‘Can I help you?’ someone says, in a tone that suggests helping me is the last thing on her mind, and I turn to see a stout, grey-haired woman in her seventies standing in the doorway. I fish in my bag and find my Met warrant card. I have no authority in Lancashire, but I doubt she’ll know that.
‘Assistant Commissioner Florence Lovelady,’ I tell her. ‘I was looking for the family.’
‘Haven’t lived here for years,’ she says, with her habitual note of triumph when giving bad news.
I know who this woman is. Sally had a ‘woman that does’ who came in every day to help with the cooking and cleaning. This woman served me breakfast and dinner six days a week for five months and every two weeks brought a clean set of nylon sheets to my room. She never knocked before entering, just announced, ‘Sheets,’ before dumping them on the bed. I was always expected to change my own bed, but I’m pretty certain she did the job for the men who lodged here. She was the kind of woman happy to wait on men but considered it beneath her to do the same for a woman, especially one younger than herself. In the late 1960s, the worst sex discrimination I had to deal with always came from other women.
I let my gaze move around the dusty surfaces, glance over the dead insects and say, ‘I’m surprised they haven’t sold it.’
‘The girls wanted to. It was Sally who hung on.’
‘You’re Mary, aren’t you? I lived here. In 1969.’ I don’t add, ‘Back when it happened.’ It hardly feels necessary.
She squints at me.
‘The family called me Flossie,’ I say reluctantly. ‘My hair was different then. A much brighter shade of red.’
‘Ginger,’ she says. ‘Colour of carrots.’
‘How are you, Mary?’ I ask her.
‘You were covered in freckles.’ She takes a step closer, as if to check whether I still have them. I do, although they’ve faded over time. ‘You went bright red when someone showed you up.’
‘Where is Sally, do you know?’ I ask. ‘Is she still alive?’
‘Northdean Nursing Home at Barley,’ she tells me. ‘She won’t speak to you.’
I still have my warrant card in my hand. ‘Do you mind if I look around?’ I ask her.
‘Suit yourself,’ she tells me. ‘I need spuds. Then I’m locking up.’
She leaves me, heading towards the vegetable garden, and I walk further into the house. I don’t open the door of the parlour – old habits die hard – and have no interest in the lodgers’ sitting room, so instead I walk along the high-ceilinged corridor until I’m almost at the front door, then turn and climb the stairs. My room was the smallest of those given to the lodgers, at the back of the house, overlooking the Hill.
The door sticks and for a moment I’m tempted to see it as a sign that there is nothing to be gained from dredging up old memories. But my stubborn streak always won out against my better instinct and I push hard.
The lilac-and-blue crocheted bedspread that I hated is still here, but its colour has faded from years of being exposed to sunlight. The narrow bed under the window is made up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those are the sheets I slept on all those years ago, that if we were to employ the forensic techniques that weren’t available to us in the 1960s, a trace of me could still be found. After all, who else would have lodged here after what happened? The door on the narrow wardrobe is hanging open. One of the drawers in the chest by the bed isn’t properly closed and I spot a plastic hairbrush in it that might have been mine once. It is as though no one has been in this room since I left it in a hurry. Randy and I weren’t allowed back after Larry Glassbrook’s arrest. Our things were collected by other officers and I spent the rest of my time in Lancashire in a hostel on the other side of town.
The three police posters that I taped to the wall are still here.
Missing, reads the first. Have you see Stephen Shorrock? Missing, says the second. Have you seen Susan Duxbury? Missing, again, on the third. Help us find Patsy. I taped the posters directly opposite my bed, in spite of Mary’s grumbles that they were morbid and would damage the woodchip wallpaper. They were the first things I saw when I woke up each morning, the last at night.
As I’d approached the house, I’d avoided looking at Larry’s workshop, a one-storey brick building a short distance from the back door, but I can’t avoid it now. Its flat roof is directly in front of my window.
I reach out and touch the wall for balance, take a deep breath although the air in here is stale and warm.
The workshop is where Larry spent most of his time, where he played his music – no, I do not want those songs in my head – and where he made the coffins and caskets that held the remains of Sabden’s dead.
And a few of its very unlucky living.
4
The words ‘coffin’ and ‘casket’ are used interchangeably, but the two are quite different. A coffin is a six- or eight-sided box that follows the contours of the body: narrow at the head, widening at the shoulders, tapering in again towards the feet. Think Dracula, rising. A casket is bigger, rectangular, usually with a large, curved lid.
Larry Glassbrook made both, but hardwood caskets were his passion. I lodged with his family for five months in 1969 and once – when he was bored, I think – he invited me into his workshop. He played music as he worked – Elvis Presley, almost certainly – and broke off from time to time to roll his hips or slick back his dark hair. Larry was a handsome man and he made the most of his resemblance to the King of Rock. He was rarely short of female attention but, to be honest, I found him a bit creepy. There was no doubting his skill, though.
He started with the lid, gluing and pressing together long slats of oak in a rounded vice. He used joint fasteners, a sort of heavy-duty staple, to make sure they couldn’t move. The box was made in a similar fashion, glued, fastened and joisted to give it strength. Larry liked to boast that his caskets could carry men weighing 300 pounds or more. The lid was fastened to the box with four metal hinges and sixteen screws.
No one was getting out of a Larry Glassbrook casket once they were shut inside. In fairness, very few people tried.
Coffins and caskets weren’t hermetically sealed in those days. If they had been, Patsy Wood might have died before she ever regained consciousness. Larry’s caskets were closed using a method he invented himself. Immediately below the rim of the lid, directly opposite the outer hinges, were two locking mechanisms hidden beneath decorative trims. When the latch was turned, a small metal strip on the inside of the coffin, concealed behind the fabric lining, slid into place and prevented the lid from being dislodged during interment, or by any clumsy handling. If Patsy had known where to feel, if she’d managed to tear away the satin lining, she might have been able to unlock the casket.
She’d still have needed to deal with the ton of earth above it.
She didn’t find the locks. We know that. But I can still imagine her reaching frantically around the tiny space she found herself in. I think she’d have screamed then, her voice loud and scared, but angry too. At fourteen, we don’t imagine anything really dreadful can happen to us. At that point, she would have thought she was the victim of a practical joke, horrible but temporary. If she yelled loudly and long enough, they’d get her out of here, wherever ‘here’ was.
She would have called out the names of those she could last remember, the people she’d been with before it happened. One of the things I wonder, when I think about Patsy’s time in the casket, is how quickly she stopped shouting for her friends and began to call for her mother.
I’d put it at less than thirty minutes after she came round, but I imagine time goes slowly when you’re trapped beneath the earth.
Caskets are bigger than coffins. She’d have been able to reach up, feel the smooth, pleated satin inches above her head. I think at that point she would have known what contained her. She knew the Glassbrook family. She knew what Larry Glassbrook did for a living. She’d probably been invited into his workshop, or sneaked in with her friends, t
o see the wooden boxes in various stages of readiness. She’d have known then that she was trapped in a casket, although she’d probably have called it a coffin.
I imagine her falling silent, believing her mates (because of course it was her mates – who else would play such a trick on her?) were just outside the casket, listening to her screams. Patsy would have forced herself to be quiet, thinking they’d be quicker to let her out if they thought she might be in real trouble. Maybe she even gave a gasp or two, as though she were struggling for air.
When that didn’t work, because it couldn’t work – her friends were nowhere near – I think she’d have screamed again, long, loud and hard this time. I have no idea how long a person can scream before it becomes impossible to go on. I hope I never find out. But at some point, maybe when she’d been conscious for about an hour, Patsy would have fallen silent, if only for a time.
The exertion would have exhausted her. She’d have been panting. Hot. Sweating. It would have occurred to her that air was probably in short supply. I think this is when she would have begun to plan, to think of any possible ways of getting herself out. She’d have started, tentatively and as calmly as she could, to explore her surroundings. And then she’d have discovered something even more terrifying than that she was trapped in a coffin.
She wasn’t alone.
Also by Sharon Bolton
Sacrifice
Awakening
Blood Harvest
Now You See Me
Dead Scared
Lost
A Dark and Twisted Tale
Little Black Lies
Daisy in Chains
Dead Woman Walking
About the Author
SHARON BOLTON is a Mary Higgins Clark Award winner and an ITW Thriller Award, CWA Gold Dagger, and Barry Award nominee. She lives near London, England. Sharon Bolton was previously published as S .J. Bolton. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
1. Susan
2. Stephen
3. Patsy
Excerpt: The Craftsman
Also by Sharon Bolton
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Alive. Copyright © 2018 by Sharon. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Cover design by Mimi Bark
Cover photographs of graveyard © Jag Cz/Shutterstock.com; background © Jaroslaw Grudzinski/Shutterstock.com
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ISBN 9781250318442 (ebook)
First Edition: August 2018
eISBN 9781250318442
First eBook edition: May 2018
Alive Page 4
