Poppet (31 page)

‘You burned her dress – but we did a reconstruction. Remember?’

She does. A girl coming down the steps of the rehab clinic – acting stoned. Looking more like a shampoo commercial than a drug addict. She shakes her head and whistles under her breath. ‘Are these the clothes the actress wore?’

‘They disappeared from MCIT – must have got lost when we moved offices. Scandalous how things like this always seem to go missing.’

He pulls out a handbag and a pair of sandals and lines them up on the frozen ground. ‘Even if they called in a forensics specialist to check the clothes – which I doubt, because who’s going to raise that suspicion with me directing the investigation? – this is going to vaguely match the profile of the woodland. Wood or a fallow pasture with a similar soil composition to this one. Any amount of minerals the clothes have accumulated will match.’

He brushes his hands off and uses the sleeve of his jacket to wipe his brow. ‘Well? Could I make it any easier?’

Her eyes go to his. ‘I told you – I can’t dive.’

‘And is that the truth? Or is it an excuse?’

She can’t answer. She can’t because it would be something like –
it’s an excuse. Actually I can dive, I just don’t want to open up the past
…
if I do it then everything’s going to come falling out and it’ll all go to hell
.

And then she’d probably start crying too.

‘I’ve got to go.’ She fumbles in her pocket for the car keys.

He shakes his head, defeated. ‘Again? You’re going to walk out
again
?’

‘I’m sorry, Jack, it’s getting late.’

‘No – it’s really not funny any more. Really. Not funny. I’m getting tired of this – and I’m especially tired of you protecting your shit-head brother.’

‘
It’s not that
,’ she says, shocked. ‘It’s not my brother.’

‘Then what is it? Hmmm? What is it?’

She stands looking at him for a long time. That thing inside her that wants to give way is trembling. She’s not going to cry.
Not
going to cry.

‘Please, Jack – please, you don’t understand.’

‘Forget it.’ He turns away, his hand held up to stop her speaking. ‘Just forget it. I don’t want to hear it.’

The Old Mill

LYING ON HER
bed, fully dressed, a stone-like emptiness settles in Penny’s head. The Old Mill is empty and silent beneath her – not a creak, not a sound. DI Caffery is long gone. Penny watched him go, through the heart holes in the shutters at the front of the house. He didn’t get straight into the car, but walked through the side gate. She had to dart across to the back windows to find him again, standing on the back terrace where all her plant pots are gathered. He stood for a while, gazing across the valley at the treetops where Upton Farm is. A wind came up and flapped open his jacket, flicked up his tie and flattened the shirt and trousers against him. It seemed to break whatever spell was holding him. He headed back the way he’d come, got in the car, and was gone.

Caffery must be about her age, maybe a little younger. A lot of women would think he was sexy, but he wouldn’t be the sort they’d want to marry. A lot of women need charmers, flatterers, men who spend money on Valentine’s day gifts wrapped in cellophane. He’s none of those things – she could see it a mile away. Instead there’s something straightforward about him that Penny recognizes. An honesty. No wedding ring, she noticed. Maybe because of the gifts.

She closes her eyes. There’s no point wondering what age Caffery is, whether he’s single or not, because he will live in a fancy city loft apartment. He will eat at the best restaurants with loads of friends every night. He has a string of beautiful, accomplished girlfriends. He is an utterly different species from Penny. All men are. Or rather,
she
is the different species.

Penny can’t read other humans – she can’t decipher their moods and the layers of deception they pile on themselves. Isaac, for example. There’d been a time she actually thought he liked her – she even believed he saw in her a mother more caring than Louise, the same way she imagined Graham saw in her a wife more caring than his own. She was wrong there, as she has been so often. She’s learned this lesson over and over: in this huge human jigsaw puzzle there is no mirroring piece to match her, no niche for her to slot into. She’s given up hoping.

She thinks about that day – all those years ago. It was cold and damp and very still, the clouds squatting over the country like a warning. She remembers Isaac cannoning down the stairs and out of the front door, knocking down the coat stand in the hallway. He wore his school shoes and socks and nothing else – his torso and arms were smeared in blood and faeces. A stranger might have misunderstood – might have believed Isaac was being attacked, that
he
needed help, but Penny knew.

She leapt back in the car. Engaged the central locks. He raced towards her.
Penny, Penny
– his voice low and unnatural. As she started the car, he clambered on to the bonnet, his legs and genitals stained and bloody. She leaned on the horn and rammed the car into such quick reverse that he somersaulted off on to the ground. She slammed on the brakes, flicked up the headlights and sat trembling, watching him. He was already getting up, unsteady on his feet – maybe he’d been drinking – he swayed around, fumbling on the ground until he found what he’d dropped: one of his poppets. He was so hot with blood and death he was steaming in the frigid air.

He straightened and turned to look at Penny.

‘No,’ she hissed. ‘You won’t get me too.’

She floored the accelerator. The car danced and skidded forward, forcing him to scamper away into the barn. He slammed the doors closed behind him and Penny, high on fear and adrenalin, dared to leap out and run home the big latch, locking him in. It was only when she got to the first phone booth and dialled Harry’s number that the shaking started.

Now, in her unlit bedroom, she curls up in the bed, the quilt over her ears. She never saw the bodies, never saw the bedroom. She pieced it all together – some from what she saw smeared on Isaac’s naked body, some from later newspaper articles, but mostly from the questions Harry refused to answer. He was never the same man after what he saw in the Handels’ house.

Something occurs to her. She sits up and switches on the reading light. Grabs her glasses and lifts up the quilt. The missing patch. Two mornings ago its disappearance reminded her of Isaac and his habit of stealing clothing for his poppets. She didn’t know then that he was out of hospital, so she hadn’t given it much thought. Now, trembling, she inspects it feverishly. The stitching all over the quilt is loose. The piece could have easily come away from general wear and tear, nothing to suggest it’s been cut out.

The thought doesn’t go away though, the sudden shaky idea that Isaac has come back. She gets up and goes downstairs. The big old painted grandfather clock says eight o’clock. She rechecks all the windows and the doors. She’s about to turn to the stairs when her eye is caught by the medlars in the prep room. There’s a store cupboard there where she keeps boxes of citric acid and gelatine. At the back of it is a door. The door leads to the basement. It has a lock on it but she hasn’t checked if it’s closed.

Stupid, stupid, she tells herself, you’re turning into a bundle of neuroses. Over-reacting. A doctor would say you’re suffering from the curse of the female – hysteria brought on by an imbalance of hormones. When’s your next period due, Miss Pilson? But she can’t stop staring at that cupboard.

Under the floorboards are the skeletons of the mill. The water-wheel has long rotted away, but the huge stone troughs they used for washing the fleeces are still there, and the old maintenance hatches for the days when they’d send a child down to unlodge a branch that had entangled in the mill wheel. There’s a whole labyrinth of tunnels and culverts and sluice gates – most are wadded and sealed to prevent draughts coming up through the floorboards, but if someone really wanted to come into the house – if they really wanted …

From the kitchen she gets her heaviest skillet. There’s a torch hanging next to the back door – she loops it round her wrist and clicks it on. She creeps into the prep room and into the larder. There’s a bare electric bulb in here which she switches on. Then changes her mind and switches it off. She’s picturing what she will look like from the other side of the door – lit up and emblazoned like on a movie screen. A perfect target.

She steps forward. Rests her fingers on the handle. She’s been through this door several times: it leads to a rickety flight of wooden stairs that creak and complain at the smallest weight. There is no electricity down there – nothing. Just moss and stone and hardened expanding foam in the cracks.

Open it. Open it. There’s nothing there. Nothing
.

Her hand trembles.

Open it. Open it – prove to yourself he’s not standing there. Open it
.

She lets all her breath out. She runs the two huge bolts at the top and the bottom, turns the old key in the lock. Then quickly she pulls boxes off the shelves and stacks them against the door. Anything heavy – anything with glass that will make a noise if disturbed. The outer door has no lock, just an old-fashioned T-hinged latch. She uses string to wrap around it several times. Then she pushes a chair against it and drops back against the wall, shivering and sweating.

Graham and Louise Handel

CAFFERY STARTS TO
compose a message to Flea. He gets twenty words in then changes his mind, puts the phone in his pocket and walks around the garden impatiently like something that’s about to explode. This is like the man who keeps hitting himself in the face over and over. Still hoping Flea’ll change her mind? What a joke that is. Whatever is stopping her isn’t going to go away. His best bet is to get to the bottom of the Isaac Handel case, then take a long breath and move on to alternatives for closing the Misty Kitson case.

Eventually, for no particular reason except that he can’t think what else to do with them, he re-buries Misty’s clothes in the garden. Covers them with soil. He doesn’t want to get the holdall with the dolls out of the car, it’s the last thing he wants, but he does it anyway. The one place he can close off from the rest of the house so the smell doesn’t permeate everywhere is the utility room, so he carries them in there. Then he showers and changes into an old T-shirt and sweatpants. He spends an hour printing anything he can find about voodoo dolls, then pours a large Scotch and carries the printouts through into the utility room. He puts his nitriles back on and starts picking through the dolls.

They make an ugly hotchpotch of textures – Handel seems to have used all manner of materials, from patchwork squares, to raw sheep wool, to glazed clay, to small pieces of stick or wood. Anything he can scavenge. They are crude and unsettling – having them here is like having extra people in the house.

The printouts tell him the notion of a voodoo doll is a popular myth. There’s almost nothing to connect it to the Haitian strand of voodoo; the only place the dolls seem to surface is in New Orleans, where voodoo has undergone a kind of Americanized renaissance for the tourist industry. Nevertheless, in the popularized fiction of voodoo – the sort of thing a fourteen-year-old boy might read – voodoo dolls not only exist, they are objects of terror. They obey a fixed set of rules, they can be used to control the humans they represent.

Caffery fumbles two of the dolls to one side. Both are made from leather – human outlines stitched crudely together with something that looks, to Caffery’s uneducated eye, like catgut from a stringed instrument. When Isaac came out of the house after the murders he was clutching two dolls. Penny only glimpsed them, and doesn’t know what happened to them afterwards, but she maintains she’d seen them before and they were the ones which represented Graham and Louise Handel.

Isaac’s juvenile-custody record was destroyed – as is usual – after three years, so there’s no way of finding out what property was detained. But it’s not a leap of faith to believe that the dolls Caffery’s looking at now were the ones Isaac was holding. They are dressed in clothes strikingly similar to the ones itemized in the CSM’s report as found on the Handels’ bodies – jogging trousers and a T-shirt on the female doll, brown cord trousers on the male. It may be that they seemed innocuous enough to a string of custody officers and nurses to have slipped unnoticed through the system. A sectioned patient showing a particular attachment to an object? One which, when scanned, showed no traces of metal, no sharp objects – it’s feasible he managed to convince people to let him keep the dolls.

Why? Caffery wonders. Graham and Louise were already dead. Why would he want to keep their effigies?

He goes into the kitchen and fetches a reading light and a magnifying glass. Studied under the glass, the dolls are even more disconcertingly ugly. They have polished shells in place of their teeth, and they differ from the other poppets in that they both have their eyes sewn shut. If the poppets symbolized whatever it was Isaac wanted to inflict on their real-life counterparts, did he stitch their eyes closed because he wanted them dead? And did he continue doing things to the dolls after his parents’ murder? The dolls are covered in tiny puncture marks, the heads have been twisted repeatedly, leaving a cracked black crease in the leather delineating the neck. Maybe it wasn’t enough simply to kill his parents, Caffery thinks, maybe he’s kept these dolls so he can continue to torture his mother and father beyond the grave.

He sits back in the chair and stares at his reflection in the black windowpane. There are a few stars visible above the trees – otherwise the countryside is wide and black and limitless. He imagines Handel out there somewhere – tries to picture what he’s thinking. What he’s planning with his Stanley knife, his pliers and his wire.

Dandelion Ward

THE MAUDE HASN’T
gone. It’s tricked them all. It has changed its mind and it’s coming back. It’s not far away, not far. Already it has done things Monster Mother can’t think about. Things it never should have done.