Poppet (28 page)

She comes to the table and opens the jar for him. The vacuum makes a reassuring
thwock
. He leans over and smells it. ‘Mmmm.’

‘Tastes even better – there you go, all yours.’

‘Thank you.’ He takes the jar, recaps it, and sets it in front of him on the table. Folds his arms. ‘And now, I think we should talk.’

‘Do we have to?’

‘We have to. Even though you’re doing everything you can to avoid the subject.’

She gives a grim half-smile. ‘And in my position? A cop turning up on your doorstep? It means bad, bad, bad. I can only think it’s Harry – and I don’t want to.’

‘Harry’s fine. He says to send his love.’

She gives a small frown. ‘Not Harry?’

‘He sent me here, but he’s OK.’

There’s a tiny pause. She sits at the table, meets his eyes head on. ‘OK – then what?’

‘Upton Farm. Harry told me the truth.’

She is silent for a long time, her eyes roving over his face. Then she shakes her head. ‘So, tell me. Am I in trouble? That was years ago – in the end I don’t know how what we did could be seen as obstructing the police – I mean, I did report it, and …’

The sentence dies. Caffery is shaking his head. ‘It’s not about what you did back then. It’s what’s happening now. It’s Isaac.’

‘Isaac. What’s happened to Isaac?’

‘He’s out.’

That knocks Penny’s expression in half. She pales. Her mouth opens slightly, but she doesn’t speak. In the corner a grandfather clock ticks the seconds out, as if emphasizing the way time is stretching. And then she leans forward, elbows on the table.

‘He’s
out
? Really?’

‘Really.’

‘OK, OK. OK.’ She pinches her nose tightly. ‘This is insane. I was only thinking about him this morning … And he’s out, you say? What happened? He escaped?’

‘No – he had a tribunal – he was discharged. He’s rehabilitated.’

‘
Rehabilitated?
No – oh no. Someone like him doesn’t …’ She lets the sentence drift off. ‘Where’s he been released to?’

Caffery doesn’t answer.

‘Not back
here
? You are kidding me, aren’t you?’

‘I need you to help me fill in the details. I’m trying to get an idea of what Isaac was like. The sort of things that preoccupied him. Things that interested him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it might help me pin down the places he’s likely to gravitate to.’

‘You’ve lost him, haven’t you? He’s gone.’

‘I’m not here to alarm you – there’s nothing to suggest he presents a danger. I’m trying to get a feel for what he’s like, that’s all. Take me through what happened.’

Penny scrapes her chair back. She stands for a few moments, nervously unbuttoning and buttoning the front of her cardigan, her eyes darting around the room. She crosses to the windows that face out over the valley. The trees on the far side have turned purple in the failing light. She opens the window and stands for a moment, looking up the valley in the direction of Upton Farm.

Then she pulls the shutters closed. She locks them. She goes to the next window and locks those shutters. And the next. She circulates the entire room – locking every window. She disappears into a side room where he can see fruit piled and he hears her locking and bolting the door there. A moment later she crosses the living room and goes to the front door, which she also locks.

‘Jesus.’ She grabs a glass and comes back to sit at the table. She fills it with the plum vodka, knocks it back in one. Then a second. She wipes her eyes and makes an effort to calm herself. ‘I’m sorry. I suppose it serves me right. If Harry had put my name on the report – if we’d been honest – then I’d have been warned, wouldn’t I?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Lost my little old dog the other night too. It never rains, eh? All my fault. I know – all my own fault.’

Caffery watches her drink more vodka. He watches the colour come slowly back to her face.

‘November the second,’ she says suddenly. ‘That’s when it happened. It was a horrible November – a bad year for the fruit. We’d had a wet summer and some of the trees were empty. I remember worrying that the wildlife was going to starve – all the birds and the squirrels. The business had only just started, so that was a worry too. And I was trying to work out how to end it with Graham. As it turned out that was the last thing I should have been worrying about. They told me later Isaac had been with the bodies for three hours. Doing things to them. I suppose if I hadn’t arrived he’d have gone on and on.’

Caffery nods silently. ‘You know about the trip wire, don’t you?’

She looks up. ‘The explosives? Yes. They said it was meant for whoever found the crime scene – but Isaac told Harry he’d planned on setting the bodies alight remotely. He could deal with all the things he’d done to their bodies, but he couldn’t stomach seeing them burn. He’d got some sort of device to start the fire – he was always clever with his hands. Electronics and things like that. Second nature.’

Caffery clears his throat. Clever with electronics?

‘So what happens now?’ Penny asks.

‘That’s what I’m here to ask – what do you think happens now?’

Car headlights shaft through the heart-shaped holes, finding the rows of glass jars with their multi-coloured preserves. Honey gleams gold, blackcurrant jam a deep amethyst. Penny taps her foot a few times, seems to be considering whether to continue. When she does, it’s in a lower, more confidential voice.

‘He’ll be off out there in the wilds, living like an animal. But he’ll be back. He hates this world – he hates it. The warning signs were there all along. I could have predicted what he was going to do – if I’d known how to read the signs.’

‘Meaning?’

‘His poppets. The ones of his mum and dad. He’d sewn their eyes shut. I should have known what he was planning.’

‘I beg your pardon? His what?’

‘His poppets, his dolls? You
do
know about his poppets?’

‘Yes. I just never heard them called—’

‘He was holding them when he came out of the house. One in each hand. I knew what he’d done just from the way he was clutching them. Eyes stitched closed.’ She gives him a curious smile, as if he’s stupid. ‘Don’t you know what the poppets are for? Don’t you know about Isaac and why he makes his dolls?’

Thom Marley

THE DIVE UNIT
have spent their day searching and bitching, hunched against the cold and the wet. They’ve continued to scour the wide band, Flea alongside them, dragging her empty body from hedge to hedge, field to field. It’s been the longest two days she can remember. She hasn’t caught up from diving all night then going straight to work yesterday – all she’s wanted to do is sleep. But whatever and whenever, you always stand shoulder to shoulder with your men.

Jack Caffery, who is supposed to be the SIO on this, hasn’t shown his face in all that time. Why should he? she reasons. He knows there’s going to be no new find – no evidence. Maybe it was for the best – it’s given her time to work through in her head what she wants to explain to him.

At five, when it’s getting dark and all her men are freezing and exhausted, she takes them into a huddle, gives them hot chocolate from the giant flask she’s kept in her back seat and supermarket cakes from a Tupperware container. She explains that if it was up to her, they would be paid not by the number of hours but by the difficulty and by the toll each hour takes on the spirit. Around them the RV car park is in chaos, the other support-unit teams are packing up for the night. She almost fails to notice the old Mondeo that pulls off the road and into the far corner of the car park. But then two of the big vans drive off and the car is out in the open.

Jack Caffery. At last. She sends her team home with the truck and when she’s certain they’re on their way, she approaches. He rolls down the window.

‘Hi. You OK?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Do you want to talk?’

She shrugs and walks round to the passenger seat, rattles the door. He clicks off the locking and she opens the door and gets in. Her body is aching from the cold of the day in the field – out here play-acting trying to find Misty – and the car isn’t as warm inside as she’d expected. It’s not lush and easy to sit in, her breath still fogs the air. Caffery’s in his work suit with a thick corded jacket over the top. He’s turned in his seat, waiting for her to speak.

‘Yeah.’ She buckles the seat belt. Nods out of the windscreen. ‘Can we just go?’

He doesn’t argue. He starts the car and pulls out of the parking area.

‘Take a right. Go through Monkton Farleigh.’

He does as she says. She sits with her elbow jammed against the door, her forehead against her fingers. The night countryside squirms past the car, swallowed up under the wheels.

‘At the main road take a right – head towards Bath.’

He obeys her instructions without a word. She lets her eyes sneak sideways and follow his hand on the gear stick. She’s watched his hands several times before. They are hard and slightly tanned, no rings. She’s never seen a ring on his fingers. Not even the white mark from one that has existed there in a past life.

‘OK,’ she says when they are on the main road and have reached cruising speed. ‘I did want to talk. And when you didn’t come on site I thought about calling. I did. Just didn’t know how to start.’

‘Now’s a good time.’

‘First let me say sorry about the other night. I didn’t mean to be as blunt as I was.’

He gives a grim smile. Changes gear. ‘Understandable. It wasn’t an everyday conversation – a coffee-morning chat.’

‘To put it mildly.’

‘I could have been better about it. I could have been more gentle.’

She turns her eyes away – focused on the road, because she knows he’ll be trying to see her expression.

‘Before you judge why I said no you need to know some of the things that happened. After Misty was …’ She stops. Starts again. ‘After she died.’

‘What things?’

‘You’ll see that what I did was the best thing I possibly could – the best route. It’s not as simple as you think.’

‘Try me.’

She takes a long, deep breath. Leans her shoulders back in the seat. She really doesn’t want to go through it again. Not at all.

‘OK,’ she starts tentatively. ‘Imagine it’s late spring. Here … the same road, but eighteen months ago. Thom’s borrowed my car. It’s eleven at night and he’s off his head and … well, you and I both know what’s happened back on that road. He’s coming along here – just like we are, except he’s trousered and he’s going fast because he’s got something awful in the boot of his car. Something he really shouldn’t have – you know what I’m talking about. As he comes round this corner, he picks up a tail—’

‘A traffic cop?’

‘Yes. One of ours. Avon and Somerset’s finest – someone you and I happen to know, but that’s another story. Left here.’

Caffery swings the car to the left and they begin to wind their way down the side of the valley that leads off the escarpment.

‘So he comes down here with the cop on his back, and I’m in the house – we’re going to get there in a minute – you’ll see – and the first I know about it is headlights and noise and Thom crashing into the house so pissed,
so
pissed he’s straight into the toilet and throwing up and crying. And then the cop – minutes behind. It was a split-second decision: I couldn’t even begin to go forward and guess what it would mean in the end.’ She breaks off for a moment, knowing the next bit is insanity. ‘But anyway – I told the cop I was driving.’

‘You
what
?’ His eyes go to hers and she isn’t quick enough to look away. ‘Say it again?’

‘And I did the breathalyser for Thom.’

‘What the—’

‘I know, I know …’ She massages her temples wearily. ‘But
I didn’t know what had happened
. I didn’t know Misty was in the boot until
four
days later. She was in my car for
four
days before I realized. My shithead brother? He’s picked up her body, put it in
my
car, and doesn’t even tell me – leaves me to find it. The next morning he’s gone – and after that I can’t contact him – he won’t take my calls. I had to doorstep him to even get a word out of him.’

Caffery shakes his head. Lets out a low whistle. ‘And still you protected him?’

‘By then it wasn’t me protecting him, it was me protecting myself. From him and his mondo-bizarro bitch of a girlfriend, who turned the whole thing around so it looked like I …’ She rubs her arms. She realizes she is trembling. A sweat is coming out on her forehead. ‘So it looked like I did it all. Take a right here. This is it. My house.’

The Promise

WHEN MELANIE ASKS
where AJ got to this morning, he lies. He tells her that Patience called – Stewart was acting up and needed another walk. Patience had a headache so AJ had to drive home and do it, because the dog is so nuts lately he can’t be trusted to go out on his own without running away into the forest. AJ hates the lie, almost dents it, his teeth are so tight as he delivers it, but he hasn’t got the balls to tell her what he’s done. He dreads the moment the phone rings and Caffery’s voice on the other end announces:
I’m going to have to come out to Beechway
.

He’s going to be ready by then. He’s made himself a promise. He’ll have explained it all to Melanie by then and she’ll be fine about it. She’ll understand, because she will have come to her senses. He stands in the gents’ and looks at himself in the mirror and makes himself repeat it.

‘AJ, you are going to find the right time to tell her. Swear it now, swear it? I promise. On Stewart’s life, I swear.’

At five p.m., when he’s finished all the rotas and the overtime sign-offs, and checked that the care-plan reviews have been written up, he is done in. The late nights have caught up with him. He locks his office and heads home. Melanie has a board report to prepare, so she’s going to follow later.

Patience has spent the day preparing another challenge for ‘breakfast’ – a proper English kedgeree, served with boiled eggs, chopped chives and coriander. Her disappointment when AJ walks in alone is written all over her face.