‘Do you?’ I hear an edge in his voice that tells me to be very careful.
‘I believe women who are baptised in this lake change,’ I say.
His blue eyes look black. ‘If you changed, it was down to a very bad case and nearly being killed by a maniac.’ His face softens and he smiles. ‘But right now, Floss, I swear you haven’t changed in thirty years. It must be the moonlight.’
‘There is no moon.’
‘I hadn’t noticed.’
He leans forward and kisses me. I let him because some part of me has always loved Tom and always will. I let him because the last time Tom and I were here, like this, I was a woman whole and undamaged, a woman for whom the world was full of wonderful and exciting possibilities. For a second or two I want to be that girl again.
We break apart. He smiles. I smile back. He reaches out and I know that this time his hands are aiming for my throat. Not in a friendly way.
I gas him.
CS gas works surprisingly well.
I aim at his chest, as I was taught years ago, when I still came into regular contact with the unpredictable public. The spurt of liquid hits its target and evaporates instantly into a gas that will cause Tom almost unbearable pain for the next few minutes. I jump to my feet because I cannot afford to be caught by it too. He falls forward, clutching at his eyes, although he probably knows it is the worst thing he can do. I have to act fast. I push him face down and cuff his hands behind his back. Then, before he can recover and start kicking, I tie nylon rope from Larry’s shed round his ankles. I take hold of his collar to drag him back to the car.
It isn’t easy to get a man of Tom’s size and weight into the boot of a car, but I have faced bigger obstacles than this tonight and I am determined to manage it. He fights me, of course, but he is still weak and shaky from the gas.
‘What the fuck are you doing? Are you insane?’ he spits out when he can speak again.
‘I’m the woman you made me,’ I say. ‘When you locked me in that basement and cut off my finger and drove me out of my mind with terror.’
His face screws up incredulously, but I see the fear in his eyes. ‘Floss, you’ve got it wrong.’
‘We found your fingerprints on the photographs from the Glassbrook house,’ I say. ‘You sent those pictures to Larry Glassbrook. You knew he’d assume Luna was guilty. You planted the evidence that framed him.’
He shakes his head. His eyes are red and streaming.
‘You and I wore gloves all the time we were in the house tonight,’ I say. ‘There is no way your fingerprints could have been on those pictures unless you touched them thirty years ago. You’re a much more careful officer now than you were back then.’
He bucks, tries to sit upright. I push him back with Larry’s jemmy.
‘You have one chance to make me change my mind.’ I’m lying. He has no chance of living beyond the next few minutes, but I still want information from him. ‘Tell me who the other Craftsmen are.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m guessing Roy Greenwood and David Milner, back then,’ I say. ‘Greenwood had access to the funeral parlour. Milner was interested in pottery, and both were members of Daphne and Avril’s coven. Greenwood’s dead now, of course, so someone would have replaced him. Charles Labaddee I know about. John Earnshaw maybe. How many more?’
He surges up again and I have no choice but to whack him hard with the jemmy. I aim for his shoulder because I want to keep him conscious. He falls back down.
‘I’d say seven in total,’ I say, knowing that covens are typically thirteen in number, but thirteen is a lot of people to trust, especially when dark magic is your thing. Seven is the next most propitious number. ‘You, Charles, Milner, if he’s still alive. Who else? I want four more names.’
He sneers. ‘They will kill you.’
I bend lower. ‘They can try.’
And because all pretence between us has been dropped, I take out Larry’s knife and make a small cut above his cheekbone. He swears and starts to buck in the car boot. My heart is leaping in fear. If he gets loose, our positions will be reversed in seconds, but I’m almost done. I step back to the lake, find the clay picture, still damp and pliable, and smear Tom’s blood over it. When I get back to the car, he is half out of the boot, so I gas him again.
When he can see, I show him the effigy of himself, see the horror in his eyes and know that he believes. He starts to scream as I put the effigy in the boot with him, but we both know that no one will hear him here. I get into the driver’s seat, start the engine and drive to the edge of the water before getting out.
‘Last chance,’ I lie again.
He spits at me. ‘I will haunt you,’ he says.
‘Oh, I’m counting on it.’ Pushing him down, I close the boot. Then I start the engine again and release the handbrake. The car rolls forward. Tom bangs and kicks against the inside of the boot. I think I can see the metal buckling.
The front of the car hits the water and it rolls on, sending black waves up the muddy shore towards me. Soon the water will kill the engine, but gravity will take over. This lake is very deep.
When a third of the car is beneath the water, I begin speaking. I have never performed a binding spell, but the actual words don’t matter so much as the intent. I am surprised, though, by how readily the words of the very first binding spell I ever heard come back to me.
‘Lead Thomas, whom Mary bore, the son of Harold, to me,’ I say.
The car slips further into the water and begins to float. Bubbles of air burst up from all around it, and I can still hear Tom banging and yelling to be free. If what Marlene told me is correct, he will be doing that for all eternity.
‘Drag him by his hair, by his guts, until he does not stand aloof from me,’ I say, ‘and until I hold him obedient for the whole time of my life, loving me, desiring me and telling me what he is thinking.’
The car is sinking, the bubbles becoming less frequent. There is one last slick of silver on the lake’s surface and then it too vanishes. I stay until the water is still again, and then I gather up my things and leave.
71
Wednesday 11 August 1999
The sky is overcast when we gather round Larry Glassbrook’s grave for the second time. We don’t call it a second funeral, of course. Even in Sabden, we prefer to bury our dead only once. So we call it private prayers for the family, and this time Sally and her daughters stand at the graveside and weep together.
A sharp breeze from the moor wraps itself around us as the vicar begins to speak feel the need to press closer to someone for warmth, but no one is near enough. I’m standing alone.
Apart from the tall man a few inches behind me. I can feel his breath, cold against the side of my neck. There is no warmth to be had from him.
‘We thank you now for all his life,’ says the vicar. ‘For every memory of love and joy, for every good deed done by him.’
On the other side of the grave, a little removed from the group, I catch Dwane’s eye. For some reason, he has dressed today in his old sexton’s clothes, and he leans against a spade.
In my ear, I hear a heavy sigh.
This time there are flowers. The coven came with arms laden, many from their own gardens, others they’ve gathered from the summer fields and hedgerows. Mugwort, meadowsweet, guelder rose and mallow, flowers that ease pain, take away anxiety, give restful sleep. My friends, the thirteen witches, stand in a circle round the grave now, and when I look at their faces, I see many expressions: sadness, shame, guilt, but most of all fear. They know how powerless they are. How powerless women such as they have always been.
Above us, the clouds shift and the sun shines through, flooding the churchyard with light. Still quite early in the day, the sun is behind us and shadows appear, smooth-lined from the headstones, spiky and swaying from the trees, human-shaped and still from the congregation.
There are twenty-two of us gathered round the grave. I
count twenty-three shadows.
As soon as I allowed him to be interviewed, Ben named Superintendent Tom Devine as the man who called my son’s hotel room shortly after I left, coaxed him down to the car park under the pretence of my needing help with the car and stood by while someone else grabbed him from behind. A search for Tom Devine is underway and he is generally assumed to have left the area. Whether he will ever be linked to the three murders thirty years ago is a moot point. In a whispered aside as we were waiting for the vicar to arrive, Brian Rushton told me that the photographs we found at the Glassbrook house, the ones with Tom’s fingerprint, have vanished. As has the effigy of me.
Tom didn’t act alone.
I will haunt you. Tom’s voice is so clear in my head that for a moment I’m sure I actually hear it again. I find myself mouthing back my answer and see Daphne on the other side of the circle watching me. I clamp my lips shut and tell myself to focus.
The other man that I love – the good man that I love – my husband, Nick, arrived early this morning, hurtling over the moors from Manchester Airport in a rattling hire car, and he and Ben haven’t been apart since. The two of them look at me strangely, almost as though they think I might be leaving them. In a way, I already have. I crossed a line last night. I will never completely cross back again.
‘We thank you for the glory we shall share together. Hear our prayers through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
I doubt there is a Christian at the graveside, except perhaps Brian Rushton, but we dutifully mutter our ‘Amen’s, and then people start to walk away. Sally and the girls leave first, then Ben and Nick, then the witches. Brian follows and my little friend and I are alone.
Almost alone.
‘If anything happens,’ I say, ‘call me. I’ll come back.’
Dwane doesn’t reply. Nor will he look at me.
‘I can help,’ I say. ‘I know about the Craftsmen now.’
Dwane’s eyes go beyond me to the church gate. ‘Family’s waiting.’ He turns his back and smooths the already perfect mound of earth.
At the outer corner of the churchyard, movement catches my eye. I look round to see the three dead teenagers sitting on the wall, kicking their heels against the stones in the way bored kids do, and I remember how close my son came to being one of them.
I regret nothing.
I raise my hand in a wave that anyone watching will think is aimed at Dwane and turn to leave. Two shadows, my own and the one that will haunt me for the rest of my life, go ahead, reaching the path before I do and bouncing along the gravel to where my husband and son are waiting. I thought I might dread this moment but, actually, I find myself interested. Curious to see what comes next.
‘I’m glad you’re with me,’ I say.
‘Always,’ Tom replies.
Author Note
Sabden, at the foot of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, is a real place that bears little resemblance to the town called Sabden in this book. For my story to work, I needed a town, not a village; I needed dozens of streets, shops, pubs and factories, a well-stocked public library and an equally well-staffed police station. I needed municipal parks, grand Victorian buildings and lots of graveyards.
My Sabden is based on the town of Darwen, a few miles away, where I was born and grew up. Darreners will probably recognise many of the landmarks and streets that found their way into the book. My apologies, as required, to the residents of both Sabden and Darwen.
The historical facts about the 1612 witch trials are correct to the best of my belief.
Acknowledgements
Sam Eades and the teams at Trapeze and Orion for their confidence and support.
Anne Marie Doulton and her colleagues at the Ampersand and Buckman agencies for their wise counsel and tireless efforts; my old friend John Wilcock who helped me understand what witches do; my slightly newer friend Adrian Summons, for casting his mind back to how policing was done in the 1960s; the Killer Women, for letting me join the coolest club in town; those who loiter around the scene of the crime; and finally my family, who help more than they will ever know.
Q and A
Lara Dearman interviews Sharon Bolton
You’ve written The Craftsman in the first person, which immerses the reader in the main character Florence Lovelady’s point of view. Did you find aspects of your own personality creeping into the novel, or were you able to maintain a critical distance?
I think it’s inevitable that an author will write herself into her books, regardless of whether she is writing in the first or third person. That’s not to say that my characters always reflect my own opinions, or that I would always behave the way they do in given situations. I doubt I’d ever be as brave as they are, for one thing. But a story is so much more than a series of actions in circumstances, narrated by an anonymous voice: stories have life, depth and colour breathed into them by the storyteller. While my books can be deeply personal, I’d feel I was cheating the reader to offer anything less.
Florence encounters sexism throughout the novel, and has to work harder than her colleagues to be taken seriously. She is belittled and insulted, at points harassed and bullied. To what extent do you consider The Craftsman to be driven by these issues? And is it important for a novel to ‘say something’ as well as tell a story?
I never set out to ‘say something’; I set out to tell a great story. (To be honest, I think it’s a little pretentious to put the message before the story.) That said, as a story unfolds, themes start to emerge alongside the characters and plot developments, and as this happens, I can develop them, especially if they have a particular resonance for me. One theme of The Craftsman is how societies turn on the outsider and, ultimately, how societies create their ‘witches’. Florence, being young, female and a Southerner, is the obvious outsider, and her treatment reflects a natural human fear of ‘the other’.
Although we, as readers, are given an insight into Florence’s insecurities and vulnerabilities to her colleagues, she often comes across as aloof and standoffish. Is it important for a novel’s protagonist to be likeable?
No, and some of our best-loved characters have been anti-heroes, whom we might avoid in real life. I know I’m not alone in finding troubled, difficult characters infinitely more interesting than the traditional ‘good guy’, and lots of writers – Gillian Flynn, for example – have written brilliant, gripping stories featuring deeply unpleasant characters.
For all that, Florence is far from unpleasant, and while the other characters might struggle to warm to her, I expect readers to quickly grasp that her prickliness is fed entirely by her insecurity and by her desire to be the best that she can be.
The Craftsman taps into some of our darkest fears – missing children, human sacrifice, the occult. Why do you think readers enjoy being frightened? The scene in which Florence finds Patricia’s body and realises she has been buried alive is particularly disturbing. Did you find the subject difficult to write about?
Making ourselves scared while we remain safe is something that humans feel compelled to do. From our earliest days, as we sat round campfires, we told each other scary stories. It’s a way of coming to terms with our fears, looking them in the face and perhaps even planning how we might deal with them. Writing about being buried alive was exceptionally difficult for me – I’m claustrophobic and can imagine few worse deaths. For that reason, I don’t dwell on the victims in The Craftsman and instead focus attention on unravelling the mystery and catching the killer.
The most touching relationship in the novel is between Florence and her teenage son. What made you decide to focus on this as opposed to a more conventional partner-sidekick dynamic?
I have a son of Ben’s age and find it very easy to write teenaged characters and tell a story from a mother’s point of view. I suppose I see the mother-child bond as being the strongest we have, and the one that, once broken, will have the most disturbing impact on us.
You evoke the landscapes and people of Lancashire so beautifully
. To what extent did the setting shape the story?
I would have struggled to write this story anywhere other than this particular part of Lancashire. It is where I was born and grew up, and where much of my family still live. The Pendle witches weren’t just characters from stories or history books for me; they were my great-great-aunts, maybe even an ancestral grandmother. The landscape of my youth was one of wild, wind-swept moors and soot-blackened industrial towns. I think The Craftsman was shaped by this heritage, as I was.
The Craftsman is set, though, during a period of unusually warm weather. For many readers in the North-West, the prolonged heatwave might be the one aspect of the novel they find impossible to swallow.
Witchcraft is an important part of The Craftsman. By the end of the novel we learn Florence herself is a witch. Does she believe in magic? Do you?
Florence and I are as one on this. In The Cunning Wife, the second book in the trilogy, she is asked whether or not she believes in witchcraft. She says, ‘There is something in the human condition that compels us to believe in a power beyond ourselves. A power not of the natural world that – and this is the important part – that we can harness and use for our own benefit. Religious people talk about the power of prayer, business people about positive thinking. What it all boils down to, I guess, is whether we can impact upon our world and manipulate it, by thought and projection and desire.’
The questioner waits, knowing Florence hasn’t properly answered the question.
‘As for me,’ she says, ‘I’m too old and wrinkled to dance naked in the moonlight, and the thought of pulling eyes out of newts makes me gag.’
Lara Dearman is the author of The Devil’s Claw, published by Trapeze Books.
Also by Sharon Bolton
Sacrifice
Awakening
Blood Harvest
Now You See Me
Dead Scared
Lost
A Dark and Twisted Tale
The Craftsman Page 35
