Poppet (25 page)

The moment he and Melanie get to work, AJ makes an excuse and goes straight to Handel’s room. It still hasn’t been turned round for the next admission off the acute ward. He unlocks the door, goes in, and locks the door behind him before anyone sees. The rooms in the pre-discharge ward are designed for low-risk patients ready to move either out into the community or to be referred on to medium-secure units. The patients have furniture and can put up posters. Some risk-evaluated patients even have baths in their en suites. Handel was allowed a tub and coat hangers and a spotlight above his bed for reading.

A start has been made on preparing the room for the next occupant. The cleaning equipment has been brought up here and left in the corner. There are two bin liners full of rubbish sitting under the window. AJ squats and starts going through the contents. Nothing too odd: the usual assortment of sweet-wrappers, a mouldy apple, magazines and old underwear.

The patients are very good at hiding things away – and it’s rarely the sort of things one might expect, like cigarettes or drugs. Quite often it’s food. AJ’s lost count of the number of treasure troves of mouldering cake and pizza he’s found tucked away in pillowcases, in the backs of wardrobes, even stuffed into trainers with the laces tied neatly over the top. Sometimes it’s dirty clothes they’ve attached a random significance to. Once he found an old-fashioned ceramic sewing thimble that had been packed to the brim with a thick sticky substance. He’d put the tip of a biro into it and dug around for several seconds before he realized it was the patient’s collection of ear wax.

It’s a charmed life this, working at Beechway.

Having gone through the contents of the bin bags and found nothing that means anything to him, AJ sits on the mattress and glances around. The walls are bare apart from a few dabs of Blu-tack where Isaac’s posters have been taken down. The curtains are torn in one place – he must make a note of that and get a works requisition into Maintenance. The door to Isaac’s shower room is open, and AJ’s attention is drawn to the tap in the basin, which is dripping steadily.

The bathrooms are designed to be indestructible, with no ‘ligature points’ – i.e. nowhere the patient can hang him or herself. All the taps and handles are curved down towards the floor. These bathrooms are black holes of dread to the nursing staff. It is rare to go into one and find the toilet unused. And then there is the usual careless detritus of human functions – tissues glued together with snot, and, in the case of the men, other bodily secretions. Pubic hair, scabs, vomit. Even the most fastidious OCD patients seem to have a blind spot when it comes to bathrooms.

He stares into the room for a long time, the cogs in his head turning slowly. Then he gets up and crosses to the bathroom door, switches on the light.

Thankfully the cleaning crew have been through already – it smells of bleach and the light reflects off the newly cleaned sink. The window looks out over to the admin unit, where one or two lighted windows can be seen. The skies are clouded and low, threatening rain. It’s as dark out there as if it was evening. AJ uses his toe to give the bath panel a quick push. It bends then bounces back with a loud
whoomp
. He crouches and runs his hand around the edge where the plastic meets the bathtub. His forefinger finds the breech – up in the top-right-hand corner, at the end where the taps are, the panel is missing a bracket.

He fumbles his keys out from his trouser pocket and, using the passive security fob, which is a rigid slab of plastic, he carefully pries the top corner of the panel away from the bath and peers inside. The fibreglass bottom of the bathtub is visible, but not much more. He gets out his mobile phone, and opens the torch app. Pushing his right hand in between the panel and the bath, he uses his arm to increase the space, then shines the torch into the dark.

Something is wedged down there. A large holdall with ‘Adidas’ written on it. He grits his teeth – stretches for it, catching the handle on the tip of his finger and dragging it closer. He won’t be able to pull it out intact – he’ll have to open it and empty the contents while it’s still behind the panel. When the bag is close enough, he shifts position so he can keep the phone light shining on it and get leverage on the zip.

He pulls the zip back, feeling the soft tick tick tick of the slider bumping along the teeth. There’s a smell coming out of the bag – a smell of old laundry. You only have to work in a place like this for one day to learn that patients will store the strangest of things in the strangest of places – you never put your hands anywhere you can’t see first. So he nudges the phone closer and squints through the gap.

What he sees makes him hurriedly pull his hand out. The bath panel snaps closed with a loud crack and he sits back, breathing hard.

A Holdall

THE PHONE WAKES
Caffery. It is morning and he is lying on the sofa in his office. He jerks upright, thinking it’s his mobile, thinking it’s Flea. It’s not. It’s the office phone. He rolls over, reaching across to the desk for it. It’s reception – AJ’s here again – something he wants to talk about.

‘Give me five. I’ll be down.’

He loosens his tie and sits for a while rubbing his face, reorientating himself. Isaac’s report is scattered on the floor around him – he must have fallen asleep reading. In the incident room there are three civilian officers already at their work stations. He’s slept through it all. The first proper night’s sleep he’s had since Jacqui Kitson walked into Browns Brasserie five nights ago.

He fishes his mobile out and checks for texts or calls or emails from Flea. Nothing. Now there’s a surprise. After a while he gets up. He avoids looking at Misty’s photograph – as if he’s ashamed to have been thinking about something else. He finds his spare toothbrush in the top drawer, has a quick, make-do wash in the men’s, then goes down to meet AJ, who is standing shyly in reception, holding an enormous Adidas holdall. Is it just Caffery or is he a little paler than he was yesterday?

‘Thank you for letting me come up,’ he says when they get back to the office. ‘Everything OK?’

Caffery shrugs. Pulls a seat out for AJ. There’s a briefing on another case going on in the CCTV viewing suite – he has to close his door on the noise.

‘I had a word with the pathologist last night – they’re going to take a second look at Zelda.’

‘So you are going to follow up on it?’

‘I’ve already started. Yesterday I went to the hostel Isaac’s supposed to be staying at.’

‘And?’

‘He’s not there. Hasn’t been since the day before yesterday.’

‘Fuck.’ AJ sits down with a bump. ‘Fuck.’

‘I know.’ Caffery checks his watch again. He didn’t mean to sleep this late – it’s set him back. ‘We don’t know where he is but I’ve got some leads I’m going to follow.’ His eyes travel down to the holdall. ‘I take it there’s something important in the bag?’

‘Yes, I … or rather, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s important, but I found these. Hidden in Handel’s bathroom.’

He lifts the holdall on to the desk, unzips it and spills out the contents. Caffery puts his glasses on and shuffles his chair forward for a closer look. He gets a whiff and covers his nose with his hand. ‘Jesus. They stink.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I don’t even know if I should have them – if they’re stolen property – or evidence or what. Maybe I should have left them where I found them – but I didn’t.’

‘I wish you had.’ Caffery pushes his chair away from the desk and gets to his feet to open the window.

‘I thought you’d want them.’

‘Why would I want them?’

AJ shifts uncertainly. He shoves his hands in the pockets of his jacket and looks at his feet. ‘I don’t know,’ he says lamely. ‘I suppose I thought you might get Handel’s DNA from them? Maybe?’

‘Right.’ Caffery fastens the window open as far as it will go. The chill morning air comes in. ‘Right.’

They stand together in silence and stare at what is on the desk. A pile of dolls. Nightmarish things, made from a variety of plastics and fabrics. Most have awful, lifelike eyes – tiny plastic things from a hobby shop. Like frogs’ eyes they blink open and closed when the dolls are moved. A few have stitch marks where the eyes should be. One has a normal eye on the left and a red boiled sweet in place of the right one.

Each is different and unwholesome in its own way. Some seem to represent females – they have long string hair and crude breasts sewn from sheets of knitting. Others are males with tiny appendages of hobby-shop felt or dangling, crocheted sacs. Some have miniature strips of masking tape placed over their eyes and mouths. Others have their arms tied behind their backs with lengths of garden twine. Some have horrible little sets of teeth – made of maybe shells or fake pearls, Caffery can’t tell. Some are enshrined on pink satin cushions, their hands crossed on their chests, the way medieval saints and warriors are often depicted on their tombs – brave, sacred and martyred.

‘They were in his bathroom?’

‘Uh-huh. Hidden behind the bath panel.’

‘They stink. No one noticed the smell?’

‘You’d have to put it in context. You know, of the overwhelming completely unavoidable, completely constant and disgusting smell that is normality in the unit. Don’t tell me you’ve never been in a place like that?’

Caffery inclines his head. ‘Not pleasant, I grant you.’

‘And everyone was used to Isaac smelling. Especially in the beginning. These—’ He waves a hand over the dolls, as if he’s struggling to find the words to describe them. ‘These
things
he made. It was all he ever did with his time. He’d always carry one or two around with him – couldn’t be separated from them. Not ever. We gave up trying. If you’d spent most of your time sandwiched under Isaac’s armpits you’d smell too.’

He unfolds a piece of paper torn from a ring binder and holds it out to Caffery. On it have been written several lines in a very small, neat hand. Caffery peers at them. He can make out one or two phrases that sound biblical in origin.

AJ runs a finger under a few of them:

Be thou not one of them that committeth foul acts
.

Avoid idleness and intemperance
.

‘This is what Pauline wrote on her thighs. And this is what Zelda wrote. And this … ?’

He locates a line at the bottom and taps it.

Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart
.

‘That is what Moses wrote on his walls before he pulled his eye out.’

Caffery nods slowly. He raises his eyes and finds AJ looking at him steadily.

‘If I had any doubt at all before – when I saw this I thought …’

‘I know what you thought.’ Caffery wants to be going and he wants to be going now. ‘And for the record? I’m thinking it too.’

Upton Farm

MOMENTS AFTER AJ
leaves the building Caffery gets a call from Beatrice Foxton, the pathologist. She’s done the second post-mortem on Zelda and hasn’t been able to reach any further conclusions. Sometimes, she explains, we just have to hold our hands up. And say we don’t know for sure.

Caffery decides it doesn’t matter. He’s seen and heard enough about Handel to keep going anyway. He puts on a pair of nitrile gloves – as much for the sake of cleanliness as from a fear of contaminating evidentiary material – and packs the dolls into the holdall. He seals it in a bag he gets from one of the CSIs, then carries it to the car. Throws it in the boot and climbs into the car. He lets the engine run for a few minutes then sniffs. No smell coming from the dolls. Good. He puts the car into gear and heads out of the car park.

In the nineties when Handel murdered his parents, there was still such a thing as policing in villages. If the place was too small for a station, there would be a single cop who lived in an authority-owned police house, a cop who stepped out of his front door straight on to his beat – who knew not just the locals in the village itself, but the inhabitants of every lane and every farm in the area. He would have known Isaac and his parents. The photocopied transcript of the police notebook on the day of the murders states that a call from a nearby phone box went through to the village police station. That the cop, Sergeant Harry Pilson, was on the scene within ten minutes.

Upton Farm has changed hands three times in the years since the murders. The present owners, a couple who live two miles away, bought the place five years ago and let it out as a holiday home. Caffery stops off at their house to pick up a set of keys. The husband’s out, but the wife is there. She’s a forty-something woman with angry eyes and defiantly city hair; it’s clear country living is an aesthetic choice and not what she was born to. Every inch of the place is filled with the sort of country living that townies aspire to: oilskins and designer wellies. Paintings on the wall that are self-consciously artisan in their appearance. She probably hopes he’ll admire it, but he’s known women like her before and is too old to waste his time lying. He declines her offer of coffee and asks for the keys to Upton Farm.

‘You’ve always rented it out?’

She gives a short laugh. No humour. ‘We’ve always
tried
to rent it out. If anyone would take it. This area is supposed to be a popular holiday destination, but I’ve only had six rentals this year. And two of those changed their mind after the first night there. Walked out and demanded their money back.’ She shakes her head. ‘I’d put it on the market, but who would want it? Only some London idiots like us who don’t know its history.’

Outside, it’s a cold, damp day. Wisps of vapour streak up from the red-and-orange forests that line the valleys and cling to the cliffs like low cloud. Caffery has the heating on full blast as he drives, along back lanes wide enough for one car, with passing places at intervals – and God help the traveller who meets a tractor coming the other way. On the passenger seat is Sergeant Pilson’s report from the day of the murders. One of the DCs at MCIT is checking whether Pilson still lives in the area. If he does, they’ll message Caffery his contact details.