust Tom, of course, and deep down, I realise, part of me still loves him, but Tom is tainted by what happened thirty years ago. He is still clinging to the belief that we got it right back then. On some level, Brian knows that we didn’t.
Finding him, I explain quickly what I want. That I know there was another group of witches in town thirty years ago and that I believe they may have been responsible for sending Larry the photographs.
‘They need to be fingerprinted,
’ I said. ‘Can you do that here?’
‘Witches?’ he says in response.
‘You don’t have to believe it,’ I say. ‘Just accept that they do. Can you find fingerprints here?’
‘Very crudely.’ He is still frowning at the mention of witches. ‘We can’t pick up partials or find anything difficult, but obvious, clear prints we can usually find.’
‘Can we try?’
He sets off, gesturing that I should go too. ‘Already in hand. Come on, we’ll see if they’ve found anything.’
I follow him along the corridor and down into the basement.
‘Found three more or less complete prints.’ The officer in the fingerprint room has deep furrows between his brows. ‘But to be honest, this might be contaminated evidence.’
‘What do you mean?’ Brian asks.
The officer pushes an enlarged image of a fingerprint at us. I look at the arches and whorls, surrounded by black dust. ‘This is the boss’s,’ he says, an embarrassed grimace on his face. ‘Easily done,’ he goes on. ‘Especially when emotions are running high.’ He looks at me. ‘We’ll probably find yours on here as well.’
It takes me a few seconds to find my voice. ‘I guess we weren’t thinking properly. We were both so excited to find something.’
Brian swears beneath his breath but is too respectful to criticise me or Tom out loud. ‘Any luck on the others?’ he asks.
The officer shakes his head. ‘Not yet.’
‘We should leave him to it,’ I say. ‘Brian, I’m not feeling well. Do you think I can sit down somewhere?’
I knew when I said it that there was a risk Brian Rushton would take me to Reception, or one of the interview rooms, but he takes one look at my face and realises I really am not well. He daren’t leave me alone. So he takes me up to the CID room and sits me at his own desk. He makes tea and speaks quietly to a woman in the corner before he leaves, glancing often in my direction. It is clear she has been told to keep an eye on me.
I am not well. I have never in my whole life been less well. I am fighting an urge to run screaming from the room. I can feel the world spinning away from me, leaving me in vast, inescapable darkness, but I know I have to cling on somehow. I close my eyes, drop my head onto Brian Rushton’s desk and pray for calm, for strength, for clarity of thought. I try to connect with my sisters at the four corners to draw in some of their power.
My head is leaning on the files that Brian brought into my hotel room. The old Glassbrook files.
When I lift my head, I am not being observed. There are three people in the room, but they are being sympathetic, giving me privacy, so it isn’t difficult to slide the files off the desk and into the bag that is waiting on my lap.
‘I’m going to the ladies’,’ I say, to the woman who has been tasked with looking out for me.
She half gets to her feet. ‘Can I help at all? Do you know where you’re going?’
‘End of the corridor,’ I say. ‘Look for me if I’m not back in ten minutes.’ I give her what I hope is a brave smile.
The ladies’ toilets have improved considerably since my day. There are six cubicles, all of them empty, and I lock myself in the one furthest from the door.
Thirty years ago, the people who murdered the children, the people I must learn to call the Craftsmen, saw a chance to frame Larry for the murders when they realised what his daughter and her friends had done. Quite why they would want to I don’t know. Maybe they felt vulnerable, saw the police search closing in. Maybe we were close with the cricket connection and they felt the need to close the case down quickly.
Having decided to frame Larry, they sent him the incriminating photographs, and evidence that he would have believed entirely convincing – my amputated finger – and let him reach the only possible conclusion. They gambled on him rescuing me and taking the blame for the crimes.
Which means they must have told him where to find me. There must have been something else sent to Larry in that brown envelope. Something I haven’t seen yet but have a chance of finding now, if it wasn’t destroyed or lost thirty years ago.
I sit on the lavatory lid and make my way through the file. I see photographs that I remember and handwritten notes, many of them mine. I flick through witness statements and file notes, and thank heaven for the computerised databases that make our jobs so much easier now. I keep going, with one eye on the time, because I know that sooner or later someone will look for me.
At last, three-quarters of the way through the file, I find the list of clothes that Larry was wearing on the night he was arrested. As I read through, I’m remembering the straight-legged jeans, the light brown jacket edged in lilac, the apricot-coloured shirt, the pointed-toe suede shoes. Winkle-pickers. The name comes back to me after all these years.
The list goes on to detail the contents of his jeans’ pockets: One set of three keys, one black leather wallet, containing a five-pound note and three one-pound notes. Loose change, including six shillings and ten pennies. A blue-and-white-striped handkerchief. A brown, plastic, fine-toothed comb.
And then the contents of his jacket pockets: One amputated finger (believed to be third finger of the left hand of WPC Florence Lovelady), one bloodstained tissue, wrapped round said finger, one cutting taken from the Sabden Gazette, dated 18 June 1969.
I can think of no reason why Larry would have a cutting from the Sabden Gazette in his shirt pocket, that night of all nights. Two minutes later, I find it, shrunken, faded, its ink rubbing off on surrounding papers but legible enough.
It is the story of the riot at the Perseverance Mill. I’d had no idea there was even a photographer there that night, but there must have been, because the photograph that accompanies the story was taken from the back of the crowd. It shows dozens of men, many in the flat caps worn in those days, staring at the doors of the mill, while six officers – Detective Inspector Sharples, Detective Sergeants Brown and Green, Constables Butterworth, Devine and Lovelady – face them off.
Great metal doors. An underground space. A place within a short drive of St Wilfred’s Churchyard, where I was found. This is it. Thirty years ago, Larry Glassbrook rescued me from the Perseverance Mill. My son is in the Perseverance Mill.
68
I trust no one.
I leave the station seeing only the desk sergeant and I tell him that I’m going back to my hotel. He nods, hardly able to meet my eyes, but that is a good thing. He does not see the spark that I know I won’t be able to hide.
I drive as fast as I dare, keeping a constant lookout for headlights tailing me. Once again I go via the Glassbrook house. Taking only a few minutes, I find the tools I will need in Larry’s shed. A very sharp knife, heavy-duty metal cutters, a large iron hammer and a carbon-steel rod shaped at both ends, which in the US is called a crowbar, in England a jemmy. I wrap them in a piece of canvas and I’m ready. In my car I have a torch and the CS gas canister that Ben teased me about this morning.
Only on the two-mile drive back to the mill does my resolve waver. Thirty years have gone by. The mill was empty in 1969 and I’m being stupid to imagine it is even still there. It will have been demolished long ago. I will arrive in Jubilee Street to see a block of residential flats. Despair washes over me and I almost pull over, but something keeps me driving, along the main road and into Jubilee Street.
It is there. I see the tall, dark-brick walls in the pale glow of security lights as I draw closer. The surrounding wall is still standing. The gates have been renewed and look stronger and more forbidding than ever. Somehow the mill survived long enough for a preservation order to be put on the building.
To one side of the gates is an illuminated sign, and as I park at the kerb, squeezing in between a Citroën and a Honda, I read, Perseverance Mill. Offices, light industrial premises and workshops to let.
The Craftsmen that Marlene told me about are powerful men. Rich men. They may own this building, may have owned it for over thirty years. Maybe John Earnshaw, who owned it i
n 1969, is one of them. Unable to keep it empty, in defiance of all urban-development regulations and compulsory-purchase orders, they may have developed it, let it out, keeping some parts of it for themselves.
Am I clutching at straws? I don’t think so. Something about this place has always felt very wrong, and that tells me I’m right.
I don’t have much time. The Craftsmen will have been watching me since I arrived in town; they may already know that I left the police station. If they realise I’ve seen the file, they might know I’m coming here. I have no time to waste, but I will not disappear without trace.
I reach for my phone. Avril answers on the first ring.
‘Florence, darling, we’re pretty certain he’s somewhere in the town centre. Not too far from the main road, closer to Padiham than the Hill, not as far as the Hinton Street bridge. I’m sorry we can’t be more—’
She is describing an area of roughly half a square mile.
‘It’s OK,’ I tell her. ‘And you’re right. He’s in the Perseverance Mill. I’m there now.’
‘Oh my goodness. Wait for us. We’re on our way.’
‘No, Avril. I need you to stay where you are, you and the others. Stay at the four corners. I need you to send me protection. And strength. For me and Ben. Right now. Can you do it?’
‘Florence, please tell me you’re not—’
‘Avril, I have to go. Can I rely on you?’
A short pause. Then, ‘Always.’ The line goes dead.
I look around carefully when I get out of the car. The parked cars – so many of them now – are empty. No one is watching me from the surrounding houses. I touch car bonnets. None of them is warm.
The mill pond is still here, but transformed now into a garden where office workers can enjoy their lunch. As I peer over the wall, I catch the sickly scent of buddleia blossoms. Back on the Hill, I didn’t check for a buddleia bush and so have no means of knowing whether what I smelled there was real, a memory or clairvoyance. It hardly matters.
The Craftsman Page 33
