Poppet (35 page)

The pliers and the wire and the other things Handel bought at Wickes aren’t here. Maybe they’re elsewhere in the woods. Caffery starts to manoeuvre himself backwards out of the cave, ticking off in his head the searches and permissions he’s going to need. Surveillance. The superintendent should OK the surveillance spend, but he can’t picture anyone in the Force Targeting Team relishing the prospect of staking out this place. They have a limited overtime allowance and they’re not going to waste it. They want a nice warm car to sit in. Not bird watchers’ gear, sou’westers and peeing in a bottle.

Something dangles near Caffery’s face. He freezes, half bent over. His eyes rotate slowly, and he lifts the torch, partly as a weapon. The object is inches away from his eyes – so close it takes a moment to focus. It’s the crudely stitched face of a doll. It must have been wedged between the roots overhead and Caffery has dislodged it. It hangs from its legs, upside down, swinging with the momentum of its drop.

It bears all the hallmarks of one of Isaac’s poppets. The mix of textures – in this case a butterscotch-coloured fake leather for the skin, highly polished porcelain for the face, and a strange little dress made from a scrap of white lace. Caffery doesn’t touch it. He scrambles his glasses out from the pocket of his North Face, crams them on his face and cants his head round so he can study it in the torchlight.

Yes, it’s similar to the others. But there’s more. This one is different, nastier. It’s a female with long yellow strands of wool, like blonde hair, that sway as she rocks to and fro upside down. Her hair is free, but nothing else is. She is gagged with a narrow strip of duct tape and her arms are folded across her chest, stitched there. As if to secure her arms further the wrists have been bound with a delicate silver chain wrapped tightly around them.

Caffery is now sufficiently conversant with Handel’s style to understand. This means a woman, a flesh-and-blood woman in the real world that Handel has plans for. She has blonde hair and in her wardrobe will be a lace dress or a blouse with a tiny, unnoticed tear in it. Missing from her jewellery box will be a silver bracelet.

An Unfortunate Dwarf

THE PLANS OF
Beechway High Secure Unit are like the map of the Odyssean labyrinth. So multilayered, multifaceted you could lose yourself. A print of them has been framed and mounted in Melanie’s office and now AJ stands and stares blankly at them. Maybe there is something in this place that can engulf a person. It swallowed Pauline and Moses and Zelda. Maybe it’s busily swallowing him too.

He runs his hands through his hair. Scrunches up his eyes and wishes he could take a pill – some of the drugs the patients get when they go into crisis. Something just to switch his head off and sluice things out of him. He glances over his shoulder at the kitchenette. The little touches of homeliness Melanie has added. A print of a cat sleeping on a white Mediterranean wall. A teapot in two pieces, painted with the blue water and sky of the Riviera. He’s sure he and Mel have touched something in each other. But this? This secret? All the openness he thought they had – after sex and laughing and their candid admission sessions – after all that, she’s still hidden things. AJ is sure it’s got something to do with her separation from Jonathan, he just doesn’t know what. This is turning to a bleaker day than the one when his mother died – alone in the garden, with grass and earth coating her half-bitten tongue.

He washes up the coffee cups. Melanie’s left an open packet of chocolate digestives, which he diligently wraps and tucks into a tin. He switches off the light and heads back through her office. At the door he stops. He stands very still, his head against it, his hand on the light switch. He breathes in and out.

Then he switches the light back on, goes to the window, lowers the blinds and sits down at Melanie’s desk. It’s made of functional beech – very light and honey-clear, everything organized carefully. There is an old-fashioned in-and-out-tray stacker with one or two envelopes in it. Her computer is a PC with a light-up wireless mouse on a mat that has a quote printed on it, white against a blue background:
Failures do what is tension relieving, while winners do what is goal achieving
.

AJ looks at the mat for a long time. Eventually he touches the mouse. Just his finger resting lightly on it. The computer comes to life.

It is password-locked.

Of course it is.

He sits back, almost relieved. He doesn’t want to be the sneak. He really doesn’t. He has no right to spy on Melanie or judge her. It’s not as if he’s perfect. She’s had it hard, and maybe he should understand more. She didn’t know where all this would lead. He’s going to call her. Say he’s sorry. He pulls out his phone and looks at the screen and instantly all he can picture is Isaac Handel with his hands around Zelda’s neck. He puts it back in his pocket.

He taps his fingers on his knees, undecided. Then he opens the bottom drawer of her desk. There is nothing much of interest in there – a sponge bag, a pair of purple kitten-heel shoes – maybe in case she needs to look smart for an unexpected occasion. Also some deodorant and a pair of flesh-coloured tights. In the next drawer there is a desk organizer full of paper clips and rubber bands. Wedged under it is a hefty paperback book.

He pulls the book out:
Screaming Walls – A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to the UK’s Most Haunted Asylums
. It must be something she’s bought in the wake of The Maude’s appearances. Maybe she wants to study precedents of the unit’s ‘haunting’. The date of publication as 1999 – long before the first manifestations of The Maude in Beechway. Out of curiosity he flicks to the index and looks for Beechway. It’s not mentioned. He’s about to put the book back when something else occurs to him.

The index takes up four pages, but he runs his finger down each page, just out of curiosity, his eye scanning the alphabet:
Bedlam (Bethlem)
;
Care in the Community
;
Cherry Knowle Hospital, Sunderland
;
Denbigh Hospital
;
DSMV diagnosis
;
ectenic force
;
Hine, G.T. (architect)
;
Mental Health Act, effects of
;
Ryhope General
;
St George Field, Bethlem
;
‘Sitting’ and possession
…

He comes to a halt, his finger under the words. Sitting and possession?

Quickly he turns to the page number.

The text is dotted with plans and photos of a mock-Gothic building, a classic workhouse structured on the
enpeigne
or ‘comb’ principle, with separate units connected like the teeth of a comb to a spine. The Gothic Revival details have been shored up by some hasty council; a set of columns that would originally have been constructed of iron core covered in plaster to resemble stone have been replaced by stacked and painted breezeblocks. But the pointed arched windows and external crenels remain intact.

Hartwool Hospital. It’s in the north of England near Rotherham. He races through the text, muttering the words under his breath like a reception-year child on his early reading books.

Multiple episodes of self-abuse were attributed to the influence of the so-called ‘B ward sitting demon’. Rumoured to be the ghost of a past matron, a dwarf who abused the patients …

AJ’s pulse beats strong and loud in his ears.

A suicide attempt in which the patient tried to cut off his own nose …

Patient X reported an incubus crouched on her chest when she woke …

Staff absences and resignations were occasionally blamed on the fear there was a ghost dwarf or an unknown entity that sat on the chests of patients …

… hallucinations and delusions of haunting …

… this crude image of a dwarf squatting on a patient’s chest was produced by one of the patients in 1997 …

He stares at the image. A line drawing of a dark shape crouched on the chest of a supine patient. Next to it a photo of a gravestone in the grounds of the now-abandoned hospital.

Our sister Maude, an unfortunate dwarf,
who departed this life and was born into the spirit life,
18 September 1893

AJ glances to the page header – Hartwool Hospital. Rotherham. His pulse is deafening now.

Hartwool Hospital is the place Melanie worked before she came here. The place she was transferred from during the Care in the Community upheaval.

The place she worked with Jonathan Keay.

Things Are Not What They Seem

PENNY PILSON HASN’T
returned Caffery’s call, so he drives carefully back down the valley, over a rickety bridge, and up to the Old Mill. The shutters are all still closed. He knocks and tries to peer through the sweetheart holes but it looks dark in there. He’s getting back into his car when there’s a noise – a shuffling inside the house – and the door opens a crack.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

Penny’s wearing a knitted cardigan and denim cut-offs, and has her arms crossed with her hands tucked under the armpits. Her feet are naked and her hair is ruffled and smeared as if she’s been kneading it with greasy hands.

‘You OK?’

‘Yes.’ Her face is quite clear of make-up, but as Caffery approaches he’s sure it’s more than just the nakedness that’s different. It’s not the same nervousness she had yesterday, it’s different. It’s a kind of new reserve. As if she’s holding something back.

‘You sure?’

‘Of course. I was in the bath, that’s all.’

He nods. He’s a bit taken off guard by her. ‘I left a message earlier.’

‘I know – I’ve been so busy all day – I was going to call when I’d had dinner.’

He assesses her carefully. She hasn’t invited him in, and she’s positioned herself to fill the gap in the door so he can’t see past her. ‘I had a question. I’ve been up there –’ He lifts his chin, indicating the direction of The Wilds. The old yew tree. ‘And I think I’ve found where he’s living.’

‘Oh?’

‘The Wilds?’

‘Yes. You’re right. He used to go there when he was living at the farm.’ She gives a blank smile and begins to close the door.

‘Wait.’ Caffery puts a hand up. ‘Just a minute – I’ve got another question.’

She hesitates. Then, almost reluctantly, she opens the door again. He gets a glimpse of the passage beyond. No lights on. A strange smell. Maybe something she’s cooking. Her fingernails are bitten and raw.

‘I found something I wanted you to look at.’

From inside his jacket pocket he pulls out the doll. He’s wrapped it in a plastic carrier bag, and now he carefully opens it and holds it out for Penny to inspect. She stares at the doll, her throat working.

‘Yes,’ she says tightly. ‘That’s his work.’

‘Do you know who it could be?’

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t really want to look at it any more. If you don’t mind.’

He wraps the doll and returns it to the inside of his jacket. Penny is a different person from the one he met yesterday. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. His memory flits over the affair – her dalliance with Graham Handel. Maybe that’s what’s happening now. Maybe she’s got someone in the house she’s ashamed of.

‘I’ll be on my way then.’ He is about to turn away when she leans forward and whispers fiercely at him.

‘
Mr Caffery?
’

‘Yes?’

‘
Things are not what they seem
.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Just that.’ She straightens. ‘I’ll say goodbye now.’

And before he can ask her what she means she steps back inside and closes the door, leaving him standing there, bewildered, not entirely sure what has just happened.

He drives back to MCIT, wondering if he should turn round and go back. What the hell did she mean –
Things are not what they seem
… He parks in his usual spot under the flyover and goes upstairs. The doll in his inside pocket presses against his chest – as if it is digging its fingers into him. He hates the thing. He’ll be glad to see the back of it. In his office he puts it on his desk, the plastic carrier bunching around it like a nest. While the rest of the office block hums gently as various team members come and go, as the necessary phone calls go out, as the superintendent gets on to the surveillance team, Caffery moves the vast lens of his microscope lamp and positions it over the doll.

Using one gloved finger, he lifts the chain that has been used to bind the doll’s arms. It’s a bracelet – and now he has the chance to study it carefully he sees there is a silver pendant tucked inside the chain. He takes one or two photographs of the doll as it is; figuring there’s nothing to lose if he pulls it out, he uses the nail of his little finger to get leverage on the object. It springs free and falls across the gagged face of the doll.

Two letters in curlicue script. The letters are M and A.

In his pocket his phone rings. He pulls it out and sees AJ LeGrande’s name flash up on the display. ‘AJ, hi.’

‘Can you talk?’

‘I can.’

‘I’ve got a name.’

‘A name for … ?’

‘I keep thinking – whether Handel had some place he could hole up. Someone who could help him?’

This is so apposite – so like having his mind read – Caffery lets out an incredulous laugh. He stops studying the doll and sits down – pulls over a Post-it pad and finds a pen.

‘Go ahead?’

‘Jonathan Keay,’ says AJ. ‘K-E-A-Y.’

‘Keay. Who is?’

‘Who was an ocky-health person here – occupational therapy? Until about three weeks ago. No idea where he’s gone.’

‘Fine.’ Caffery keeps writing, the phone jammed under his chin. ‘So … details?’

‘Out of date. I’ve got an address – but I’ve just been told he’s not renting there any more and the mobile I’ve got is a dud too. Just tried it.’

‘DOB? National insurance number – should be on his records.’

‘Yes, but that’s HR and I’m not authorized to get into them. I’ve got an old landline – haven’t tried it. Looks years old.’