‘I’m an old friend,’ I say. ‘Do her family visit much?’
She says nothing, and by the slightly different rhythm her footsteps make along the upper corridor, I know that she is aware of Sally’s history and her connection to the man we buried today. She raps on a door at the end of the corridor and opens it without waiting to be invited. I think I hear voices in the room beyond, but when Ben and I follow her in, we see a single figure, sitting in an armchair at the window.
‘Hello, Sally,’ I say, as the door closes behind me. ‘It’s Florence. Do you remember me?’
There is no reply, and so I approach the chair, catching her reflection in the glass of the window before I see her properly. The beautiful woman I remember has gone. Sally was always thin, but in her late sixties, her skin seems loose on her bones, as though at some point she lost weight suddenly and quickly. There are deep grooves around her mouth, and her eyes seem almost to have disappeared beneath a brow that has grown more prominent with age. Or maybe it’s an illusion created by her lack of hair.
I can see large patches of reddened, scabbed scalp. I watch a thin, trembling hand reach up and take hold of her hair, and then I notice that clinging to her clothes, lying scattered around her chair on the carpet, are dozens of stray fair hairs. Sally is pulling out her own hair.
The sight of her has blown away the conviction that brought me here. She doesn’t look capable of leaving the room by herself, never mind carrying out malicious errands for Larry. Sally cannot have left the effigy for me to find.
‘We’re not alone, Mum.’
I spin round and see what Ben has already spotted.
There is a woman in the corner, by a bookcase, frozen in the act of returning a book. For a second I think I’ve made a mistake, that this is Sally and that she has barely changed at all. She is still slim as a young willow tree, and her hair gleams silver blonde, although it’s much shorter than I remember. She’s wearing make-up, though, which I never saw Sally do, and her clothes don’t seem quite right. I never saw Sally in jeans and high-heeled boots.
‘Hello, Flossie,’ she says. ‘What a surprise. And who is this gorgeous young man?’
‘My son,’ I say. ‘Ben, this is Cassandra Glassbrook. You might have heard of her. Cassie Glass, the songwriter?’
‘He’s too young.’ Cassie smiles from me to Ben, like a fox wondering which chicken’s throat it’s going to rip out first. ‘I haven’t released anything in years.’
‘A lot of people believe that Cassie, not Bryan Ferry, wrote “Slave to Love”.’ As I speak, I’m hoping Ben won’t say he’s never heard of ‘Slave to Love’ or Bryan Ferry, that for once in his life he will be tactful.
‘Did you sue?’ he says.
‘We reached an agreement.’ Cassie gives that small, smug smile I remember so well.
‘Good song. Mum and Dad play it when they think I’m in bed.’
‘We didn’t know you were here,’ I say. ‘The woman who showed us in didn’t mention it. If you and your mother want some privacy …’ I leave the offer hanging.
Cassie steps away from the bookshelf. ‘It’s been years since Mum and I had a conversation. Stay for a few minutes. She seems to like people talking around her. Although it’s impossible to know how much she takes in.’
We sit, moving chairs so that Cassie, Sally and I form a little group in the window, and it feels as though the Hill is the fourth member of our party, not Ben, because he takes a chair a little out of the circle and opens his book.
‘I don’t announce myself at reception,’ Cassie says. ‘There’s a side door that’s not locked during the day. I just slip in.’
I remember Cassie’s old habit of moving around silently, of sneaking up on people when they had no idea she was close.
‘I didn’t see you at the funeral,’ I say. ‘I looked for you.’
She shrugs. ‘I wore sunglasses, sat upstairs. I figured Luna would enjoy having the attention to herself.’
Luna. She’d vanished after the service into a waiting car, seemingly unmoved by the hostility of the townsfolk. She’ll be miles away by now, speeding back to her affluent life. Last time I checked, she was London-based. Cassie, on the other hand, lives in a converted loft in nearby Salford.
‘Cassie, when did you last go to the old house?’ I ask her.
‘Why?’ she counters.
I remind myself that I cannot demand information from Cassie Glassbrook. I will have to tease it out of her.
‘I found something there today. It might be relevant to your father’s case and I have to report it to the police. If you—’
‘How thrilling. What?’
I allow a second or two to pass and hold her stare.
Her smile fades. ‘Get over yourself, Flossie. What do I have to gain from winning your approval? Or lose by being myself?’
I say nothing.
‘You saw Dad in prison,’ Cassie says. ‘I know you did. Mum told me. What did he talk about?’
Sally’s face starts a strange, twitching motion, as though an insect is bothering her and she’s trying to shake it off.
Cassie did this too, back in the old days, said whatever came into her head without considering its impact. I remind myself that she has never married, never had children and that she achieved financial success early in life. She has probably never, properly, grown up.
‘He talked about the three of you,’ I say. ‘You and Luna and your mum.’ I glance at Sally, but her face has fallen into stillness again. ‘Cassie, if you went to the house today, or recently, if your father asked you to leave something there, it would be very helpful if you told me.’
‘I’ll tell you if you tell me what it was.’
‘You know I can’t do that.’
She twists abruptly at the waist, a movement that seems a little unnatural. ‘Why don’t I ask this gorgeous boy of yours?’
She smiles again at Ben, and the predatory look on her face makes me want to scratch her. I imagine my fingernails raking down from her eyes, tearing apart the skin, causing blood to run like tears down her face.
My breathing is quickening again; I can feel my face glowing hot. Ben was right: I was a fool to come here.
‘I was in the car,’ says Ben. ‘I can’t tell you anything.’
Cassie exhales loudly and seems to deflate in her chair as she turns back to me. ‘I haven’t been to the house of horrors for over a decade,’ she says. ‘I’m never going back.’
Cassie’s face is entirely serious now, the mocking sneer gone completely. I believe her. I try to take deep breaths without letting it show. Even so, I see Ben glance sharply at me.
‘Why did you never leave town, Cassie? Surely it would have been easier for the three of you?’
Cassie’s eyes glance towards her mother. For a second their eyes seem to meet, and then Sally’s glass over again. ‘Mum refused,’ she says. ‘She gave various excuses over the years, didn’t you, Mum?’ She leans over and unwinds the hair from Sally’s finger, gently pushes her mother’s hand back to her lap.
‘Dad wouldn’t agree to selling the house, was one excuse. Another was that nobody would buy a place with such a gruesome history. After a few years, Luna and I both went to university and it was less of an issue. At least there we could pretend to be normal people. Tell me something, Flossie, did he ever tell you why he did it?’
‘Many times,’ I say. ‘He said he did it out of love.’
She pulls a face. ‘That’s twisted.’
‘Yes, I always thought so.’
Her eyes narrow and then settle on my left hand. ‘Still missing,’ she says, and I swear there is a tiny smile tickling the corners of her mouth.
‘Fingers don’t grow back,’ snaps Ben, surprising us both.
‘No,’ Cassie says, and I know that she is unruffled by my son’s annoyance, possibly even entertained by it. ‘But you know, prosthetic limbs and stuff.’
‘A finger isn’t a limb, it’s a digit, and Mum doesn’t
model nail varnish, she catches criminals.’
Ben does not have my hair colour, but he has the classic redhead temper. ‘Are you still in touch with Luna?’ I say, to change the subject, because I don’t want these two spatting. Ben is smarter, but he also has a strong sense of fair play. If they fight, Cassie will win.
She turns back to me. ‘Not since she went to university. I don’t think Mum’s seen her for years either.’
We both glance at Sally. It’s probably coincidence, but her eyes seem to be holding more water than a few minutes ago.
‘What you went through was a major trauma,’ I say. ‘It affects people in different ways.’
Cassie pulls a face. ‘It wasn’t only about Dad. Luna was pissed off about John. He dumped her a few weeks after Dad was convicted.’
‘Well, that’s not entirely surprising,’ I say. ‘And in any event, John had issues back then. I’m not sure he was ready for a serious girlfriend.’
‘He dumped her for me.’
What? I don’t say this. I say, ‘Really?’ as though it’s no big deal. Even though it is a big deal.
‘It was always me he was interested in,’ Cassie says. ‘I wasn’t sure about dating someone younger. Pretending to be keen on Luna gave him an excuse to hang around.’ Her eyes drift away and she laughs. ‘Remember that time you found a dog in your bedroom? It was John’s. His dad’s pub always had black dogs, to make some sense of the pub name, I suppose. He was with me in the house. We didn’t know where it had gone.’ She laughs again, and it feels as though she’s laughing at me. ‘We nearly died when you raised blue murder and Dad came charging upstairs.’
I find myself shaking my head and not really sure why. John, interested in Cassie, secretly dating Cassie, while telling Tom and me he thought he might be gay? What boy of fifteen, back in the 1960s, would claim to be gay if he wasn’t?
I get up to go. Being here has reminded me of why I never liked Cassandra Glassbrook. I feel sorry for Sally, but there is nothing I can do for her. I simply have to hope she is being kindly treated. I bend to pat her hand and wish her goodbye, but her eyes are fixed on the Hill and I don’t think she has even realised I’m in the room.
Cassie watches us go, her eyes on Ben, but her last words are for me. ‘Did you ever think, Flossie, that Larry was keeping you close for a reason?’
57
The sun is still strong when we step outside, but the breezes dance around our heads, lifting my hair, cooling the beads of sweat on Ben’s temples. Neither of us head back to the car. We both seem to need the fresh air, although there had been nothing unpleasant about the atmosphere in the nursing home.
Nothing we could put a finger on, anyway.
We walk to the edge of the car park and look out over the moors.
‘You’ve still got the keys to their house, Mum.’
I glance down at my bag. ‘Oh, so I have. I forgot.’
‘No, you didn’t. I saw you look at your bag three times.’
A flock of birds flies past. Small, black rooks. The only bird I ever saw on or around the Hill.
‘You had your head in that book all the time we were in there,’ I say. ‘You didn’t see a thing.’
‘I saw that old woman watch you both talking every time she thought you were looking the other way. She hasn’t got dementia, Mum – she’s faking it.’
I turn away from the view to face him. ‘Nonsense,’ I say, but the look on his face doesn’t falter.
‘When you said he did it out of love, she reacted. Her face screwed up, like she was in pain. And then again when you talked about the dog.’
‘She had her back to you. You couldn’t see her face.’
‘I could see her reflection.’
What he is telling me seems absurd. And yet Ben’s intelligence has been surprising me for fifteen years. ‘Sally isn’t even seventy yet. Why would she fake dementia and lock herself away in a nursing home?’
‘If people think she’s a spanner short of a toolbox, they’ll leave her alone. Not hassle her with questions. There are lots of ways of running away, Mum.’
I think about this. No. ‘She could have sold the house. Moved the girls away. Made a new life.’
‘You’re assuming she could. What if she couldn’t?’
There is a knot tightening in my stomach. Thirty years ago, we thought we had the answers. Not all of them maybe, but enough. I’ve been back hours and I’m realising how little I know.
Ben and I walk, by unspoken agreement, out of the car park and onto the road.
‘I’ve been thinking about that letter,’ Ben says. ‘About Larry writing to you a lot. Any number of people could have known that, and that you visited him. They would have expected you to come back for the funeral. Any one of them could have left that thing for you.’
‘They couldn’t know I’d go to the hives, though.’
I remember my hairbrush, left behind in the Glassbrook house.
They have my hair. They have my hair.
What if they have my finger too? What if they somehow managed to get hold of it, all those years ago? What if they have my bone, the most powerful essence of all?
‘Mum!’
I make myself focus on Ben. I am being ridiculous. There is no ‘they’. Larry, the child killer, the man who planned to kill me, made the clay picture thirty years ago, and it got overlooked somehow.
‘Was he guilty?’ Ben asks.
And there it is. The question I have never allowed myself to ask. When I wake in the night, and it seems I am the only person alive in the world, still that question will not form itself in my head.
‘There was a lot of evidence,’ I say.
‘What evidence, exactly?’
I take a deep breath. ‘Partly circumstantial. He had access to the caskets directly before burial. He had transport to ferry the unconscious kids around. He knew them all, via the cricket club, so they wouldn’t be afraid of him. He was a good-looking man, so people were more inclined to trust him.’
‘And he was found with your dismembered finger in his jacket pocket.’
‘That too,’ I agree. ‘And my blood on his shirt and in his wood store. He claimed that’s where he kept me the two days I was missing. Gagged, so none of the family would hear me screaming.’
Ben starts. I let my hand touch his briefly.
‘The police found an unfinished clay effigy in his workshop, and some belongings of the three earlier victims,’ I say. ‘Enough to convict him even without his confession.’
‘So was he guilty?’ Ben repeats.
‘He never said he wasn’t,’ I say.
‘Er …’
‘He pleaded guilty. But he said the minimum he could get away with in court. There wasn’t a trial, so to some extent he didn’t have to say much.’
‘But you must have interviewed him?’
‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t have been allowed to, but yes, he was interviewed at length, and I read the transcripts.’
‘And?’
‘They were vague at times. There were things he refused to answer, or claimed not to remember. He insisted it wasn’t Beryl, for example, who’d made the phone call to me that night about Luna’s whereabouts, but he wouldn’t say who.’
Ben gives me a pitying look. ‘And you all just accepted this?’
‘You have no idea of the pressure we were under to get a conviction,’ I tell him. ‘Larry was a gift horse.’
‘So was he guilty?’ Ben asks again.
When his mind is on something, Ben will not let it go.
‘Ben, I honestly don’t know.’ I turn round. ‘Come on, we have to get back. I want to catch someone senior at the station before they all go home for the day.’
He follows, unable or unwilling to see the dread that’s creeping over me. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Why would Larry, why would anyone plead guilty to a crime they didn’t commit?’
‘You tell me,’ I snap. The Glassbrook case made my career. It made me famous.
Even now I see young officers nudging each other when they look my way. That’s her. That’s Florence Lovelady.
It changed me, too, in ways it took me years to fully realise. I have demons, of course I have. No one could go through what I did and emerge unscathed. There are times when the dark places seem just round the corner, and God knows they feel a whole lot closer now that I’m back in the North.
But I lived. I brought the killer to justice. I won, and that knowledge made me more confident, less inclined to step back and let others have the limelight. It gave me a sense of the importance of life, of the need to reach out and grab opportunities with both hands. It taught me never to waste time, because time is precious. Larry’s conviction made me who I am.
‘Who was he protecting?’ Ben says.
We get back to the car and sit, doors open, because it’s too hot to close them.
If Larry’s conviction is unsafe, what does that make the woman who was born out of it?
‘Is it possible Larry knew who the real killer was and took the blame anyway?’ Ben asks.
I say, ‘Why would he?’
‘It would have to be someone he cared about a lot.’
I shake my head. ‘That only leaves his family. The two girls were kids. Sally wasn’t a big woman.’
‘None of the victims were big. And Sally, in fact everyone in the house, had access to some weird and wonderful drugs. Sally’s midwifery drugs, not to mention all her herbal stuff.’
I had no idea Ben knew so much about the case. I’d been forgetting the increasing potential of the Internet, and the determination of fifteen-year-old boys.
‘Sally?’ I say. ‘It isn’t possible.’
‘She hasn’t got dementia, Mum. I’m sure of it. But great way of avoiding awkward questions – pretend you can’t remember your own name. Who’s going to take her in for questioning?’
‘The killings stopped.’
Ben thinks about this. ‘Well, maybe that was the deal. He’d take the blame if they behaved themselves. Maybe he had an insurance policy. Something hidden in that old house. Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t let them sell it.’
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