Poppet jc-6

by Mo Hayder

  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.

  To her husband’s bewilderment, Penny went home crying. Her error had been exposed in the clearest light. Graham was a different person from the one she’d believed she was in love with. She made up her mind she would end the affair with Graham – whatever the cost.

  Now, sitting on the sofa in the mill, her attention goes to the windows. They open out on to the bottom of the valley. On the other side of the stream the forests slope up and up – ending where the mists at the top crowd around Upton Farm. Maybe it was her punishment, the world teaching her a lesson, but she never did get the chance to tell Graham it was over.

  Ironically, the day she chose to do it – All Souls’ Day – happened to be the day Isaac Handel had decided to end his parents’ lives.

  Job

  HARRY PILSON STILL lives in the police house he worked from for thirty years. He retired at fifty to avoid a move out of the village to Chipping Sodbury police station and purchased the house under the right-to-buy scheme.

  Pilson has just got in – he delivers ready-meals to the elderly in his area. He’s a lean and healthy sixty-year-old dr
essed in a pullover and corduroys. He glances at Caffery’s card, then shows him through to the back room, past his wife, who stands in the kitchen drying a plate and gaping at them. ‘Job,’ he murmurs to her, pulling the door closed on her disapproving frown. ‘Won’t be long.’

  If Caffery knows cops, it’s probably been this way for years in the Pilson household – Harry’s job taking him away all the time, his wife always abandoned in the middle of something in the kitchen, wondering when it’s all going to stop.

  Pilson closes the living-room door behind him and leans against it for a second. It’s one of those very ordered rooms – a cabinet full of crystal and figurines, the TV remote set neatly on top of today’s folded newspaper. DVDs shelved in alphabetical order.

  ‘What can I do for you, Inspector?’

  ‘Can we talk? Properly.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we’re doing?’

  ‘No – I mean, properly.’ Caffery sits at the small dining table and places the case file in front of him. He nudges the chair opposite with his foot. Looks up at Pilson. ‘Not fucking-around talking, not job talking and not canapé talking either.’

  Pilson hesitates. He sits down obediently, but there’s a chink in his expression that warns Caffery not to push it. He folds his arms.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘It’s about Isaac Handel and what happened at Upton Farm.’

  Pilson’s face sags visibly. Caffery has opened a wound. A hatch into the past. ‘Why now, after all this time? Why MCIT?’

  ‘Can we talk or can we not?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We can talk.’

  ‘You must have known the family. What were they like?’

  ‘What does your intel tell you?’

  ‘Not much.’

  Pilson taps his fingers on the table, as if he’s considering his options. ‘OK,’ he says eventually. ‘And I’m only telling you this because it’s so long ago. I did know them. Graham Handel – the father – he was the start of the problem. Playing away from home like an addiction. He never tired of it. His wife? She gave up waiting for him to change and followed suit – ended up almost as bad.’

  ‘The report says people in the village used to talk about them dabbling in voodoo?’

  Pilson snorts. ‘Nah – Louise did a course and had some books out from the library – that’s all. You get a double murder like that and the local grapevine goes sonic – two plus two becomes a hundred.’

  ‘Talk me through what happened, after you got the call.’

  ‘It’s a long time ago – my memory’s not what it was.’

  ‘I’m sure you can remember taking the call.’

  ‘What I can remember is in the file.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Something in the room shifts at Caffery’s tone. Pilson’s attention narrows and hardens to a point. ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘I’ve been up to the farm – it’s not the kind of place you just happen to be passing and notice something odd. So your tipster must’ve gone out of their way to get up there.’

  Harry rubs his forehead distractedly. ‘I wouldn’t know – I swear. So many years have gone by it’s hard to recall details.’

  Caffery shakes his head, opens the file. ‘Just so you know? The poor-memory thing? It isn’t working for you.’ He finds Pilson’s report, pulls it out. ‘It’s very detailed – exemplary, in fact. Except some of the details don’t make sense when you stand them up against each other.’

  He slides out the crime-scene photos, placing them on the table.

  Pilson becomes quite still. Stiff. He averts his gaze from Graham and Louise’s faces, their mouths pulled open. ‘Do we have to?’

  ‘We do. I like to get things very clear in my head. And thinking about what you went through, I can kind of see how the facts might have got a bit scrambled.’ He leaves the briefest of pauses. ‘How some details might have slipped your mind.’

  Caffery has just given him the chance to own up and keep his reputation intact. Pilson doesn’t take it. Instead he shoves the photographs back across the table to a place he can’t see them.

  Caffery folds his arms. Sighs. ‘OK – we’ll do it the hard way. So let’s see … you arrived at the house at six forty-five p.m. – ten minutes after the call? The front door was open, but you didn’t go into the house – you went straight to the barn. Now why would you do that?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Says here that you saw a trail of blood leading into the barn.’

  ‘Well, then, that must have been it.’

  ‘You’re not sure?’

  ‘Like I said, it was a long time ago.’

  Caffery stares at him. ‘You’re really not in a position to lie any more. Let’s talk about the blood trail.’ He finds the photograph of the farmyard and barn. He makes a show of peering closely at the photograph. ‘I can’t see any sign of a blood trail. Can you?’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t show in the photos.’

  ‘It doesn’t show in the CSI report either. There’s some blood in the downstairs hallway, but Isaac would need to have been dripping with it for you to see it on the ground outside. Graham and Louise had been dead three hours – their blood would have been mostly dry by then anyway.’

  ‘I can’t remember what I saw. I just knew he was in the barn.’

  ‘The front door to the house is wide open, and yet, for some reason, instead of going into the house, you go straight to the barn?’

  Pilson doesn’t answer. Caffery tries a different tack. ‘OK – for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s something – copper’s nous maybe – leads you, against all evidence, away from the house and over to the barn. And then …’ Caffery locates the section of the report, reads: ‘The access door to the big barn was open. I looked around the door frame and saw Isaac Handel in the hayloft. He appeared to be covered in blood.’

  Caffery runs a thumb along the folder, so that it will lie open at the page. ‘You want to modify your statement, Mr Pilson?’

  ‘What? You expect me to remember it better after all this time?’

  ‘No, I expect you to remember it accurately, to tell me the truth. I’ve just come from that barn. It’s pitch-dark in there. You can’t even see the hayloft from the access door – you’ve got to be a good six feet inside the barn – and still you’d have to bend backwards to get a good look.’

  Pilson is shaking his head, but he doesn’t look like an ex-cop any more; he looks like anyone who’s been caught in a lie and won’t admit it.

  ‘Fine,’ Caffery says. ‘So you’re trying to work out how much trouble you’re in. Why not let me fill in the blanks for you? You’re protecting someone – I don’t know who, but I’m going to find out. OK?’ He pauses, giving time for that to sink in. ‘And when I do, I’ll be coming back here to charge you with obstruction. And if Handel does anything else in the future, it’ll be on your head.’

  Anxiety crosses Pilson’s face briefly. ‘Handel can’t do anything, He’s inside. High Secure.’

  ‘That’s right. High Secure – which, every six months, whether the patients ask for it or not, holds the statutory MHA discharge tribunals. And this time … ta-dah!’ He gives a flourish of the hand, like a magician. ‘Isaac Handel was discharged. I guess that’s why they go through the whole rigmarole – to make sure the ones who need to be kept in are. And the ones who don’t need to be kept in get let out.’

  Pilson’s mouth closes. You can almost hear his teeth dancing one against the other. ‘They’ve let him out? Are you having a … ? Aren’t they supposed to tell us when they let people like that out?’

  ‘Our unit was informed, as is the protocol. Though most relevant parties are retired now, like yourself. Besides, what’s to worry about? The doctors say he’s stabilized. The tribunal reckons he’s safe to live in the community.’

  There’s a pulse beating in Pilson’s temple. He glances towards the kitchen where his wife is.

  ‘Would you like me to ge
t her to lock the doors?’ Caffery says. ‘Would that make you feel better?’

  ‘They don’t know what they’ve done. Letting him out.’

  ‘But you do. Who called it in? Who were you protecting?’

  For half a minute, Pilson says nothing, just keeps taking deep breaths, shaking his head every so often. He reaches across the table and with trembling fingers he turns the crime-scene photographs over so they are face down.

  ‘My sister,’ he says miserably. ‘I was protecting Penny.’

  The Old Mill

  THE STORY HARRY Pilson has to tell is old, and sadly familiar to Caffery, who has heard every imaginable tale of adultery over the years. Every possible combination, every conceivable twist. Still he can’t help feeling sorry for the guy. The more he talks, the more Caffery understands why he lied.

  Fifteen years ago Pilson’s sister, Penny – who was married at the time – was having an affair with Graham Handel, Isaac’s father. On the day of the killings she went up to the house to see him. She intended finishing the affair. By the time she arrived, Graham Handel and his wife had both been dead some hours.

  Penny knew she had to report it, but she had no excuse to give her husband for her presence up at the house. So Harry agreed to cover for her. Together they conjured up the phone call. The fake woman. Fake name, fake address.

  ‘She’s drifted away from me,’ Harry says. ‘Or I’ve drifted from her. I think she’s ashamed, even now – it was a bleak spot in her life. When you see her, will you send her my love? Tell her I still think about her. Ask her how that mongrel dog of hers is.’

  Penny is now divorced from the husband she wanted to protect, and lives in the last house in the village. The Old Mill. Harry has told Caffery it’s the house with grass growing on the roof, and he sees it immediately, even in the dark: a green froth on the old clay roof tiles. At the windows are Swiss-style shutters – a heart cut in each centre – and there’s a hand-carved business sign above the porch – Forager’s Fayre, Home-made Preserves.