Poppet (27 page)

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 dressed 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 get 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
.

He has to rap loudly to get an answer. When the door opens, he sees Penny is quite different from her brother. Much younger – probably mid-forties – and very pretty, with heavily kohled eyes and bright henna-red hair cut pixie-style. A faint, quizzical smile.

‘Yes?’

‘Penny Pilson?’

‘That’s me.’

He holds up his card. ‘Have you got a moment? Just some routine questions.’

Penny’s face falls a little. But she doesn’t ask him what the routine questions are. She holds the door open and lets him in. The hallway is narrow with bare stone walls, the floor tiles also stone – worn in clear twin grooves by centuries of foot traffic. Penny beckons him to follow and heads away down the corridor. She’s small and voluptuous. She wears a falling cascade of bracelets on her arms, battered jeans and beaded leather thong sandals on her dainty feet, which are bare, in spite of the cold.

It’s a high-ceilinged building – brick-walled, but warmed by a huge wood burner in the centre of the floor. At one end of the space is what looks like a commercial kitchen, where industrialsized pots simmer on a huge catering-style stainless-steel cooker, filling the air with the smell of stewing fruit. There are pyramids of freshly picked apples in the corner, and a trestle table at the far end of the room houses a range of jars – all hand-labelled, and tied with hemp or raffia. Every wall is covered in shelves similarly piled with jars.

Penny clicks on the overhead light and takes a pile of paperwork off a chair for Caffery to sit.

‘Tea? Coffee? Something stronger?’

He smiles. ‘I’d love a Scotch, but under the circumstances …’

‘I make the best plum vodka. I’ll get you some.’

Caffery tilts back in his chair, his head turned to watch her moving around the kitchen. ‘Can I just say that you’re a bad woman. If I was an alcoholic – which I probably am on some level – you’d have
co-dependent
or
enabler
stamped on your forehead. Not to mention I’m driving.’

‘I’ll make it a small one. Just to taste. Just to leave you wanting more.’

He shakes his head. This is the sort of woman who can spell trouble for men. Earthy and sexy. Knows how to feed the senses. Obviously her appeal wasn’t lost on Graham Handel. She fills a tiny glass with a ruby-coloured liquor. It catches the light and reminds him Christmas is not far off. He sniffs and sips. It’s the taste of a hundred different berries, a hundred different spices.

‘Forager’s Fayre? How comes I’ve never heard of you before?’

‘I dunno. Welcome to wild-and-woolly Gloucestershire. The crusties. Note my attire? Every piece of fruit I use has been foraged – or donated by friends. You walk around these days and see apples rotting on the ground. People just don’t bother to pick them. Ever noticed that?’

‘Now you mention it.’

‘People’d rather go to the supermarket and buy stuff grown thousands of miles away than eat what’s growing in their back garden. Go figure. Want to know my best-selling variety?’

‘It was the first thing I was going to ask you.’

‘Church Car Park Crab-apple Jelly.’

‘Car Park Jelly?’

‘Yup.’ She reaches to a shelf and grabs a jar. ‘A church car park in Wotton and ten crab-apple trees just drop their fruit every September. What was the diocese doing with the fruit? Not sending out a work party to collect them, I can promise you. Instead they were partitioning off that side of the car park so no one could park there. Didn’t want complaints from the congregation that their cars were getting sticky. Here—’