‘I need four. Can you get me four different colours, at least six of each?’ Please,’ I added, when he didn’t move.
‘What colours do you want? I’ve got black, white, green—’
‘It doesn’t matter. Green. Give me some green ones.’
‘I’ve got pink too. Do you like pink?’
‘Anything.’ I put a green figure down at the top of Nelson Street, at the point where Patsy had last been seen.
‘Red? Blue? Purple? I changed the curtains. Did you see?’
I was putting green figures where sightings of Patsy had been reported. ‘What curtains?’
‘At your bedroom window. They were lilac before. I’ve made them blue. And I’ve put some flowers in the window. Red roses.’
I froze. ‘Dwane, did you leave some flowers for me? A couple of weeks ago?’
His eyes dropped.
‘Dwane, those flowers had been left on a grave. The card said, RIP.’
He kept his eyes down. ‘Not like he’s going to miss ‘em,’ he said, after a moment.
Silence. I was on the verge of laughing. RIP? I’d been so spooked.
‘OK, we can deal with that later. Can you see what I’m doing? I’m putting figures where the children were seen. I’ll use pink for Susan Duxbury. Blue for Stephen Shorrock.’
‘What colour do you want for Luna?’ he said.
I carried on putting figures on the model. I knew where most of the sightings of the three children had been. I’d have to double-check a few of them, but I knew I remembered enough to make this work. When I’d finished, I stood back.
Dwane said nothing, his eyes going from the model village to me.
‘They all vanished from in and around the town centre,’ I said. ‘Except for Luna.’
I carried on staring, at nearly twenty tiny figures in green, pink, blue and red, each representing a sighting. I let my eyes drift and, when I came back to the moment, I was staring at a cricket green, towards the northern side of town. Two teams were playing, all the players in white, and in front of the pavilion was a small crowd of people.
Dwane stepped closer. ‘Do you like cricket? You can come and watch sometime. Lots of families watch.’
‘I do like cricket,’ I said, thinking it wasn’t a complete lie. I’d watched my brothers play a few times, when there’d been nothing else to do. ‘It looks like quite an occasion,’ I went on, noticing the table of food and drinks, the deckchairs, even bunting strung round the pavilion.
‘Every Saturday afternoon,’ he said. ‘Lots of women come. And kids, but they’re no trouble. They come for the free tea. The wives and girlfriends make it. You wouldn’t have to, though, not your first time.’
Oh Lord.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure about my shifts yet. I have to work a lot on Saturdays.’
‘When the kids go home, we go to the pub,’ Dwane said. ‘Black Dog.’
The Black Dog was just a couple of streets from the cricket green ‘What’s this?’ I pointed to two large trapdoors immediately in front of the pub.
‘Cellar,’ he said.
‘Of course. For storing beer. Well, I really must—’
‘Dates back yonks,’ he said. ‘They kept prisoners in there before taking them to Lancaster Gaol. You can still see the chains. I can show you, if you like. Landlord lets me go down when he needs help bringing barrels up.’
‘I have to get back,’ I told him. ‘Thank you, Dwane, and for the tea.’
I tried hard, but I couldn’t stop him walking me to the car.
All leave had been cancelled for the day, and every serving officer had been told to report for duty. Constables were walking their beats, knocking on doors, peering into outbuildings and even coal bunkers. Others were out searching the parks and surrounding moorland. Patrol cars were stopping all traffic out of the town.
To my frustration, I’d been assigned to stay with the Glassbrook family. I could see the logic, but I was itching to be doing something more productive than babysitting. So, it turned out, were Larry and Sally. Midway through the morning, as rain started to fall heavily outside, they went to join the search, leaving me alone with Cassie.
She denied having any homework. There was nothing she wanted to watch on television. She wouldn’t leave my side, following me from my room to the kitchen, even the lavatory. She checked that the doors, even the windows were locked and started at every unexplained noise. In the kitchen, she wouldn’t sit but paced the floor, opening and closing drawers. When she came to the cutlery drawer, she began lifting and dropping the heavy utensils, making a sound like chains rattling.
‘Cassie, stop it!’
She jumped and pushed the drawer closed.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I know you’re worried. I am too, but we have to keep occupied. Haven’t you anything to read? Piano practice?’
‘Can we look at your charts?’ she said.
‘Which charts?’ I asked, although I had a feeling I knew.
‘The ones in your bedroom.’
I raised my eyebrows. I’d made a point of putting my charts away every day before I left for work, on the top shelf of the wardrobe, under my piles of sweaters. She couldn’t have seen them unless she’d been snooping.
‘Luna found them,’ she said defensively. ‘She was always going in my room too.’
It was no time for a lesson in morality. I nodded my agreement and Cassie sprinted from the room to fetch them.
I started with the funeral chart, unrolling it so that we could see all sixty-six rows, one for each of the burials that had taken place in and around Sabden that year. I’d made seven columns headed Date, Time, Name of Deceased, Gender, Age, Funeral Director, Coffin/Casket and Cemetery.
‘Where do you even begin?’ Cassie looked dismayed, as though she’d expected the answer to appear magically once she and I looked together.
‘Well, the starting point is always what we know for sure,’ I said. ‘We know that Patsy was found in this grave.’ I pointed to the listing on Monday, 16 June, of Douglas Simmonds, in a casket, buried at St Wilfred’s, at 10.30 a.m., by Glassbrook & Greenwood. As I did so, I remembered that Cassie was only sixteen. I should not be talking to her about the possibility of her sister being buried alive.
She nodded at me to go on.
‘So I looked at other graves in St Wilfred’s,’ I said. ‘But there have been nearly a dozen this year, and only one of them was a casket burial.’
‘It has to have been a casket.’ Cassie was scanning the rows. ‘There wouldn’t be room in a coffin.’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘So I ruled out all the coffin burials on the chart. ‘Unfortunately, that still left over twenty.’
She looked up, as though startled by an idea. ‘How would they know? Whoever took Patsy, the same people who’ve got Luna, how would they know whether it was a coffin or a casket in the grave they were planning to use?’
‘Good question,’ I said. ‘We think they could only have done it by watching funerals, by hanging around outside funeral parlours when the hearses left. That’s another reason why we think we have to look in recent graves.’
‘Someone hanging around funerals would be noticed,’ Cassie said. ‘That’s weird behaviour. My dad would spot that: he doesn’t miss a thing. I think it’s someone whose job involves funerals.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone who works for a funeral parlour would know whether it was a coffin or a casket. The vicar or priest would know. The man who digs the graves would know.’
With an uncomfortable twist in my stomach, I remembered that Dwane was employed to work in other churchyards apart from St Wilfred’s. He dug most of the graves in Sabden.
‘Twenty caskets.’ Cassie was tapping each casket burial as she came to it. ‘Why can’t you look in them all? Why have you waited this long?’
‘The Home Office would never give us permission to open all those graves without something more to go on,’ I said. ‘We
have to narrow it down a bit.’
‘So you take out all those places that are closed at night.’ Cassie’s voice was getting higher and more shrill. ‘The cemetery on Duckworth Street only has one gate and it’s locked at sunset. No one can climb over a wall with a dead body.’
My respect for Cassie was growing. ‘It’s very unlikely but not impossible,’ I said. ‘If it all happened after interment, then Stephen and Susan almost certainly aren’t in the cemetery. They could be in any of the church graveyards, though. None of them are locked at night.’
‘If she was put in the casket before the funeral, it couldn’t have been a funeral in the afternoon,’ said Cassie. ‘Caskets aren’t sealed until a couple of hours before they leave the parlour. People always want to do last-minute viewings if they can.’
‘Good point, but nobody really thinks she was in the casket before the funeral,’ I said.
Except Dwane.
‘You have to consider it, though, don’t you? What do you say, keep an open mind?’
‘We do.’ I gestured at the chart. ‘But there are over twenty funerals that were carried out before midday. Again, too many to exhume without something more.’
‘What about those that happened soon after the abductions?’ Cassie had spotted three lines of text, more or less evenly spaced. The first said, Susan Duxbury goes missing, Monday, 17 March; the second, Stephen Shorrock goes missing, Wednesday, 16 April; the third, Patsy Wood last seen, Sunday, 15 June. ‘A grave would be easier to dig up if the ground was still soft,’ she went on.
‘I thought of that,’ I said. ‘On the other hand, the recent graves are the most frequently visited by family members. The sexton and churchwardens will keep an eye on them too. Any disturbance would be spotted.’
‘It’s hopeless, isn’t it?’ Cassie’s face crumpled.
‘No,’ I said, with more confidence than I felt. ‘It’s there. We’ll find it.’ And then, because giving Cassie something to think about seemed to help keep her calm, I swapped the charts. The one that focused on the missing children was much simpler. Just three columns, one for each child.
‘You need a new column,’ said Cassie. ‘For Luna.’
This didn’t feel like a good idea to me, but Cassie was thrusting a pencil into my hand, so I took it and then went down the column, firing questions at her. Luna’s birthdate. Her class at school. The subjects she took. The school mates with whom she was friendly.
‘There’s nothing,’ she said, when we’d got to the bottom. ‘There’s not a single thing all four have in common, except school and age.’
She was right, but I didn’t want to agree out loud.
‘And they definitely weren’t friends. Luna wouldn’t have been seen dead with Dumpy Duxbury.’
I thought back to pictures I’d seen of a plump Susan. ‘What about Stephen?’
‘No, they thought he was a weirdo. And that he had BO.’
‘Cassie, how do you know this? How do you know so much about them?’
‘I don’t. I just saw them at cricket sometimes.’
Cricket? I remembered the frozen game in miniature I’d seen that morning. A crowd of admiring wives and children.
‘Your dad plays, doesn’t he?’ I said. ‘Do you go and watch?’
‘Mum makes us. She says it’s a family occasion and we should support it.’
‘On Saturday afternoon, is that right? Cassie, I don’t suppose you can tell me who’s in your dad’s cricket team, can you?’
I had no paper to hand: I’d have to write on the chart.
‘Apart from Dad, you mean? Mr Butterworth is, but you’d know about him already. And Mr Greenwood, Dad’s partner. I think he’s chairman of the club.’
‘Eleven players,’ I said. ‘And possibly some reserves. Can you remember any more of them?’
‘John’s dad’s a good batsman, but he’s usually too hungover to run,’ she said. ‘And that creepy dwarf guy.’
That made six. ‘What about Mr Wood, Patsy’s dad?’
‘Oh yeah, him.’ She looked at me. ‘Shit,’ she said.
‘Mr Duxbury?’ I asked her. ‘Mr Shorrock?’
She nodded, her eyes wide and shining.
‘And their wives and children would usually come along too?’ I said. ‘To support the team, and because there’s a good tea afterwards?’
She nodded again. ‘Flossie, is this it? Is this what you’ve been looking for?’
I shushed her, rolled the charts and pulled the elastic band back over them.
‘I need to use the phone, Cassie,’ I said. ‘And we should ask a neighbour to come and sit with you. I have to pop into work.’
41
‘OK, Flossie, what’s on your mind?’ Rushton said.
Outside Sabden Police Station, the rain was still pouring down, beating against windows, turning gutters into fast-flowing streams, causing mini-waterfalls from the corners of buildings. The sky had darkened to a flat grey.
A damp chill had settled over the CID room, in spite of the number of bodies gathered round my charts.
‘Cricket,’ I said. ‘You know I’ve been saying from the beginning that there’ll be something that links these children? And that when we find it, it’ll point us in the direction of the killer?’
‘And you think it’s cricket?’ Brown pulled a face. ‘Do girls play cricket now? I thought it was netball.’
‘Not the kids,’ I snapped. ‘Their dads. According to Cassandra Glassbrook, who’s a pretty smart girl, all four of these children’s fathers played in the Sabden Weekend Cricket League at the cricket green on Tythebarn Street.’
I could see scepticism on all the faces around me. Even Tom didn’t look convinced.
‘The Sabden Weekend Cricket League is a family affair,’ I said. ‘There’s always tea afterwards, which the wives and girlfriends make. The children come along too, for the tea.’
No one spoke. Christ, could they not see it?
‘That’s where he found them,’ I said. ‘Cricket matches go on for hours, don’t they? The team that’s batting spend most of the time in the clubhouse, or sitting outside, watching, waiting for their turn. They’ll watch the kids playing, get to know them. I think our killer could be someone on the cricket team or someone who attends the matches regularly.’
Around me, expressions were changing, opening up, as they thought about it.
‘You’re sure about this?’ Rushton said. ‘About Susan’s dad, Stephen’s dad and so on.’
‘Not a hundred per cent,’ I said. ‘We’ll need to check, obviously, but—’
‘She’s right.’ Tom’s face had turned an odd shade of grey. ‘I play in that league. Shit.’ He spun on his heel and walked away. At the window, he leaned his lower arms on the sill and dropped his head.
‘Question is, who else?’ said Rushton. ‘Get back here, Tom. We need you for this.’
‘At least eleven,’ I said, as Tom straightened up. ‘Maybe up to twenty. The point is, our man will be one of them.’
‘Who’s the secretary?’ said Sharples. ‘He’ll know who’s in the league.’
‘Beryl,’ said Tom. ‘Beryl Donnelly. But I know everyone, sir. I can do the list.’
‘Better late than never,’ Rushton said. ‘Florence, sit with him. Keep him on his toes. Make sure he gets them all. Then we can start ruling them out.’
42
Forty minutes later, the blackboard in the CID room listed the names of seventeen men. Those I recognised were Larry Glassbrook, Roy Greenwood, Robert Duxbury, Jim Shorrock, Stanley Wood, Ted Donnelly, John Earnshaw, Reg Bannister and Dwane Ogilvy. Also, I noticed with a start, a Charles Labaddee, who I guessed must be Marlene’s husband. Tom Devine and Randall Butterworth were on it because Tom had insisted. In between were five names I didn’t know. Interviewing all of them was to take priority that day.
Tom and I were tasked with talking to Roy Greenwood.
We’d thought we already had every crime reporter in the North of England st
aying in town, but the number seemed to have increased at the news of another missing child. Several cars we didn’t recognise were parked outside the station, and men in raincoats and trilby hats were hanging around the front entrance, chatting, smoking, stopping everyone who came out.
Tom and I used the back entrance. While Rushton hadn’t said anything in my hearing, I knew he had to be regretting his decision to televise the reconstruction of Patsy’s last movements. I said as much to Tom as we climbed into his car.
‘We wouldn’t have found Patsy if we hadn’t done the TV appeal,’ he said, in an unusually flat voice. ‘Or should I say you wouldn’t?’
He drove fast out of the station car park. We tore round the corner and raced along the main road. When we were almost at the market square, we ran a red light.
I sat still and silent, conscious of everything that wasn’t being said, and wishing someone else had thought of the cricket connection. Whatever I did, it seemed, I made people dislike me.
We didn’t have far to go. Greenwood lived on the main road, not far from the funeral parlour. On the outside, the grime-stained stone house was large but nondescript: two storeys, plus an attic and a cellar. Tall, narrow windows with lace curtains hung in each. The roof was steeply sloping, its black tiles stained by pigeon droppings. The doorbell chimed four times, we waited, and then Roy Greenwood, dressed in his customary dark suit, peered down at us.
‘Officers,’ he said, not looking at all surprised.
Tom held up his warrant card. I did the same.
‘Sorry to disturb you on a Sunday, Roy, but we’d like a word,’ Tom said.
Greenwood’s haughty expression softened. ‘About Elanor, of course. Mother and I were awake long into the night. Please come in.’
‘Were you out searching, Mr Greenwood?’ I asked, as we followed him down the dark hallway.
‘No, I never leave Mother at night. She has bad dreams.’
The room Greenwood led us into was large. Four armchairs were placed round a central hearth, in which a fire blazed. The chairs were upholstered in a dark green fabric, protected by antimacassars. In front of the window was a baby grand piano, as black and shiny as Greenwood’s hair. It held at least a dozen silver-framed photographs.
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