The Craftsman

by Sharon Bolton

  Tammy and John are driven away in separate cars. Tom reappears; a smartly dressed man is following him. I think I must know this tall man in the expensive suit, but can’t quite place him. He is in his early forties, with dark hair, heavy eyebrows and narrow, slate-coloured eyes, and something about his bearing tells me that he is police, a senior detective. I get out of the car to meet them. Both see that I’ve been crying and neither can meet my eyes.

  ‘I’m going in to lead the questioning,’ Tom says. ‘It will take a while because we may have to wait for solicitors and—’

  ‘I know how it works,’ I say. ‘I want to watch.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Can’t be done, Florence. I’m leaving you with DI Brian Rushton. Stan’s son. He’s heard all about you. He’ll look after you.’

  I nod at the man I remember only from photographs, a stocky child in a policeman’s helmet. It is his resemblance to his father that I recognise and I warm to his presence. Behind us, I hear Tom getting into his car and driving away.

  ‘We’re going to check the cellars, ma’am,’ Rushton says to me in his father’s voice. ‘You can come, if you do exactly what I say.’

  The cellars are vast. The walls are stone, painted white in places, but the paintwork is old and peeling. The floors are flagged, except where stained and curling sheets of linoleum have been laid. The rooms we walk through are cold and smell of spilled beer and damp towels. I see gleams of lichen on some of the walls.

  The kegs are down here, of course, gleaming silver barrels in neat lines, connected to the walls by a labyrinth of tubes. There are boxes of crisps, nuts and pork scratchings, crates of bottled beer, of cans and soft drinks. There are rooms where trestle tables are stacked against walls, and towers of gilt chairs stretch to the ceilings; others where bedroom furniture and bathroom fittings are kept.

  We don’t find Ben. We check everywhere possible. I even insist that empty barrels are checked, but he isn’t here. When we reach the room where the great double trapdoors allow access to the car park above, I pause. These could be the doors I heard, the doors through which my limp and hurting body was thrown, but I cannot be certain.

  ‘There’s another room through there,’ the barman who is our guide tells us, and we follow his gaze towards a stone wall, with barrels stacked against it. Behind the barrels, I can see a sheet of reformed wood.

  ‘What sort of room?’ Rushton says.

  ‘It’s old,’ the barman says. ‘We don’t use it.’

  The barrels are heavy and it takes four men – Rushton, the barman and the two constables who have accompanied us – to tip and roll them away but, after a few minutes, they slide aside the wood to reveal a low archway, stone-lined, gleaming with damp from the nearby river and containing the husks of old wooden barrels. None of us will be able to stand upright in it.

  Claustrophobia grabs hold of me as we step beneath the low, uneven roof and watch Rushton’s torch pick out a narrow, crumbling staircase at the far end. It is so old and worn the stone seems to have melted into its surroundings, and it gleams with a liquid sheen that makes me think it won’t be solid enough to hold our weight.

  ‘Mind yourself,’ the barman says, and slips up the staircase like a squirrel.

  ‘You don’t have to come,’ Rushton tells me, but I do, and a few uncomfortable seconds later, he and I have scaled the slippery steps and are standing in the furthest part of the Black Dog’s cellars. The two constables wait below.

  This is the room Dwane told me of long ago. The place where miscreants and villains were kept on their way to Lancaster Gaol.

  The stone is crumbling in places and the earth breaking through. It is small, not big enough to stand upright, and feels crowded even with three of us. I guess it to be twelve feet by eight. There is an iron grille above our heads, through which plant life trails. I guess this grille is on the riverbank and that at times of high water the cellar floods.

  There are the remains of chains around the walls, and iron clamps – fetters or manacles, I think they’d be called. Iron rings are set low in the walls.

  ‘Have you been in here before, ma’am?’ Rushton asks me, in a low voice.

  I take my time. The flagged stone beneath our feet, the sense of being underground, the damp and the cold all feel right. The space does not, though. The prison in my memory was bigger than this.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say.

  ‘It wasn’t searched before,’ Rushton says. ‘I know that old case. I’ve looked through the files many times. This part of the cellar was blocked off and not searched. So you could have been here. Luna Glassbrook and the others could have been kept here.’

  ‘Ben isn’t here,’ I say. ‘That’s all that’s important now.’

  63

  I make my phone calls. I phone my husband, who is still in Paris, and lie to him, telling him I’m not worried, that I’m only checking in with him to make sure all boxes are ticked. I phone Ben’s grandparents and lie to them too. I phone my son’s best friend, and his second-best friends, and the girl I know he’d like to be his girlfriend but hasn’t dared ask yet. None of them has heard from him, and despite my lies, I sense tiny darts of my own panic speeding across the country, lodging in hearts and nerves.

  Naming fears gives them power. Ben’s abduction – I can no longer say ‘disappearance’ – is becoming more serious with every passing minute. I want to run out into the night, yelling his name. I want to bang on every door in the hotel and make people tell me what they saw and heard. I want to go to his room, to find something of his that still carries his scent and hold it to me. I do none of these things. The first would achieve nothing, the second would get in the way of the police investigation, and as for the third, I’ve seen enough cases of missing kids to know that to be the action of a parent who has given up. I will not give up.

  I’m thinking whether there is anyone else I need to phone when there is a knock on the door. Ben wouldn’t knock, so I quell the leap of hope and open it to see Brian Rushton.

  ‘Have you got a minute, ma’am?’ he says, as though I might have other, more urgent tasks on hand. Tucked beneath his left arm are a stack of old cardboard files, the sort we only see these days when we have to dig into archives that haven’t yet been computerised. He sits on the bed. I take the chair.

  ‘My dad talked a lot about the old days,’ he says. ‘Especially the Glassbrook case. It bothered him, right up until the end.’

  Not just me, then. I hadn’t been the only one who couldn’t quieten those nagging doubts. ‘Your father was a fine officer,’ I say.

  He half smiles. ‘There’s stuff I’m betting you don’t know about,’ he says. ‘Stuff in the files, going back years. It was investigated but kept quiet. Almost as though someone didn’t want any boats rocking.’

  Boats rocking? I have heard this before.

  That someone could only have been his father, but I don’t say this. I say, ‘What sort of stuff?’

  He glances down at the files. ‘Four months after her funeral, her real funeral I’m talking about now, Patsy Wood’s body was stolen.’

  Whatever I’d been expecting him to say, it wasn’t that.

  ‘Someone got into the cemetery one night and dug her up,’ he continues. ‘They replaced the coffin, filled in the grave, put it all to rights, but the groundsman saw it next morning and knew something was up. He reported it and there was a low-key investigation. The coffin was empty.’

  It is as though the room has suddenly grown hotter. ‘How could I not know about that?’ I ask.

  ‘It was kept quiet.’ Rushton shrugs. ‘I’m guessing Dad figured enough damage had been done. It wasn’t as though the girl could be hurt any more. The family could, though. Maybe he didn’t want to cause them more distress.’

  I look at the window. It is already open, but there is no air in this room. ‘He hushed it up?’

  Brian Rushton inclines his head. ‘I wouldn’t have mentioned it – you’ve got enough on your plate
– but there was something else.’

  ‘What?’

  He gives a deep sigh. ‘They couldn’t match DNA in those days, so don’t read too much into it, but human remains were found among the ashes of a bonfire on the Hill.’

  She will not rest … You have to burn her.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  He looks down at the files on his lap.

  ‘Why do you think this is relevant to Ben’s disappearance?’

  He looks up. ‘I don’t know that it is. I just know people weren’t happy about Larry Glassbrook’s conviction, even though they never voiced their concerns out loud. It preyed on minds. I sensed it in Dad.’

  He gets to his feet. ‘Tom told me what you found at the Glassbrook house, about your new theory, that it might have been the kids after all. If you’re right, there’s a hell of a lot we’ve missed.’

  I stand up too.

  ‘I just got a call from the boss,’ Rushton says. ‘John and Tammy’s solicitors have arrived and the interviews are about to start. He says you can come in and watch, if you want.’

  ‘He wants to keep an eye on me, doesn’t he?’ I say, as we head down the stairs.

  Rushton says, ‘He also tells me you’ve stolen evidence and that if you don’t hand it in now, he’ll have you arrested.’ He half smiles, to show he only half means it, or maybe that Tom only half means it. Whatever. It’s a fair cop. I hold open my bag to show the envelope I took from the canvas bag while I was left alone with it in Tom’s car.

  ‘Not compromised in any way,’ I say. ‘I wore gloves the whole time, and it’s bagged separately.’

  He holds my stare.

  ‘I couldn’t just sit there waiting for you to take Tammy and John in. I was going out of my mind. I thought if I looked at the photographs again, something might occur to me.’

  ‘Did it?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Hand them over.’

  64

  ‘Not the same evening,’ John Donnelly is saying, as we arrive. He is leaning back in his chair, but his hands on the chair arms are clenched. ‘What do clothes prove? Back then we wore the same things till they stank.’

  ‘Same moon.’ I can’t see the face of the detective sergeant interviewing him, just her shoulder-length brown hair.

  ‘Far as I know, the same moon has been coming up every night for millions of years,’ John says. He lifts one hand to his mouth to nibble at his nails, but the hand is shaking.

  An officer next to me says, ‘He’s insisting the photos were taken before Luna disappeared.’

  ‘Any sign of Luna?’ I ask, and he shakes his head. Luna has vanished as effectively as Ben has.

  Tammy and John are being interviewed in separate rooms. There are close-circuit television cameras in both that relay footage to the waiting offices. We can step from one screen to the next, keeping track of both interviews.

  On the other screen, Tammy isn’t even pretending not to be scared, but her story is the same, that none of the teenage gang knew anything about the other children’s disappearances.

  ‘Luna believed her dad was guilty,’ she is saying. ‘She was never the same after he was arrested. Never got over it. Larry must have taken those pictures.’

  ‘Why would Larry send pictures to himself?’ Tom asks her. ‘Why would he even take them in the first place?’

  She doesn’t answer him. ‘John was going with Luna in them days,’ she says instead. ‘He was always nicking his dad’s van to drive us around. It doesn’t mean nothing.’

  Tom leans back in his seat and scratches his head. ‘Now, you see, I interviewed John the night Luna vanished and I distinctly remember him telling us he was gay. Which is odd, when you think he’s been married for over twenty years and the two of you have three grown-up kids. Why would he say he was gay, Tammy?’

  ‘Being gay wouldn’t make him a murderer,’ she says.

  ‘Not being gay makes him a liar,’ Tom counters.

  ‘I wonder who’s going to tell the truth first, you or your wife,’ says the detective sergeant to John. ‘I hope it’s your wife. I don’t think she could cope with a long prison sentence.’

  John’s face is pale.

  ‘I can see how it would have worked,’ she says. ‘Who would kids trust more than other kids? Especially the cool kids, the gang everyone wanted to be part of. You probably sold it as some sort of prank: “Let’s break into the funeral parlour, see a few dead bodies. Meet you there at ten o’clock. Can you sneak out without your mum seeing?”‘

  ‘For the benefit of the tape, Mr Donnelly is shaking his head,’ says the accompanying constable.

  ‘You wouldn’t even have to break in. Luna could have sneaked the spare set of keys from home. Her mum’s bag would have all the sedative drugs you needed. Easy.’

  ‘My client has no comment,’ says his solicitor.

  ‘You had the cellar to keep Luna in while she was missing,’ the sergeant says. ‘So you see, John, we know how you did it. We just don’t know why.’

  ‘Why did you kill your friends, Tammy?’ says Tom. ‘What had Susan, Stephen and Patsy ever done except want to be part of your gang?’

  We hear the door to the interview room open and a uniformed sergeant pokes his head into shot. ‘She’s ready for you, sir,’ he says. ‘She’s signed the immunity-from-prosecution form.’

  Tammy’s solicitor, whose eyelids have been drooping, sits up. ‘What’s that?’ she says, and rubs her face.

  The door closes behind the sergeant.

  ‘Going to have to leave you for a while, Tammy.’ Tom gets to his feet. ‘Someone else needs my attention. I hope she’ll be more cooperative.’

  ‘Who?’ Tammy says. ‘Who’s here?’

  ‘Tammy, keep quiet,’ her solicitor says. ‘I’ve never heard of an immunity-from … What was it again?’

  ‘Oh, ignore Mack – he’s always getting his forms mixed up,’ Tom says.

  ‘Is it Luna? Is Luna here?’

  ‘Luna was threatening to burn down the Glassbrook house earlier this evening,’ says Tom. ‘I’d say that’s a woman with a lot on her mind.’ He pauses at the door. ‘I might be a while. I’ll have someone bring you both a brew.’

  ‘Wait,’ Tammy calls.

  Tom frowns as he turns back.

  ‘Tammy, I don’t think—’ her solicitor begins.

  ‘You can’t trust Luna,’ Tammy says. ‘No one could ever trust Luna. She’s not right.’

  Tom sighs. ‘Tammy, do you actually have anything to say, because I—’

  ‘It was her idea.’

  In the office, we all take a breath and hold it.

  Tom lets the door go. ‘What was?’ he says.

  An hour later, seven of us gather in a meeting room.

  Tom kicks off. ‘According to both John and Tammy, and their stories seem to agree, Luna’s abduction was faked by the kids themselves. They cooked it up between them. She hid in the Black Dog cellars for a couple of nights, and then John drove her up to that old graveyard. She’d only been in the grave a few minutes when Florence arrived.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Why would they do something so stupid and irresponsible?’

  ‘For a bit of a laugh, John claims.’ The female sergeant pulls a sympathetic face at me. ‘I know, I know, but I can see it,’ she says. ‘Those kids had been on television. Attention’s a funny thing. The more you get, the more you want.’

  Tom says, ‘According to Tammy, it was entirely John and Luna’s idea and she was bullied into going along with it. She does admit, though, to making the phone call to you that night, Florence, the one that told you where to find Luna.’

  It could have been Tammy I heard that night. I remember it being high-pitched and sexless, the sound of someone trying to disguise his or her voice.

  ‘It would explain why Luna’s disappearance differed from the others in some crucial ways,’ Brian says.

  I’d argued that myself. Oh God.

  The female se
rgeant says, ‘Where John and Tammy differ is in John’s view that Luna’s real reason for suggesting the prank was that she already suspected her dad, or saw that other people suspected him, and wanted to draw attention away. She figured that no one would suspect Larry if his own daughter was one of the victims. The story about being raped, the accusations about you, ma’am, were all about getting attention away from her dad. She was trying to protect him.’

  ‘Luna hates her dad,’ I say. ‘She called him a “monster”.’

  ‘She might still have wanted to shield him,’ the sergeant says. ‘For as long as she could.’

  More than one head gives an almost imperceptible nod and I sense a relaxing of tension around the room. I know that feeling. It steals over police teams when they see the end in sight. It has never terrified me before.

  Tom says, ‘So if they are telling the truth, we’re back to Larry Glassbrook being the rightfully convicted perpetrator of the three murders and the abduction of WPC Lovelady in 1969.’

  ‘What about the photographs taken in the Black Dog car park that night?’ I say. ‘It makes no sense for Larry to have taken those and sent them to himself.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense for the kids to have done it either,’ says Tom.

  Nobody speaks. He’s right. It doesn’t.

  ‘John and Tammy Donnelly are liars,’ I say. ‘They lied to us years ago and they’re lying now.’

  Suddenly no one can look at me.

  ‘We can find no indication that either Tammy or John left the Black Dog tonight,’ says a young male constable. ‘On the contrary, they were unusually busy. Tammy was in the kitchen; John was running between kitchen and bar, helping out with the serving. If either of them had vanished for any length of time, one of the staff would have noticed.’

  ‘There were three others in that gang,’ I say. ‘Dale Atherton, Richie Haworth and Unique Labaddee.’

  ‘Dale Atherton died,’ someone says. ‘Years ago. Heart attack.’

  ‘And I’m pretty certain Richie Haworth emigrated,’ someone else says. ‘New Zealand, I think.’