The Craftsman

by Sharon Bolton

  62

  I only panic on the inside. On the outside, I step calmly around the room, checking the wardrobe, beneath the bed, behind the shower curtain, in case he is playing a sick practical joke, although I know he is not. I will be expected to have checked the rooms thoroughly and so I do.

  I run downstairs and out through the back door to the car park. There is no reason to think I might find him here, but I check all the same, and I peer over the low, black wall to the river that runs through the centre of town, mostly underground.

  The water is low, the banks rising steeply towards me, thick with summer vegetation. He cannot be down there. I cannot think of my son in relation to this nasty, creeping river. And so I go back indoors, and I’m only panicking on the inside. I push my way behind the bar, ignoring the protests of the barmaid, and find John Donnelly in the kitchen.

  ‘Ben is missing,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t find my son. Is there a games room or a lounge I don’t know about? Anywhere he might be watching television?’

  Tammy appears, wide-eyed and taut of face.

  ‘No,’ John says. ‘Children aren’t allowed in the public rooms. When did you last see him?’

  I don’t answer John’s question. I have too many of my own. ‘Did you see him at all this evening? After I left?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him since dinner,’ Tammy says. ‘Over an hour ago. He went upstairs with you.’

  John lifts his hands in a gesture that says he has nothing to add. They should be annoyed, at my barging my way into their private rooms, throwing questions at them, but they aren’t. They get it.

  ‘Has he been talking to anyone else in the hotel?’ I think of Dwane and wonder if he’s still here. Dwane might have invited Ben up to see his model town. Please God, let Ben be with my old friend.

  Tammy shakes her head.

  ‘Do you want me to call the police?’ John says.

  ‘Give me a sec.’ I leave them and head out to the public bar. I’m still not panicking on the outside. I push open the door and see that I was right: Tom is here. He has his back to me, but I recognise his jacket from earlier, and his voice as he laughs.

  ‘Tom,’ I call to him as I cross the room.

  ‘Hey.’ He feigns surprise, but the warmth in his eyes tells me he was hoping to see me, that he came here to engineer a meeting. Then he looks properly at my face. ‘What?’

  ‘I need to talk to you. Now.’

  He follows me to the corridor, which is deserted, apart from John and Tammy, hovering by the kitchen door.

  ‘Ben is missing.’ Because I don’t want to waste time waiting for him to ask questions, I tell him everything that he will need. ‘He was here when I left ninety minutes ago. I’ve searched our rooms, the car park and the public rooms. He hasn’t taken his coat, his phone or his wallet. Tammy and John haven’t seen him. He said nothing about going out, and he knows no one in town. Going out without leaving me a message would be very out of character.’

  Then, because I know it’s coming, I add, ‘I went up to the Glassbrook house. I have a set of keys. He knew I was going.’

  Tom’s eyes narrow. ‘Could he have followed you up there?’

  ‘Not impossible,’ I say.

  ‘Do you have a photograph?’

  ‘Upstairs. It’s a couple of years old, but—’ I stop, because panic is fighting its way out. That is a scream in the back of my throat and—

  ‘Florence!’ Tom says.

  I meet his eyes.

  ‘Get it. Quick. I’ll see you back down here. Two minutes. Go.’

  I go, pushing someone aside on the stairs, running into my room. I pick up my bag and from Ben’s room grab his phone and look for his room key. I don’t see it.

  The hall downstairs is empty when I get back. Ben’s key isn’t hanging behind Reception, and its absence suggests to me he didn’t plan to leave the hotel.

  ‘Florence.’

  Tom is back. ‘Let me tell you what I’ve done.’ He beckons me closer. ‘I’m taking it seriously,’ he says. ‘Not because I’m worried – I’m not. I’m sure he’s fine and not far away – but I’m pulling out all the stops because it’s you.’ He gives me a tiny smile. ‘And because it’s us. And it’s here.’

  I manage a similar smile back to thank him. Tom knows I’ll demand everything he can throw at the search for my son and that I’ll raise hell if I don’t get it. He knows that because of what the two of us went through we will always take seriously the disappearance of a child. And he knows that here, in the North-West, we will always assume the worst.

  ‘I’m listing him as a vulnerable missing person and I’ll get his picture sent round,’ he goes on. ‘There’ll be a dog team here in ten minutes.’

  A dog team will only find a trail if Ben left on foot.

  ‘I’ve got Uniform coming to do a search of the hotel. Tammy and John will cooperate. Another team will start combing the town, the public parks, the pubs that we know are tolerant of underage drinkers.’

  I nod. I know Ben is not in any of those places but that Tom has to follow procedure.

  ‘You and I are going up to the Glassbrook house now, to make sure he’s not there. Then I’m going to bring you back and you will wait here for him, checking with his dad, and any friends at home he might have been in touch with.’

  His dad. Oh God, his dad.

  ‘Right, then.’ Tom pulls me along the corridor and out of the hotel as a wave of déjà vu washes over me. He and I did this so many times back then. But never when I was feeling this sick. This helpless.

  ‘You’re doing great.’ Tom opens the car door for me.

  ‘I need to get onto the system,’ I say, as we head out of town. ‘I’ll come in after I’ve made those phone calls. I need to check other teenage disappearances in the North-West. I’ll speak to Yorkshire too.’

  Tom says nothing.

  ‘Cumbria,’ I say. ‘Merseyside,’ and I’m conscious I’m half talking to myself. ‘He wouldn’t take them from here. Not without throwing suspicion on himself. He’d go further afield, but not too far. He must be based here. How the hell did he know I’d come back? And how did he persuade Ben to leave the hotel? Ben’s smart.’

  ‘Florence, get a grip.’ When Tom snaps at me, I see the fear he’s trying to hide for my sake. ‘There is no “he”,’ he goes on. ‘There is no child predator on the loose around Sabden. Larry Glassbrook killed those kids, and he’s dead.’

  Tom has switched on his blue light and we speed through the quiet streets. Half of me wants to yell at him to slow down, so that I can check each dark street and corner we pass; the other half needs him to go faster. We reach the Glassbrook house and Tom sweeps into the drive without checking his speed, pulling up beside the front door. From the boot he takes a torch and two pairs of disposable gloves and I thank God he’s still thinking clearly, functioning as a police officer and not a close-to-panicking parent.

  He bangs on the door to raise Luna as I run round the garden, checking behind trees, under shrubs. When there is no response from the house, I hand over the keys and we go inside. We check it from top to bottom and then Larry’s workshop, the wood store at the back, the garden shed. We find nothing. Luna isn’t here. Neither is Ben.

  ‘Tom.’ We are standing directly outside the back door, wondering what to do next. ‘I know what you think, and I know I’d be the same in your shoes, but will you humour me, please?’

  ‘Go on.’

  I tell him what I heard from Luna earlier. That one night, while I was missing, she saw Larry digging in the garden after dark. That it had creeped her out, partly because gardening was out of character for her father, and partly because who digs in the dark unless they have something to hide?

  ‘Where in the garden?’ he says.

  ‘By the hives.’

  Tom says nothing.

  ‘“Tell it to the bees,”‘ I say. ‘The last time I saw Larry, there was something on his mind. He said he’d told it to the bees. I thought it w
as the effigy I was supposed to find. What if it wasn’t? What if Larry knew nothing about that but hid something near the hives?’

  Tom sighs. ‘Your call,’ he says. ‘We could spend half an hour looking for the remains of Larry’s pet cat, and I think that time could be better spent. But we’ve got a torch, and there are spades in the shed, so your call.’

  I make the call. I find a spade and lead Tom over to the beehives. He shines the torch on the ground and we see nothing but smooth lawn, the grass overly long, and a few common weeds. We could dig for hours and not find what Larry left here. I step closer to the hives and feel something hard beneath my foot.

  I grab Tom’s hand and shine his torch down. A small stone, which means nothing, except that there are more than one. A line of them. Six stones in a straight line, then a line of four stones, at right angles. The letter ‘L’.

  ‘This is it,’ I say. ‘It’s here.’

  I hold the torch. Tom digs quickly.

  ‘L’ for Larry? ‘L’ for Luna? ‘L’ for Lovelady? ‘L’ for love?

  ‘Hello,’ Tom mutters, and I hold the torch still. In the deepening hole is a canvas bag with a drawstring top, old and very dirty.

  ‘Inside,’ Tom says.

  At the kitchen table, Tom pulls apart the string tie. What falls out of the bag is a large brown envelope without stamp or postmark, addressed to Larry Glassbrook, Esq. in neat, old-fashioned writing. Tom upends it and we see several black-and-white photographs and one scrap of stained tissue. Tom turns all the pictures so that they lie face up, and I know the sight of the first hits him as hard as it does me. It is a photograph of the two of us.

  The picture is thirty years old, taken when I lived and worked here. I am a young woman of twenty-two in this picture and I am drunk. The Tom I remember from those days is leading me out of the Black Dog.

  In the second photograph, we are a few feet from the pub, and I can see Tom’s car in the background. In a third, I see the pub van, and John Donnelly loading something from the pub cellar. These photographs were taken the night Tom and I made love at the Black Tarn, the night I pulled Luna from a premature grave.

  The fourth is not of Tom and me but of Luna herself, and she is climbing into the back of the Black Dog’s van. Standing ready to close the doors behind her is John. The last picture is of the van leaving the pub car park. John can be seen at the wheel. He was too young to drive legally back then, but I think I can remember Tom telling me he’d been pulled over once and given a caution for driving without a licence.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Tom says. ‘Who took these?’

  ‘It’s the same night,’ I say. ‘In every photograph John is wearing the same clothes.’

  ‘He always wore the same clothes. The poor bastard didn’t have any clothes apart from his dad’s hand-me-downs.’

  I point to the photograph of Luna getting into the back of the van. ‘Those are the clothes we found her in,’ I say. ‘This is the night we found her.’

  Tom doesn’t reply.

  ‘Look at the moon.’ My finger hovers over the bright white ball in the sky and moves from one photograph to the next. It had been a nearly full moon the night Luna was taken, full when she was found.

  ‘Not in the same position,’ Tom says, but there is doubt in his voice.

  ‘It wouldn’t be. The moon moves across the sky. I’d say the pictures of John and Luna were taken about an hour after we left.’

  ‘Who?’ he says. ‘Who took them? Who on earth was waiting outside the Black Dog for hours on the off-chance?’

  I don’t know, and that’s not what’s uppermost in my head right now. ‘These pictures prove that Luna was not abducted. Not by her father, not by anyone. Does she look as though John is forcing her into that van? They faked it. I said all along Luna’s abduction was different.’

  Tom seems to sway on the spot. ‘Hang on, Florence – you found her in a shallow grave.’

  I reach out to touch his arm, but he flinches away. ‘Yes, a very different burial to the one the others got. She wasn’t in a coffin. She was miles out of town. And I was tipped off. I was told where to find her. Luna was never in any danger.’

  He steps back, as though to get a better look at me. ‘So where was she, all the time she was missing? And why? Why the hell would anyone fake an abduction? What was the point?’

  Suddenly I am so sure of my ground. In time, I will be angry, furious with myself for not seeing it before, for ignoring the nagging doubts I’d always had about Larry’s guilt, but for now, acknowledging what I know to be the truth will be enough.

  ‘To draw attention away from the real killers,’ I say. ‘Them. John and Luna killed Stephen and Susan and Patsy. The others, Tammy, Dale, Unique, they were probably in on it too. Tom, remember at the time we said Luna’s abduction was a ruse, a way for Larry to draw attention away from himself, because what man would kill his own daughter? Well, we were right about the ruse bit, just not about who was responsible.’

  He shakes his head, but I know Tom. He’s thinking about it.

  ‘They knew we were getting close,’ I say. ‘They knew I was getting close. Luna found my charts, knew I was interested in the kids at school, that I was gathering information about them. She and John saw me visiting school. God, they even tried to pump me for information here in the garden one day. Remember John telling us he was gay? Luna trying to throw suspicion on me? They are manipulative liars. They were dangerous when they were teenagers, they are doubly dangerous now, and they have Ben.’

  I think back to John and Tammy’s concerned faces at the Black Dog earlier and feel how easy it would be to rip people apart with my bare hands. I feel my nails digging into my palms and my breathing spiralling. I am burning with rage. These people have no idea, no idea at all, what they unleashed when they went after my son.

  ‘Elanor Glassbrook hasn’t lived in Sabden for years,’ Tom says, and his voice sounds as though it is a long way away.

  I have to force myself back to him, to speak in a calm voice when all I want to do is howl. ‘John Donnelly and Tammy own the pub we’re staying in. Ben would trust them. If they knocked on his door and said, “Something’s happened to your mum. She’s downstairs. Come quickly,” he’d do it.’

  Tom turns from me and leans over the sink. For a second I think he’s about to vomit. ‘Why did Larry confess?’ he asks the taps. ‘If Larry was innocent, why did he serve thirty years in prison?’

  ‘Out of love,’ I say. ‘He knew Luna had done it. He took the rap for her.’

  He talks to his reflection. ‘She let her dad go to prison?’

  I move to stand behind him. ‘She was a teenage psychopath. She’d have seen her father hang.’

  Tom exhales another long, slow breath. I feel myself on the verge of losing patience, but I need Tom with me.

  ‘Someone sent him proof,’ I say. ‘Someone sent these pictures to Larry.’ I reach out and nudge the scrap of tissue. Were I not wearing gloves, I’d still have no fear of contaminating it with my DNA. My DNA is already on it. This tissue wrapped my severed finger.

  ‘Someone sent him my finger,’ I say. ‘He would have known it was mine: he complimented me on my nail varnish. He knew his daughter was a monster, but he acted to protect her.’

  Tom turns and I can’t read the expression in his eyes. ‘The killings stopped,’ he says. ‘I’ve been here for thirty years plus and there have been no more unexplained disappearances of Sabden children.’

  ‘That would be the deal,’ I say. ‘He takes the blame; they have to behave themselves. He buried proof to make sure they kept their word. All this time he wouldn’t let Sally sell the house because the pictures were buried in the garden.’

  ‘Oh crap,’ Tom says.

  ‘And maybe they didn’t stop,’ I say. ‘Maybe they got cleverer. Which is why I need to do that search of missing children cases. After we bring in John and Tammy.’

  We speed back through town. For much of the journey I’m clutching m
y seat, because Tom’s driving hasn’t improved in thirty years and I’m not about to ask him to take it easy. When he’s forced to brake for traffic, I say, ‘I wasn’t kept in Larry’s wood store those two days. He made that up. I went in earlier. It isn’t the same place.’

  This time he doesn’t argue. ‘Where, then?’

  ‘I’m guessing the Black Dog,’ I say. ‘That place will have big cellars. And those double doors we saw will allow easy access to the car park. I think that’s where they kept Luna and where they kept me too. Maybe the others for a time.’

  ‘We searched the Black Dog.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a hidden cellar nobody knows about.’ I wonder if I’m clutching at straws, that my need to find Ben is so strong I’m imagining hiding places that don’t exist. ‘Dwane told me about something once. A very old cellar, still with chains, used to keep prisoners on their way to Lancaster Gaol. Did you ever hear about that?’

  He lifts his shoulders in a brief shrug. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And Luna at least will have been a willing captive. She’d have been prepared to hide.’

  ‘You weren’t, though. We looked for you in the Black Dog cellars. We looked everywhere. None of us slept for three nights.’

  His voice breaks and I reach out to pat his hand. I can’t allow either of us to give in to panic. Ben is my son. My life will end if his does.

  We reach the pub quickly. There are patrol cars in the car park, their lights flashing.

  Tom switches off the engine and turns to me. ‘You’re staying here,’ he says.

  I reach for the handle and he grabs my arm. ‘Don’t be a fool, Floss. I can’t involve you in this. I am going in, alone, and I will have John and Tammy Donnelly driven to the station for questioning. If they won’t go willingly, I’ll arrest them. Then we’ll search the cellars. You will stay here till the Donnellys have left, and then you will go to your room. Do I make myself clear?’

  I can’t argue. I can’t do anything that might delay the search for Ben.

  I watch Tom disappear inside the pub and stare at the door for a second. I catch sight of the canvas bag, now carefully wrapped in evidence bags, that is lying on the back seat. And then I panic on the outside too.