The Buried

Book 0: The Craftsmen

by Sharon Bolton

Genres: Female Sleuths; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

AN OLD ENEMY IS LAID TO REST . . . AND A NEW CRIME IS DISCOVERED

Florence Lovelady, the most senior serving policewoman in Britain, visits convicted serial killer Larry Glassbrook in prison. Larry is coming to the end of his life but has one last task for Florence: to learn the identity of the remains discovered at children's home Black Moss Manor. The town Florence escaped narrowly with her life still holds many secrets. Will she finally learn the truth? Or will time run out for her first?

The latest Florence Lovelady thriller, set shortly after the bestselling first novel The Craftsman in the chilling, new series from Richard and Judy bestseller Sharon Bolton

Praise for The Craftsman series
'Engaging, compulsive reading. Sharon Bolton at her best.' Rachel Abbott
'Beautifully dark and disturbing, I won't sleep well tonight.' Jenny Blackhurst
'Darkly gothic and brilliantly original, The Craftsman will have you spellbound.' JP Delaney
'I dare you to read it after dark.' Mark Edwards
'Fabulous, utterly unique storyline, that will effortlessly stand out in the crowd of thrillers.' Helen Fields
'The Craftsman is an absolutely terrific crime novel that takes your darkest fear and makes it reality.' Elly Griffiths
'The Craftsman goes to some very dark places, and will have readers looking nervously over their shoulder with every page they turn.' Mick Herron
'Filled with intrigue and suspense. The Craftsman is spellbinding.' Clare Mackintosh
'A brilliant blend of rich crime thriller with a hint of the gothic.' Sarah Pinborough

Release date: November 10, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 304

Sample

Monday, 26 July 1999

‘Black Moss Manor,’ I say, across the rickety, Formica-topped table in the visitors’ room. I’m picturing the steep, laurel-lined drive on the outskirts of town, the soot-blackened stone, the pointed gable in the centre of the slate roof. I can see large square windows, those on the ground floor barred.

Behind us, an argument breaks out. A whistle is blown; someone barks out an order.

I remember peeling red paint on the front door, the rusting drainpipes and the ferns that sprang from crumbling mortar. I can almost smell the crisp air of the moor, the boiled vegetables, the stink of urine that formed an evil-smelling cloud around the rear of the building.

Conscious of Larry’s eyes on me, I quickly reread the article from the Lancashire Morning Post: human remains found, four children assumed dead from natural causes. I register the byline of the journalist and the references to the local historian and the police superintendent. I tell myself that it is nothing to do with me.

‘That place saw a lot of children through its doors,’ I say, when I look up.

Larry’s black hair has turned snow white, and his skin has coarsened. His nose has been broken more than once, and there is a puckered scar above his right eye where someone tried to remove it with a dinner fork. He is handsome for all that. Anyone wondering how Elvis might have looked had he reached the age of seventy, and kept his weight under control, need only look at Larry.

‘Some of them would have died,’ I finish.

Larry lowers his voice. ‘Oh, they did. I buried ’em all, and not on the premises.’

‘What are you saying?’ I ask. ‘Did you do this? Did you kill them?’

Larry pulls a face, an expression of surprise, of disappointment. ‘Hell, no,’ he says.

‘You can hardly blame me for asking.’

‘Florence, I killed Susan Duxbury, Stephen Shorrock and Patsy Wood. I owned up to it, and I’ve served three decades for it.’

I do not need him to tell me this. Thirty years ago, in 1969, three young teenagers disappeared from near their homes in Sabden and were never seen alive again. I was a lowly WPC, still on probation, but I tracked down and caught the killer. Larry.

‘I’m not getting out of here alive,’ he says. ‘What have I got to gain from lying?’

He has nothing to gain. Nothing at all.

‘I remember every coffin, every casket I ever made, Florence. Does that surprise you?’

Larry, before his imprisonment, was a master carpenter and a part-owner of Sabden’s only funeral directors, Glassbrook & Greenwood. His partner, Roy Greenwood, ran the business and walked before the cortège in black tailcoat and top hat, carrying a silver-topped cane. Larry made the beautiful, satin-lined, hardwood caskets.

‘In all the time I worked with Roy, I made eight children’s caskets for Black Moss Manor,’ Larry tells me. ‘Three were for babies. There was never any budget, but I made ’em nice because I had two kids of my own.’

I cannot help the raised eyebrows. A devoted father who killed the children of others. He either doesn’t see it or ignores me. He starts to cough and pulls out a handkerchief. A bloodstained handkerchief.

‘Ten minutes, ladies and gentlemen,’ the officer on duty calls. Around us, we hear people making their preparations to leave. Some have a long way to travel and are impatient to be out. Behind Larry’s head, I see a couple embrace.

Larry and I never touch. Larry and I are not lovers, spouses or partners. We’re not relatives, or even friends. I have no idea what Larry and I are.

‘My point is,’ he goes on, ‘they weren’t buried at Black Moss. They went to St Augustine’s, the nearest churchyard.’ He taps his finger down on the cutting and says, ‘So where did this lot come from?’

‘They predate you,’ I suggest. ‘When did you start work at the firm?’

‘In 1946.’ He’s anticipated the question. ‘Roy came into school looking for an apprentice good at carpentry.’

I glance back at the cutting. Four small skeletons. ‘So these remains go back further. It says here the home dates back to the nineteenth century.’

Larry sighs, a damp, unhealthy sound. ‘Florence, I know a thing or two about dead bodies and what happens to them in the ground. The soil up there is acidic. And wet. Small corpses wouldn’t last fifty years.’

‘You’re saying these are unofficial burials?’

‘Yep. And recent ones at that. Last twenty years. Thirty at the absolute outside.’

‘Then they’ll be investigated.’

‘Does it look to you like they have an investigation planned?’

I look once more at the newspaper cutting. The remains are to be cremated following a private service. ‘I can’t get involved.’

‘Doesn’t sound like the WPC Lovelady I remember.’

I’m the last visitor sitting. The officer in charge is looking at his watch.

‘Larry,’ I say, ‘we closed the children’s home down. The people who ran it served time.’

I’m trying to remember the name of the two people in charge. Ashton? Aston?

‘A couple of years,’ Larry says. ‘Then they were out again. You might have closed the children’s home down, but you didn’t stop what was going on.’

I’m shaking my head.

‘You know there’s something wrong in that town, Florence,’ he says. ‘You could feel it all those years ago.’

Thirty years ago, in Sabden, Larry was my landlord. I lived in his house, along with his wife, teenage daughters and a couple of other lodgers. It wasn’t the easiest of times: I was struggling to find my feet in a rough Northern town, wondering if becoming a police officer hadn’t been an arrogant mistake, feeling out of place and out of sorts from the moment I woke up in the morning. Larry had been decent to me, his wife kind, almost motherly, his daughters friendly albeit in the self-absorbed way that teenagers have. The Glassbrook family and their home had been one of the few positives about my new life.

Until I found out too much; until Larry kidnapped and tortured me; until he left me for dead in a freshly dug grave.

The third finger on my left hand is hurting. Phantom pain, of course: I lost that finger years ago, but it hurts me all the same, especially when I’m anxious. Normally I tuck it into my armpit and the pressure helps, but I won’t do that in front of Larry.

Something wrong in that town. I could almost laugh. I raise my eyebrows again. This time he sees it and he smiles. ‘More than just me,’ he says.

‘I’m not going back there.’ I mean it. I am never going back to Sabden.

Larry pulls out his bloodstained handkerchief and I notice again how grey his skin looks, how his flesh seems to have dissolved. I shouldn’t be shocked. And yet I am. For the first time in decades I have to face the thought of a life without Larry.

‘How about for my funeral?’ he says.

Never underestimate another witch’s power. That’s what my mother always told us, and so I don’t, even when the witch in question is my mother. In her day, Sally Glassbrook was a powerful practitioner of the old craft, and I watch myself when I’m around her.

I say a prayer for strength as I get out of the car, imagining a thin silver cord running from my core right down to the centre of the earth. When I’m calm – God, it pisses me off that she can still do this to me – when I feel calm enough, I head for the door.

The old bitch’s nursing home is a few miles out of Sabden. It’s not nearly as old as it looks and, once inside, might be any modern medical facility. The old stone exterior is fake, like the filial devotion that picked the most expensive home in the area for my mother. I don’t give a monkey’s about her comfort. I chose it for its location.

I never use the front door, preferring to slip in unnoticed through a side entrance. The floor isn’t carpeted, but she never hears me approach. I’m about to turn the door handle when I hear voices inside.

‘All the signs say Larry will pass soon.’ The woman speaking has a rich voice, with Lancashire overtones. ‘Maybe even the day of the full moon.’

My mother gives a faint laugh. ‘He always had a flair for the dramatic.’

My mother? What the fuck? My mother has barely spoken in years. She has early-onset dementia, exacerbated by chronic depression. She lies in bed with her eyes wide open or sits in a chair and stares out at the moor. Sometimes she wanders the room in bare feet and pulls at her hair. Occasionally she mutters to herself. She doesn’t talk to people.

The strange voice says, ‘Cassie has been making enquiries. She wants to hold the funeral in Sabden.’

‘She’s back?’ my mother says. ‘She’s been in town?’

I hear the panic in my mother’s voice. I have been forbidden to set foot in my home town for nearly thirty years: forbidden by Larry, but Sally went along with it. At sixteen years old, shortly after his arrest, the two of them had me sent away to live with relatives, told me that under no circumstances was I to return. I went along with it. I had no choice.

‘No, no, I don’t think so,’ says the other woman in the room. ‘Not in town as such. Just phone calls. It’s not a good idea, Sally. The funeral, I mean. Even ten miles down the road would be better.’

I can hear traces of a West Indian accent. We knew a West Indian family years ago, but I can’t quite bring their name to mind.

‘What difference does it make now?’ my mother asks. ‘People will get excited for a few hours and then they’ll all go away, including Cassie.’

Hearing her say my name feels like an old sore being scratched. It’s been years since she’s even acknowledged my existence.

‘She wants to sell the house,’ says the West Indian woman. ‘She wrote to Avril.’

Avril Cunningham is my solicitor. So much for client confidentiality.

‘So do I,’ my mother says. ‘I’d have sold it years ago. I owe her that, at least, after what I did to her.’

‘Will you go to the funeral?’ asks the woman.

‘No.’

After what she did to me?

Even in the corridor I hear the sigh that comes next. ‘Sally, we need you to come back to us. When it’s over, when he’s really gone, will you leave this place?’

There is silence in the room for several seconds. Then my mother says, ‘What can I do? What can any of us do?’

‘You must have seen the news? About the children’s bodies found at Black Moss Manor.’

I have a subscription to the Lancashire Morning Post. I remember that story. Meanwhile, from inside the room comes a heavy sigh. ‘I did,’ my mother says. ‘So what?’

‘They’re going to cremate them. Not bury, cremate.’

‘It’s the cheaper option.’

‘And it destroys all the evidence.’

I press a bit closer to the door.

‘There’s talk of it being the same day, Sally. All the attention will be on Larry’s funeral. No one will pay any mind to what they’re doing on the other side of town.’

No response that I can hear.

‘They’re trying to hide something, Sally.’

They? Who are they?

‘Sally, you knew that place. That girl you helped, she came from there, didn’t she?’

‘Marigold?’ There is warmth in my mother’s voice. ‘Florence and I delivered her baby.’

I remember Marigold. She appeared in our house shortly after my father was arrested. And then vanished, just as suddenly.

‘We tried to save her,’ my mother is saying. ‘We did our best. Why don’t you ask Florence?’

‘No,’ the woman snaps. ‘We’re all agreed. Florence must not come back.’

Tried to save her? Did their best? What are they on about? Marigold went back to her family.

‘The Craftsmen are our curse, Sally,’ the woman says. ‘No one can face them but us.’

The Craftsmen? I’ve never heard this before, and yet it is resonating somewhere deep inside me, like an ancient fear awakened after a long sleep.

‘Long-dead corpses, Marlene,’ my mother says. ‘What can we do?’

The woman, Marlene, says, ‘What if they’re not so long dead? What if it isn’t over?’

I wonder whether I heard talk of them as a child – disturbing talk – whether I let it slip into my subconscious, never to be thought of. The Craftsmen. I find my mouth forming the words silently and realise that I’m unnerved, maybe even – afraid?

There is movement in the room. I backtrack several paces until I can slip round the corner. I find myself breathless.

My mother has been lying to me. Oh, I know, she never actually said, ‘Cassie, my love, my mind has fled, leaving me empty and useless. This paper-thin walking corpse is just a bad memory made flesh.’ She never actually said it, just— Bloody hell, I had no idea my mother was such an actress.

And Marigold? The Craftsmen? What the actual fuck?

And what was it, exactly, that she did to me?

I hear a door close and footsteps walking away. Fortunately for me, Marlene – of course, I remember now – she is Marlene Labaddee, an old friend of my mother’s and the owner of the flower shop on Sabden’s main road – does not share my habit of sneaking in by the back door.

I move quickly towards my mother’s room, hoping I’ll catch her in the act of … I’m not sure what – some act of the living – but she’s back in her usual chair by the window, staring out at the moor.

She is wearing a shapeless wool skirt that’s too big and too warm for the day. Above it is a blouse I remember from when I was a child and a thin pink cardigan. Her hair, once long and fair like mine, is shorter and thinning now, more grey than silver. She has a habit of twisting strands round her fingers and pulling at it. Her cardigans are always littered with loose hairs.

For several seconds I watch her reflection in the glass of the window. Only when her eyes lift and meet mine do I walk to her bookshelf and kneel. As I start to pull out the books, I watch her out of the corner of my eye, waiting – hoping – for a reaction. She stays still in her chair, shrunken and dull, her eyes on her lap.

Every time I come in here I mess around with her bookshelves. Sometimes I leave books under the bed, or outside on the window ledge, or soaking up a spill beneath a coffee mug.

‘Your husband is dying,’ I announce. I have a sudden brainwave and put the books back with their spines facing inwards. ‘Any day now. Lung cancer that’s spread to the pericardium. Sorry for your loss, blah, blah, blah.’

I stand and cross to the wardrobe. Last time I came, I turned everything inside out. I have my hand on the door when I realise it’s pointless. My mother is never going to come out of her stupor and snap at me to behave myself and leave her things alone. She knows exactly what I’m doing, and why, and she doesn’t care.

Weary now, I take the other armchair, just as we hear noise out in the corridor. The trolley is approaching. There is a brief knock on the door and it opens immediately.

‘All right, Sally. Ready for a brew? Oh, hiya, Cassie, love. I didn’t know you was here.’

I’ve never learned the names of the staff, but this woman’s face is familiar enough. Creased and bloated, red-veined and sweating with the effort of pushing a wheeled trolley. They all know me, of course. I pay the bill every quarter.

‘Has my sister been recently?’ I ask her.

‘Not as I know of, love.’ She pours tea and leaves.

‘I’m going to see Dad on Wednesday,’ I say when Mum and I are alone again. ‘I’ve got special permission, seeing as how he’s dying.’

My mother doesn’t reply.

‘Any preference for funeral flowers?’ I say. ‘Who was that friend of yours? You know, the florist on the main road, Marlene someone or other? Do you see much of her?’

Not an eyelid flickers.

‘I was thinking of asking Marigold to the service,’ I say. ‘You remember Marigold, don’t you? Lived with us for a time. Don’t suppose you can give me an address?’

Again, Sally doesn’t move, but I sense a difference in her breathing. She will know, now, that I was listening outside the door.

‘Maybe the Craftsmen,’ I say, thinking in for a penny. ‘Are you still in touch with any of those old guys?’

Almost. She gives a start and a half-glance in my direction. She and I make eye contact for a split second, then she slips back into her stupor.

‘What did you do to me?’ I ask. ‘What was it, exactly, that you feel you need to make up for?’

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Giving up, I get up to leave, but at the door, I stop and turn back.

‘I’ll be staying in town for the funeral,’ I say. ‘I’ve booked a room at the Black Dog,’ I say. ‘With John.’

Finally, a reaction. Her head jerks upright, her eyes wide with fright. I’m smiling as I leave the room.

Tuesday, 27 July 1999, the early hours

‘Florence! Florence, wake up. It’s not real.’

I’m entombed. The blackness is all around me and creeping ever closer is—

‘Florence, come on. Wake up.’

Movement beside me and then soft light brings me back to my own bedroom, my husband leaning over me. I am wrapped up tight in the bedclothes. Sweating, I pull myself free. Nick hands me a glass of water.

‘You OK?’ he says.

I nod. ‘Did I wake Ben?’

When the dark dreams come, I scream. I’ve been known to wake neighbours if the windows are open.

‘Can’t hear anything,’ he says. ‘I’ll go see in a minute. Are you sure you’re OK?’

‘Fine. Check on Ben.’

I’m not fine. It will be hours before I’m anywhere close, but I want Nick out of the room. If he stays, I know exactly what will come ne—

‘Usual dream?’ he asks me.

I nod again, although strictly speaking, there are three recurring dreams that we dread. The first, that the hands of dead children reach towards me from the earth of their own graves. That’s pretty bad. The second, that a man without a face is cutting pieces off me, one by one. I really don’t enjoy that one. The third, and worst, is that I’m still alive but trapped in a coffin deep underground. A coffin made by Larry.

I’ve been having these dreams for thirty years.

‘Every time you go to see him,’ Nick says as I head for the bathroom.

This isn’t strictly true, but close enough that I don’t even try arguing.

‘How much longer?’ he asks me.

My face in the mirror is corpse pale. ‘Maybe not long at all. He’s ill.’

I start counting, a therapy trick to control my breathing. ‘He’s dying,’ I add, before I reach four.

‘Good,’ says Nick.

Nick goes back to sleep eventually. I never can after the dreams – so I don’t try. Instead, I climb to the top floor and release the loft ladder. Hidden behind a box of Ben’s baby toys that I can’t bear to throw away, I find a cardboard box, dull beneath a veneer of dust, shrink-wrapped in cobwebs and with missing, nibbled-away corners. The woman I used to be wrote SABDEN on the lid.

I skim past the file on the Glassbrook murders – I need no more of those memories in my head tonight – and find my file from August 1969. Sure enough, there are newspaper cuttings of the Black Moss Manor case. Working back in time, I find a follow-up story of what happened to some of the children after the home closed down. I find court reports, summaries of the trials of the people who worked there. Aster was the name I couldn’t remember. The two people who ran the home were Drs Frederick and Judith Aster.

And then I find the one I’m looking for. On Thursday, 14 August 1969, the front page of the Lancashire Evening Telegraph was given over entirely to a story about the fire that swept through the home the night we closed it down.

The accompanying photograph was taken shortly after nine o’clock the same morning. I know that for a fact because I’m in it. Tom had driven us both up there, screeching to a halt some distance from the blackened building. There had been too many fire engines in the way to get closer.

In the photograph, I’m looking at the manor. Tom, perhaps sensing that we were being watched, has turned to face the camera. I don’t really need to read the accompanying story. I remember every detail of that day: windows blown out by the heat; the sodden ground littered with broken furniture, books, even children’s clothes. I remember the soot that seemed to hang in the air, the charred walls, the fallen chandelier.

I remember the fire chief showing us round, indicating two distinct points of origin in the staff offices.

‘Fires don’t start accidentally twice,’ I’d said.

‘No, they don’t, young lady,’ he’d replied.

I remember the heat-buckled filing cabinets, their contents reduced to ashes. They’d been left open, those cabinets, so the fire could destroy their secrets.

I’m not going back to Sabden, but I can make a phone call or two. I can put Larry’s mind at rest before he dies. I owe him that much. I turn to leave the loft and stop dead.

I owe him? I owe Larry? Now, where the hell did that come from?

Larry is dying. In a few days, maybe even hours, they tell me, he will be gone. He will take his secrets to the grave.

And I will be free.

The rising moon has woken me, as it often does. It’s a waxing gibbous moon, a day off full, a time when human energies are at their peak. I do my best work when the moon is nearing fullness. My loft flat has floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides. Moonlight floods in. It gets hot, especially in summer, but I usually sleep during the day and work at night.

A few years ago, one of the rare magazine interviews I’ve ever agreed to made a big deal of my nocturnal habits, calling me a ‘silver-haired vampire’. Daft twats. My hair is ash blonde, not ‘silver’. And I’m not a vampire. I’m a witch.

I get up. I have a piece to finish – an opening score for a new musical – but I’m not sure I can work tonight. So I stand at the open window, looking down at the sparkling lights and deep shadows of Salford at night, and I have a sense of my life opening up like a flower. Everything I’ve dreamed of for so long has slipped a little closer, will soon be mine for the taking.

A little over thirty miles north is the town I grew up in. Sabden. And in Sabden lives the only man I’ve ever truly loved. As long as Larry is alive, I can’t go back, and yet I’ve never been able to leave it completely. From my mother’s nursing home, miles away across the moors, I can sometimes see its rooftops. I hover at its edges, obeying the terms of my banishment, but close enough to get there quickly when the time comes.

That time is coming. I can feel it.

I can picture Sabden’s lights in the distance, its endless rows of dirty terraced streets, its factory chimneys like blackened fingers clutching at the sky. In my head, I can see the great black mass that is Pendle Hill at night and our old house on the edge of the moor. I hear my mother’s bees humming their songs around the apple trees and the sound of hammering in Larry’s workshop as he bangs and saws and nails in time to the Elvis Presley music he loves so much.

A sudden pain. As though someone has hit me hard in the stomach. I gulp in a breath, and when I let it out again, it greets the world as a sob.

My father is dying.

No, I will not cry. Not for Larry. And yet that’s exactly what I’m doing. Tears are streaming down my face, I’m gulping in breath, and I’m crying for everything I once believed to be true and the life that should have been mine. And yes, I admit, I’m crying for my father, who is leaving me for ever. Where is this terrible grief coming from? I’ve waited thirty years for this. I’d have killed him myself had it been possible.

I can’t stop, so I let myself cry. After a time, when the moon has risen higher, I feel calmer. There are no clouds in the sky tonight, but I can see the silver lining behind my pain. I remind myself that I’ve waited for Larry’s death. This misery is simply the price I have to pay. My tears are the sacrifice.

Perhaps they’ll be the only one needed. But I can be flexible.

I’m getting cold, but I don’t close the window. Instead, I walk to the stereo and press ‘play’. The track is one of my favourites and it seems appropriate for tonight. Paul Simon’s ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’. I have my own lyrics, of course.

The music starts. ‘Stab her in the back, Jack,’ I sing. ‘Throw her ’neath a bus, Gus.’ I’m feeling better already.

I look out, towards the blackness that I know is Sabden. Towards the place where he is, and I send my words out into the night.

I’m coming, my love.

It’s late afternoon before my schedule frees up and I have a chance to make the calls that I’ve been thinking about all day. I start with the easiest of the three, to the water company.

‘What can I do for you, Assistant Commissioner?’ says the gruff Northern voice of the company’s managing director. Were I anyone else, he probably wouldn’t have taken the call, but most people, even hundreds of miles away, prefer to keep on the good side of the Met’s senior ranks.

‘Not much to say, really,’ he tells me, when I’ve explained why I’m calling. ‘We’ve a reservoir up at Astley Bank, bit further up the moor. Long story short, we’ve been losing more water from it than we should, even at this time of year, so I had the lads check for leaks. The equipment picked something up just outside the manor so we dug that section of pipe up. That’s when we found the bodies.’

‘Did you see them yourself?’ I ask.

‘Aye, I went up there. Something like that, we take it seriously.’

‘Can you tell me anything about the condition they were in?’

A short pause. ‘Well, I rather think that’s a question for the local police, love.’

I give him a second or two of silence, hoping he might fill it. He doesn’t.

‘Are there plans to search the rest of the grounds?’ I ask. ‘How do we know there aren’t more remains to be found?’

‘Already done.’ His voice takes on a note of satisfaction. ‘The entire back garden was dug up. Nothing else. Case closed.’

Case closed.

For a moment, I try to give myself permission to believe it, to put it behind me and move on. But I’m still reeling from the thought that sprang into my head in the small hours: that I owe Larry. The idea is absurd. I owe him nothing. And yet …

Nick has asked me, many times, why I have stayed in touch with Larry over the years, why I visit him, receive his letters, send him gifts in return, even fight his corner when he is being ill-treated. I think my husband suspects, although he has never voiced as much, that I had feelings for Larry thirty years ago, feelings I’ve never managed to leave behind.

He’s wrong. I don’t, and never did, have feelings of that sort for Larry. Nor am I one of those women for whom sadistic killers hold a grim fascination. Larry’s crimes revolt me, enrage me, even after all this time.

The truth is, I cannot explain the hold Larry has over me, why I keep going back. I’m not sure I ever will.

The press office supplies me with the telephone number I need next, but only after repeated assurances on my part that it’s a personal matter and nothing to do with the Met.

Abby Thorn, who wrote several of the stories about Black Moss Manor in 1969, was a cub reporter in Sabden at the same time I served my probation there. Like me, she moved away as her career took off. I’ve caught glimpses of her over the years. She’s been the Middle East correspondent for several of the national papers and at one time had her own radio show with the London Broadcasting Corporation. Now, like me, she seems to be winding down. She’s the Northern correspondent for The Times, writes occasionally for her old paper, the Lancashire Morning Post, and presents a weekday current affairs show on BBC Radio Lancashire.

The switchboard at the BBC in Blackburn is answered quickly and I’m put through to the news desk. Ms Thorn isn’t available and so I leave my number.

I should be doing this face to face. People can lie when we only hear their voices. (Take it from me: I’ve turned lying into an art form.) And she can put the phone down on me if I really piss her off. I should go up there, walk into her shop, look her in the eyes.

I could, at that. Larry has days left. What difference can it make now?

Except it does. It’s been drummed into me for so long I can’t change it now. While Larry is alive, I can’t go back to Sabden.

‘The Flower Pot,’ she says in her low-pitched, sing-song voice. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Hello, Marlene,’ I say. ‘This is Cassandra Glassbrook.’

She catches her breath. Good start.

‘Well, hello, my girl,’ she says. ‘Long time no see. How are you, Cassie?’

She’ll know exactly how I am. My mother will have told her.

‘Your father’s time is very close now,’ she hurries on. ‘I hope he rests in peace at last.’

That is most unlikely. Still, I say nothing.

‘What can I do for you, Cassie? Are you calling about funeral flowers? I would be honoured to do a wreath for your father.’

Brilliant opening.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Can you do it in marigolds?’

Silence.

‘That’s not really the sort of flower we get in the shop.’ Her voice is guarded now.

‘Shame,’ I say. ‘Marigolds shouldn’t be forgotten about, should they?’

Nothing. Then, ‘I know you were at the home yesterday, Cassie. Your mother called and told me.’

So, she can use the telephone as well.

‘Why is she pretending to have dementia?’ I ask. ‘What the hell is she playing at?’

‘She is not pretending—’

‘I’ve seen her medi