50
Tuesday 1 July 1969
Unlike Avril and Daphne, I couldn’t tell the time using the astral elements, so I set an alarm for four o’clock in the morning. I dressed in clothes I’d put out the night before and crept downstairs. As I let myself out of the house, I could hear voices on the first floor. I was sorry to have woken them, not least because of the questions I’d face later, but there was no help for it.
I might be a rookie witch, but I was still a police officer, and this was police business.
The exhumations of Ada Wright and Winifred Brown were to be carried out by the book this time, taking place simultaneously in the early hours of Tuesday, 1 July. I cycled out towards St Joseph’s Churchyard, on the south side of town, gambling that Tom, who lived closer to Duckworth Street Cemetery, would be attending the other one.
Rushton’s car was parked by the gate.
I left my bike and slipped over the wall into the churchyard to see the exhumation a good hundred yards away. Detective Sergeant Brown was supervising the cordoning of the site and the erection of the tent. Rushton stood a little way distant, smoking. I could make out a man in black whom I assumed to be the priest. I watched council workmen carry in the soil tray, the turf board, the specialist cutting and digging equipment. The men installed lights and then, under the guidance of a man I knew to be a sexton from Burnley Council, they entered the tent. Brown and Rushton left, I guessed to sit in Rushton’s car.
I sat on the dew-damp grass, knowing I’d be less visible, and listened to the rhythmic sound of spades striking the earth. I watched cigarette ends like fire-flies light up the darkness and heard mumbles of conversation.
As the first factory whistles started, at a little before six in the morning, one of the workmen went to fetch Rushton and Brown. I waited until they were inside the tent before moving closer.
I couldn’t see what was happening in the tent, but I could picture it.
The grave, I knew, would be rectangular, about four feet deep. The box of earth would sit on one side; the other would be left free for the exhumed coffin. Rushton, Brown, all the others would be gathered at the grave’s foot and head.
‘On you go, then, lads,’ said Rushton.
Bulges appeared in the side of the tent. I heard a low-pitched grunt.
‘Steady, nice and steady,’ said a voice I didn’t know, and I pictured the casket slowly rising from the ground, the strained faces of the workmen.
The casket would be dull, its lovely glow tarnished from months in the ground. As it rose, it would brush against the sides of the grave; loose soil would crumble onto its lid.
Silence fell. A rattle. A couple of mumbled curses.
‘Let me have a go.’
‘Give it a good tug.’
I gave them several more minutes, listening to the sound of fingers sliding along the casket rim, pulling at trimmings, until I couldn’t bear it any longer.
‘I can do it,’ I called.
Silence inside the tent. A second later, Rushton was out, striding towards me.
‘What the bloody hell are you doing here, Lovelady?’
He looked as though he might hit me. I took two steps back, not because I was afraid of him but because I was thinking properly and he wasn’t. ‘Stay where you are, sir. You too, DS Brown.’
To my surprise, they both did. Over their shoulders, I could see the workmen filing out of the tent.
‘I told you to stay away,’ Rushton snapped, as Brown called over the constable at the gate.
‘With respect, sir, you said you’d arrest me if I came into the station, if I attempted to contact the Glassbrooks or if I tried to leave town. I’ve done none of those things, and this is a public open space. I haven’t come anywhere near the crime scene and there is no possibility of my compromising it, but if you touch me, then you might.’
I could see him breathing heavily.
‘Do you know how to open this coffin?’ Brown asked me.
‘There’ll be two gold trimmings on the opposite side to the hinge,’ I said, conscious that demonstrating a familiarity with caskets would hardly help my case at the moment. ‘Slide them along the wood, away from the centre as far as they’ll go and then twist. You’ll feel the internal mechanism move and you should be able to open the lid.’
Brown looked at Rushton. Rushton nodded and then turned to the constable, who’d reached us.
‘Stay with this one,’ he told him. ‘Don’t let her move.’
Rushton and Brown went back into the tent. I waited.
‘Jeez,’ said one of the men. A second later, the smell of putrefaction and chemicals reached us. The constable at my side inhaled sharply.
‘Nothing,’ I heard Brown say. ‘There’s nothing there except—’
‘Ada,’ said another voice. ‘Jeez, I had no idea corpses looked like that.’
‘Sir, that smell isn’t right.’ I was itching to get in the tent. I took a step closer and a hand closed around my arm. ‘Sir, that’s not how an embalmed corpse is supposed to smell,’ I went on. ‘I dug up Patsy, remember? You have to check properly.’
‘She might have a point,’ said Brown, in a voice I probably wasn’t supposed to hear. ‘That satin fabric doesn’t look quite right to me.’
‘Move it,’ I said. ‘Pull it to one side. Check underneath.’
Silence in the tent. Then a ripping sound.
‘Oh my good God,’ said Rushton.
He came out of the tent and spent a moment looking at the sky, breathing deeply. Then he took me into custody. Again.
51
‘Luna’s changed her story,’ he said to me three hours later. ‘Seems she wasn’t raped after all.’
I was back in the same interview room, facing the same mirror. Rushton and Brown were interviewing me.
There was something going on in the station, some sort of removal work, because I could hear heavy, solid objects clanging together. Each bang resonated along the corridor outside. Each one made me start, although I think I managed not to let it show. After a while, the din took on the sound of my world falling apart.
‘Then she’s a liar,’ I said. ‘She lied to me or she’s lying to you. Either way, I’m disappointed you trust her more than one of your own officers.’
From directly outside the door came a shrill, metallic clatter and both men flinched.
Even given the noise, Rushton seemed uncomfortable. He never normally led interviews. Nor, I was discovering, was he particularly good at it. He lacked the quick wit of Sharples, the dogged attention to detail of Brown. He looked sad, too, I thought.
‘Or did she make a mistake?’ I asked. ‘Well, that’s easily done. I can see how the act of sexual penetration by a complete stranger can be mistaken for something else entirely.’
He winced. ‘This isn’t helping.’
‘Luna is now saying that she had sex recently, for the first time, with one of her friends,’ said Brown. ‘She was frightened her parents would find out, or that she’d get pregnant. So she figured if she told us she’d been raped, she wouldn’t get the blame. She thought better of it once she’d calmed down a bit and decided to tell us the truth.’
Something banged on the floor above us. Both men looked up. I was thinking about Luna’s new story. It was credible, except …
‘I spoke to John Donnelly,’ I said. ‘He denied that he and Luna had ever had sex. I believed him.’
‘Not John Donnelly,’ Rushton said. ‘Dale Atherton. Luna was angry with John for not wanting to sleep with her, so she did it with Dale instead. To spite him.’
It was exactly the sort of stupid, reckless thing Luna would do.
‘Is she still claiming she could smell my perfume when she was being held prisoner?’ I said. ‘Perfume that I don’t actually own.’
‘She was never sure about that,’ Brown said. ‘She isn’t accusing you. No one’s accusing you.’
‘Not yet,’ Rushton said.
We all three of us jumped
then. Directly above us, someone had knocked over a filing cabinet.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Without waiting for the interview to be formally concluded, Rushton got up and stormed from the room.
Six hours later, I was driven back to Avril and Daphne’s house, feeling … well, more bemused than anything else. Apart from the brief interview with Rushton, I’d spent nearly ten hours in a cell, seeing no one except the duty sergeant, who brought me two meals, five mugs of tea, escorted me to the ladies’ on the hour so I wouldn’t have to use the bucket and kept me up to date with news of the investiture of Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon.
Avril’s Triumph Herald was parked outside the house when the police car pulled up. My bike, once again, was leaning against the inside of the front porch, as though it had developed a boomerang ability to come home.
‘We’re in the garden,’ Avril called as I made my way into the kitchen, ready to apologise for worrying them. ‘Bring a glass.’
There was a wine glass on the kitchen table, and it says something about my mood that I picked it up without question. The two women were on the patio, enjoying the early evening sun in two low garden chairs. Avril wore her sunglasses, Daphne a large, floppy straw hat. A bottle of red wine, half empty, was on the wrought-iron table in front of them. There were only three garden chairs in Avril and Daphne’s garden, and I wasn’t sure where I was expected to sit, because in the third chair sat Tom Devine.
It didn’t seem necessary to speak.
‘He brought your bike back,’ said Daphne in a small voice.
‘Again.’ Tom’s grin faded within seconds.
Avril rose. ‘We should leave them to it,’ she told Daphne, who pushed herself up, slightly less gracefully. They both walked past me, their eyes down and the back door closed behind them.
I sat in the seat Avril had vacated and put my glass on the table. ‘Give me some of that,’ I told Tom.
He poured. I drank. The wine was blood red in colour, leaving grains of a crumbly sediment in the bottom of my glass.
‘Talk,’ I said. ‘Or leave. Make your mind up quickly.’
‘I take it you know Stephen was found this morning?’ he began.
I fixed my eyes on the moors. ‘I guessed as much. They didn’t let me see.’
‘He was tucked away under that satin the undertakers put in coffins. My group found Susan.’
‘You were bang on the money, then.’ I watched a large black bird making slow circles. ‘Or do they all still think I deserve the credit for that one?’
‘I didn’t mean to drop you in it. I was trying to prove to you I don’t always act like a pillock’ He picked up the wine and topped up my glass as well as his own. I didn’t object.
‘Post-mortem?’ I said.
‘Only initial examinations,’ Tom said. ‘They were both dressed, on top of the corpses, just under that satin stuff that funeral directors use. We’re all agreed now that the kids were put in the coffins before they were buried. Both jobs were too neat, too clean. No way you could achieve that by digging up a grave.’
I leaned back in my chair, still looking at the moor. Knowing that someone had accessed Glassbrook & Greenwood’s parlour on the nights before three early morning funerals took us no further forward. We’d already guessed as much.
‘Stephen didn’t wake up.’ I was picturing the dead face of an elderly woman surrounded by undisturbed satin. ‘He and Susan might have been dead when they were put in the caskets.’
‘They weren’t,’ Tom said. ‘We found vomit and saliva beside Susan. Stephen had wet himself. But you’re right: neither woke up. They were lying too neatly, no sign of a struggle or distress.’
‘Well, that’s something. It would have been hard to look at another like Patsy.’
There was a moment’s silence, while I’m sure we were both thinking about the torn satin wrapped round Patsy’s bloodstained hands, her cracked lips, the scratch marks on her face.
‘Maybe he thought Patsy was dead,’ Tom said. ‘Maybe she was never intended to go through that.’
‘Or maybe with Susan and Stephen he got it wrong. Maybe he had to keep trying until he succeeded.’
I’d spoken without thinking, but it was important. Had the children been meant to wake up and find themselves trapped or not? Did he creep into the churchyard and sit beside the grave, enjoying the sound of their screams? Had he been frustrated with Susan, then Stephen and driven to try again?
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
Tom reached into an inside jacket pocket. ‘I’ll be in deep shit if anyone knows I showed you these.’ He put two Polaroids on the table.
‘Louvre dolls,’ I said, bending closer. ‘Clay pictures, as they say in these parts. In the caskets?’
‘Both very similar to the one we found with Patsy,’ Tom said. ‘Susan’s is a bit tubby, as you see. Stephen’s has male genitalia. Blackthorn spikes in all the right places.’
I didn’t want to look at them, so I looked at him instead.
‘Did they both have all their teeth?’
‘Both missing one canine. Recent extraction. We’re checking with their dentists. And yes, both teeth appear to have been baked into the effigies. I tell you what, Floss, it’s some sick shit.’
‘What about Luna?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing. No clay picture, no amateur dentistry.’
‘She’s different, Tom. She’s not a part of the pattern.’
He visibly perked up at my use of his name. ‘Throwing us off the scent, you think?’
‘Of the seventeen members of the cricket club, who do you think is the last one we’d suspect when Luna went missing?’
Tom shrugged.
I said, ‘Luna was taken by someone who cared about her. Who wasn’t prepared to let her die and who made sure she didn’t by getting me involved.’
Tom leaned back, exhaled, picked up his cigarettes. ‘Larry? Jeez. Good luck trying to argue that one, love.’
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him not to call me ‘love’, but that was an area I didn’t want to stray into. ‘I won’t be arguing anything,’ I said instead. ‘I’m suspended without pay, remember?’
‘No, you’re not.’ Tom’s face relaxed. ‘Bloody Norah, I need a fag. Wilma and Betty wouldn’t let me smoke.’
‘Good for them – it’s a filthy habit. And I am.’
‘Rushton can’t do that and he knows it. He has to pay you. He just lost his temper. I’ll make sure someone drops your wage packet off on Friday.’
Well, that was something.
‘He’s sending a car to pick me up in the morning. He wants me back for more questioning.’
Tom nodded.
‘I spent the whole of today in a cell alone. Rushton spoke to me for ten minutes.’
‘So take a book,’ Tom said. ‘Not one about witchcraft.’
‘What’s going on? Why does he want me in again if he’s got nothing to say to me?’
‘Has it occurred to you that he might want to keep you safe?’
It hadn’t. But while I was a suspect in the case, there were people in town who were perfectly capable of taking the law into their own hands.
‘Personally, though, I’d say he’s keeping you out of trouble,’ Tom went on. ‘Half the blokes at the station are taking bets on what you’re going to do next.’
He looked at his watch, drained his glass and got to his feet. ‘How long are you staying here?’ he asked.
‘I can’t leave town,’ I told him. ‘And I don’t have anywhere else to go.’
He lowered his voice. ‘Just be careful.’ His eyes were darting nervously from the house to me and back again. ‘Blokes down at the nick have been talking. There’s something not quite right about those two.’
‘They’re lesbians,’ I said. ‘I’m not. But I shouldn’t have to tell you that, should I?’
We stared at each other, and I don’t think Avril and Daphne were uppermost on his mind any mo
re.
‘Why did you tell your wife about me?’ I asked.
He gave a heavy sigh. ‘I’d no idea she’d do that. And I didn’t tell her anything. I came home late, obviously not myself – I mean, come on, it’s not the sort of thing that happens every day – and she found one of your hairs on my jacket.’
‘That’s it? She raises merry hell because of a hair?’
He shrugged. ‘She’s had a thing about you for months now. Pretty much since you arrived. She knows I …’
‘What?’
He held up both hands. ‘Floss, we can’t do this now. We have to get this case over with. Then we can talk about you and me. I’ll be in touch. Please stay out of trouble.’
The back door opened mysteriously before Tom could touch it and he disappeared. I stayed where I was, watching the sun sink lower over the moor, turning the pale grasses a deep gold and sending rosy trails across a turquoise sky. Lancashire was beautiful, I realised. Inhospitable, unpredictable, verging on savage at times, but heartbreakingly, wonderfully beautiful.
There was still a ‘you and me’.
It wasn’t until later that I wondered whether that might be exactly what I’d been intended to think.
52
‘You two are plotting something,’ I said when dinner was over, and Avril and Daphne had spent most of it exchanging meaningful looks.
‘Nonsense,’ said Avril. ‘We merely have a lot of non-verbal communication going on. It happens to couples when they’ve been together for any length of time. Tom seems like a nice young man.’
‘Tom is married, and don’t try to change the subject. I know you’re going out tonight. I’ve seen the bags by the door. Is it a coven thing?’
‘Goodness’ – Daphne opened her eyes wide with fake surprise – ‘whatever gave you that idea? Oh look, one last mouthful. You have it, Florence, dear. You’ve got a nice relaxing evening ahead of you.’
She emptied the bottle into my glass. It was more than a mouthful. It was our second bottle of the evening and I’d drunk my fair share.
The Craftsman Page 24