Poppet (26 page)

In the nineties there were phone boxes deep in the countryside where the big telecommunications companies hadn’t yet got their signals. The call to Sergeant Pilson came from a phone box just to the south of Upton Farm – a woman driving past the farmhouse realized something was wrong. She drove on, got to the phone box and called. She gave her name and address, but when the investigating team tried to trace the witness her address turned out not to exist. Either she had lied, or, in Pilson’s own admission, he might have written it down incorrectly. Police press releases urging the person to come forward amounted to nothing. Ultimately it was the only loose end in a very tight case.

Upton Farm is about as high as you can get in this part of the world and as Caffery gets nearer clouds gather. The air turns whiter and his visibility dwindles. He skirts west of the dark Forestry Commission pine forest before heading northward. As he nears the farm, a few spots of rain begin to fall. It’s like crossing into the Himalayas. A sign at the roadside reads:
Upton Farm Cottage – holiday lets available
.

It’s similar land to where Caffery lives – but it’s higher, more lonely. He turns on to the driveway and the house comes into view. It’s a handsome three-storey Edwardian dwelling built from a blueish-grey shale. There’s a newly fitted slate roof and the windows are freshly painted. The sparkling panes reflect a perfect image of the surrounding conifers. Two large barns, constructed of wood which has been treated in pitch, stand on the opposite side of the concrete courtyard. Beyond them clouds have closed in; where distant hills should be visible is an impenetrable wall of shifting white.

Caffery parks in front of the house. A section of the concrete has been dug up and replaced, incongruously, with York stone flags. A couple of potted bay trees stand either side of the front door. An Edwardian-style boot scraper to the left of the doorstep completes the picture. Elegant rusticity.

He unlocks the front door and steps inside. The house smells of furniture polish and air freshener – everywhere are dotted dried-flower arrangements. The staircase has a polished-oak handrail and a hardwearing cord carpet runs up the centre of the risers. He’s transferred the crime-scene photos to his phone, and he opens the ones taken in this hallway and compares them to what is in front of him. In the nineties the staircase had an enclosed banister, wallpapered in stipple paint effect. Where he’s standing now, the wall was daubed with bloody handprints.

The handprints were an exact match. Handel was responsible for torturing, killing and mutilating his parents – no doubt about it. That’s not what’s wrong here. It’s something else. Caffery has no idea what. He goes slowly up the stairs, opening his mind and his ears and his skin to everything this place can communicate.

The room where Graham and Louise Handel were found is along the landing to the right of the stairway. When Isaac lived here this corridor was dark – carpeted in green Axminster with a leaf-swirl pattern. Now there are bare boards, stripped and waxed. The photos on Caffery’s phone show seven framed prints on the wall, all hanging askew from the violence that had taken place. Now the walls are bare. Painted grey.

He opens the door to the room slowly. The curtains are open, the light is chalky and flat. Here too, everything is as different as can be. An oak box bed with a scrolled leather headboard replaces the divan; a thick sheepskin rug at the foot of the bed covers the place Isaac’s parents died.

The trip-wire was between here and the bed. The bomb-disposal team had to work only inches from the mutilated bodies of Graham and Louise. The men should have been accustomed to carnage, but the experience evidently got to them – one of the team resigned his position the following day and became a teacher. Apparently he never explained his reasons to anyone.

Caffery comes in and squats, lifting a corner of the rug. The boards beneath it are as smooth and polished as the rest, but there is a slight tonal difference, a darker patina in the grain. A succession of new owners hasn’t been able to get rid of all the bloodstains.

He holds up his phone in front of the modern image of the room and zooms on the photo of Louise, pictured from this angle. She wears jogging trousers and a Dunlop T-shirt, and lies on her back, her mouth wrenched open. Blood trails from the corners of her mouth to her jaw. Her ears and some teeth are missing.

Caffery glances up and around – tries to picture the minimalist room with curtainless windows as it was in the nineties: old lumpy furniture, heavy curtains against dark windows. He closes his eyes and spins himself through the years. It’s not much of a leap for him to imagine that era, and it doesn’t bring him any closer to the nudging point of what is wrong with the whole scenario.

No. He’s not there yet.

He takes one last look around the room, then starts along the corridor and back down the stairs. Outside, the clouds have cleared briefly; pale sunshine floods the farmyard, glancing off his windscreen. He wonders about the woman who reported the murders. What could she have seen to alert her?

Caffery turns and gauges the distance from here to the road. That’s wrong to start with – the bottom part of the house isn’t visible from the road. The crime-scene report says Pilson responded to the call and he arrived at six forty-five p.m. That he followed a blood trail that led from the house to the barn. The fence and the paved area are new – fifteen years ago, the house and barns would have stood on the same concrete courtyard. A cop responding to a triple-nine call would pull up outside the house, and his first instinct would be to look for casualties. According to the report, the front door was open. The distance from the house to the barns is approximately twenty-five metres. So why didn’t Harry Pilson go into the house first?

Caffery crosses to the right-hand barn. It was in this barn, the larger of the two, that Handel was cornered and arrested. The large doors are padlocked, so Caffery tries the small access door. It’s bolted but not locked, and it swings open. The barn is still being used to store straw and hay. Inside, it is surprisingly warm, a little dusty, and all the sounds from outside are muffled. He blinks – his eyes adjusting to the gloom. A shaft of grey sunlight from the partly open door falls at an angle to his right, catching motes of hay dust and casting a small square of light on the floor of the barn. There’s a sound – a
churr, churr
rising in pitch, again and again, and ending on the third
churr
, with a decisive
cluck
. Hens – half a dozen of them – stalk out of the shadows, into the small square of light and begin to scratch and peck at the floor, searching for insects and spilt grain.

Caffery looks at the picture on his phone. Pilson said he spotted Handel in the hayloft – right from this spot. The hayloft is almost directly above him, and Caffery cranes his neck, trying to find the correct line of sight. All he can see is planking overhead; he can’t see the edge of the loft. He steps inside the barn, keeping his palm flat against the door to prevent it slamming closed and cutting off the light. The hayloft rim is still out of his line of sight.

‘And that’s just not right,’ he murmurs. He jams his ASP baton between the door and the frame to keep it open, and takes a couple more steps inside. The hens scatter noisily into the dark. Again he stares at the hayloft.

He stands there for a long time – thinking about the phone call, the blood trail, and the rest of the bullshit in the report. Yup, he thinks, bullshit.

That’s what’s been bugging him all along. Sergeant Harry Pilson’s report is all lies.

Poppets

THE JAMS ARE
all potted and now need time to cool. Penny lies on the sofa, a blanket pulled up around her. She’s weary – she didn’t sleep well and when she woke this morning she was in no doubt. The quilt next to her was warm. She felt it all over, trying to understand how this quirk of temperature had happened. The shutters weren’t open for the sun to come in and she hadn’t been lying on it – the blankets were still tucked around her. There was no explaining it. It was just as if Suki had been there.

She sighs and lifts her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. Her breasts chafe at the underside of the blankets – a sudden, crackling reminder of what it was to be sexual. Sensuality has been Penny’s undoing. Over the years she’s eaten too much and drunk too much and loved too much, in all the wrong places. You get told as youngsters that a type of emotional incontinence, a stray hedonistic streak, will lead to no good. You never believe it – until, lo and behold, it leads to no good.

Fifteen years ago Penny was married. Not happily, but respectably and without rancour. Not much sex, but equally no fighting and no poison. Then her hormones sabotaged everything. She met the Handels at a village party and soon she and her husband became friends with the attractive couple from Upton Farm. Graham in particular was good-looking – tall with a touch of danger about him that pricked Penny’s senses wide awake. Graham, for his part, took one look at the pretty cook who had moved into the Old Mill and knew exactly where his life was going to take him. Penny didn’t stand a chance.

The affair evolved slowly, almost under the noses of their respective spouses. Louise Handel travelled away on business a lot and that allowed Graham and Penny to spend more time together. She grew to know a lot about the Handels and their lives. More than she wanted to know. She found they had a son who didn’t attend the local school but was taken out of the county to a ‘special’ school. Isaac definitely had needs. Introspective and unable to look anyone in the eye, on occasions when Penny encountered him with his parents she tried to get through to him but failed.

Sometimes when Louise was away Graham would send Isaac outside to play while he and Penny locked themselves in the spare bedroom on the top floor. Penny worried about Isaac outside – his silence was disturbing – maybe he suspected what was happening. Maybe he would tell his mother. After sex, she would look out of the window under the eaves and watch Isaac playing – always solitary and a bit too intense for a thirteen-year-old who should be out kicking a football with his friends. Usually he would be squatting, completely absorbed in some private task. Making something.

One day, during school hours, Penny happened to be passing Isaac’s bedroom on her way to get a glass of water. Ordinarily she’d have walked straight past – she’d made a pact with herself never to pry into the life of Graham’s family. Today, however, Graham was showering, Louise was away on business and Isaac’s door stood open. It was too tempting. On his bed was a small tin. Curious, she crept inside, sat on his bed and opened the tin. Inside she found a collection of odd little dolls made from scraps of leather and pieces of stick. One wore a crudely made track suit, fashioned from scraps of fabric Penny recognized as belonging to Louise. The other doll was male. It wore trousers of brown cord – similar to a pair Graham had in his wardrobe.

Penny chose not to mention the dolls to Graham. She wasn’t sure why – was it because they were so disturbing? Or was it because they felt like a subtle key to her lover’s private world? Over the following weeks she increased the times she went into Isaac’s room and from what she found and the snippets of information she got in conversation from Graham, began to piece together what was happening to the boy. She decided that anyone or anything who had upset or angered Isaac would have a doll made in their likeness. These strange mini-representations of people and creatures populated the adolescent’s world. A neighbour’s notoriously bad-tempered cat – who had once scratched Isaac – was depicted with a toilet roll as the body, real hair stapled to it, eyes glued on clownishly. Its paws, Penny noticed, were bound, and the hair seemed to be real cat hair. She stole a few strands and the next day secretly compared it to the cat. The hairs appeared to match.

Graham told Penny that at Isaac’s school there was a little girl who had a habit of stealing. She must have been driven by the thrill, because the purloined objects followed no logical pattern – sweets and toys and money and clothing and pencils and pieces of paper and socks. She stole the pencil shavings from someone’s sharpener, just to prove she could. The day Isaac’s football disappeared from his show-and-tell shelf was the day he came home and made an effigy of the little girl in a torn blue gingham that exactly matched the girls’ uniforms at Isaac’s school. It had long black hair made of wool and one hand tied behind its back. The stealing hand, forever disabled.

Penny went to the local library and browsed several books on voodoo. The books explained that a voodoo fetish, or ‘poppet’, must contain an object close to the person represented – ideally something taken from the body: fingernail clippings or hair. Excretions too – urine, faeces, semen, mucus, sweat, blood – could be collected and used. Even clothing. A shaman or medicine man would then chant spells which had the power to transfer physical acts committed on the doll to the person or thing it represented.

‘Mrs Handel has these books out on loan all the time,’ said the librarian with a sniff. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? You know – the way the boy’s turned out.’

Louise was doing an OU history course, and when Penny dug a little deeper she discovered Louise had indeed chosen voodoo and the slave trade for one of her papers. It was clear to Penny that Isaac had somehow seen the books, or been influenced by Louise’s interest, but when she questioned Graham about the books he made light of her unease. This marked the beginning of her loss of faith in her lover. Slowly, over the next few months, she began to suspect he wasn’t serious about her. She even began to wonder if she wasn’t the only lover Graham had known during his marriage, and whether Louise’s ‘business’ trips were actually getaways to visit her own boyfriends. Penny’s anxiety and guilt about her husband – her quiet, unargumentative, unadventurous, unsexy husband – exploded.

That month Penny and her husband were invited to the Handels’ Halloween party. Graham insisted it would seem odd if they didn’t attend. Penny can still remember it in vivid detail – she spent most of the night in the kitchen wearing her gypsy blouse and patchwork skirt, clutching her handmade witch hat in one hand, bemused by all the strange women dressed in green wigs and suspender belts who smoked and laughed and swallowed champagne in gulps and outlined their mouths in red gloss.